After you get arrested, I can still hang around with you. You are, after all, innocent until proven guilty.

After you’re convicted, and while you’re imprisoned, I guess I’m supposed to shun you. You are, after all, separated from society.

When you’re released from prison (and have satisfied any post-confinement restraints), I’m supposed to welcome you back into society. Felons who have served their time, for example, should have their right to vote restored. Those ex-felons should also be given jobs, so the ex-felons aren’t forced into a life of perpetual crime. After you’ve repaid your debt to society, we welcome you back.

Do I have that right?

Let’s apply those rules to three examples. First, a guy who steals milk and bread for his family is arrested. No problem; he’s innocent until proven guilty. The guy’s convicted; now I shun him for the duration of the punishment. When the punishment’s over, I welcome him back, restoring his right to vote and offering a job. He’s repaid his debt to society and all that.

Second example: A 16-year-old attacks a Vietnamese-American man with a large stick, knocking him unconscious, and later that night punches another Vietnamese-American man, all while using racial slurs. The 16-year-old is charged as an adult, pleads guilty to felony assault, and serves 45 days in prison.

May you associate with that person after he’s released from prison? If the guy later assaults another Vietnamese-American, and that new assault somehow becomes a matter of public interest, then the world will surely condemn your poor judgment: “He seems to be a racially motivated lunatic! How could you have spoken to him? You should have known!”

On the other hand, if the guy never attacks anyone else, and becomes a famous movie star, the world will forgive your decision to associate with him: “Of course you should spend time with Mark Wahlberg.”

Now that we’re clear on how this works, we can move on to my last hypothetical situation.

A guy is arrested on July 27, 2006, on felony charges relating to soliciting prostitution from a minor. It’s no problem socializing with the guy before 2006, because he hasn’t been arrested for anything. And I should keep socializing with him after July 27, because he’s only been arrested, not convicted. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that.

On June 30, 2008, the guy pleads guilty to two charges — procuring a person under 18 for prostitution and soliciting prostitution.

I now have to shun the guy for a while. He’s been convicted, so he’s no longer presumed innocent.

The guy is sentenced to 18 months in prison. (He serves only 13 months, with extensive work release, allowing release for up to 12 hours daily, six days a week.)

I’m not exactly sure how long I’m supposed to shun the guy, but let’s call it the entire length of the original sentence — 18 months. (I’m also not sure what to do with the year of house arrest after release from prison and the registration as a sex offender. In most states, a sex offender’s right to vote is restored after release from prison, so I guess sex offenders are deemed to have repaid their debts to society upon release.)

That means that at year-end 2009 — 18 months after conviction, when the sentence is over — the guy has repaid his debt to society. I’m supposed to embrace him again — because anything else wouldn’t be fair.

The guy is arrested again on July 6, 2019, for assorted sex trafficking offenses. The guy dies in jail, so there’s no decision — either acquittal or conviction — on the second set of charges. For the second arrest, the guy is once more presumed innocent from July 6 until his death. There’s no shunning an innocent man.

Here’s my point. (You hoped knew I’d get there eventually.) This guy was supposed to be shunned by society only from June 30, 2008, the date of his first (and only) conviction, through year-end 2009, when his sentence expired. All the rest of the time, he was either not yet arrested, presumed innocent, or had repaid his debt to society.

Tell me again why there’s all that fuss about people who were hanging around with Jeffrey Epstein during the 1990s or from 2010 until his death.

Just think about it. I’m not sure how you’ll resolve that thought experiment, but you owe it to yourself to be consistent.

(In case you’re interested, Donald Trump was presumed innocent until May 30, 2024, when he was convicted of 34 felony offenses. Trump received an unconditional discharge on January 10, 2025. MAGA Republicans didn’t do too good a job of shunning him during the intervening months. Maybe they’ll do better next time.)

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and later oversaw litigation, compliance and employment matters at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

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As far as his legal defense is concerned, Mangione has seen many wins: overwhelming support from those maintaining his innocence, a legal fund to aid in his defense, and several heavy charges being dropped. While terrorism charges were dropped last September, we noted that he could still face the death penalty because of his second degree murder charges. Friday's development changes that.

From New York Times:

A Manhattan federal judge on Friday ruled that prosecutors would not be able to seek the death penalty at the trial of Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old man accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive in 2024.
…
Judge Garnett said in her opinion that two stalking charges against Mr. Mangione, one of which carried a maximum sentence of death, did not meet the legal definition of a crime of violence, and had to be dismissed.

You can hear his legal team here:

VICTORY LAP: Luigi Mangione's defense team applauds judge's decision to take death penalty off the table, praises supporters of suspected CEO assassin pic.twitter.com/rCzT1trxNF

— Fox True Crime (@FoxTrueCrime) January 30, 2026

The legal team still has a tough battle ahead. Despite the warrantless search of his backpack, the judge ruled that the evidence seized may be used against him.

Now, the weightiest consequence he faces is life without parole. If it comes to that, good luck keeping the man behind bars:

A Minnesota man allegedly tried to break Luigi Mangione out of jail in New York, authorities said https://t.co/L2373VkeTx pic.twitter.com/TLZ8r64A3H

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) January 29, 2026

A nation governed by the rule of law must abide in a way that gives due process to anyone accused of a crime. High profile cases like this may put liberty to the test, but they also show us who we are when it matters.

U.S. Judge in Mangione Case Drops Charge Carrying Death Penalty [NYT]

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She joins Alina Habba — another lawyer with more cable news presence than criminal prosecutorial know-how — in having to sheepishly depart a U.S. Attorney role she held illegally.

The opinion marks a ignominious end for the insurance lawyer without any criminal law background, whose only qualification for the job was a willingness to pursue federal criminal cases based on Donald Trump’s fever dreams. When attorneys with experience and principles refused to launch phony prosecutions to harass Trump’s enemies, the president published what was almost certainly meant as a DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi complaining that no one had pursued his perceived rivals and flagging Halligan as the sort of lawyer who could get in there and bring cases against former FBI Director and Bridgewater Associates executive James Comey, and current New York Attorney General Letitia James.

And Halligan proved the president right to the extent the sort of lawyer willing to sign onto those cases required one with no clue what she was doing and a degree from the Dunning-Kruger School of Law. She promptly wasted taxpayer dollars on two cases swiftly laughed out of court. While neither case had much going for it — the James case kept getting rejected by grand jurors and the Comey indictment wasn’t even signed by a grand jury — the biggest problem was Halligan’s own illegal appointment.

Those decisions were made by Judge Cameron McGowan Currie of the District of South Carolina, sitting by designation by order of Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Albert Diaz to conclusively resolve the matter of Halligan’s appointment without requiring the judges of the Eastern District — who might be charged with finding her replacement — to decide the issue. Spoiler: This will be relevant.

