Your WiFi Repair Guy May Be The FBI

Your WiFi Repair Guy May Be The FBI By Matt Kaiser

If someone is interested in a career in the creative arts these days, I think being a federal law enforcement agent may be worth considering. You get to lie, you get to play dress up, and you get to think of so many creative ways to get into other people’s houses without a warrant.
Of course, everyone knows that federal law enforcement can work undercover. They get to set up whole personas that are false to try to do their work.
And FBI agents can get other people to wear a wire — especially if they’re threatened with the prospect of decades in prison, regardless of whether any judge would ever impose a sentence of that length for the conduct the agents allege.
During an interrogation, federal agents can lie to people with little consequence. Federal agents can go through your garbage without implicating the Fourth Amendment — after all, you’re the sucker who threw away your trash. If you didn’t want other people rooting through your garbage, you should have just left it all in your house to fester.
And, federal court in Nevada, in a case being litigated in part by Supreme Court Super Lawyer Tom Goldstein, federal agents can cut your internet, then dress up as an internet fix-it guy, and go into your house to search and see what they can find.
How does this work?

The federal government was investigating Paul Phua — a Macau gambler who was in Las Vegas for the reason most people go to Las Vegas (no, not Celine Dion, the other reason).
Caesar’s Palace was grateful for Phua’s presence; they put him up. He was staying at a villa owned by the casino. It had its own butler. It was, apparently, pretty nice.
The feds thought that Phua was involved in some illegal gambling activity. They wanted to get into that villa to look around to try to find something to back that up, like evidence, so they could get a search warrant.
As an aside — why is the government so intent on going after Phua if it doesn’t have enough evidence for a search warrant? I mean, the standard is probable cause. It’s not exactly a high bar. The government has something less than probable cause and it’s going to keep drilling down on this guy? Why, exactly?
But I digress. Agents, aroused with suspicion that someone is gambling in Las Vegas, dressed up as something like Best Buy delivery guys and showed up at the villa. They said they wanted to give Phua some computers. And, of course, they wanted to make sure the computers connected to the internet at the house, so they’d need to come in and test the WiFi on the computers in every room. Or something like that.
The butler said no.
So the agents set fire to the house, then posed as firefighters to go in and pretend to put the fire out.
Oh, no, I’m sorry, I moved straight to the next law enforcement idea that would be licensed if what the FBI did here is deemed constitutional.
Instead, the agents cut the WiFi to the house then posed as repairmen to fix it. While “fixing” the WiFi that they broke, they took hidden video of the place. They apparently found enough to go get a warrant.
When Phua was charged, his lawyer, not surprisingly, filed a motion to suppress everything that came after the “break your WiFi” trick. It appears the attack on this practice is in two stages — first, agents aren’t actually constitutionally allowed to break your WiFi so they can pose as repair people to go fix it, and, second, they sure aren’t allowed to cover it up when they file a search warrant application with a magistrate.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has responded to answer the motion.
AUSA Kimberly Frayn wrote that “the record makes clear that law enforcement had ample reason to suspect defendants of illegal bookmaking before raising any ruse in this matter.”
“Ample reason” is, apparently, something less than probable cause though, because otherwise the government could just get a warrant.
It’s good to know that the government will only cut services to your house so they can create a fake reason to get in and search for evidence against you when there’s “ample reason” though. Because “ample reason” is a well-defined constitutional doctrine.
See, agents aren’t the only people in the federal law enforcement community who get to make things up.

---

Matt Kaiser is a white-collar defense attorney at Kaiser, LeGrand & Dillon PLLC. He’s represented stockbrokers, tax preparers, doctors, drug dealers, and political appointees in federal investigations and indicted cases. Most of his clients come to the government’s attention because of some kind of misunderstanding. Matt writes the Federal Criminal Appeals Blog and has put together a webpage that’s meant to be the WebMD of federal criminal defense. His twitter handle is @mattkaiser. His email is mkaiser@kaiserlegrand.com He’d love to hear from you if you’re inclined to say something nice.

Mayer Brown’s Former CIO Charged With Defrauding the Firm Out of a Whole Bunch of Money

Editor's note: The Probate Court of Cook County lawyers don't have to bilk their own firms...they bilk the helpless wards of the court.  Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com


Mayer Brown’s Former CIO Charged With Defrauding the Firm Out of a Whole Bunch of Money By Christopher Danzig

In a time when many law firms are relatively less stable than their employees would like, it’s definitely not good to hear about a Biglaw executive allegedly defrauding his firm out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But such is the world we live in. So let’s get to it: which former executive at Chicago-based Mayer Brown is facing pretty egregious fraud charges?

It’s the former chief information officer, David Tresch, who stands accused of defrauding the company out of nearly a million dollars. From the Chicago Tribune:

A former executive at Mayer Brown was arrested Thursday on federal charges that he allegedly defrauded the Chicago law firm of at least $850,000.
David Tresch, 51, of Itasca was Mayer Brown’s former chief information officer. He allegedly approved payments to a vendor for work that had not been performed and pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from that vendor, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago.
FBI agents seized Thursday approximately $210,000 in bank accounts controlled by Tresch, as well as a camping trailer, a van, and a luxury automobile.
Tresch was released on a $100,000 partially-secured bond.

Ohhh boy. This does not look good. It’s kind of like a weird variation of that scene in Michael Clayton:
We’re not the guys you steal from. We’re the guys who fight in court for a living! Are you so f**king blind that you don’t even see what we are?
Biglaw attorneys work hard for their bucks. I imagine Mayer Brown partners are steaming mad about this. But at least it sounds like they are on top of the situation.
According to the Tribune, Tresch was fired in June “following an internal investigation” after working at Mayer Brown since 2004. When he was terminated, the firm also turned the case over to federal prosecutors.
Apparently the firm asked Tresch to stop using the unnamed IT vendor early last year due to cost cutting measures, but Tresch allegedly continued approving invoices and collecting checks anyway.
Well, at least we know he’s got the cash for a decent defense attorney.
Former Mayer Brown CIO arrested on fraud charge [Chicago Tribune]

23 Comments

• Print

Topics

Biglaw, Chief Information Officer, CIO, David Tresch, Fraud, IT, Mayer Brown, Money, Technology, White-Collar Crime

17 Jul 2014 at 11:14 AM

Biglaw, Crime, Dewey & LeBoeuf, Jury Duty, White-Collar Crime

New York Is A Great Place To Be Indicted

By Matt Kaiser

No one has getting indicted on their bucket list. No one sends word of their indictment to their alumni magazine.
That said, if you’re going to get indicted, it’s a whole lot better to be charged in state court in New York than in federal court anywhere else in the country, in at least one way.
The criminal case about the implosion of Dewey & LeBoeuf shows why. Last week, the folks charged in the Dewey meltdown filed a number of motions to dismiss the indictment. Everyone but Zachary Warren filed an omnibus motion to dismiss. Steve DiCarmine filed his own motion that was so, well, something that it contained Above the Law’s quote of the day. Zachary Warren filed a separate motion. There’s some great stuff in all of the pleadings about the government’s case.
What’s perhaps less obvious to those of us who do white-collar criminal defense but don’t normally practice in state court in New York is that, according to the law as set out in these papers, New York state is a magical Shangri-la of due process compared to federal court.
How?

