Judge Kaplan’s Ire Hits All Lawyers in the Sam Bankman-Fried Case

We’ve entered the soul-sucking phase of Sam Bankman-Fried’s month-long criminal trial. The part where an antsy Judge Lewis Kaplan paces and glares – and then lashes out at prosecutors (and also defense lawyers) for wasting everyone’s time.

The government proffered two dud witnesses on Wednesday that probably did more harm to their working relationship with Judge Kaplan than good to their borderline airtight fraud case. Ex-FTX lobbyist Eliora Katz and the paper-pushing Google bureaucrat Cory Gaddis didn’t spend an hour on the stand between them delivering lackluster performances that peeved the no-nonsense judge.

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Late in the day, Kaplan accused prosecutors of “calling up a mannequin” in Katz, who had spent her morning testimony mumbling variations of “I don’t know anything and I didn’t work at FTX back then” in response to most every question. Her perplexing statements hinted that Katz would rather nuke her own credibility than play the game prosecutors wanted her to. That game was hardly earth-shattering: simply reading tweets and transcripts into the court record. At times, Kaplan was very clearly peeved at the sheer number of documents that Katz was asked to read into the record – especially given these were all public statements made on Twitter or uttered from the defendant’s mouth in front of Congress.

As bad as she was, the Googler was worse. Gaddis, who responds to legal requests the search engine giant receives, spent his ever-so-brief testimony saying there existed metadata that (I guess) demonstrated some Google doc whose contents weren’t actually discussed had been received, or worked on, or something, by Bankman-Fried. (Editor’s note: No, I’m not going to try to improve that sentence because it’s perfect.) Then cross-examination demonstrated Gaddis didn’t know a damn thing about metadata, a revelation that threw the bench into disarray.

“We have 18 people devoting time to this case, and it’s really a crime” what you’re doing to them, an exasperated Kaplan grumbled at the prosecution once the jury had left the room. He blasted them for making Gaddis fly…