But despite Judge Currie’s order, Halligan stuck around anyway, continuing to identify herself as the head of the office, until Judge Novak penned what can best be described as an “Order To Explain What The Hell, Lady?” asking her to explain why the court kept seeing her name on documents as though nothing had happened. The DOJ’s response wasn’t so much legal advocacy as a Newsmax chyron with footnotes. It marked the natural and logical endpoint of a strategy forged by a DOJ brain trust that believes “being loud on TV” counts as a litigation strategy.

Ms. Halligan’s response, in which she was joined by both the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, contains a level of vitriol more appropriate for a cable news talk show and falls far beneath the level of advocacy expected from litigants in this Court, particularly the Department of Justice.

Judge Novak is a Trump-appointee. It’s a reminder that while there are some in-over-their-head Trump-nominated district judges and a bevy of Republican Circuit Court judges willing to light fire to their dignity to stay in Trump’s good graces, the federal trial courts have, more often than not, put aside partisanship to honor the rule of law.

Bondi, Blanche, and Halligan — that three-headed dragon meme if all three heads sported googly eyes — decided to tell Judge Novak that the court ruling Halligan’s appointment illegal in the Comey and James cases didn’t apply to any other cases and every criminal defendant would need to relitigate the issue from scratch. Judge Novak declined the invitation to turn validity of every prosecution in the district into legal whack-a-mole.

Rather stunningly, Ms. Halligan fails to even mention Chief Judge Diaz’s Order, let alone discuss its impact here. In short, Ms. Halligan has not only ignored Judge Currie’s rulings, she has also turned a blind eye to an Order from the Chief Judge of the Fourth Circuit. The Court finds it inconceivable that the Department of Justice, which holds a duty to faithfully execute the laws of the United States — even those with which it may have disagreement — would repeatedly ignore court orders, while simultaneously prosecuting citizens for breaking the law.

Is it stunning, though?

For an added injection of comedy: even if Halligan’s appointment had been valid, it would have expired on January 20, 2026, the day Judge Novak issued this order. So the 120-day clock ran out… again! This whole exercise in defiance was for nothing.

The DOJ’s attempt to bootstrap this to the Supreme Court’s attack on nationwide injunctions, a dunderheaded argument from the start, also earned an exasperated eye roll from Judge Novak:

The Court’s concerns about Ms. Halligan’s representation do not implicate the specific concerns that the CASA Court set out to address and, more importantly, do not reach beyond this Court, let alone across the Nation. Rather, the Court simply applies the legal precedent promulgated by Judge Currie’s Order, which disposed of the validity of Ms. Halligan’s appointment for all matters in which her unlawful appointment becomes an issue in this District, to include the specific indictment in the case at hand.

“Simply flouting a judicial order because of a disagreement of ‘interpretation’ and acting like that order does not exist is simply not an option,” Judge Novak writes.

But the most surgically cruel jab comes at the end, as Judge Novak declines to refer Halligan to disciplinary authorities:

The Court recognizes that Ms. Halligan lacks the prosecutorial experience that has long been the norm for those nominated to the position of United States Attorney in this District. Consequently, and in light of her inexperience, the Court grants Ms. Halligan the benefit of the doubt and refrains from referring her for further investigation and disciplinary action regarding her misrepresentations to this Court at this time.

You’re not malicious, just stupid is a rough passage to have published in the annals of American law.

But it’s a frustrating conclusion to reach. Virginia authorities have already indicated that they won’t bother enforcing professional ethics without an engraved invitation from a judge… and maybe not even then. Does anyone have jurisdiction over accountability anymore? Or is this just an elaborate game of hot potato until everyone gives up? Leniency is a virtue, but at a certain point someone has to put their foot down, because — to borrow from Judge Novak himself — simply flouting a judicial order because of a disagreement will continue to be the DOJ’s plan of action as long as everyone keeps treating these lawyers like misguided students instead of willful bad actors. Halligan may be out, but whoever comes next will push even further, knowing the worst that happens is a strongly worded opinion that declines to follow through.

But firewalls only work if breaching them carries an actual cost.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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“The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking,” California attorney general, Rob Bonta, said in a statement. “I urge xAI to take immediate action to ensure this goes no further.”

Bonta’s office is investigating whether and how xAI violated state law.

On X, California governor Gavin Newsom called for an investigation into “Grok’s disgusting spread of child porn on this website”.

Musk responded that there has been no use of the stripping tactic to turn photos of children into lewd images. One of the most vocal dissenters to that stance has been Grok itself.

It’s still doing it btw.. they just shut off its media tab & thanked their lucky stars that the world is currently being run by Fucking Pedophiles, so can do what they like. pic.twitter.com/WxZroKxYu8

— Michael Walsh (@thatbloodyMikey) January 1, 2026

Damn, do any of Elon’s children have his back?

The undress feature was reworked to only work for the fools that paid for Twitter premium. When this didn’t fix the problem, the feature was apparently removed for everyone:

Grok now won’t undress women even for paid users.

Protest works. Big tech is not invincible.https://t.co/n8hOBx2NmD pic.twitter.com/9t1sVZsVQL

— Ed Newton-Rex (@ednewtonrex) January 14, 2026

Let’s see how long this fix stays up — my money is on someone circumventing safety protocols by asking for the nudes in iambic pentameter. Godspeed, California.

California Attorney General Investigates Musk’s Grok AI Over Lewd Fake Images [The Guardian]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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A disbarred Rockville attorney pleaded guilty Jan. 9 to theft and fraud schemes worth more than $4.2 million.

Sari Kurland, who was suspended from the practice of law and indicted in 2024 amid an escalating investigation by the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission, entered a plea agreement in Montgomery County Circuit Court on Friday, court records show.

Kurland, 64, pleaded guilty to one count of theft over $100,000 and 15 counts of misappropriation by a fiduciary, and faces a maximum of 15 years in prison, according to the plea agreement.

The majority of the schemes involved a mix of high ROI fibs about oil and crypto currency. Word to the wise — unless your name is Eric Adams, Jake Paul, or Hawk Tuah Girl, leave crypo-scamming people out of their hard-earned cash to the professionals.

Kurland hired Covington & Burling to represent her in the proceedings to come.

Disbarred Attorney Pleads Guilty To Fraud Schemes Worth $4.2 million [The Daily Record]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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You’ll be shocked to learn which door Pam Bondi’s office chose.

Judge David Novak’s January 6 order, gave the government a week to explain why Lindsey Halligan keeps showing up as the U.S. Attorney on filings despite absolutely not being the U.S. Attorney — real, acting, or interim. When we last covered this, we wrote:

And she now has a week to come up with an explanation that somehow reconciles “Judge Currie ruled I am not the U.S. Attorney” with “I keep calling myself the U.S. Attorney anyway.” That’s… quite the needle to thread.