Get this: in New York state court, the judge gets to look behind what the prosecutors did in the grand jury!
And the government is required to present exculpatory evidence to the grand jury. And a defendant gets to routinely have the judge do an in camera review of the grand jury transcript to make sure that the grand jury was instructed properly on the law. And the judge looks to see if all of the indictment was voted on by the grand jury. Then, a judge can dismiss the prosecution if the case is a “needless or unfounded prosecution.”
You don’t get any of this in federal court. New York is amazing!
Here’s how it’s framed in the omnibus motion filed by Steve Davis, Steve DiCarmine, and Joel Sanders:

The test for when a prosecutor must present legally exculpatory evidence to a grand jury turns on the potential of the exculpatory evidence to make out a complete defense or to eliminate a “‘needless or unfounded prosecution.’” People v. Valles, 62 N.Y.2d 36, 38 (1984); see also People v. Lancaster, 69 N.Y.2d 20, 26 (1986). Where the evidence makes out a complete defense or eliminates a needless or unfounded prosecution, the prosecution’s failure to present that evidence dictates the dismissal of the indictment. Valles, 62 N.Y.2d at 38.

Admittedly, a defense motion is maybe not always the most neutral place to find a description of the law. But still – that there are case cites from after the birth of the republic for some of these propositions is pretty freaking beautiful.
Or check this out:

While the prosecutor’s discretion in presenting his case to the grand jury is broad, it “is not unbounded, for it is settled that at a Grand Jury proceeding, the prosecutor performs the dual role of advocate and public officer, charged with the duty not only to secure indictments but also to see that justice is done; ‘as a public officer he owes a duty of fair dealing to the accused and candor to the courts[.]’” People v. Lancaster, 69 N.Y.2d at 26; People v. Pelchat, 62 N.Y.2d 97, 105 (1984) (the prosecutor “is charged with the duty not only to seek convictions but also to see that justice is done,” including in the grand jury).

Ok, fair enough – a federal court will also give lip service to the idea that a prosecutor is supposed to do something more than just obtain an indictment. A prosecutor is supposed to do substantial justice (though one worries that “do substantial justice” is really measured by securing substantial prison terms – time in prison being the main way justice is measured by those who go to the same credit union as Eric Holder).
In federal court, you can theoretically get a judge to look at what happened in the grand jury. The judge will look into it just as soon as you show that there’s a real and credible reason to think an experienced (my sense is that “about six months on the job” = “experienced” for purposes of a federal prosecutor getting the benefit of the doubt as experienced) prosecutor did something wrong in the grand jury. Though, of course, if you don’t have the grand jury transcript, and you don’t know who the grand jurors are, it’s not completely clear how you’d show there was mischief in the grand jury.
Not so in New York:

This duty “of fair dealing extends not only to the submission of evidence, but also to instructions on the law . . . . ” Lancaster, 69 N.Y.2d at 26. Thus, when the prosecutor “instruct[s] the jury with respect to the significance, legal effect or evaluation of evidence,” CPL § 190.30(7), he must be guided by his duty of fair dealing to the accused. When he fails in this duty and his instructions are so “deficient as to impair the integrity of the Grand Jury’s deliberations,” the resulting indictment must be dismissed. People v. Cannon, 210 A.D.2d 764, 766 (3d Dep’t 1994).

Compare all of this with the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Kaley v. United States (see my prior discussion of the case – and the Chief Justice’s big hug for the defense bar (sadly in dissent) – here):

[T]he whole history of the grand jury institution” demonstrates that “a challenge to the reliability or competence of the evidence” supporting a grand jury’s finding of probable cause “will not be heard.” United States v. Williams, 504 U. S. 36, 54 (1992) (quoting Costello, 350 U. S., at 364, and [*1098] Bank of Nova Scotia v. United States, 487 U. S. 250, 261 (1988)). The grand jury gets to say — without any review, oversight, or second-guessing — whether probable cause exists to think that a person committed a crime.

Apparently the “whole history” of the grand jury institution doesn’t include what happens in New York state court. Which totally makes sense when you think of how insignificant a state New York is. I mean, it only joined the Union recently, right?
Prosecutors have massive amounts of power. And, in federal court, they get to do almost whatever they want in front of a grand jury, with minimal judicial oversight. This is a problem, and it’s a bigger problem in white-collar cases where the law is complex and exculpatory evidence is more likely to be real.
I hope I never get indicted. But if I do, I hope it’s in New York.
Earlier: Dewey Defendant Suggests Prosecution’s Confusion As To ‘Very Basic Law School Stuff’

---

Matt Kaiser is a partner at The Kaiser Law Firm PLLC, a boutique litigation firm in Washington DC, which handles government investigations, white-collar criminal cases, federal criminal appeals, and complex civil litigation. You can reach him by email at mattkaiser@thekaiserlawfirm, and you can follow him on Twitter: @mattkaiser.

