The motion to dismiss was packed with the usual hyperbole and ad hominem attacks from attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, who will soon be running the Justice Department.

“No President of the United States has ever been treated as unfairly and unlawfully as District Attorney Bragg has acted towards President Trump in connection with the biased investigation, extraordinarily delayed charging decision, and baseless prosecution that give rise to this motion,” they bloviated.

At bottom, they objected to testimony by Trump’s White House aides, Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout, along with the introduction of a federally mandatory financial disclosure and several tweets issued while Trump was in office. These violate the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. US that evidence of official acts must be excluded to ensure that the president acts boldly and without fear that he’ll go to jail for doing crimes, they insist. They largely failed to lodge these objections at trial, however, suggesting that they did not anticipate the Supreme Court being crazy enough to buy what they were selling. (Oh ye of little faith!)

But Blanche and Bove aren’t just nasty. They’re creative, too! So they had several interesting theories why their untimely objections should carry the day. Maybe Trump v. US required a special hearing on immunity claims, and the lack of one constitutes a mode of proceedings error that does not require preservation. Maybe they refrained from objecting too much “to avoid antagonizing the court or testing its patience,” and so Justice Merchan should be a pal and treat those objections as if they’d been timely lodged. Maybe presidential immunity is a superpower that trumps all others.

Justice Merchan was not persuaded, and he noted that “the Trump Court” (cough) took pain to affirm that it wasn’t murdering all prosecutions of former presidents in their cribs, but rather setting out a rubric to separate official from unofficial conduct:

In attempting to assuage the concerns expressed by the dissent, Chief Justice Roberts succinctly clarified the majority’s holding. “As for the dissent, they strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today – conclude that immunity extends to official discussions between the President and his Attorney General, and then remand to the lower courts to determine ‘in the first instance whether and to what extent Trump’s remaining alleged conduct is entitled to immunity;” the Trump Court expressly indicating that its holding is no broader than that.

And so Justice Merchan took the Court at its word, finding that “the evidence related to the preserved claims relate entirely to unofficial conduct and thus, receive no immunity protections.” Rejecting the mode of proceedings argument, Justice Merchan noted that US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein conducted a fact-based review pursuant to Trump’s first federal removal petition and concluded that covering up a hush money payment to a porn star by dummying up fraudulent invoices to your lawyer was not official conduct. And so, Justice Merchan reasoned, “It is therefore logical and reasonable to conclude that if the act of falsifying records to cover up the payments so that the public would not be made aware is decidedly an unofficial act, so too should the communications to further that same cover-up be unofficial.”

The court added that, even if the evidence adduced at trial were official in nature, their introduction “poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch.”

And finally, if all the above was wrong, then it was harmless error since there was so damn much evidence against Trump that it wouldn’t have made any difference.

As of this writing, there is still a pending Motion to Dismiss Based on Various Previously Rejected Theories and Also I WON THE ELECTION. There’s also some rumbling from the defense about juror misconduct. It’s not clear what that involves, although the judge characterized it as a letter from the defense which “consists entirely of unsworn allegations.” That should appear on the docket in the next few days, if only in redacted form.

This case is hanging on by a thread. But it is hanging on.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker. 

It’s like a modified pump and dump, because at the end of the day it will most certainly go back down.

This guy thinks so, too.

“If they are all egging each other on using a social-media platform, they are effectively engaged in a crowdsourced pump-and-dump scheme,” said Daniel Hawke, a partner at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP.

The traders “are making no effort to conceal their apparent intent to manipulate the price of the stock,” added Mr. Hawke, a former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s market abuse unit.

As Belfort’s nearly two years in prison will tell you, pump-and-dumps are illegal. So are 4.4 million Redditors about to go to jail? Uh, probably not.

“Our team is of course -- our economic team including Secretary Yellen and others -- are monitoring the situation,” [White House Press Secretary Jen] Psaki told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.

The SEC said late Wednesday that it is monitoring the “volatility in the options and equities markets” and “working with our fellow regulators to assess the situation….” Suing hundreds of defendants who likely traded in small increments probably isn’t practical for the agency, according to securities lawyers, while a case that alleged a few key individuals instigated any problematic trading could be feasible….

Some investors, though, said the trading talked about in Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum isn’t manipulative and reflects an earnest effort by individual investors to seize on opportunities that have always been available to establishment players…. “This is the ultimate triumph of the newbies over the old pros,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers. “But what’s frustrating to the old pros is that they can’t engage in the sort of behavior that the newbies can do.”

Pity, because it doesn’t look like they’ll be getting any help from Congress.

“For years, the same hedge funds, private equity firms, and wealthy investors dismayed by the GameStop trades have treated the stock market like their own personal casino while everyone else pays the price,” [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren said.

“Gotta admit it’s really something to see Wall Streeters with a long history of treating our economy as a casino complain about a message board of posters also treating the market as a casino,” [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] tweeted…. “AOC got our backs,” read a post on the forum, along with a screenshot of Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter thread.

[Tucker] Carlson then slammed the Wall Street establishment for crying foul on a game insiders are usually the ones playing. "That's a crime only people who work for hedge funds are allowed to manipulate the market often with the help of CNBC. Normal people are not allowed to do that already. The people in charge of our system are outraged that anyone without an official position at a hedge fund would dare manipulate the market to their benefit."

Well, those are some delightfully strange bedfellows, but if the powers that be aren’t going to do what the hedge funds pay them to do, someone else will, it seems.