But thread it they nonetheless tried. In yesterday’s filing — flagged by Chris Geidner — the Justice Department responded with 11 pages of “How dare you, sir!” Backing up its indignation, the DOJ offers… well, not much. The filing is remarkable not because it’s unpersuasive — though it is certainly not — but because it manages to be wrong in so many different ways while insisting, loudly, that everyone else is misunderstanding how courts work.

As you recall, when Judge Cameron McGowan Currie tossed purported indictments against former FBI director and Bridgewater Associates executive James Comey and current NY Attorney General Letitia James, she noted that Lindsey Halligan was illegally pretending to be the interim U.S. Attorney. The insurance lawyer with zero prosecutorial experience landed in the role after Donald Trump posted a DM intended for Pam Bondi complaining that she hadn’t done enough to baselessly prosecute his enemies. Soon after, the DOJ fired the existing interim U.S. Attorney, Erik Siebert, purporting to replace him with Halligan. But since the statutory 120-day limit on interim appointments already lapsed, the DOJ couldn’t legally appoint another interim candidate to the job.

Confronted with this straightforward set of facts and law, the DOJ responds, “nuh uh.”

Contrary to this Court’s suggestion, nothing in the Comey and James dismissal orders prohibits Ms. Halligan from performing the functions of or holding herself out as the United States Attorney. Although Judge Currie concluded that Ms. Halligan was unlawfully appointed under Section 546, she did not purport to enjoin Ms. Halligan from continuing to oversee the office or from identifying herself as the United States Attorney in the Government’s signature blocks.

Sure, the judge ruled that the prosecutor possessed no legal authority, but why would we expect that to carry over to other cases? Under the DOJ’s garbled logic, the only remedy for illegal prosecutorial action is for each and every defendant to fight it out in their own cases.

This is like arguing that because a court vacated your speeding ticket, you’re entitled to keep telling every cop you’re legally allowed to go 90.

In fact, Judge Currie rejected the defendant’s request in James to enjoin Ms. Halligan from performing any “functions or duties of an interim U.S. Attorney,” James, ECF No. 22 at 16. See James, ECF No. 140 at 25.

This is a reading comprehension fail. Judge Currie acknowledged that there could be tasks involved in running the office that are not constitutional violations, but that tasks like, you know, signing filings as the U.S. Attorney, are definitely illegal.

This Court appears to be under the misimpression that because Judge Currie’s rationale for dismissing the indictments was her conclusion that Ms. Halligan was unlawfully appointed, the United States must acquiesce to that rationale in all other cases or else it is “ignor[ing]” Judge Currie’s orders. Just seven months ago, the Supreme Court characterized that “vision of the judicial function” as “extreme” and “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”

This is sovereign citizen levels of pulling case cites to make a string of non-sequiturs.The Supreme Court’s recent efforts to blow up nationwide injunctions has nothing to do with this case. District court opinions aren’t automatically binding upon the rest of the district, but in this instance, Judge Currie was designated to fully resolve the issue of Halligan’s appointment for the benefit of the whole district. Judge Currie’s ruling even concluded that the district judges are the only ones with the power to appoint an interim U.S. Attorney at this point absent a presidential nomination.

The government can disagree all it wants — and is more than free to appeal — but absent a contrary ruling, continuing to identify Halligan in the Eastern District as the U.S. Attorney is just trolling. Dangerous trolling because it compromises serious criminal prosecutions for what amounts to a bit. And any attorney signing onto the government’s contemptuous position deserves an ethical referral.

When the government has already been told it’s acting illegally and didn’t stop, it’s pretty clear how they feel about ethics.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Powell’s statement explains that the DOJ is probing Powell’s June testimony to the Senate Banking Committee, covering cost-overruns in the renovation of Federal Reserve buildings. Blasting the cost of the Fed renovations has taken on totemic power among Trump and his allies as they search for a reason to punish the central bank for refusing to slash interest rates given the country’s dodgy economic outlook. A spokesperson for Attorney General Pam Bondi said the department wants to “prioritize investigating any abuse of taxpayer dollars.” The Director of the FBI is using a taxpayer jet for date nights and Kristi Noem dropped $200 million on private jets during the shutdown. Abuse of taxpayer dollars? Girl, the call is coming from inside the house.

For what it’s worth, the Fed’s expensive renovation is due in part to the Trump administration’s demand that they junk the original, modern design plans to match Trump’s preferred Saddam-Hussein-palace aesthetic. On top of that, the Fed had to deal with heavy cost spikes in raw materials because some idiot jacked up tariffs on construction materials.

By complying with Trump’s first term design demands, Powell’s now facing possible criminal charges from Trump’s second term. It’s technically an unprecedented development, but completely unsurprising from a guy who built his financial empire by running businesses into the ground and leaving everyone else holding the bag. Powell’s learning what all those USFL owners did back in the 80s, but the stakes this time — the fate of the global economy — are considerably more grave than allowing the NFL to become the unholy monopoly forcing us to subscribe to every streaming service so we can wake up at 9 a.m. to watch 2-10 teams play in Dusseldorf.

This is what it looks like when the Department of Justice stops even pretending it’s a law-enforcement agency and just becomes the President’s personal law firm. As midterms loom, Trump desperately wants an interest rate cut to juice the stagflating economy and his Department of Justice is leveraging the criminal justice system to intimidate the Fed to make the change over its best judgment by turning Groutgate into a federal crime.

Have you been denied cheap money just because economic fundamentals look like three sticks of dynamite attached to an old-timey alarm clock? You may be entitled to compensation! Call Bondi & Blanche LLP.

Trump, naturally, denied any knowledge of the investigation while simultaneously taking the opportunity to remind everyone that Powell is “certainly not very good at the Fed” and “not very good at building buildings.” Trump’s decision to demolish the East Wing and put in the world’s most hideous ballroom has already gone 100 percent over budget.

These potential charges follow Trump’s prior effort to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook. That move now sits with the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority is trying very hard to create a “Federal Reserve exception” to its broader project of turning independent agencies into presidential sock puppets. The conservative majority wants Trump to run roughshod over the administrative state right up until it nukes their own retirement funds. They hoped to drop not-so-subtle hints to stop the administration, but subtlety isn’t the strong suit of a guy with a gold-plated toilet.

But if the Supreme Court wants to pretend it can protect the Fed with a bespoke exception about why it’s “unique,” while also bulldozing every other independent agency, it should be prepared for the obvious response: the White House doesn’t care. If they won’t let Trump fire governors at will, he’s willing to use the DOJ to manufacture bogus criminal charges to secure the “for cause” excuse he would need in any event.

Powell continues:

This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role; the Fed through testimony and other public disclosures made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project. Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.