27 Mar 2014 at 1:16 PM

Biglaw, Crime, Dewey & LeBoeuf, White-Collar Crime

The Identities Of The Dewey ‘Secret Seven’ Are Slowly Being Revealed

By Staci Zaretsky

Earlier this week, we mentioned that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance was interested in unsealing the criminal case filed against Dewey & LeBouef’s former executives. Such a move would have the potential to reveal the identities of the “secret seven” — the finance folks who turned to the authorities after things at the failed firm went sour.
Today, documents in the case are slowly being unsealed, and we’ve got info on those who squealed to law enforcement. Get your fill of schadenfreude here…

Right now, information is available for just one of the secret seven, but we expect that more may be released as the day continues. Please check back here for the latest updates.
The first member of the secret seven is Francis Canellas, the failed firm’s former finance director. Canellas joined LeBoeuf Lamb in 2001 and worked as a junior accountant. Canellas became the finance director after the merger with Dewey Ballantine, and reported directly to Joel Sanders, Dewey & LeBoeuf’s CFO. Canellas pleaded guilty as part of an agreement with the DA’s Office in mid-February.
Here are some of the details, according to the New York Law Journal (reg. req.):

In an exhibit attached to his Feb. 13 plea agreement, Canellas discussed how he worked with firm leaders, including former chairman Steven Davis, former executive director Stephen DiCarmine, former CFO Joel Sanders, former controller Thomas Mullikin and other insiders to make misleading statements to banks.
“Sanders, Mullikin and I were the main contacts with individuals at JPMorgan, the placement agent on the private placement. Sanders, Mullikin and I, along with others, provided financial statements and other information to the banks and private placement investors that we knew to be false and intentionally failed to provide information that we knew would be of interest to the banks and investors,” according to an exhibit in Canellas’ court papers.

In exchange for disclosing “all information concerning any criminal conduct whatsoever” with regard to Dewey & LeBoeuf’s alleged wranglings with white-collar crime, Canellas will receive a maximum of five to 15 years in prison, but the DA will supposedly recommend two to six years in jail with full cooperation.
We’ll be sure to let you know who else will be singing the blues in Sing Sing as we find out.
Earlier: Prior ATL coverage of Dewey & LeBoeuf
Ex-Dewey Finance Director Pleads to Grand Larceny [New York Law Journal (reg. req.)]

18 Comments

• 
• Print

Topics

Biglaw, Crime, Dewey & LeBoeuf, Francis Canellas, Secret Seven, White-Collar Crime

21 Mar 2014 at 2:21 PM

6th Circuit, Biglaw, Clerkships, Dewey & LeBoeuf, Hotties, Securities and Exchange Commission, White-Collar Crime, William and Mary School of Law, Williams & Connolly

What Else Dewey Know About Zachary Warren?

By David Lat

For a while, interest in the Dewey drama seemed to be flagging (at least according to our traffic statistics). But lately it has revived, thanks to the recent criminal charges against the firm’s former leaders, plus the arrival on the scene of Zachary Warren — a total Dewey & LaBoeuf-Cake.
Interest in Zach Warren has been keen — and not just because of his good looks. His tale seems to resonate with Above the Law readers because, as Matt Kaiser recently noted, “he seems like one of us.” Although Above the Law’s readership is expanding, with more than a million unique visitors a month, it’s still fair to say that a young lawyer, recently graduated from a top law school, is within ATL’s demographic sweet spot.
Over the past few days, we’ve learned more about Zachary Warren. Dewey want to share this knowledge with you? Of course we do….

Here’s an interesting perspective on Zach Warren from one tipster (who hasn’t met him):

[T]here seem to be some parallels in the stories and actions in the case of Zachary Warren and Amanda Knox. Both grew up sheltered and were eager to please. Both ended up saying stuff under pressure that they would later regret. Both never saw themselves as the target of an investigation until it was too late. Both will be misunderstood and maligned unfairly by people who know nothing about them except for what they read in the press. Both will face a lifetime of negative consequences not because of anything they did, but for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and for being too naive.

And both are total hotties. But I suspect Zach Warren never did splits and a cartwheel after getting arrested — although if he did, I’d like to see the video footage. (For the record, Amanda Knox denies the infamous gymnastics.)
Here’s more about Zach Warren, from someone who knows him (although not well):

He’s really nice and charismatic. Thoughtful and very smart (even by clerk standards). A wonderfully sweet, kind, fun guy.

This is consistent with what Warren’s former boss, Judge J. Frederick Motz, told James Stewart of the New York Times: “Zach is a wonderful person, a decent, fine young man. I’m so sorry he’s being put through what’s happening.”
Finally, here’s an assessment from a third tipster, a family friend of the Warrens:

Your article was well done and fair for someone with so little personal knowledge of Zach. Our families have been close at times over the years, and there is not doubt that Zach is the real deal, a good person who would never knowingly participate in any fraudulent activity. Anyone who believes that a kid just out of college would have been allowed to participate in the financial planning of such a major law firm knows nothing about the business of law. The prosecutor has the power to charge and bring a calamity on a good family — a half-million dollars or more to defend through trial. One would hope that clear thinking and the fair and appropriate exercise of discretion will bring an early end to this nightmare for a family of dedicated public servants.

The cost of a good defense lawyer raises another interesting point that has emerged in our recent conversations with sources about Zachary Warren. Why did Zach Warren talk to law enforcement without a lawyer? Matt Kaiser floated some excellent theories yesterday, but we’ve also heard that Warren might have been concerned about money. The theory is that because Warren didn’t think he had done anything wrong and possessed significant knowledge about the legal system (as a lawyer himself), he didn’t think it necessary to drop a four- or five-figure sum on a retainer.
We’ve previously described Zachary Warren as being “well-to-do,” but let’s refine that a bit more. As a Sixth Circuit law clerk, Warren is probably earning between $60,000 and $70,000 (depending on the COLA for Memphis, which I’m guessing is low). He won’t start earning the big bucks until he joins Williams & Connolly (which has an above-market starting salary of $180,000 — and if he gets credit for his two clerkship years, he’d be looking at $210,000). If you focus on his current, reasonable but relatively modest salary as a law clerk, plus the possibility of debt from law school, Warren probably wasn’t eager to go out and hire a macher of the white-collar bar.
What about family money? After all, Zach’s parents, Judge Roger Warren (retired) and Professor Christie Warren of William & Mary Law School, were apparently wealthy enough to help Zach buy a home when he moved to D.C. for Georgetown Law.
Well, let’s not put too much stock in that. It was a relatively modest home, just $399,000, and it’s possible that the Warrens saw it as an investment, not just throwing around loose change. (It would have been a smart investment; D.C.’s real estate market has done well since September 2009.)
We’ve done some poking around online, and it seems the best description of the Warrens would be upper middle class, but not rich. In 2012-2013, Professor Warren earned $76,200, according to a database of Virginia state employee salaries. As for retired Judge Warren, in 2012 he earned $67,400, as a special consultant to the California Judicial Council. He has had better years; in 2010, for example, he earned $123,125 from the National Center for State Courts, an organization he used to lead (go here, click on the Form 990 for 2010). But even in their best years, the Warrens were probably not breaking the $250,000 barrier. And I tend to agree with Elie Mystal on this: earning $250,000 is nice, but it doesn’t make you rich.
Given his finances and his parents’ finances, one can understand why Zach Warren might not have wanted to hire a lawyer until it was 100 percent clear that doing so was absolutely necessary. And in further defense of Warren, how much could a lawyer have helped?
I dealt with many excellent defense lawyers when I worked as a prosecutor, but there’s only so much a defense lawyer can do if the prosecution holds a tough line. I previously wondered whether Zachary Warren was given the opportunity to cooperate with the Manhattan DA’s office on the Dewey investigation in exchange for more lenient treatment for himself, like the Dewey secret seven. What we’ve been hearing lately is that there were some vague and preliminary discussions between Zachary Warren and Cyrus Vance’s office about a negotiated resolution, but they didn’t get very far because the kind of plea the DA’s office required would have wiped out Warren’s professional future.
We don’t know all their identities, but most of the Dewey secret seven seem to be finance folks. They can plead guilty, even to a felony, and still find work somewhere — maybe not in the securities industry or in public accounting, but somewhere. Zachary Warren, however, is a lawyer, barred in D.C. and California. A guilty plea carries bigger consequences for him, as noted by Steven Harper:

