Michael Voris

I've put up a post with my thoughts on the recent developments over Michael Voris over on the Cold Case File blog.

Revisiting Sam Bankman-Fried

I ran into a recent article that points to the same questions I had about Sam Bankman-Fried when I posted on the scandal a year ago:

[T]he received narrative goes on to say that FTX was run by a dozen or so polyamorous hippie-style geniuses who suffered from ADHD, lived communally in a luxury penthouse in the Bahamas, and had their own doctor-therapist who prescribed amphetamines for their ADHD. The only female in the group I'm aware of was Caroline Ellison, so according to that doctor, there wasn't really that much action. Nevertheless, it was the synergy between Beanbag Boy Bankman-Fried and Queen Caroline that drove the whole enterprise, or something like that. But they let Caroline lose $10 billion in unsupervised trading, and John Ray III says he's nver seen anything like it.

Never underestimate what a beautiful woman can do.

At the time, I was scratching my head: I kept doing web searches on ADHD and came up with discussions like this:

In order for people age 17 and older to be diagnosed with ADHD, 5 or more symptoms of inattention and/or hyperactivity/impulsivity must be present and negatively impacting directly on social and academic/occupational activities.

Among those symptoms listed are:

• Makes careless mistakes/lacks attention to detail
• Difficulty with organization, time management, and deadlines
• Avoids tasks requiring sustained mental effort
• Loses things necessary for tasks or activities
• Easily distracted (including unrelated thoughts)
• Forgetful in daily activities
• Procrastinates and puts off tasks until the last moment possible.

Sam had a degree in math and physics from MIT, while Caroline had a degree from Stanford in math. My degrees are in Eng Lit, but I can still compute that somneone who can't sit still, makes careless mistakes, and has difficulty with time management and deadlines isn't even going to be capable of taking the SATs or any other standardized test at all, much less get through course work in an undergraduate math or physics major.

How did they even get near a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange? This raises questions that go far beyond Sam and Caroline, but up to now, nobody has been asking them. The piece I discovered at the link at the top, originally in Fortune but behind a paywall there, at least begins to give some insight:

When a jury convicted Sam Bankman-Fried on seven fraud-related charges, it marked a symbolic end to the biggest scandal in crypto history. But for Bankman-Fried's law professor parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, the legal ordeal is far from over.

Bankman-Fried's bankrupt FTX exchange, now led by a caretaker CEO, is suing Bankman and Fried to recover a $10 million gift from their son that was paid with corporate funds. More seriously, the parents—Bankman in particular—might face the risk that federal prosecutors charge them for abetting their son's criminal enterprise.

What do you mean, "abet"? Sam himself apparently couldn't even sit still behind a computer screen. Somebody else had to be calling the shots -- in fact, somebody had to create Sam from the start. I can't imagine that he could have been admitted to a highly selective university like MIT based on the admissions standards for applicants from the general public. The story continues,

Long before Bankman-Fried launched his ill-fated crypto empire, his parents enjoyed substantial financial security and cultural status. They live in a house on the immaculate campus of Stanford University at which they hosted gatherings of the Bay Area's academic and political elite, and enjoyed access to the very top ranks of the Democratic party thanks, in part, to Fried’s fundraising prowess.

Given that capability, it sounds as though Prof Bankman was already running a scam not much different from Jeffrey Epstein's philanthropic hustle, in which he bundled so-so donations from his marks to Harvard and MIT and parlayed them via smoke and mirrors into favors and prestige for himself. Sam's Wikipedia entry gives some insight into this environment:

Bankman-Fried was born on March 5, 1992, in Stanford, California. He is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School. His aunt Linda P. Fried is the dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. His younger brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried (b. c. 1995), is a former legislative assistant, Wall Street trader, and the former director of the non-profit Guarding Against Pandemics and its associated political action committee, which came under scrutiny by Federal investigators after it was discovered that much of the $35 million on its books had been stolen by his older brother, Sam, from Alameda Research accounts.

What we're seeing is a preexisting network of connections, nepotism, and money that could not only place Sam in the highly prestigious and upscale Crystal Springs Uplands School, get him into MIT almost certainly via an admissions category that bypassed the ordinary competitive process, and even assure his graduation with a degree in physics and math. (My surmise has always been that if powerful families can ensure the admission of unpromising offspring to prestige schools, they can just as effectively ensure their graduation.) My view continues to be that Sam, essentially a special-needs child, was entirely the creation of his parents, powerful and prosperous people at the top of the academic food chain, and for the whole of his life, he was groomed for his role as their puppet. The Fortune story continues,

Whether or not Bankman’s role at FTX amounted to abetting in the criminal sense, there is evidence he was directly involved in major decisions at the firm. That evidence includes numerous group chats on the messaging app Signal, produced as evidence at Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial, in which Bankman participated during a time frame up to and including the exchange’s collapse.