One expert speaking with CNBC characterized the investigation of Powell as “the Maduro option,” an ominous comparison after the administration used a federal indictment as justification for killing somewhere between 40-80 people to depose the head of a sovereign nation. Reportedly, the administration hoped to use the threat of criminal prosecution to convince Maduro to walk away.

Having scored a big win following that playbook, they may well be trying to implement this model at home. By drawing monetary policy lessons from Sicario, the administration hopes to make every governor internalize the threat, so they don’t deliberate based on inflation, employment, or evidence, but based on what will keep Pam Bondi’s DOJ out of their inbox.

Even Republicans recognize this real-time erosion of the rule of law. Senator Thom Tillis, who is retiring and therefore allowed to drop the act and be honest — says he’ll block Fed nominations until this gets resolved. “It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question,” Tillis said, even though it’s been “now” for a year at this point.

But as much as it’s a signal to the Federal Reserve, it’s also a signal to the Supreme Court. Trump isn’t going to wait to find out if Humphrey’s Executor survives or if some Drunk History about the Second Bank of the United States shields the Federal Reserve. This administration isn’t interested in what the Court’s going to decide — so they might as well just give him what he wants anyway. If there are any genuine “institutionalists” left on the Court, do you want to let Trump fire Powell at will or do you want to force him to drag Powell up on charges first? Is that a predicament that might convince a justice to just give in?

If there’s any positive from Powell’s announcement, it’s that the grand jury convened by the DOJ is likely centered in Washington D.C. and citizens of the capital have proven repeatedly that they’re willing to refuse to indict a garbage charge and more than willing to reject any nonsense that does reach trial.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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The entire prosecution, led by Trump flunky Lindsey Halligan, who I’d refer to as deeply unserious if she didn’t wield so much undeserved power, has been objectively embarrassing for the government. And it’s gotten worse.

Wednesday in the case there was a hearing in front of Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick over potentially privileged materials collected in four different search warrants. And, he was *not* impressed. The defense raised concerns that the materials collected 5+ years ago were stale. As reported by ABC News:

Judge Fitzpatrick appeared to agree with those concerns during Wednesday’s hearing, as he repeatedly pressed Assistant U.S. Attorney Tyler Lemons over what materials the government had reviewed and why the disputes over privilege were not settled during the more than five years that the government had those communications in its possession

Fitzpatrick, citing what he described as “unusual” behavior by the Justice Department and the quickly approaching January trial date, ordered the government to hand over “all grand jury materials” related to its investigations of Comey by Thursday at 5 p.m. ET — an urgent deadline that reflected Fitzpatrick’s concern over the government’s conduct.

Judge Fitzpatrick slammed the government’s actions, saying it felt like an “indict first, investigate second” situation.

Well, to be fair to the DOJ, the judge’s statement isn’t quite accurate. You see the government *did* investigate — multiple times! — and those prosecutors decided there wasn’t enough evidence to indict but the president threw an inadvertently public hissy hit about *not* prosecuting his political enemies and the statute of limitations was about to run out, so we’re left with this blatant miscarriage of justice. But for simplicity’s sake, criticizing the prosecution as “indict first, investigate second” gets the job done.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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U.S. District Judge Jamar Walker ordered the government to provide discovery to James’s legal team related to their vindictive/selective prosecution argument. But instead of getting their documents in order, the DOJ went all Bartleby, the Scrivener, saying they prefer not to.

On Tuesday, the government filed “Notice Of Reasons For Not Providing Pre-Vindictive/Selective Prosecution Motion Related Discovery.” Which was just a fancy way of saying the DOJ was going to go all Eric Cartman and do what they want and ignore the judge. The filing, signed by Roger Keller Jr., brought in from the Missouri office to give an assist to the woefully inexperienced interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, is a wild romp (for a court document) that attempts to impose the government’s will on the court.

“In the October 24, 2025, proceeding, the Court instructed the United States of America (the Government) to provide Defendant with vindictive/selective prosecution-related discovery before she filed any such motion. The Court’s instruction is premature as the Government bears no such obligation until a defendant ‘overcomes a significant barrier by advancing objective evidence tending to show the existence of prosecutorial misconduct. This standard is a ‘rigorous’ one.'”

And there’s more! Keller continues that the law “does not ‘allow[ ] a defendant to have discovery on the government’s prosecutorial decisions [until] the defendant … overcome[s] a significant barrier by advancing objective evidence tending to show the existence of prosecutorial misconduct.”

“The Order to produce vindictive/selective prosecution-related discovery before Defendant filed her motion relieved her of her obligation to overcome the prosecution’s presumptive lawfulness with ‘evidence tending to show the existence of prosecutorial misconduct,'” the filing reads. “The Government is not required to produce vindictive/[selective] prosecution-related discovery until Defendant overcomes the presumption of the prosecution’s lawfulness.”

What an absolutely insane thing to read in a DOJ filing! No motion to reconsider the court’s order, just a bold proclamation — nah, we’re not doing that. What a thoroughly odd response. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s check in with a conservative legal commentator.

Ah, this isn’t likely to work out well. (And who came up with that incomprehensible title for the document?) https://t.co/eO7ZHJvP5r

— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) November 4, 2025

When the far-right legal strategy is so far afield you have Ed Whelan — the man who will gladly peddle conspiracy theories for the cause — balking, methinks you’ve gone too far.

Judge Walker certainly thinks so.

“The Court has received the government’s filing regarding discovery on the issue of vindictive and/or selective prosecution. The Order on the parties’ jointly recommended discovery plan governs discovery in this case,” the judge said. “To the extent any discovery dispute arises, the parties may address it in a motion.”

Looks like he’ll be keeping a pretty tight leash on the parties.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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That would be a kindness, if only because it would spare Halligan the ignominy of watching the humiliating implosion of both high-profile cases.

Three motions filed yesterday by Comey’s legal team illustrate the fatal flaw in the prosecution. The barebones indictment — just a page and a half stating in conclusory fashion that Comey, a former Bridgewater Associates general counsel, lied to Congress back in 2020 — is so vague that it could apply to two alternate theories of the case. Was Halligan saying that Comey lied about authorizing his former deputy Andrew McCabe to speak to the Wall Street Journal? Or was she suggesting that he lied about dispatching his friend and lawyer Daniel Richman, to speak to the New York Times?

Comey’s lawyer Pat Fitzgerald said that he himself only learned that “PERSON 3” was Richman the day before the arraignment.

Neither theory of the case makes much sense, but the Richman plot seems almost comically ridiculous, since the testimony in question very clearly pertained to McCabe only.