[A] plea deal poses special problems that don’t affect non-lawyers. Reportedly, Warren passed the bar last July. Among other things, a guilty plea could end forever his ability to practice law. That would be a tough way to close out an investment of five years (law school plus two clerkships) and $150,000 in tuition.

So, in fairness to Zachary Warren, not bringing a lawyer with him to that fateful interview might have been a case of “harmless error.” It probably couldn’t have saved him from indictment, since it seems that the Manhattan DA’s office has a hard-on for him — in the non-sexual sense — and wants to see him go down.
Why might this be the case? Some folks we’ve communicated with, noting that the Warren prosecution is being handled by a state DA’s office rather than a U.S. attorney’s office, have wondered whether Zachary Warren’s professional pedigree — Stanford, Georgetown Law, two federal clerkships — might have engendered resentment of him on the part of the assistant district attorneys working on the case.
I’m generally a sucker for tales of status anxiety (affiliate link), but I’m skeptical of this theory. The Manhattan DA’s office is, as Kaiser noted, arguably the most well-regarded state prosecutor’s office in the country. It isn’t some rinky-dink local prosecutor’s shop; its prestigious prosecutors often go on to U.S. attorney’s offices (or, heck, the U.S. Supreme Court). The main ADA on the Dewey case, Peirce Moser, isn’t some random, inexperienced Touro Law grad; he’s a seasoned prosecutor and a graduate of UVA Law. (Yes, both Touro and UVA are in our March Madness contest for America’s worst law school — but it looks like Touro is making it to the next round and UVA is not.)
Two other random tidbits about Zachary Warren. First, we hear that he’s straight, single, and “a real sweetheart” (so start your engines, ladies). Second, some have looked with suspicion on how quickly he got promoted to his $100,000 job as a client relations manager at Dewey, wondering if perhaps he got fast-tracked because the powers-that-be sensed he might be corruptible. But we’ve heard a different explanation: he got a “battlefield promotion” a few months after arriving at Dewey, because his predecessor in the post quit. (As you may recall, Dewey was a place with a lot of turnover.)
Yes, our coverage to date has been fairly pro-Zach. For a less sympathetic take, see, e.g., Death Throes of Innocence (or, for that matter, the reader comments on some of our prior posts). In addition, we’ve heard rumors that in the coming weeks the DA’s office will show more of its hand — in ways that could materially affect our perception of Zach Warren. We reserve the right to change our opinion of him after additional facts emerge.
So we’ll keep you posted. If you have information to share about Warren, including comments on or corrections to what we’ve previously written, please email or text us (646-820-8477). Thanks.
DEWEY & LE BOEUF: MORE COLLATERAL DAMAGE [The Belly of the Beast]
History, Class, and White-Collar Crime [Death Throes of Innocence]
Earlier: Why Did Zachary Warren Talk To Law Enforcement?
What Dewey Know About Zachary Warren, Defendant No. 4 In The Criminal Case?
Dewey Finally Have Criminal Charges Against Ex-Leaders Of This Failed Firm?

Editor's note: Let's hear it for Judge Rakoff! Yes, why does a big wheel like Esformes get off with a multi-million dollar fine and never serve time? Why do the parasites in the Probate Court of Cook County continue their dirty work unimpeded?   Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

09 Jan 2014 at 12:06 PM

Jed Rakoff, White-Collar Crime

Judge Rakoff On Prosecutors’ Motives, DOJ’s Explanations, And The Lack Of High-Level Prosecutions Following The Financial Meltdown

By Matt Kaiser

Probably the most interesting question in white-collar crime these days is why there were no prosecutions arising out of the financial meltdown a few years ago.
As with most interesting questions, there are two polarized sides — one side wants to take up pitchforks and torches and head to Wall Street now, and the other side thinks that perhaps we should be a bit more circumspect about throwing people in prison (from that description, you can probably guess which side I’m on).
Judge Rakoff — a man we should all listen to one almost any subject — has weighed in with a thoughtful piece in the New York Review of Books called “The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted?”
How does Judge Rakoff answer the question?

First, he states the obvious — if there’s no fraud, there should be no prosecution.

[I]f the recession was due, at worst, to a lack of caution . . . then the criminal law has no role to play in the aftermath. For in all but a few circumstances (not here relevant), the fierce and fiery weapon called criminal prosecution is directed at intentional misconduct, and nothing less. If the Great Recession was in no part the handiwork of intentionally fraudulent practices by high-level executives, then to prosecute such executives criminally would be “scapegoating” of the most shallow and despicable kind.

