This week in the saga

The week the fortress starts leaking from the south. In Washington the written gag order lands — the defendant may not attack the prosecutor, the staff, the witnesses — and he answers by attacking the idea of the order itself. In New York the ledger trial grinds through its third week and hands him one clean win elsewhere: a class action collapses. Then Atlanta: two of his own co-defendants kneel in a single week, guilty pleas traded for testimony against the rest. The lawyer who once promised to release the Kraken is suddenly, he insists, a stranger — she was never his attorney. And through all of it the megaphone that once sat silent on the table is, by his own delighted account, running hot.