Young Thug trial at standstill as attorneys consider witness' 2015 police interviews
Defense lawyers also are asking the Georgia Supreme Court to order Judge Ural Glanville to send a recusal motion against him to another judge.
Testimony in the Young Thug / YSL trial in Atlanta, Georgia, is at a standstill until July 8 as attorneys and the judge consider what the jury should hear from a key witness’ jail calls and police interviews. At the same time, defense attorneys have turned to the Georgia Supreme Court after the judge rejected calls to leave the case.
The jury was last in court on Monday for testimony from Kenneth “Woody” Copeland, a former friend of rapper Jeffery “Young Thug” Williams who spoke to Atlanta police gang investigators on several occasions in 2015.
The racketeering conspiracy case against Williams and his five co-defendants and alleged Young Slime Life gang members rides largely on Copeland’s testimony, but he hasn’t testified the way prosecutors hoped. Instead of backing up what he said nine years ago, he’s testified that he lied in the interviews and can’t recall much of what he said.
“I know 100 percent facts and I’m telling you now: I was not truthful. I was saying whatever they wanted me to say. I was saying whatever I could come up with,” Copeland testified on June 13.
Copeland later testified, “I know I aint complete school, but I, I think I’m speaking proper English. I told you: I don’t recall nothing I said to no polices.”
“You keep sitting right here asking me the same question over and over and over and over and over and over and over. I’m tired of it! I’m drained!” he told Fulton County Deputy District Attorney Simone Hylton.
Given that testimony, prosecutors want to play Copeland’s 2015 interviews as part of their effort to persuade the jury that he told the truth then but is lying now. That’s about 17 hours of video, and defense attorneys of course have objections to what prosecutors do and don’t want jurors to see. They don’t believe any of the interviews are legally admissible as inconsistent statement because Copeland hasn’t denied the statements, he’s only said he lied or doesn’t remember, but Fulton County Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville disagreed.
The judge had the attorneys in court to all day Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and for 2 1/2 hours on Friday, but they haven’t finished going through the interviews. Trial was only scheduled for Monday and Tuesday next week, and Judge Glanville said Friday they’ll need those days to discuss the interviews as well as 2 1/2 hours of phone calls Copeland made from the jail.
The discussion will continue on Monday, July 1, and possibly Tuesday, July 2, then on July 3 Glanville will conduct an “in camera review of Copeland’s ex parte matter,” which apparently refers to the transcript of the judge’s June 10 private meeting with prosecutors and Copeland about his initial refusal to testify, which led to his witness stand arrest for contempt of court and weekend jailing.
Glanville did not tell defense attorneys about the meeting, but Williams’ lawyer Brian Steel learned of it and confronted the judge during a break in Copeland’s testimony. Glanville demanded Steel tell him how he learned of the meeting, then had him detained for contempt of court before formally sentencing him to 10 weekends in jail for criminal contempt. The Georgia Supreme Court stayed the sentence while Steel appeals the contempt conviction.
Glanville also has ordered anyone who attended the June 10 ex parte meeting to appear to a hearing on Tuesday to “to show cause … why one or more of them should not be held in contempt for disclosing information from the ex parte conversation to members of the Defense counsel.”
Bumpus’ attorneys filed a motion to quash the show cause order and to recuse Glanville from the contempt issue, but Glanville rejected it on June 18. He also rejected a disqualification motion from Steel.
Glanville earlier rejected a disqualification motion from Williams’ co-defendant Deamonte Kendrick’s attorneys, who filed an emergency petition Thursday that asks the Georgia Supreme Court to halt the trial and order Glanville to send the motion he rejected “for hearing before an unbiased judge.”
The petition cites Georgia state law that says a judge must send a recusal motion to another judge if it “is timely, whether the affidavit is legally sufficient, and whether the affidavit sets forth facts that if proved would warrant the assigned judge’s recusal from the case.”
It cites the judge’s own words in his June 14 written order, which says the recusal motion “contains assertions of fact to support the allegations of bias and impartiality.”
Glanville’s order goes on to say “there is a notable lack of evidence to support the assertions,” but the Supreme Court petition says that’s because of the judge’s “own recalcitrance in refusing to provide a transcript of a secret, ex parte proceeding.”