And, has that kind of intentional misconduct taken place? We don’t know, and Rakoff says he has no opinion.
But, he thinks, there’s good reason to be suspicious. Assuming that’s right, Rakoff goes through why it would be so, in light of his excellent vantage point about the institutional issues that drive white-collar prosecutions.
As an aside, before we get started on Rakoff’s discussion, let me point out that there have been mortgage fraud prosecutions since the meltdown. Many of them are local, though, where U.S. Attorney’s Offices are going after lower level players in the mortgage business, rather than executives at companies involved in mortgage fraud. If you’re curious, there have been prosecutions in Tampa, of reality TV stars, and of ultramarathoners who trigger weird schadenfreude in IRS agents.
Back to Rakoff. Why no prosecutions in the C-suite? The Judge rejects a few possible explanations that have been offered by DOJ. According to Rakoff, the problem isn’t that executives likely didn’t know what was going on, it doesn’t lie with the difficulty in proving that sophisticated counter-parties relied on any false statements, and it isn’t really accounted for by a concern that such prosecutions would harm the economy (as Holder may or may not have said).
Rakoff’s project isn’t really in justifying the lack of prosecutions (assuming fraud happened, which he only does for the purposes of this article). Rather, he’s trying to explain why the system is set up to get this result. He’s doing sociology not policy work here.
He rejects the fastest sociological explanation offered by the haters of Wall Street — that AUSAs want to cut financial executives a break because they see the law firm partnership looming:

At the outset, however, let me say that I completely discount the argument sometimes made that no such prosecutions have been brought because the top prosecutors were often people who previously represented the financial institutions in question and/or were people who expected to be representing such institutions in the future: the so-called “revolving door.” In my experience, most federal prosecutors, at every level, are seeking to make a name for themselves, and the best way to do that is by prosecuting some high-level person. While companies that are indicted almost always settle, individual defendants whose careers are at stake will often go to trial. And if the government wins such a trial, as it usually does, the prosecutor’s reputation is made. My point is that whatever small influence the “revolving door” may have in discouraging certain white-collar prosecutions is more than offset, at least in the case of prosecuting high-level individuals, by the career-making benefits such prosecutions confer on the successful prosecutor.

I think he’s right — and that’s creepy in lots of other cases — but I don’t think anyone who is anything like on the inside of this business thinks that an AUSA doesn’t want to bring a big case.
Rather, Rakoff said there are three factors that led to the lack of prosecutions.
First, government budgets and priorities led to a gap right when the lack of a gap was necessary to investigate these cases. The FBI shifted resources after 9/11 from financial crimes to terrorism, and Rakoff thinks little of the SEC’s priorities or budget of late. They’ve been going after low-hanging fruit too — just like the U.S. Attorney’s Offices.
Worse, the financial fraud investigations were farmed out to a number of US Attorneys Offices, rather than keeping them all in New York. That leads to what you see in Tampa, and not to a prosecution in a boardroom.
And the fabled U.S. Attorney’s Office in S.D.N.Y. was busy doing insider trading cases.
As Rakoff says,

While I want to stress again that I have no inside information, as a former chief of that unit I would venture to guess that the cases involving the financial crisis were parceled out to assistant US attorneys who were also responsible for insider-trading cases. Which do you think an assistant would devote most of her attention to: an insider-trading case that was already nearly ready to go to indictment and that might lead to a high-visibility trial, or a financial crisis case that was just getting started, would take years to complete, and had no guarantee of even leading to an indictment? Of course, she would put her energy into the insider-trading case, and if she was lucky, it would go to trial, she would win, and, in some cases, she would then take a job with a large law firm. And in the process, the financial fraud case would get lost in the shuffle.

Second, according to Rakoff, government regulation played a big role in the conditions that set up the collapse. It’s a little awkward for the U.S. government to try to put someone in prison for implementing policies that the same U.S. government put in place.
Finally, Rakoff bemoans DOJ’s work prosecuting corporations instead of individuals. He raises reasonable concerns about prosecuting companies — those prosecutions hurt shareholders and innocent employees, they can be seen as a cost of doing business, and they lead to law enforcement policies that are odd.
And here, I think, is where the revolving door criticism starts to have merit. Check out Rakoff’s description of a corporate criminal investigation:

 Early in the investigation, you invite in counsel to the company and explain to him or her why you suspect fraud. He or she responds by assuring you that the company wants to cooperate and do the right thing, and to that end the company has hired a former assistant US attorney, now a partner at a respected law firm, to do an internal investigation. The company’s counsel asks you to defer your investigation until the company’s own internal investigation is completed, on the condition that the company will share its results with you. In order to save time and resources, you agree.

Fast forward a few months, and the benefits of this arrangement become clear.

 Six months later the company’s counsel returns, with a detailed report showing that mistakes were made but that the company is now intent on correcting them. You and the company then agree that the company will enter into a deferred prosecution agreement that couples some immediate fines with the imposition of expensive but internal prophylactic measures. For all practical purposes the case is now over. You are happy because you believe that you have helped prevent future crimes; the company is happy because it has avoided a devastating indictment; and perhaps the happiest of all are the executives, or former executives, who actually committed the underlying misconduct, for they are left untouched.

Judge Rakoff is a wicked smart guy who has been around this block. I think there’s a lot for everyone with a strong view of what should have happened to be disappointed with in his piece.
Earlier: Judge Rakoff Rips The Government For Dropping The Ball On Financial Crimes

17 Dec 2013 at 3:21 PM

2nd Circuit, Benchslaps, Department of Justice, Eric Holder, Jed Rakoff, Media and Journalism, S.D.N.Y., U.S. Attorneys Offices, Wall Street, White-Collar Crime

Judge Rakoff Rips The Government For Dropping The Ball On Financial Crimes

By Joe Patrice

Remember the 80s? Big hair, Dynasty, Huey Lewis was popular for some reason. Well, Judge Jed Rakoff remembers the 80s, and he also remembers the way the federal government used to actually investigate and prosecute people who committed massive financial crimes — Mike Milken, Ivan Boesky, Charles Keating, a bevy of other savings and loans kingpins. Good times.
And Judge Rakoff wants to know what happened to prosecuting financial crimes, specifically the sort of fraud that crippled the economy. So he took to the pages of the New York Review of Books to ponder all the financial prosecutions that could have been. And he has some theories about what happened and how prosecutors could do a better job in the future.
It’s a fascinating look at a bunch of ideas that the government is going to totally ignore…