. . . There is also the balance sheet itself, which listed obscure tokens that had little real-world value and included surreal entries like “Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account.” If Bankman had seen it—which seems plausible, given his role as lawyer and close advisor to the firm—it’s hard to fathom how he could accept the validity of such a document, which would have received a failing grade from a high school accounting teacher.

As for Bankman’s precise role at FTX, it was amorphous like everything else at the company his son ran as a personal fiefdom. The only formal documentation about its corporate structure, drawn up by an executive and published on the dust jacket of Michael Lewis’s book about Bankman-Fried, lists Bankman as a direct report to his son.

Well, that's the org chart, which says nothing about who's really calling the shots. Should Profs Bankman and Fried ever stand trial, we may possibly learn more about how that layer of the power elite actually works.

More On The 2024 Dilemma

I ran into a piece by Walter Shapiro at The New Republic, The Real Reason Why Biden Shouldn’t Drop Out:

Panicked Democrats, vibrating with anxiety over the polls, continue to nurture an unlikely fantasy: Joe Biden looks at his family across the Thanksgiving table on Nantucket and says with a weary sigh, “I can’t do this for another five years. I’ve tried my best. But I just don’t have the stamina to keep going through 2028.”

Nothing in the president’s makeup suggests that he would abruptly jettison his reelection campaign. . . . Every sign emanating from his inner circle and reelection campaign suggests a stubborn refusal to even acknowledge his growing legion of Democratic doubters. But even if Biden were to accept the truth embedded in the polls, as Harry Truman did when he bowed out in 1952, the subsequent multicandidate scramble for the Democratic nomination would create as many (if not more) political problems as it would solve.

This echoes David Axelrod, who says, "It's very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden's team says his resolve to run is firm." But Shapiro goes into detail on the downside for anyone who thinks about stepping in if, as seems unlikely, Biden will withdraw even this early in the cycle:

If Biden announced on the Monday after Thanksgiving that he would be retiring, it would give 2024 presidential contenders fewer than 100 days to declare their candidacies and define their image before 14 states pick delegates on Super Tuesday, March 5. And 11 other states will be holding Democratic primaries later in March.

Organizing a campaign and raising the money at that pace would be gruelling enough. But candidates would also face high-intensity scrutiny from the media and the voters without any benefit from a learning curve. It would be the equivalent of opening a musical on Broadway without a single tryout and just three days of rehearsals.

. . . Those who have been watching the Republican debates (not necessarily a recommended activity) probably will have noticed that, in a technical sense, both Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have grown more adept over the last three months. That is the learning curve at work.

. . . Even a globe-trotting governor like Newsom, who visited China last month, would be ill prepared for the full range of queries that would be immediately hurled at him as a presidential candidate—hourly questions about a cease-fire based on the latest glimmers of news from Gaza, repeated inquiries about the best Democratic strategy on Capitol Hill to keep the government open, and never-ending queries about how to finance proposed new government programs.

But he also raises an issue that I haven't seen from anyone else, the extent to which the McGovern wing of the Democrats has gained effective veto power over the past 50 years:

As president, Biden has papered over many of the ideological fissures in the party by being far more ambitious in his legislative agenda than his prior moderate reputation might have suggested.

This is a polite way of saying that the Democrat center, in the persons of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, has been forced to cave to the far left, in the form of the Squad and similar constituencies. They aren't papering over fissures so much as they're adopting the agenda, and the problem is that the putatively centrist leadership, Biden and Pelosi, have aged out, leaving no centrist equivalent to Bill Clinton to take over in their place. But there's no credible leftist to replace them, either:

But if the 81 year-old (as of today) Biden opted out of a second term based on age, presumably that would also leave Bernie Sanders (82) and maybe Elizabeth Warren (74) on the sidelines. An unanswered question under such a scenario: Who, if anyone, would emerge as the left-wing favorite in the primaries? There is no natural successor to Sanders or Warren being bandied about as a break-in-case-of-emergency option should Biden withdraw.

