Andrew Ross Sorkin

You can't really spoil history.

So,

Charles Mitchell effectively gets indicted for tax evasion.

By the way, that case brought against him by Roosevelt, effectively signed off by Roosevelt, who had a chip on his shoulder about Mitchell.

And that was part of the politics, too.

So this gets back to the strange parallels in life, Democrats and Republicans, for better or worse.

And he goes to trial.

Everybody expects that he's going to be convicted.

Everybody thinks he's going to be convicted.

Right.

He had, by the way, engaged in what was demonstrably a sham tax transaction with his wife.

And you get into I mean, you really get to see what was going on in the moment when he's literally in the room with his wife, you know, planning this whole tax strategy out.

And the jury comes back and finds him not guilty.

And this goes to exactly maybe what people thought about after the financial crisis of 2008.

Nobody really went to jail.

And when people discuss this with the jurors, when you read all of the sort of articles and opinion pieces about this at the time, the view was that –

He did basically what everybody else just would have done.

And they did not consider that to be criminal.

Interestingly, he had done it with the blessing of his lawyer, which was also sort of from a legal perspective, a very interesting defense, which was that he went to the lawyer, got the lawyer to bless it.

Completely corrupted process.