The first motion requests a bill of particulars laying out specifically how Halligan thinks this crime went down. When and how did this authorization take place? What did Comey order Richman to leak? What was the Senate inquiry he “corruptly” influenced? Which statement in Comey’s testimony was false? Inquiring minds — and Jim Comey — want to know!

The second motion requests the disclosure of the grand jury transcripts for all the reasons: Halligan was installed as US Attorney after the president pushed out her predecessor, a career prosecutor, for refusing to indict Comey and James. Four days later, in her very first appearance before a grand jury, she secured the instant indictment — after first getting no-billed, and then holding the jurors over until almost 7 p.m. No line attorneys were willing to put their names on the indictment, and the only lawyers willing to associate themselves with the prosecution had to be imported from North Carolina. The theory of the case is so vague that it suggests an inexperienced prosecutor (who may or may not have been illegally appointed) might have fudged the details. And, on top of all that, Comey says that an FBI investigator who testified before the grand jury was likely tainted by exposure to privileged materials. Whoopsie doodle!

The third filing was a Bronston motion to dismiss based on the literal truth of Comey’s answers to Ted Cruz’s ambiguous questions. During the exchange, the senator fired off a series of accusations, characterizing prior statements by Comey and McCabe as diametrically opposed, and scarcely providing room for Comey to reply.

CRUZ: Now, as you know, Mr. McCabe, who works for you, has publicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it. Now, what Mr. McCabe is saying and what you testified to this committee cannot both be true. One or the other is false. Who’s telling the truth?

COMEY: I can only speak to my testimony. I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017.

CRUZ: So your testimony is you’ve never authorized anyone to leak? And Mr. McCabe, if he says contrary, is not telling the truth, is that correct?

COMEY: Again, I’m not going to characterize Andy’s testimony, but mine is the same today.

As the motion points out, this hectoring was not a careful deposition designed to elicit clear responses, but rather an exercise of political rhetoric. And saying “I stand by my testimony” is basically a non-response to an inchoate shouting. It is literally true, and the lack of context in the indictment, which claims that he “falsely stat[ed] to a U.S. Senator during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that he, JAMES B. COMEY JR., had not ‘authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports’ regarding an FBI investigation,” strongly suggests that Halligan painted an incomplete picture for the jurors.

If Comey does manage to get his hands on those grand jury transcripts, he’ll obviously be supplementing the Bronston motion. But it likely won’t come to that, thanks to Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, the senior judge from South Carolina designated to hear the disqualification motion. If she agrees with courts in New Jersey, Nevada, and California that 28 USC § 546 permits the president one, and only one, 120-day interim appointment, then Halligan’s installation was ultra vires and prosecutions she alone secured are likely a nullity. Judge Currie has also ordered Halligan to turn over “all documents relating to the indictment signer’s participation in the grand jury proceedings, along with complete grand jury transcripts” so that she may “determine the extent of the indictment signer’s involvement in the grand jury proceedings.” It should make for fascinating reading.

US v. Comey [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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A judge in New York state has dismissed two terrorism charges against Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
…
Although prosecutors argued that writings left by Mangione demonstrated a terrorism motive, the judge said they failed to show that the suspect intended to put political pressure on the government or terrorise the general population – key provisions of New York’s terrorism law which was passed in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks.

This is one of those times where you get to see that facts =/= feelings play out in real time. Goes to show that the terrorist perp walk wasn’t nearly as significant or symbolic as Eric Adams intended for it to be:

Eric Adams says he confronted Luigi because he put fear into the hearts of CEOs and he wanted to comfort them by looking him in the eyes.

Yes, great way to disincentivize terrorism. Make those who commit such acts international celebrities involved in a cosmic struggle with the… pic.twitter.com/7nA1vBSb6Z

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) December 20, 2024

Luigi isn’t out of the fire yet. He still faces a second-degree murder charge at the state level and still faces federal murder charges.

May Luigi get a fair trial that follows the rule of law.

Judge Dismisses Terrorism Charges Against Luigi Mangione [BBC]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Kwon and his company Terraform Labs created two cryptocurrencies: Luna and UST. Luna was a typical cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. But UST was a stablecoin. Stablecoins are generally backed by legal tender currencies like the U.S. dollar which keeps its value stable.

But UST did not have a cash reserve to peg its value. Instead, its peg to the U.S. dollar was based on an algorithm that encourages trader arbitrage. For example, if the value of one UST becomes less than $1, people can buy UST, convert it to Luna, and then sell that Luna for a profit. Conversely, if the value of one UST is greater than $1, people can buy $1 worth of Luna, convert it to UST, then sell the UST for a profit. In theory, this adversarial relationship between the two coins were supposed to keep UST’s value in check.

Kwon also established the Anchor Protocol to incentive use of UST. Anchor was advertised as a savings platform where people would deposit their UST and receive a guaranteed 20% interest. At that time, high-yield savings accounts offered at most 1%. The unusually high return rate attracted investors, mostly people looking for alternative investments.

In May 2022, a very large UST trade caused it to lose its peg and stability. As UST’s value fell, more Luna coins were produced in an attempt to stabilize the price. But instead, the massive production of the Luna coin devalued that as well. This resulted in a death spiral of both currencies — now worth pennies on the dollar.

Kwon and Terraform Labs were hit with civil lawsuits and criminal investigations in both the United States and South Korea where he was based. During the UST crash, Kwon was in Singapore claiming that he was working on restoring the peg. But later he fled the country. He was finally arrested in Montenegro where he was caught using a fake Costa Rica passport to board a flight to Dubai.

A good portion of UST holders were retail investors. There are many stories of people who lost their life savings on UST. Some of these people cashed out investments, sold appreciated assets, and withdrew from their tax-deferred retirement accounts triggering taxable income.

Unfortunately, the IRS issued two pieces of guidance. The first is Notice 2014-21 which stated the basic tax rules for cryptocurrency transactions. It stated that unless someone is in the trade or business of trading cryptocurrencies, a taxpayer is only entitled to claim a capital gain or loss.

The second guidance from the IRS was a chief counsel memorandum released in 2023. This memorandum stated that taxpayers cannot claim a worthlessness or abandonment deduction for cryptocurrencies. This is because both of these are miscellaneous itemized deductions and these deductions have been disallowed for the years 2018 to 2025 due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Some taxpayers had sufficient capital gains to offset their losses. But others sold business assets, withdrew from tax-deferred retirement accounts or took other actions that triggered ordinary income. In these cases, capital losses can only offset $3,000 of ordinary income, with the remainder to be carried forward indefinitely. This created the unusual situation where the taxpayer has to pay taxes on income he or she does not have.

There were some tax-planning options to minimize the sting. Those who kept their Luna or UST coins could follow the guidance stated on the IRS 2023 memorandum to claim either the abandonment loss or the worthlessness loss on January 1, 2026, which is when miscellaneous itemized deductions would be allowed once again. Unfortunately the Big Beautiful Bill which recently passed made the disallowance of the miscellaneous itemized deduction permanent.