“Petitioner requests this Court direct Glanville to follow the law. Based on Glanville’s own findings, Glanville should be directed by this Court to assign the Motion for Recusal to an unbiased judge for hearing on the merits,” according to the petition from Atlanta attorneys Doug Weinstein and E. Jay Abt of The Abt Law Firm and Katie Hingerty of The Hingerty Law Firm.
Weinstein said they’ve been helped from attorneys around the country.
“Thank you to those attorneys around the country who contributed in some way to our Petition. I won’t tag y’all, but it is great to see all those defense attorneys who have watched this case and feel the need to help,” Weinstein wrote on X.
The petition also asks the high court to order Glanville provide defense attorneys with an unredacted transcript of “the secret ex parte proceeding.”
Here’s what the petition says happened in the June 10 meeting:
The Georgia Supreme Court had not addressed the petition as of Friday night. Copeland, meanwhile, was released from jail on June 10 after agreeing to return to court to testify. He’s enjoying his newfound Internet fame and has amassed more than 286,000 followers on TikTok. (I only have 174,000.) He’s also open for bookings, according to his profile.
Some trial watchers have cited Copeland’s social media prescence when arguing prosecutors shouldn’t be allowed to play statements he made in 2015 about not wanting to be seen as a snitch. The argument is his current actions show he’s not afraid of Williams and his co-defendants, but I don’t think it’s the defendants who are an issue here. It’s the huge Internet masses that are consuming this trial every day.
Jury convicts former Ontrak CEO of insider trading
A federal jury convicted former Ontrak Inc. CEO Terren Peizer of three felonies for dumping company stock in an insider trading scheme aimed at avoiding more than $12.5 million in losses.
Peizer is the first to be prosecuted for insider trading based on his Rule 10b5-1 plans, which The Wall Street Journal describes as “a safe harbor executives have enjoyed for 25 years to protect against insider-trading charges” that involves committing to selling in the future “regardless of market events.”
In Peizer’s case, prosecutors argued he knew full well that Ontrak was going to lose Cigna as its largest health insurance customer when he committed to shedding himself of Ontrak shares in two Rule 10b5-1 filings in May and August 2021.
“In establishing his 10b5-1 plans, Peizer refused to engage in any “cooling-off” period—the time between when he entered into the plan and when he sold stock—despite warnings from two brokers, a senior Ontrak executive, and attorneys,” according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. “Instead, Peizer began selling shares of Ontrak on the next trading day after establishing each plan. On August 19, 2021, just six days after Peizer adopted his August 10b5-1 plan, Ontrak announced that the customer had terminated its contract and Ontrak’s stock price declined by more than 44%.”
I didn’t see as much of the trial as I intended because I went to the National Football League trial instead, but I do know Peizer had many supporters in court. James Bergerner, also known as Sweet James the billboard lawyer, was in the gallery for opening statements, and several supporters were sitting on the floor when I walked in because they refused to sit on the government’s “side” of the courtroom, which was the only side with open seats.
I wasn’t in court for Friday’s verdict so I don’t know how many saw him get convicted, but his supporters will have a chance to weigh in through character reference letters ahead of Peizer’s sentencing, which Senior U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer scheduled for Oct. 21.
Judge won’t dismiss Hunter Biden’s laptop lawsuit
Hunter Biden's lawsuit against a former Trump White House aide who distributed the contents of his laptop will proceed in Los Angeles after U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera on Thursday rejected defendant Garrett Ziegler’s motion to dismiss.
“Plaintiff did not sue Defendants for creating a report or website. Defendants are being sued for “accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging” Plaintiff’s computer data,” according to the 18-page order, which rejects Ziegler’s lawyer’s argument that the case should be dismissed under California’s anti-SLAPP law.
Judge Vera also has Matt Gaetz’s and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s lawsuit against the City of Anaheim over the cancellation of their rallies in 2021. A jury trial is scheduled for June 2025.
There was a scheduling conference on Tuesday and I saw John Eastman in the courthouse lobby when I went down to photograph Jerry Jones leaving the NFL trial. (It was a really busy moment!)
Eastman, recently disbarred in California over his false election fraud claims and the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol, was filing documents in the case early on but hasn’t filed anything since January.
California State Bar Judge Yvette Roland on May 1 rejected Eastman’s request to continue practicing law while he fights his permanent disbarment, but he still showed up to the scheduling conference with the practicing attorneys on the case, Alexander H. Haberbush and Anthony Caso. Caso represented Eastman in the litigation over his Chapman University emails is not listed as counsel on the minutes.
