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- Judge Lewis Kaplan criticizes both prosecution and defense lawyers for procedural inefficiencies during the Sam Bankman-Fried trial.
- Witnesses, including ex-FTX lobbyist Eliora Katz and Google employee Cory Gaddis, come under fire for their ambiguous testimonies.
Witnesses Under Scrutiny
The Sam Bankman-Fried criminal trial has experienced tumultuous turns, reaching a phase marked by Judge Lewis Kaplan’s visible frustration. His consternation primarily revolved around what he perceived as wastage of the court’s valuable time, exacerbated by two witnesses presented by the prosecution.
Eliora Katz, a former lobbyist for FTX, seemed to detract from her own credibility. Throughout her testimony, she reiterated her lack of knowledge about various events, often responding with variations of
“I didn’t know anything and I didn’t work at FTX back then.”
While her role was to input tweets and transcripts into the court record, the sheer volume of documents Katz was asked to read – many of which were public statements – irked Judge Kaplan.
The scenario turned even murkier with Cory Gaddis, an employee of Google, who was supposed to present metadata concerning a Google document linked to Bankman-Fried. However, during cross-examination, it became glaringly evident that Gaddis had a superficial understanding of metadata, leading to courtroom confusion.
Judge Kaplan’s Discontent
Kaplan’s criticisms weren’t solely targeted at the witnesses. He openly reprimanded the prosecutors for making Gaddis travel from Texas to New York for a testimony that, in Kaplan’s eyes, added little value to the proceedings. The heart of Judge Kaplan’s discontent seems to lie in the failure of both legal teams to establish stipulations, which facilitate smoother court operations. Stipulations allow both parties to acknowledge certain evidence as factual without extensive debates in front of the jury.
In this context, the prosecution seemed to struggle. While they had videos and blog posts connected to Bankman-Fried’s statements to lawmakers, they lacked proper stipulations for many of them, leading to elongated procedures to get them on record.
In a surprising turn, despite the day’s setbacks, the prosecution managed to pull a resonating testimony from an investigator who presented a damning Twitter conversation between Bankman-Fried and journalist Kelsey Piper. The shared lines painted Bankman-Fried in a questionable light, a sentiment that appeared to resonate with some of the jurors.