Some have accused Kwon of running a Ponzi scheme. Indeed there is evidence that money from retail investors was used to pay earlier investors. Most of them were large, institutional investors who cashed out before the crash. If this is the case, then taxpayers can use the Ponzi scheme safe harbor explained in Revenue Procedure 2009-20, a ruling issued in response to the Madoff Ponzi scheme that year. This is normally considered a theft loss deduction.

There are two problems with using this safe harbor. First, the taxpayers using this procedure can claim up to 95% of the losses not covered by insurance. This is not a major hurdle for most people as they will simply accept the 5% loss. But the bigger problem is that the IRS has announced that Kwon engaged in a Ponzi scheme and may challenge this deduction in an audit.

The other option is to claim a general theft loss deduction for the money they lost. This would be considered a theft loss in connection with the production of income. This is because the taxpayer had a profit motive when they put their USTs into the Anchor Protocol. It is important that it is not labeled as a personal theft loss which can only be claimed if they live in a federal or state disaster area. A taxpayer claiming a theft loss must prove that the loss resulted from a taking of property that was illegal under state law where the theft occurred and was done with specific intent to steal. Generally, specific intent to steal was hard to prove in investment cases.

So what does Kwon’s guilty plea mean? It could show he had the specific intent to steal making it easier to claim the theft loss deduction. In court, Kwon said, “In 2021, I made false and misleading statements about why UST regained its peg. What I did was wrong and I want to apologize for my conduct.”

Despite this development, the IRS could still be reluctant to allow a theft loss deduction. However, the IRS seems to recognize that online cryptocurrency scammers exist and taxpayers should not have face adverse tax consequences in addition to their financial pain. Last March, the IRS released another chief counsel memorandum which allows taxpayers who were victims of phishing scams or pig-butchering scams to claim a theft loss deduction.

For people who lost money on Luna or UST, they were initially faced with limited tax relief options. But in light of Kwon’s recent guilty plea on fraud charges and the recent chief counsel cemorandum by the IRS, taxpayers may be able to take advantage of a theft loss deduction.

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at stevenchungatl@gmail.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Christine Hunsicker Indicted in $300M Fashion Rental Fraud Case [WWD]

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Blood money can be as green as any other money, but investments have a tendency to take a hit when the company gets featured in Amnesty International reports. If there’s a risk your investment might end up knee deep in an assassination, that’s information that such a fund might arguably find… material?

Those same funds may have concerns about foreign bribes or international gambling sites with covert ownership.

One fund invested in such iffy companies under the management of Novalpina Capital Partners and it gave rise to a whole mess of foreign legal actions. But cutting across all the suits, the fund claims Novalpina misled it about the nature of these transactions and ultimately caused big losses while Novalpina claims it’s owed a bunch of money. But of particular interest to the American Biglaw audience is a 28 U.S.C. § 1782 petition seeking domestic discovery for use in a foreign proceeding filed in the S.D.N.Y.:

Weil, and particularly Gerhard Schmidt, co-managing partner of Weil’s German offices, was the Fund’s key legal advisor when under Novalpina GP’s control, including for all major acquisitions undertaken by the Fund (including NSO, LXO and Maxbet)….

Accordingly, Weil was responsible for conducting due diligence, negotiating, financing assistance, drafting transaction documentation, and supporting NCL in the management of Fund investments…. Schmidt managed the Fund’s investments by acting as a director in various Novalpina and Fund entities, and was one of the directors responsible for the Fund’s governance of NSO.

The fund wants the firm to produce a wide array of firm documents. Or, as the case may more realistically be, a privilege log listing a bunch of documents Weil won’t hand over. That said, the petition claims its requests primarily target “correspondence Weil had with third parties, or documents provided to Weil by third parties.” Weil isn’t a party to the lawsuit so they aren’t being accused of wrongdoing, but there’s a point where technically accurate analysis can open the door to client whitewashing. NSO was described as having “best in class” governance and compliance. In the class of spyware manufacturers… maybe that’s not a high bar? The petition claims they already have documents showing Weil involved removing references to a controversial Russian business figure’s ownership stake in a gambling site… where’s the materiality line on that?

We reached out to Weil about this matter but they did not respond. Which is understandable… it’s ongoing litigation.

This isn’t even the only 1782 petition in the matter, with Novalpina targeting the fund’s American-based current investment advisor as well as the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System, the fund’s largest investor.

You know who probably doesn’t like finding out their money is aiding in assassinations? Public pension funds!

But this all highlights the delicate game of telephone driving private equity. Pension funds rely on the say-so of the funds, who rely on the investment managers, who rely on the due diligence of law firms. It’s a legal version of human centipede, with each link more potentially obscured than the last, and you’re just trusting whatever comes out the other end.

Adding to the lunacy surrounding this case, the 1782 petition was submitted by Stone Hilton, the law firm you probably most remember connect with the words, “violently anally raped by a cylindrical asteroid in front of my wife and children (Opens in a new window),” because that’s what the co-founder of Stone Hilton allegedly said he hoped to do to the First Assistant Attorney General of Texas.

2025 has been a wild year.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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On April 23, 2025, Trump pardoned Paul Walscak, who was recently sentenced(Opens in a new window) to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release for tax evasion.

According to the IRS, Walczak controlled a network of interconnected health care companies operating under various names. For more than a decade, Walczak and his companies were not compliant with his tax obligations. From 2016 through 2019, Walczak’s companies withheld over $7.4 million of taxes from his employees’ paychecks, but did not pay those taxes over to the IRS. Instead, Walczak used the money to purchase a yacht and other luxury items. As a result, the IRS took aggressive collection efforts. They also assessed the unpaid taxes against Walczak personally, which is commonly known as the Trust Fund Recovery Penalty.

But Walczak’s mother Elizabeth Fago was a major Trump supporter during his election campaign. According to the New York Times(Opens in a new window), Fago raised millions for Trump and other Republicans. She went to a $1 million per person fundraiser dinner where attendees would have face-to-face access to Trump. A few weeks after attending the dinner, Walczak received a full pardon.

On May 28, 2025, Trump pardoned former reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley. In 2019, they were indicted(Opens in a new window) for bank fraud and tax evasion. They were accused of obtaining bank loans using false financial statements.

They were also accused of failing to timely file tax returns and paying taxes from 2009 until 2016. They took steps to hinder the collection of back taxes by hiding income and lying to third-parties about their tax returns. Their tax preparer is also accused of lying to FBI and IRS criminal investigation agents.

The Chrisleys responded by blaming everything on a former employee who stole from them, forged documents, and provided fake documents to investigators.