I didn’t get a chance to go in the courtroom, so I cannot say if Eastman had to watch the proceeding from the gallery.
NFL trial nears end as judge threatens to kill case
I watched Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones return to the witness stand on Tuesday in the civil antitrust trial over NFL Sunday Ticket that could change how the United States watches professional football.
Jones continued testifying under cross-examination from Kalpana Srinivasan of Susman Godfrey LLP, who focused on the Cowboys’ current licensing of radio rights and pre-game rights.
Increasing distribution of games outside of Fox and CBS “would be a good thing for fans, wouldn’t it, sir?” Srinivasan asked.
Jones answered no because “it would undermine the free television that we have right now.”
Much of Jones’ direct testimony on Monday focused on his opposition to NFL teams controlling their own TV rights and his support for the current revenue-sharing model that he said helps the 32 teams compete more evenly.
“I haven’t won a Super Bowl in 25 years or more. And I would be embarrassed to tell you what I do to get to win a Super Bowl,” Jones said. But because of the “equity” within the NFL, “you have to earn it and scrap for it.”
Srinivasan focused her cross on Monday on the multibillionaire’s own lawsuit against the NFL in 1995 that sought the right for the Cowboys to license its merchandise and said the NFL’s centralized control of team merchandise was a “classic price-fixing cartel.”
On re-direct Tuesday, the NFL’s lawyer Beth Wilkinson pointed out a paragraph of Jones’ old lawsuit that Srinivasan didn’t. It reads in part, “the overwhelming bulk of the club revenue derives” from shared TV rights, which aren’t controlled by the “licensing cartel” and weren’t at issue in the lawsuit..
The current witness is defense expert Douglas Bernheim, a Stanford University economics professor and probably one of the best experts possible for the NFL in this trial, if not the best. His resume includes testifying in the blockbuster antitrust bench trial between Epic Games and Apple Inc. before U.S. District Yvonne Gonzalez Rodgers in 2021.
Bernheim was on the opposite side of the antitrust battle then and testified as a witness for Epic that Apple’s App Store practices were anticompetitive. In the NFL trial, he’s testifying that the NFL Sunday Ticket promotes competition, and he’s explaining why he disagrees with plaintiffs expert Daniel Rascher, a sports economist at the University of San Francisco.
At the same time, U.S. District Judge U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez appears increasingly frustrated with plaintiff attorneys and has said he may issue a defense judgment under Rule 50 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which allows judges to issue a direct judgment if they believe claims don’t have enough evidence for a jury to consider them.
“The way you have tried this case is far from simple. This case has turned into 25 hours of depositions and gobbledygook,” Gutierrez said on Thursday, according to The Associated Press.
I understand what the judge means based on my time in the courtroom. As a lifelong, extremely casual fan of the NFL, it’s not difficult for me to get behind the idea that it is a price-fixing cartel, and as the judge said, the basic premise of the case is simple: NFL Sunday Ticket was priced in a way to intentionally prevent some people from buying it, which kept millions of fans from watching games they wanted to watch because NFL Sunday Ticket was their only option.
The NFL documents I’ve seen in trial seem to lay this all out, but much of the testimony I’ve heard is about whether the current revenue sharing model truly helps teams compete more evenly, and whether individual team TV licensing is anticompetitive or pro-competitive. That’s because one of two damages models presented by the plaintiffs involves what would have happened if the 32 teams had been able to license their own TV deals during the class period (2011 to 2023). The other involves what would have happened if NFL Sunday Ticket was available for a lower price if DirectTV had competition.
The individual licenses model puts damages at about $7 billion, while the seemingly more simple competitive pricing model puts it around $3.6 billion. Any final damages total could triple post-jury under the treble damages rule often applied in antitrust cases.
I’ve heard much more testimony related to the first because there’s a lot to say about the individual licensing theory and the plaintiffs’ argument that revenue sharing doesn’t actually promote competitiveness within the NFL. At one point I heard a long line of questioning from the defense about the demise of the Pac-12, highlighting what a horrible thing it is and really hitting home for a Corvallis, Oregon, native like me whose hometown is going to be severely hurt by it. As a casual trial watcher, it seems to me like a distraction from the central issue of, “Did the NFL fix the price of Sunday Ticket?”