He thinks the major problem now confronting the Democrats is that among the current possibilities, none will have had the time to build a credible public profile as a candidate as the prinmary season gets under way. But I think this evades the reality of 2024: the primaries are going to be irrelevant to both parties. Trump's overwhelming polling lead will make Repulblican primary victories a formality. If Joe Biden withdraws, it won't be during the primary season; it will be either just before or just after the Democrat convention, avoiding any primary battle, which would simply expose the rift between the Democrat far left and shrinking center.

My scenario continues to be that Joe withdraws sometime next summer, and the party insiders under something like Rule F designate Newsom as Joe's successor but keep Kamala as vice presidential nominee. I'm not sure this will work at all, but it's probably the only possible strategy -- put someone new and young and arguably not quite such a rabid leftist at the top of the ticket and hope keeping Kamala will satisfy the rabid left, but this is a charade, and it leaves open the possibility for a third party challenge from the far left as well.

I Haven't Seen Anything Like This So Early In A Campaign

Even in 1980, the incipient Reagan landslide seems to have taken Democrats, or at least those speaking for public consumption, by surpise. In 1972, especially after the Eagleton fiasco, there was never any serious expectation that McGovern could beat Nixon, so that election is an outlier -- but even then, the real pessimism didn't even take hold until McGovern was nominated. In the 2024 cycle, we're seeing gnashing of teeth and rending of garments a full year before the election.

The closest equivalents to the current environment that I can remember were in 1988 over Dukakis and 2004 with John Kerry, when, after the Democrat conventions, "sources" spoke to reporters without attribution about how badly those campaigns were going. But again, this was during the summer and early fall before those elections, not during the fall a full year ahead, and few people are now publicly trying to maintain a happy face. And the Democrat insiders aren't just talking on background, certainly not David Axelrod:

“I think he has a 50-50 shot here, but no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod said.

“He thinks he can cheat nature here and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”

This was in Politico a week ago:

Just under one year before the presidential election, Democrats should be concerned but not panicked about President Biden’s standing.

. . . For Biden to win reelection, however, he must make changes. I spoke with dozens of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans about what the president can do on personnel, presentation and strategy to improve his prospects. Their suggestions (pleadings?) are below.

The level of despair was striking. Since beginning this column a year ago, I’ve written repeatedly about the chasm between what Democrats say in private versus public about Biden. Yet perhaps not since Trump’s 2016 election have the party’s leaders and lawmakers been so alarmed.

What’s notable is both the uniformity of these anxieties — there’s no faction in denial — and how they mirror the discontent of the broader public.

Also in Politico a day later:

Earlier this fall, President Joe Biden’s top aides met a pair of progressives who had arrived in the West Wing with reams of data and a private warning: “Bidenomics” wasn’t breaking through.

. . . The meetings — the extent of which have not been previously reported — included sitdowns with members of Biden’s inner circle, as well as top aides charged with shaping Biden’s political and policy strategy ahead of 2024. They offer a window into a White House well aware that its economic message wasn’t resonating, even as it’s repeatedly dismissed such fears as overblown.

This reminds me of the public soul-searching in 2004 as John Kerry's campaign went awry, but keep in mind that this was only in September of that year, just two months before the election:

Following the Democratic convention in late July, Kerry was ahead (or tied) in most polls, a majority of Americans viewed Iraq as a mismanaged war and more had an unfavorable view of President Bush than of Kerry.

The mirror image is now true. What went wrong?

According to veteran strategists, three things: attacks on Kerry's Vietnam War record went unanswered, a Democratic convention went positive instead of driving a wedge between Kerry and Mr. Bush, and the Kerry campaign lacked a cohesive overall message.

"They only have two gears on their campaign: coast or fight. Like they did in 2003 when they almost lost it to us," [Howard Dean adviser Joe] Trippi says, speaking of Howard Dean's near victory. "[Democrats] stayed really positive and the mistake was not taking Bush on in the convention."

As of today via the UK Daily Mail, we're hearing similar tones, except that it's ten months earlier in the cycle:

The President has seen repeated questions over his fitness for office, with polls and pundits suggesting it is a huge problem with less than a year to the 2024 election.

When asked to respond to concerns about his age by the New York Times, the White House swerved and tried to rattle off a list of his achievements.

. . . But some of his staffers still believe he needs protecting, with a new strategy being set out to stop him falling or getting lost on stage like he has on multiple occasions.

. . . But John B. Judis, a longtime political strategist and author, suggested Biden's age has made him look less presidential.