Following a three-week trial, a federal jury found the Chrisleys guilty(Opens in a new window) of tax evasion and conspiring to defraud community banks out of more than $30 million of fraudulent loans. Before the pardon was issued, Todd and Julie Chrisley were sentenced(Opens in a new window) to 12 and seven years in federal prison, respectively.

One of the Chrisleys’ daughters, Savannah, was instrumental in obtaining the pardon as she met with Trump to advocate for her parents’ release. She spoke at the Republican National Convention. She says(Opens in a new window) that she challenged a broken system and the weaponization of the Department of Justice.

Her advocacy paid off. A White House official said(Opens in a new window) that “the President is always pleased to give well-deserving Americans a second chance, especially those who have been unfairly targeted and overly prosecuted by an unjust justice system.”

Or for some reason, Trump could have been skeptical of criminal convictions(Opens in a new window) involving fraudulent loan documents.

Whether these pardons were appropriate will depend on whom you talk or listen to. Regardless, a pardon wastes the time and money spent to investigate and prosecute a case.

Will the IRS Criminal Investigation Division want to investigate a case if they know that their target is likely to be pardoned by the president? According to the division’s 2024 annual report(Opens in a new window), 1,373 criminal investigations were conducted and 674 prosecutions were recommended. This is down from 2018(Opens in a new window) where there were 1,714 criminal tax investigations and 1,050 prosecutions.

While these two pardons stories are anecdotal, anyone being investigated by the Criminal Investigation Division will see them. Those who are well-heeled or well connected will try to get an audience with Trump hoping that he will sell pardon indulgences before their sentencing hearing.

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at stevenchungatl@gmail.com(Opens in a new window). Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung(Opens in a new window)) and connect with him on LinkedIn(Opens in a new window).

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker. 

As one of the biggest healthcare companies in the U.S., it has long been a reliable stock to invest in. But in the last few months, its stock has dropped nearly 50%, it has switched CEOs and seems to be on the back foot — a surprising development for one of the biggest names in healthcare. How did all this unfold and more importantly, can it dig out of it?

First, let’s begin with the cause for the stock to decline.

The first major drop came in April after UnitedHealth Group reported disappointing first quarter earnings. The healthcare giant also revised its adjusted earnings per share outlook for 2025 to between $26 and $26.50, compared to its previous forecast between $29.50 and $30. An analyst note from Leerink Partners called it an “uncharacteristic miss” for UnitedHealth Group.

Then, UnitedHealth Group announced last month that CEO Andrew Witty was stepping down due to “personal reasons” and would be replaced immediately by Stephen J. Hemsley, who served as the company’s CEO from 2006 to 2017. The company also suspended its 2025 outlook “as care activity continued to accelerate while also broadening to more types of benefit offerings than seen in the first quarter, and the medical costs of many Medicare Advantage beneficiaries new to UnitedHealthcare remained higher than expected.” This caused the stock to plummet again.

To make matters worse, the Wall Street Journal reported this month that UnitedHealth Group is under criminal investigation by the Justice Department for possible Medicare fraud. The investigation is related to UnitedHealth’s Medicare Advantage business, though the exact nature of the allegations is unclear. The company said in a statement that it has not been notified by the Justice Department about this investigation and called the Journal’s reporting “deeply irresponsible.”

Another publication also took aim at the insurance giant and largest employer of physicians in the country.

The Guardian reported in late May that UnitedHealth was secretly paying thousands of dollars in bonuses to nursing homes so that they didn’t transfer patients to hospitals which would lead to more expensive care. These patients were all part of UnitedHealth’s Medicare Advantage plans whose members are long term nursing home residents, and for whose care UnitedHealth receives taxpayer dollars.

In addition, UnitedHealth Group was sued by its shareholders this month, who accused the company of misleading them after the December killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The lawsuit alleged that UnitedHealth Group understated the impact of Thompson’s murder on the company. A spokesperson for the company said UnitedHealth Group “denies any allegations of wrongdoing and intends to defend the matter vigorously.”

So why is the company beset by so many issues?

During a May 13 conference call following the announcement of Witty’s departure as CEO, CFO John Rex said its challenges can be put into three categories:

“One, greater-than-expected impact in UnitedHealthcare from the health status of new members,” he said. “Two, further acceleration of utilization within Medicare Advantage. Third, indications of a broadening of this higher trend to other areas and we are prudently anticipating these trends may go even further.”

On the same conference call, Hemsley said he is “deeply disappointed in and apologize for the performance setbacks we have encountered from both external and internal challenges. Many of the issues standing in the way of achieving our goals, as well as our opportunities, are largely within our control.”

What’s notable about UnitedHealth Group’s challenges is that other public insurers, such as Elevance, Aetna or Centene, are not suffering the same fate, according to one industry expert.

“Historically, they’ve been viewed as sort of the best managed health plan out there,” said Ari Gottlieb, principal of consulting group A2 Strategy Corp, in an interview. “And so you would have expected that if United is stumbling, everyone else is as well, but this seems to be an issue that’s mostly confined to United right now. We certainly haven’t seen any other health insurers come out and say, ‘We’re seeing the same thing.’ … Everybody else sort of said, ‘Things are sort of trending as we expected.’”

He added that part of UnitedHealth’s challenges can be explained by them being too aggressive in Medicare Advantage this year. The health benefits the company offered were “greater than the market and what reimbursement supported,” he said. In other words, the plan design was too generous, which prompted increased utilization while the associated benefit costs were not adequately covered by reimbursement rates.

Another expert argued that the healthcare industry has evolved, and things that went unnoticed in the past are now catching up, such as claims denials.

“[Witty’s] strategy really was one out of the old playbook, which is the way you become successful is you increase the medical loss ratio, by which I mean you lower the value, meaning that you invest less in actual care delivery. He does that by a lot of prior authorization, a tremendous amount of claims denial,” said Dr. Robert Pearl, former CEO of the Permanente Medical Group, who is currently a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and Stanford Graduate School of Business, as well as a healthcare author and podcaster.

“The playbook that worked in a different time period, in a different Congress, different economic mindset, that’s all changed,” he continued. “The people who are going to be successful are going to be the ones not only who can respond, but who can anticipate and move forward. And UnitedHealthcare didn’t do that.”

While UnitedHealth Group is pointing to higher-than-expected utilization in Medicare Advantage as one of the key drivers of their struggles, there’s a broader issue at play, argued Dr. Adam Brown, an emergency physician and founder of healthcare advisory firm ABIG Health, as well as a professor of practice at the University of North Carolina.

The healthcare giant has its tentacles in insurance with UnitedHealthcare, provider services under Optum and pharmacy benefits with Optum Rx. And people are starting to question whether this vertical integration has exceeded its limits.

