Things SBF’s Defense Lawyers Should be Freaking out About

For a moment Thursday, it looked like Sam Bankman-Fried’s lead attorney, Mark Cohen, was lulling the U.S. Department of Justice’s star witness, Caroline Ellison, into a false sense of security on the stand.

The former Alameda Research CEO was clearly comfortable testifying during her cross-examination. She answered “yes or no?” questions with unnecessary levels of detail – a generally unwise practice for witnesses in a criminal trial. The government’s star witness even corrected Cohen’s choppy pronunciation and wording on certain questions.

And yet, at the end of a nearly five-hour back-and-forth the press corps hoped would be fiery, Cohen rested without proving his expected point: That Caroline Ellison was perhaps more responsible for FTX’s collapse last November than his own client. It was an argument Cohen seemed to telegraph in his opening statement, when he blamed Ellison’s failure to hedge Alameda’s bad crypto bets as somehow paramount. By his closing question to Ellison, he’d seemingly failed.

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Cohen, a well-regarded white collar crime attorney, also failed to severely undermine Ellison’s credibility. He landed one solid hit on the crypto empire’s insider trustworthiness when he caught her conveniently forgetting the somewhat positive characterization of Bankman-Fried’s awareness of their various (alleged) crime-ing that she’d lodged during extensive pretrial interviews with prosecutors.

A feverish-sounding, immediate intervention from Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon indicated she understood the moment’s gravity. Judge Kaplan, who hates sidebars even more than the morning’s court security officer hates cell phones, then called for one – revealing that he, too, understood. Did the jury? Probably not.

Cohen did not bring up any questions about her recreational drug use. He did not deeply probe her past romantic relationship with Bankman-Fried. (Granted, doing so might have caught jurors’ ire). While answers to his initial line of questioning suggested Ellison ran Alameda on her own with little oversight from the defendant – possibly…