'He doesn't look and speak the part,' Judis said. 'He's not a commanding or charming presence on a presidential or presidential election stage.'

Mr Judis's point is the most telling. Joe can't hold traditional press conferences or one-on-one interviews with any reporter who asks serious questions about his family business deals, the state of the Ukraine war and his plans for it, the border immigration crisis, crime, or homelessness. The same goes for debates -- it wasn't clear during the 2020 campaign that Joe can perform coherently for only brief periods (in my view, when he's kept from alcohol, despite his protestations of never having had a drink).

And it isn't just the most recent polls showing even Nikki Haley leading Biden in swing states. James Carville was saying the same thing in September:

Democratic Party leaders are not listening to their voters' concerns about President Biden's age, as they push Biden forward as the party's primary candidate for the 2024 election, a prominent Democratic strategist warned.

"The voters don’t want this, and that’s in poll after poll after poll," James Carville told the New York Times. Worrying these fears could lower voter turnout, he conceded, "You can’t look at what you look at and not feel some apprehension here."

. . . According to a CNN report, Biden's aides are terrified of losing to Donald Trump in a potential rematch as several polls show the two in an essential tie.

CNN reported last week that polls showing no clear lead between the two candidates in a hypothetical rematch were leaving aides with "existential stress" as members of the media continue to question whether Biden should run for re-election at all.

Again, we're looking at a level of pessimism among Democrats about an incumbent Democrat so early in the cycle that it's unprecedented. The pessimism about McGovern, Dukakis, and Gore was about candidates running against an incumbent, but Biden is an incumbent. There was much less pessimism about Carter's chances in 1980, and it was nowhere near as great a year ahead of that election -- in part because Reagan was an unknown quantity at that time, and it was by no means certain that he'd be the nominee. Trump is a known quantity, he's the likely nominee, and voters are making up their minds very early in the cycle.

I don't think Joe can turn things around; he's too much of a known quantity. For the odds to change, one or both sides will need to find another nominee, but as of right now, even if the Republicans have to fall back on Nikki Haley, the polls suggest even she would beat Joe.

Kevin Morris Reemerges

I'm a contrarian on many things, but I'm especially contrarian on the subject of Kevin Morris, the Hollywood lawyer who's been funding Hunter Biden's lifestyle since the wheels came off in 2019-20 and more recently, as best anyone can surmise, paying Hunter's lawyers and guiding his overall legal strategy. How's that going? Well, this past summer, the tentative plea deal and diversion agreement negotiated by Chris Clark, Hunter's attorney who was apparently paid and supervised by Morris, collapsed in a Delaware courtroom, and apparently at Morris's order, Clark withdrew from the case, replaced by Abbe Lowell.

This controversy forced Attorney General Garland to take the leash off the Delaware prosecutor, David Weiss, and make him a full special counsel with the ability to pursue the case in other districts. Now, as a result,

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig suggested it doesn’t bode well for Hunter Biden that a California grand jury is being used in a special counsel’s investigation into the president’s son.

“It’s bad news for Hunter Biden any way you slice this,” Honig said during an interview on “Anderson Cooper 360″ on Thursday evening. “Let’s remember, he already has a pending indictment in the federal district court in Delaware for the firearms-related charges.”

. . . CNN said the move by Weiss indicates he may be seeking new charges against Biden after previously bringing gun charges against him in Delaware. Honig said Biden may be looking at a second indictment out of California.

Morris has got to be some lawyer, huh? As I've been saying, he's an entertainment lawyer whose career seems to have prospered, at least for a time, because his wife, William Morris partner Gaby Morgerman, is one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood. But the projects he's been asssociated with, South Park (1997) and the musical The Book of Mormon (2011), are old news. He left his former law firm Morris Yorn Barnes & Levine in 2020, oddly at the same time that he became heavily involved in Hunter's business and personal affairs.

But as I posted here, Morris appears to have lost interest in his law practice years earlier. In 2009, he "decided to become a writer" and seems to have worked full time at writing and publishing a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems (2014), and two novels, All Joe Knight (2016) and Gettysburg (2019). By most accounts, he met Hunter in 2019 at a Joe Biden fundraiser, Hunter impressed him, and the rest is history. He seems to have dropped his aspiration to become the John Updike of his generation, as well as his entertainment law career, and undertaken Hunter as his full time project.