First of all, congratulations to Judge Rakoff on hearing the last financial crime case he’ll ever hear. The Second Circuit recently set forth its “Jesus, keep your mouth shut” standard for judges — removing judges sua sponte from cases if the judge expresses any public opinion that could be construed as a bias. A scathing essay calling out the government for failing to prosecute high-profile financial criminals is not appreciably different than saying, “I do think that I treat the government as only one more litigant” or “they have to prove their case like anybody else.” In fact, while Judge Rakoff reminds the reader that his general conclusions do not indicate that he prejudges any case, this essay is probably more provocative than Judge Scheindlin’s statements. David Lat thinks courts should not impede judicial transparency, but he’s not on the Second Circuit. Yet.
Anyway, back to the present essay. Judge Rakoff rejects the premise that there aren’t any prosecutions because when the business practices that led to the financial crisis were entirely innocent upon closer scrutiny. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a multibillion-dollar, economy-crippling fraud. If you don’t feel like reading the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report that Judge Rakoff cites, this is pretty much everything you need to know about how we got cornholed by these guys:

Subprime Primer from guesta9d12e

And these folks have basically escaped all criminal liability for these actions as the statute of limitations on all the possible claims run out. Yet the bigwigs on Wall Street are feeling persecuted. So sensitive.
Judge Rakoff notes that the Department of Justice has provided three — really, really weaksauce — reasons for its reticence to prosecute anyone involved in this debacle. First, that it is difficult to prove intent, prompting Judge Rakoff to offer a refresher course on the concepts of “willful blindness” and “conscious disregard.” Second, the Judge cites Lanny Breuer, the former head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division who’s now back at Covington, for the proposition that prosecutors were gun-shy because they had to prove that the other side of the transaction, often sophisticated institutions, relied on misleading statements:

Actually, given the fact that these securities were bought and sold at lightning speed, it is by no means obvious that even a sophisticated counterparty would have detected the problems with the arcane, convoluted mortgage-backed derivatives they were being asked to purchase. But there is a more fundamental problem with the above-quoted statement from the former head of the Criminal Division, which is that it totally misstates the law. In actuality, in a criminal fraud case the government is never required to prove — ever — that one party to a transaction relied on the word of another.

Crackerjack legal insight from the Department of Justice. The average share of stock is held for a mere 22 seconds. In the 60s, we envisioned supercomputers guiding astronauts to Jupiter — and killing them. Fast forward to today and we’re building supercomputers to churn 10,000 shares of Toys Я Us in 2 seconds.^[1] Progress!
Putting aside whether all the local school boards and the like who bought these toxic assets are really “sophisticated” financial entities, Judge Rakoff seems to recognize, unlike the Department of Justice, this new lightspeed reality where sophisticated institutions consciously forfeit their considered judgment to make fast cash. A system that calls olly olly oxen free so long as the direct victims have in-house counsel isn’t really a justice system.
The DOJ doesn’t think it’s done anything wrong:

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said Judge Rakoff “does not identify a single case where a financial executive should have been charged, but wasn’t.”
“The department has criminally prosecuted thousands of defendants for financial fraud and other related crimes in the last five years, and there are a number of active investigations still ongoing,” he added. “Even in striking the nation’s largest-ever settlement with JPMorgan last month, the department preserved its ability to investigate and potentially charge individuals at the company if the evidence supports it.”

Right. Because Judge Rakoff repeatedly points out that he isn’t passing judgment on any individual cases. Trying to derail a broad policy discussion by appealing to “where’s the specific case” instead of actually responding to the warrants is just lazy.
The final DOJ excuse that Judge Rakoff swats down is the notion that bankers can be “too big to jail.” He notes that the infamous Eric Holder quote suggesting that prosecutions could “have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” referred to prosecuting institutions rather than the individuals who run them. And this gets to Judge Rakoff’s ultimate point — the DOJ is far too obsessed with prosecuting institutions instead of individuals:

In recent decades, however, prosecutors have been increasingly attracted to prosecuting companies, often even without indicting a single person. This shift has often been rationalized as part of an attempt to transform “corporate cultures,” so as to prevent future such crimes; and as a result, government policy has taken the form of “deferred prosecution agreements” or even “nonprosecution agreements,” in which the company, under threat of criminal prosecution, agrees to take various prophylactic measures to prevent future wrongdoing. Such agreements have become, in the words of Lanny Breuer, the former head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, “a mainstay of white-collar criminal law enforcement,” with the department entering into 233 such agreements over the last decade. But in practice, I suggest, this approach has led to some lax and dubious behavior on the part of prosecutors, with deleterious results.

This is a tad unfair. In a world where the government has slashed resources for investigating financial crime and the SEC has more or less walked away from this kind of thing, getting the company to pony up for outside counsel to conduct an investigation is all but a practical necessity. Plus, since one half of the government is hell-bent on having no regulations at all, any policy that encourages prophylactic measures is probably worth it. However, Judge Rakoff is right that this “mainstay of white-collar criminal law enforcement” is regrettable. If the government were allowed to invest in expanding the FBI and the SEC wasn’t so afraid of its own shadow that it focuses on what Judge Rakoff calls “smaller, easily resolved cases,” we wouldn’t need internal investigations — but it’s not like the DOJ had a ton of choice in drifting toward this result.
Ultimately, Judge Rakoff appeals to the DOJ to refocus its efforts on investigating criminal cases against individuals committing financial crimes. Contrary to what Matt Kaiser posited last week, the reason the U.S. Attorney’s Office isn’t highlighting the number of people it lands in prison is because it’s doing a really bad job of it.^[2] The value in SIGTARP’s declaration that it’s securing longer prison sentences than anyone else is in telegraphing to Wall Street that at least one agency is not asleep at the switch.
Prison may be an overused response in the United States,^[3] especially for low-level, non-violent offenders. But the threat of prison is critically underemployed when it comes to the criminals capable of wrecking the most damage on the most Americans.
As Adam Liptak characterizes the Judge’s words, “The fear of prison concentrates the mind in a way the prospect of writing a check on a corporate account does not.”

---

[1] 2014: A Wall Street Odyssey
[2] Not to mention, the U.S. Attorney’s Office does highlight the number of people it puts in prison and for how long, in the United States Attorneys’ Annual Statistical Report.
[3] The incarceration rate in the United States from 1920 through 2006:

The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted? [New York Review of Books]
Stern Words for Wall Street’s Watchdogs, From a Judge [New York Times]
Err on the Side of Allowing Speech [New York Times]
Earlier: Putting People In Prison To Get To The Cool Kids’ Table

Editor’s note: This Shark believes that "big fish perps" like Abramoff could not exist without the "small fry" perps like Ring. Your ProbateShark says, "...fry em all" Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

28 Feb 2013 at 5:49 PM

Attorney Misconduct, Crime, Department of Justice, Federal Government, Federal Judges, Greenberg Traurig, Jack Abramoff, Legal Ethics, Sentencing Law, Tim Wu, White-Collar Crime

The Kevin Ring Case Is a Scandal and a Disgrace: Five Things I Think You Should Know

By Brian Dalton

Kevin Ring in happier times.

