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Trout pointed out that Josh’s professional duty precluded him from acting adverse- ly to his client’s interests. As a result, Josh made no mention in his letter to Byrd’s flipping on the second day, implicating Ken. Josh hand-delivered the letter to the judge, who read it and put it in a file. Later the judge decided he should give a copy of the letter to the U.S. Attor- ney, and with Josh’s consent, he did so. Josh did not know that Byrd had already been “picked.” He also did not know that when Byrd threatened to go to Assistant U.S. Attorney Warwick, Byrd was sitting in the room with Warwick. Josh and his client thought Byrd’s call was a shakedown, not a setup. Josh reacts, clearly shown on the video, exactly as you would expect an ethical attorney to react: “Well, he can’t do that. . . . I can’t advise him to delete stuff off his laptop. I can’t do that. I told you, Richard, yesterday, there’s a subpoena out for that stuff. I can’t delete that, and he can’t either.” Josh then pointed out that what Byrd was saying was very different from what Byrd had said the day before. The final video clip from the meeting shows that what Josh said to Byrd was exactly what you would expect an eth- ical attorney to say under the circumstances: “I can’t put you on the witness stand if you’re going to lie, and if I know you’re going to lie, I can’t do that.” Josh terminated the interview, but before he and the investigator left, Josh asked Byrd again to sign the two-page document to confirm that he had reviewed it the day before. Byrd signed and dated the document. Back in his office, Josh prepared a formal statement for the investigator to sign to make a record of the exculpatory statements that Byrd had agreed were true on the first day. The investigator reviewed and signed the state- ment, and Josh put it in his file. He never used that statement. In fact, he never took it out of his file. Trout paused to wonder aloud whether this statement – that Josh never used and never took out of his file – could possibly play any role in a story about a prosecution for obstruction of justice. “Spoiler alert,” Trout previewed, “it does.” Josh had no further dealings with Byrd. The following January, four months after their meeting in the jail, Byrd left a voicemail with the in- vestigator. Byrd said he was upset that he had heard nothing further from them. He said he’d done what he was supposed to do, he’d told them what he needed but hadn’t gotten anything back. Byrd wanted to know, “what’s going on with the love.” And then, as Trout described it, Byrd “delivered the punchline” – “Listen, y’all making me feel like I need to call fucking Warwick.” Byrd’s call was a shakedown. If he didn’t get the money he wanted, Byrd would go to Assistant U.S. Attorney Warwick, the person who had prosecuted Byrd and was now leading the investigation of Ken. Josh and his client wanted to make a record that Byrd had tried to extort them and that they were having none of it. But Josh did not think he could go to law enforcement because so far as Josh knew, Byrd was not cooperating with the government, and it was not in his client’s interests to tell the authorities that Byrd was, as Trout said, “ripe for the picking.” To make a record of the extortionate voicemail, Josh wrote a letter to the judge who had previously handled Byrd’s case, a judge Josh had known for over forty years, dating back to when they were Assistant U.S. Attorney’s together in Baltimore. As far as Josh was concerned, the Byrd case was over, and nothing related to Byrd was pending before the judge. Josh made no request for the judge to do anything. The letter described Byrd’s extortion- ate voicemail and explained why Josh did not feel he could report it to law enforce- ment and was instead reporting it to the judge. To provide background and context for Byrd’s threat to go to the government with damning evidence, Josh described Byrd’s earlier exculpatory statements from the meeting the previous September. A few months later, in January 2019, Josh received a letter from the U.S. Attorney’s of- fice advising him he was now the subject of a criminal investigation. Josh retained Trout. Shortly thereafter, the government raided Josh’s law firm, seizing records, including the two-page document that Byrd had signed and the formal statement that Josh had pre- pared and the investigator had signed after the interview with Byrd. Josh was advised that he was now a target of the investiga- tion. Eighteen months later, in December 2020, the government charged Josh, along with Ken and the investigator, on multiple counts of obstruction of justice. Although there had been engagement with the U.S. Attorney’s office during the months leading up to the indictment, Trout received no ad- vance notice of the indictment. He learned about the charges against his client from the Baltimore Sun newspaper. Trout asked the audience whether they had heard anything that sounded like obstruction of justice or a lawyer doing anything other than what a lawyer is expected to do. He then explained the theory of the prosecution. One count was conspiracy, which Trout characterized as “a study in prosecutorial arrogance.” Trout summarized the prosecu- tion theory as: we’ve done an investigation; 51 JOURNAL