The conventional wisdom is more or less as follows:

Kevin Morris, an entertainment attorney and novelist who earned a fortune representing the co-creators of “South Park” and won a Tony Award as the co-producer of “The Book of Mormon,” footed Hunter Biden’s overdue taxes totaling over $2 million — more than twice what was previously reported, a source familiar with conversations between the two told The Post.

Morris, whom Hunter Biden’s friends call his latest “sugar brother,” has also been funding the 52-year-old’s lifestyle in Los Angeles — including his rent and living expenses, the source said.

Plus, now, Hunter's astronomical attorney fees as well. These payments, which by now must certainly be well into eight figures, have been loosely characteried as "loans". As House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer puts it,

It sure seems that the Bidens get a lot of ‘loans’ that raise many questions. Kevin Morris is reportedly helping Hunter Biden pay off his legal bills and China debt, which the Biden team claim are ‘loans.’ These ‘loans’ have occurred both during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and presidency, which raise serious ethical concerns.

The House committees have begun the process of obtaining more information from Morris on what I assume must be the total of his financial support for Hunter and how this is characterized -- adding multimillions in legal fees from nationally prominent lawyers, Hunter's tax debts, which appear to be considerably more than $2 million, other legal fees for his child custody case, lease expenses for a Malibu residence and likely an additional residence for his wife, Melissa Cohen, and payments to his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, it's hard to avoid wondering how anyone at Hunter's age and prospects, and taking into consideration his overall lack of talent, could conceivably pay this off as a "loan".

But now we come to the next question: Kevin Morris, as far as anyone can tell, is no longer working as an attorney, and in any case, the time he's spending running Hunter's life and businesses isn't billable. He failed in his attempt at a literary career and no longer seems to be writing. One recent vignette showed him smoking weed from a bong on an upstairs porch, which suggests he's no longer much more than your average stoner. Leaving aside possibly $10-20 million or more he's spent on Hunter since 2020, his lifestyle, which seems to include major residences in Malibu and Manhattan as well as a pied-a-terre in Santa Monica and a private jet, must be financed entirely by his wife.

$10-20 million isn't mad money. Even a powerful Hollywood agent isn't rich enough to cover that family lifestyle plus Hunter. This money has got to be coming from some other source.

Somebody Agrees With Me On Gavin Newsom

Joe Biden recently reignited speculation on what's up with Gavin Newsom's not-a-campaign for president next year:

President Biden late Wednesday quipped that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) could have any job he wants, including potentially being president, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the governor’s much-discussed White House ambitions.

. . . “Matter of fact, he could be anything he wants. He could have the job I’m looking for,” Biden added, eliciting laughter in the room.

The California governor has widely been considered as a possible presidential contender, and some see him as a potential candidate come 2028. Newsom has repeatedly fended off speculation he could challenge Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024.

Biden, who will turn 81 this month, has faced persistent questions about whether he is too old to run for a second term. Polls have consistently shown large percentages of Democrats would prefer a different nominee in 2024.

Last month I went out on a limb and predicted this:

I suspect Pelosi and other insiders are fuily aware that Joe has multiple skeletons in multiple closets, and they're in the process of hedging against a set of scandals that will force Joe's withdrawal from the race late in next year's primary season, leaving a limited field with no potential Democrat replacement having a clear primary campaign record. This will open the opportunity for Newsom to become the consensus last-minute white guy who isn't either Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg.

He would keep Kamala as vice president.

This theory refines the scenario slightly:

The attacks on Biden from the Democrat Establishment coincide with the ascent of Gavin Newsom.

How could the DNC avoid a messy primary and nominate their preferred candidate (Newsom)?

It’s in the fine print.

Biden is increasingly frail and confused, his dementia is worsening and his economic plan is faltering.

His popularity continues to crumble even among Democrats.

Consider the possibility that he resigns after receiving the Presidential nomination at the DNC 2024 convention.

Why that specific timing?

Because –

Rules adopted by the Democratic National Committee in 2022 leave the DNC as the sole authority to appoint a Presidential nominee where that nominee resigns after the August 2024 convention.

No vote or primary needed.

Although the piece refers to "Rules adopted by the Democratic National Committee in 2022" and quotes them, it's without a link. Here's the text the piece claims to quote:

In the event of death, resignation or disability of a nominee of the Party for President or Vice President after the adjournment of the National Convention, the National Chairperson of the Democratic National Committee shall confer with the Democratic leadership of the United States Congress and the Democratic Governors Association and shall report to the Democratic National Committee, which is authorized to fill the vacancy or vacancies.