Full disclosure: Former Jack Abramoff associate Kevin Ring, whose criminal conviction was recently upheld by the D.C. Circuit, is a friend of mine. We grew up in the same town and have known one another for decades. In no way is what follows unbiased or objective in any sense. That said, I know that I’m right and the case against Kevin Ring was simply, unambiguously wrong. Not to say that there was no ambiguity as to whether he broke a law — there was a tiny bit of that. But under no sane system of justice would Kevin be going to federal prison. Though he almost certainly is, pending a request for en banc rehearing from the D.C. Circuit followed by a Hail Mary filing for a writ of certiorari.
We can all stipulate that Jack Abramoff is one of the sleaziest and most repellent characters to besmirch the legal profession in decades. (My favorite Abramoff moment: the time he tried convince his rabbi to bestow upon him a fake, back-dated “Scholar of Talmudic Studies” award, so he could get in the Cosmos Club.)
Anyway, Abramoff was Kevin’s boss for three and a half years, during the final period of which they were both partners at Greenberg Traurig. In the words of the judge at his sentencing hearing, Kevin was a “cog” in the Abramoff operation, a “second-tier level” administrator of the firm’s lobbying team. I won’t try to spin Kevin’s time as a lobbyist as some honorable endeavor. I couldn’t. Generally speaking, lobbyists are regarded by most of us as only slightly less distasteful than the politicians whose favor they are trying to curry. But that does not make them criminals….

There’s no denying that Jack Abramoff was a crook. He fleeced clients of millions. He bribed Congressmen. He defrauded his business partners and committed bank fraud. He got off lightly with the 43 months he served. He now hosts a radio show on XM and gets paid handsomely to speak to state legislators and other suckers about the need for — you guessed it — lobbying reform.
Although Ring worked for and was deemed a co-conspirator of Abramoff’s, under the government’s strikingly expansive definition of “conspiracy,” Ring had nothing to do with Abramoff’s most egregious offenses: bribery of Rep. Bob Ney (only member of Congress convicted), Suncruz bank fraud, millions stolen from client-Indian tribes, and tax fraud. The charges against Kevin came down to this: dinners and tickets (to Redskins games and, erm, Disney on Ice), given to a few minor public officials, none of whom would testify against him, and concerning which the government didn’t even try to prove any quid pro quo. After two trials and a loss on appeal, Kevin is looking at 20 months imprisonment. His marriage fell apart a while back. He’ll lose his bar license. His legal bills ran over $2 million and left him more than $1 million in debt. Here’s the thing, though: he has committed no crime. Even if every thing alleged is true he has been convicted ex post facto of “being a lobbyist” in the commonly understood sense.
Joe Patrice wrote a great post last week about the Ring case in the context of a broader “prosecutors gone wild” trend (cf. Aaron Swartz). But as someone who followed the Ring case closely, with mounting bewilderment and anger, I want to make the specific, outrageous particulars of the case to be more widely known. It turns out I am fortunate to work for Above the Law/Breaking Media and have colleagues who will indulge me to do so.

Oh, no reason

1. The Ring case is emblematic of prosecutorial overreach and abuse.
This cannot be repeated enough: the difference between rewarding cooperation and vindictively punishing someone for asserting his constitutional right to trial is utterly lost in this case. Joe put it well:

In Ring’s case, after securing modest sentences for cooperating lobbyists with more egregious conduct (including Abramoff himself), the government sought a 20-year prison term for the non-cooperating Ring. Take a second to ponder that… the government wanted to put Ring away for three to four times longer than the actual ringleader of the whole affair! There’s “rewarding cooperation,” and then there’s whatever the government was doing here.

But it’s actually worse than that. When the government first submitted its views of how the federal guidelines should be calculated, prosecutors said Ring’s offense level required a sentence of life in prison. LIFE. Even the judge agreed with the defense that the prosecutors were retaliating against Ring for going to trial.
2. The prosecution behaved despicably.
One Nathaniel Edmonds, Assistant Chief of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit at DOJ, was the government shot-caller in this case. I’ve heard that Edmonds told Ring’s counsel after the initial mistrial that he would “try him ten more times if that’s what it took to secure a conviction.” Which would be, of course, a totally reasonable and non-disturbing thing for someone in his position of nearly unchecked power to say. (I reached out to Edmonds and learned that he was out of the country and unable to respond.)
Examples of questionable acts by the prosecution in the Ring cases abound. Here is a sampling. Before the trial:
Kevin voluntarily reached out to the DOJ in 2004 and offered his cooperation. He cooperated for two years. In 2008, well after his cooperation ended (see #3 below) and his arrest was inevitable, he offered multiple times to turn himself in. Instead the government thought it better to send a half-dozen FBI agents to pound on his front door early one morning and take him away in handcuffs. His wife and kids were at home, of course. I know that all law enforcement enjoys a little theatrics and it happens to everyone, but still. Presumed innocent? No flight risk? Willing to surrender? What the hell was the point? I felt like the French did when they flipped out over DSK’s perp walk.
During trial:
During the second trial, two prosecutorial acts stand out to me. First, the prosecution tried to change the rules in the middle of the game. Essentially, they requested a fundamental change to the earlier jury instructions. This move came in the wake of the government’s main witness recanting his earlier testimony (see #4 below). The judge, Ellen Segal Huvelle, scolded the prosecutors for taking a “totally different position” because their witness bailed out. “It’s a very sad day that the government should be stretching at this time to come up with new arguments.” Well, the case never was about punishing a lawbreaker. It was about retribution.
At a later point in the second trial, Edmonds implied that he was in possession of evidence that Ring had secured a no-work job for the wife of a Congressional staffer. Nothing of the sort took place and there was no evidence to suggest so. It was a cheap stunt of the Joe-McCarthy-waving-around-a-list-of-imaginary-commies variety. Judge Huvelle recognized this and admonished Edmonds: “You have crossed the line of professional responsibility.” Edmonds replied with the formulation cherished by busted fibbers everywhere: “I misspoke.”
Post-trial:
Edmonds’s vengefulness did not end even when he won Kevin’s conviction. Because of my friendship with Kevin, I am aware of allegations that Edmonds made in regard to Ring’s broken marriage in a pre-sentencing report that I view as vile. My desire to shine a light on this must be balanced against Kevin’s family’s right to not have their privacy violated further, and the latter has to prevail. But I will say this: Edmonds reminds me of nothing so much as a priggish, fanatical Javert-type character. As Hugo famously said of his creation: “Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed [...] they are virtues which have one vice, — error.”
In other, more ATL-ish terms, to describe Edmonds’s action as “douche-y” is to insult popped collars everywhere.
3. He refused to give false testimony.
The government’s real agenda was to leverage a deal with Ring to get him to testify against his former boss, ex-Congressman John Doolittle, as well as other members of Congress, staffers, and Bush administration officials. For two years before his arrest, Kevin cooperated with the FBI up until the point where they began to pressure him to sign a plea agreement that required him to admit to defrauding his clients (a charge they never brought) and bribing public officials. As Kevin wrote in a letter to the judge before sentencing, he would have had to admit that he gave Doolittle and others meals and tickets in return for official favors and believed that if he stopped giving them things, they would have stopped the favors. Kevin refused to give what he knew was a false statement against Doolittle, asserted his right to trial, and this whole sh*tstorm rained down on him and his family. Neither Doolittle nor anyone on his staff was ever charged.