TD Ameritrade said it placed restrictions on certain types of trading activity on the companies “in the interest of mitigating risk for our company and clients….” Charles Schwab said shares of GameStop could no longer be traded on margin, meaning trades cannot be placed with money borrowed from the company. And Robinhood, the trading app that has made it easier for inexperienced traders to enter the market, said it wouldn’t allow margin trading of shares of both GameStop and AMC.

GameStop Stock Surge Tests Scope of SEC’s Manipulation Rules [WSJ]
SEC ‘Monitoring’ GameStop Frenzy as Warren Pressures Regulators [Bloomberg]
Trading platforms are limiting trades of GameStop and other companies. [NYT]
AOC mocks Wall Street outrage over GameStop surge [N.Y. Post]
Progressives Slam Hedge Funds Irked By GameStop Stock Boom As SEC Says It’s Monitoring The Situation [Forbes]
Tucker slams hedge funds as he explains GameStop stock market saga [The Post Millennial]
Jordan Belfort: GameStop frenzy is a ‘modified pump and dump’ [CNN]

But then again, after looking at this Business Insider report on a new survey involving "300 finance professionals with six to 10 years of post-MBA experience," it seems like perhaps willful naïveté in the face of animal nature is at an all-time high:

Top students from America's most prestigious MBA programs are increasingly seeking out careers outside of financial services, and voluntary turnover at some banks has reached peak levels, according to Business Insider's Matt Turner. According to the survey from the Toigo Foundation and Russell Reynolds, 50% of mid- and senior-level finance leaders are considering leaving their employer, and 20% are considering leaving finance.

Okay, this is not the first we're hearing of Millennial malcontentment with regards to living #ThatWallStreetLife, but what struck us most was not the unhappiness or the stats so much as it was the batshit reasoning behind them:

The report includes responses from some of the people surveyed. One respondent left Wall Street for a job at a tech firm because life was just too brutal:
"I transitioned to tech where the company says: 'We care about you.' That message alone gives you a sense of belonging and value. In banking, the messages are conveyed through your bonus. Not everyone is motivated solely by money. We want to feel engaged."

Listen up, Anonymous Snowflake, people show love in different ways. On Wall Street, it's shown through bonus checks. So while you might not think that the C.R.E.A.M ethos pervades every person on every desk at every bank, bonuses are love in the Finance Family. If you want a counter-argument - you needy fucking child - try picturing feeling super-engaged after your dope woke bro manager just dropped a bonus check for $0 on your Bloomberg keyboard two weeks before Christmas (Deutsche Bankers know what we're talkin' 'bout).

But that's not even the best quote:

"Finance could be better served if they tried to flatten their organizational structure and get to know their people — even at the department level. I'm much more than simply a pitchbook."

Umm, no. You are almost certainly not more than a pitchbook and no one wants to get to know you. They would like that pitchbook though. Also, who gave you an MBA and where can we publicly shame them?

Who is telling these people that their humanity will be valued in the early days of their financial careers? If it's the Business Schools these people claim to have attended, MBAs are even less of a bargain than we thought. This shit is supposed to suck. If it wasn't for the brutality and stress, Brian Moynihan would be a well-respected Boston lawyer who could feel joy. He'd also be significantly poorer.

On that note, we would pay all the money in the world to watch a senior analyst at KKR tell Henry Kravis that he should "flatten their organizational structure" in order to better know his minions. Watching this person be incinerated would be worth every cent.

Who's next?

"To build an inclusive culture, you have to be authentic and genuine about it. Simply updating a website or recruiting materials to show underrepresented talent doing cool work won't change an employee's mind if they are considering Facebook. They have to do more."

Okay, this one's fair. But we would also like to remind everyone born after 1981 that there was once a period in America where paying people a lot of money to do miserable work on Wall Street was seen as success.

Speaking of which:

In addition to noting the importance of inclusion, the report advises Wall Street firms to adopt a mission that employees can get behind and allows for more flexibility and freedom. While Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has broken the mold in recent weeks — lamenting President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change, for example — bank CEOs have typically kept quiet post-financial-crisis.
One survey respondent said:
"I envied my counterparts at the Googles and LinkedIns of the world — any time a crisis popped up, the CEOs would take a stance and employees would feel energized to act. That would never happen in finance, they've always tried to be neutral."

Again...what?

If you want a career that allows you to seamlessly blend your personal beliefs with your professional day-to-day activities, why would you ever consider working on Wall Street? When people in finance talk about "Activism" they are not picturing a bunch of Middlebury grads protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. They are picturing Carl Icahn coming to steal food from their kids' mouths...and they respect the shit out of him for trying. So, yeah, maybe do give Google a call.

While we're at it, neutrality is not a passive stance in the world of financial services. Whenever you're managing billions of dollars of client money in whatever form that might take, you should be pulling a hamstring trying to stay as neutral as the human body will physically allow. It should fucking hurt, because it definitely fucking pays.

We get it, things are fraught out there. But one would think that a bunch of twenty or thirty-somethings with literal MBAs would recognize that there is notional value in crisis and chaos. This new administration does in fact appear to be a dangerous shitshow capable of causing a geopolitical Armageddon. But you know who's largely responsible for it? A guy who always felt really under-appreciated and unrewarded for all the work he was doing while being paid handsomely at a little bank called Goldman Sachs.

So yeah, we said it: You all sound like a bunch of Millennial Steve Bannons.

Young Wall Streeters were surveyed about their experiences in finance — and their responses were brutal [BI]