The only other place I can find this text is at this site from 2020, which refers to it as the Democratic Party’s Rule F, but the link is broken. On one hand, the rule may or may not be current, but on the other, I'm not sure if we can rely on the Democrats to follow whatever rule is in place in any case.

I do agree with the subtext of the piece, which is that the Democrats don't trust the primary process -- just look at the so-far unsuccessful effort by the Biden handlers to replace the New Hampshire primary with South Carolina as the first in the 2024 cycle. At the same time, Newsom so far is pushing the same buttons as Biden, a continuation of preferential treatment for favored minorities (he established a California commission on reparations), same old-same-old on homelessness, crime, and immigration, preferential treatment for LGBTQ+, full abortion rights, and so forth).

An unfettered primary process might or might not nominate Newsom, but it wouldn't work at all as long as Joe is still in office. Thus there would need to be a swap imposed by the party insiders either very late in the primary season or after the convention.

Right now, the polls showing Trump, or even Nikki Haley, beating Biden are starting not to look like outliers, and other factors may figure in, including the collapse of Joe's Ukraine policy, further revelations of paymnents to the Biden family, a collapse of the Get Trump lawfare strategy via the appeals process, or a collapse of the January 6 narrative with the release of the Capitol security tapes. This leaves aside some utterly game-changing gaffe or a serious health event by Joe himself.

Democrat insiders have got to be gaming the contingencies, and Newsom looks like the most predictable replacement, especially with the supprt of Nancy Pelosi and maybe now Joe himself.

Appeals Judge Stays Engoron's Gag Order

Alan Dershowitz recently remarked that of all the Get Trump cases, the prosecutions have been putting on the weakest ones first. The New York civil case under Judge Engoron is hurning out to be not just weak but farcical. A recent commenter on Xwitter posted on the judge:

Dude! He looks like Mr. Burns off of the Simpsons. And he looks like he drives a van with no windows.

For comparison, here's Mr Burns. Judge Engoron is simply playing into Trump's hands -- in their motion for a mistrial and appeal of the judge's gag orders against Trump himself and his attorneys, they cite in particular evidence from the the judge's comments in his high school newsletter, of all things. He's 74 years old and hasn't left high school, despite his degrees from Columbia and NYU.

The Hill says of the appellate stay of his gag order:

The former president’s legal team requested an interim stay of Engoron’s gag orders — and the sanctions that resulted from his violation of them, which the New York appellate division granted after oral arguments Thursday.

The gag orders stemmed from an online attack Trump made on Engoron’s principal law clerk, who has become an unwitting main character in the fraud trial.

There's the nexus: Trump and his lawyers had been making fun of Engoron's apparent need to consult his principal clerk, Allison Greenfield, almost constantly, whispering and passing notes throughout the proceedings, which makes Engoron look weak and incompetent, and the fact that he frequently pontificates about Trump and his family in his high school newsletter only compounds the risibility. The judge has brought this on himself and doesn't seem able to back out of it. The Hill continues,

The appeals judge raised concerns over restricting Trump’s free speech in his decision to stay the gag order, meaning Trump can now comment freely about Engoron’s staff while the appeals process plays out.

Trump promptly seized this very opportunity:

Judge Arthur Engoron has just been overturned (stayed!) by the New York State Appellate Division (Appeals Court), for the 4th TIME (on the same case!). His Ridiculous and Unconstitutional Gag Order, not allowing me to defend myself against him and his politically biased and out of control, Trump Hating Clerk, who is sinking him and his Court to new levels of LOW, is a disgrace.

This again is, as Alan Dershowitz has also pointed out, the Chicago Seven defense. Engoron has telegraphed his insecurity on the point that he needs Ms Greenfield to sit with him on the bench, so his attorneys have been stressing this in their filings, and now with the gag order stayed, Trump is again hurling bombast at the two of them, which will only enrage Engoron further and elicit further bizarre reactions that soon enough will need to be overturned, and inevitably will make him a greater figure of ridicule.

None of the Get Trump cases has the A team either among the prosecutors or the judges, but the overall problem is that this case is the first one to come to trial, and it's inevitably going to set the tone for the ones that follow. The Trump Chicago Seven strategy seems to have been overall to bait the judges and prosecutors into imposing gag orders that inevitably will be overturned on appeal, and this process is now under way. This will only make the prosecutions seem weak and ineffective.

If the prosecution doesn't have the A team, Trump seems so far to have a much more capable group.