http://abovethelaw.com/2013/02/the-kevin-ring-case-is-a-scandal-and-a-disgrace-five-things-i-think-you-should-know/#more-225554

KawamotoDragon.com

Reading Tea Leaves: Defense Bar Freaking Out About the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

Editor's note: Department of Justice; How about checking  out "Domestic Corruption Practices" within the Probate Court of Cook County? A contributor of information to this blog suggested that a special blog be initiated for one purpose only. All complaints concerning attorneys and judges to the ARDC and Judicial Review of the IL Supreme Court be posted publicly on the blog. It has been suggested that many complaints are "shelved" and not acted upon. This special blog would assist in preventing such inaction.   Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster,  ProbateSharks.com

28 Sep 2012 at 4:10 PMPosted in:


Crime, Department of Justice, In-House Counsel, Securities and Exchange Commission, Securities Law, White-Collar Crime

Reading Tea Leaves: Defense Bar Freaking Out About the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

By Joe Patrice

Nothing pisses off a lawyer more than uncertainty. Uncertainty gives rise to the risk of undermining the facade of perfect knowledge that attorneys prefer to convey to their clients. Given this character trait, it’s no surprise that the collective white-collar and corporate counsel community is freaking the hell out about every scrap of information it can glean from the Justice Department about its new Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement policy.



So what exactly has these observant lawyers in a tizzy?





New edits to the DOJ website? What does that mean?!?!?



Speeches by former DOJ attorneys? Could they be hinting at something?!?!?





“I’m shocked, shocked to find improper payments disguised as commissions by a subsidiary to employees at state-owned companies to influence design specifications made in this establishment!“

A wide swath of the legal community is grasping at straws in terror of the unknown, which is a little ridiculous because the DOJ has promised comprehensive guidance in a mere two weeks. That said, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer promised guidance back in November 2011 and not much has happened since.



But white-collar defense attorneys are eager to figure out what behaviors will fill their docket for the next few years. Corporate counsel can’t go to sleep until this is resolved. And transactional attorneys should learn the contours of the law before blowing it off when a client dismisses legal obstacles from local government as something they can “just handle on our end” and then winks.



The FCPA is basically the Louis Renault law. In an effort to stifle corrupt petty officials like the former Casablanca police chief, the U.S. passed the FCPA in 1977, imposing civil and criminal sanctions on companies that bribe foreign officials and violate books and records and internal controls provisions. The DOJ and SEC have joint enforcement authority.



In a nutshell, Congress wanted to put a halt to foreign corruption stifling American businesses by holding American companies liable if they tried to game the system. Since its passage in 1977, the FCPA has… more or less done nothing. From 1977 until about eight years ago, the government did almost nothing with the FCPA. But then the government discovered the FCPA like a child rediscovering a toy from last Christmas and started aggressively playing with it, increasing the number of cases brought from 5 in 2004 to over 60 in 2010. Actions have scaled back since then, with only 13 actions brought as of July 2012, but this continues to represent an era of aggressive enforcement compared to the bulk of the statute’s 35-year history.





FCPA Enforcement Actions: The only thing growing faster than debt and Kardashian spin-offs (image via Gibson Dunn).

But as enforcement has increased, clarity has taken a nosedive — which was a common complaint during the Robespierre regime as well. Companies with multiple international subsidiaries fear prosecution for unscrupulous subordinates they barely control. The books and records and internal controls provision has expanded to include acquired companies concealing violations from their purchaser, a development bringing the law close to strict liability. The fuzzy line between “government official” and “foreign executive” in “Communist” China renders almost every gift a potential crime. When 95 percent of corporate compliance executives recently polled by Kroll Advisory Solutions believed their companies’ exposure to bribery risk has increased or held steady over the last two to three years, it’s clear that a lot of folks feel powerless to avoid the FCPA.



Lawyers seem to think the prognosis is not good for any relaxation of FCPA enforcement or the institution of a new defense to put good faith corporate clients at ease. Lanny Breuer has previously said that he has “no intention whatsoever of supporting reforms whose aim is to weaken the FCPA” and every speech and website update seems to confirm the government is just trying to provide transparency for the expansive vision of the statute they’ve carved out over the last decade.



Still, the freak-out session is entertaining to watch, and it will only be trumped by the proclamations of doom and gloom that will follow whatever formal guidance we get in October.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Joe Patrice is the author of Recess Appointment, a blog about political rhetoric, and he’ll be dropping in occasionally to write about the intersection of law and politics. To answer the question that you’re probably about to ask, he got his J.D. at NYU and spent ten years working at a Biglaw firm and a white-collar defense boutique. His favorite word is sesquipedalian.



http://abovethelaw.com/2012/09/reading-tea-leaves-defense-bar-freaking-out-about-the-foreign-corrupt-practices-act/


KawamotoDragon.com