Bernheim will continue testifying Monday. Closing arguments are expected Wednesday. Defense attorneys have not yet filed their Rule 50 motion, but Wilkinson told Judge Gutierrez on Thursday she’s hoping for a “robust” hearing. I think the major luminaries are gone for good: Jones and Commissioner Roger Goodell aren’t coming back, and neither is former CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus, who testified for the defense after Jones on Thursday.
Wilkinson’s husband, journalist and former Meet the Press host David Gregory, also won’t return, Wilkinson confirmed with me.
Previous coverage:
9th Circuit hears argument over Rundo’s dismissed case
The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals appears ready to overturn the dismissal of white supremacist Robert Rundo’s criminal case.
The three-judge panel that granted the U.S. Department of Justice’s emergency petition to stay the dismissal in April heard oral argument last Tuesday in the appeal of now-retired U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney’s selective prosecution order.
The DOJ’s reply to Rundo’s answering brief says Carney “fixated on Antifa” when he granted a defense motion to dismiss for selective prosecution. Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua P. Robbins said Tuesday that Carney assumed in his order that three people were Antifa members “but it’s not actually clear that they were.”
Only one selective prosecution dismissal has survived in the 9th Circuit, and it’s from 1972, Robbins said.
Judge Milan Smith said Judge Carney “cited hundreds of newspaper articles with no foundation for them at all.”
Rundo is in federal custody. The dismissal order also covers his co-defendant, Robert Boman, who is not in custody.
You can watch the argument on YouTube:
85-100 people have been summonsed for Girardi jury duty
Disbarred attorney Tom Girardi, husband of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika Jayne, is to begin trial Aug. 6 in his wire fraud case for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars from five clients.
Federal prosecutors and Girardi’s public defenders were in U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton’s courtroom in Los Angeles on Thursday for a hearing on motions, including one from the defense that asks for a jury questionnaire and one from prosecutors that seeks to exclude the testimony of a defense expert who testified in Girardi’s mental competency hearing last year.
Girardi is currently set to be tried alongside his former chief financial officer, Christopher Kamon, who has been in custody since December 2022, but his lawyers on Friday moved to sever his trial from Kamon’s. They also filed a motion to suppress evidence “obtained through warrantless searches and seizures and intentional privilege invasions.”
On Thursday, Deputy Federal Public Defender Charles Snyder described a defense that rides largely on blaming Kamon for the embezzlement. Kamon is charged separately with stealing money from the firm in his own scheme; his lawyer, Michael Severo, has filed a motion to exclude evidence of that scheme from trial.
Prosecutors oppose, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Paetty told Staton, “These schemes are connected.” Girardi’s lawyers also oppose Kamon’s motion because they say his other case is important to Girardi’s defense.
Judge Staton has not yet issued a final ruling.
Attorneys expect the trial to be 12 days, which is longer than initially anticipated and prompted Judge Staton to seek a time-qualified jury that requires earlier summons.
The judge said Thursday that 85 to 100 people have been ordered to appear at the courthouse on Aug. 1. They’ll fill out a questionnaire that includes questions about their knowledge of Girardi and Erika. Trial is scheduled to begin Aug. 6.
A hearing on the new motions, which include a request from prosecutors to tell the jury about Kamon trying to flee, is scheduled for July 27.
Previous coverage:
Sam Woodward on trial in OC for Blaze Bernstein’s murder
My friend Louis Keene of the Forward has been reporting on the trial of Samuel Woodward for the murder of Blaze Bernstein in Orange County, California, in 2018.
Bernstein’s disappearance was a huge event, and Woodward’s highly anticipated trial focuses on whether he committed a hate crime when he fatally stabbed Bernstein, who is gay and Jewish.
You can read Louis’ coverage here. His latest article looks at Woodward’s time on the witness stand: Killer of slain Jewish college student says victim threatened to out him
Long Lead’s amazing work on the LA veterans’ scandal
I’m excited to announce I’m working with the amazing journalists at Long Lead on the their longterm project about the veterans’ housing scandal in Los Angeles: Home of the Brave — a Long Lead Newsletter.
I’ll be reporting on a federal trial scheduled to begin Aug. 6. I’ll have much more to say as the trial nears. In the meantime, please check out the amazing work published so far.
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