By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell book
BBC - Honduras - CIA Trial book - NY Mag
Literary EDNY, Oct 21 – After weeks of trial and a day off when two jurors were sick, on October 21 Barrack was supposed to take the stand. Kurt ran from Borough Hall to EDNY, using his temporary press pass to take his laptop in.
Up in Judge Cogan's eighth floor courtroom the gallery was more full than usual. Barrack's lawyer was putting a Paul Hastings lawyer named Brady Cassis on the stand. And he started with a joke.
He asked, Have you ever been to Disneyworld? Cassis said he had.
And what did you hear while you were there? That I'd been chosen as a finalist for the game show Jeopardy, Cassis said. The jurors laughed.
From that the question led Cassis through a stint as a "pintern" at COJ's Criminal Division, then Steptoe & Johnson and Paul Hastings. He'd been present for and taken notes at Barrack's interview by the FBI on June 20, 2019.
After a fight at the sidebar about whether the notes Cassis had typed on his laptop could come in - they did - he walked through the notes.
The point seemed to be that he hadn't written down that the FBI agent had asked about any special app Barrack had used with his UAE contacts. The notes veered from Jared Kushner through Bannon to the Emirates' ruler MBZ. But by day's end, still no Barrack.
Kurt went out onto Cadman Plaza with his phone but not his larger camera, left back in the SDNY Press Room. With a handful of other journalists, he waited for Barrack. But first out the door was Grimes. He jogged after and asked, How do you think it's going, Mr. Grimes?"
He called him Mister, even though on Twitter he called him Mister Smoothie, the beverage preparation of which his lawyer Abbe Lowell said was his main job at Colony Capital, disproved by emails.
Grimes didn't answer, and Kurt added some commentary or invective.
Then, after ten minutes or more, Barrack came out. He was asked, Are you going to testify? He said grandly, "Have a good weekend, guys." Kurt intended to.
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