“I don’t think this is just a blip in the stock market,” Brown said. “I do believe it’s a bit of a reckoning where United, over the past several years, has been building an empire on Medicare Advantage and on vertical integration. And remember, Medicare Advantage is taxpayer dollars. … I think regulators, politicians — we see it even in a bipartisan manner — and of course patients are asking similar questions: Have we gone too far in vertical integration, and have we handed over too much of healthcare to one single entity?”

What’s ahead for UnitedHealth Group?

While Brown doesn’t believe this is just a “blip” for UnitedHealth Group, Gottlieb seems to disagree. He thinks the company’s issues will resolve in about a year. He gave the example of CVS Health, which was reportedly exploring a breakup back in October.

“They managed to turn things around, at least on the insurance,” he said. “I think they’re still struggling on their Oak Street clinics and some of the other assets. So these things are solvable. It will take some time.”

Bringing back Hemsley will also likely provide some stability for UnitedHealth, he noted. To fix their financial issues, they’ll likely reduce benefits in their MA plans, starting with supplemental benefits, Gottlieb stated.

He added that the DOJ investigation is probably of minimal concern to the company.

“You don’t normally see the federal government really going after large corporations and taking any significant action. To me, that’s most likely a lot of noise,” he said, noting that there may be some penalties they’ll have to pay, but nothing substantial.

Pearl agreed that UnitedHealth will likely come out of this.

“They are not going to fail. They have big reserves too, so they’re not going to go out of business,” he said. “They’re not going to run out of cash, but they are going to have to get their feet back on the ground and figure out what they’re going to do over the next 10 years.”

Brown argued that the company likely isn’t at risk of failing from a profitability standpoint. However, it could be at risk of some threats from a regulatory perspective due to the scrutiny from the DOJ, FTC, HHS and Congress. In addition, with the stock dropping, the public may be viewing the company differently.

“I think if all of those different verticals are speaking and controlling more, that may give us more of a signal of where things go with this company and other companies like it,” he said.

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“This will be a tough one,” says Don Worley, the president and managing attorney with personal injury law firm McDonald Worley in its Houston office…. “It is tough because it will be hard to find a potential juror who has not heard about this. Most will have already made up their minds about which side they are on before they arrive at the courthouse,” Worley says.

To be clear, there’s been a great deal of PR for either outcome of Mangione’s case. There’s the obvious contingent of people who have been negatively impacted by insurance companies that see Luigi as a hero: about 60% of Americans have recently reported problems with their insurance companies. But it doesn’t stop there! The fear of being screwed over by healthcare companies in the future was enough to earn Luigi a massive amount of vigilante brownie points: I have no sources but I’m willing to bet that many a shot was drank in Luigi’s honor after Blue Cross decided to mysteriously roll back their pay for your own anesthesia policy change the day after Brian Thompson was killed. People haven’t just been voicing their support, they’ve been throwing their dollars in too — Luigi recently used $300k raised by grassroots supporters to help fund his legal team. What if one of those paying supporters ends up on the jury somehow?

On the other side, you have all of obvious jury-tainting behavior from the state. You can’t start a list like this without Eric Adams. There was the conclusory address of Luigi as a terrorist that got broadcasted across the world:

New York Mayor Eric Adams on his ridiculous decision to go down to the heliport today when Luigi Mangione arrived before he was arraigned.

“I'm not going to just allow him to come into our city. I wanted to look him in the eye and stated that you carried out this terrorist act… pic.twitter.com/ntVP8U9yYX

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) December 20, 2024

The perp walk Eric Adams staged like a high budget Superman movie for political clout:

a month ago today, Luigi's perp walk took place the same day as the Superman trailer release pic.twitter.com/cP0A3qMSxq

— Luigi Nation (@mangionethinker) January 19, 2025

And if that wasn’t enough, there was the incessant fanboying from the NYPD themselves that helped add to the Luigi cult following:

not nypd posting these pictures from their official acc like they’re a luigi mangione stan acc https://t.co/rerriOBKUQ

— A ⋆˚꩜｡⋆ (@leftlelobhai) December 20, 2024

The article goes on to suggest that the questions meant for use in voir dire can be honed beforehand in focus groups. And while that does make sense, the old adage “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” comes to mind. Can you just imagine the actual voir dire?

Prosecution: Hey, we should strike juror 14.
Defense: Why, cause he’s Italian?!
Prosecution: No, because he’s wearing a Deny Defend Depose hoodie and has a “Free Luigi” tattoo on his neck.
Potential Juror: What do you want from me? I’m from Brooklyn!

There’s also the recommendation to cull the prospective jury members’ social media presence for mentions of Luigi. Valid, but who hasn’t said something online about the case? Warned your friends about the importance of not assuming Luigi did it because you believe in due process? That might be a strike. Shared or haha’d a segment with Bill Burr adamantly saying Free Luigi? Too much of a very real jury nullification risk — strike ’em. Share this gif a little too close to December 4th?:

luigi wins! bang bang! reaction video nintendo mario meme pic.twitter.com/VchdFeiOjB

— The Memes Archive (@TheMemesArchive) February 8, 2025

Thank you for your time, the door is on your left.

The prosecution has a serious challenge on their hands. For the sake of due process, I wish them and Luigi the best with finding a neutral and impartial jury. They’re all going to need it.

What Can Luigi Mangione’s Trial Tell Us About Unbiased Juries? [ABA Journal]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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Mark Roy Anderson, 70, who was living in Beverly Hills while on supervised release after serving more than 11 years in federal prison in the earlier case, pleaded guilty in April 2024 to two federal wire fraud counts, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
…
[He] was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years behind bars for duping investors out of about $18.4 million…by falsely claiming that his companies invested in high-profit hemp farms and cannabis-infused retail products as well as a sham bottling business.

The current meta for scamming people for millions is running for office and launching a bitcoin, but Anderson’s scamming happened between 2020 and 2021. Selling snake oil back then would have been a little too on the nose, but the booming CBD and Delta 8 markets easily lended themselves to swindling investors greedy for quick returns out of their cash. Anderson is ultimately responsible for 45 investors losing ~$18.4 million by working with him.

You can shame him for frauding his investors and ending up in the big house — you probably should — but you’ve gotta give him credit for at least going big.

Remember: there’s a line between getting paid to zealously represent your clients and using your law degree to siphon people’s bank accounts. Make sure you and your clients know which side you’re on.

Disbarred Attorney Sentenced 25 Years for Hemp Farm Fraud Scheme [My News LA]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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Four-dimensional chess this ain’t.

Covington took on Smith in his personal capacity after the administration signaled that it would use the DOJ to punish the prosecutors with the temerity to pursue a criminal case against the former president for collecting boxes worth of classified documents like Pokemon. And more importantly than merely having these documents, he sent his representatives to attest that he’d turned them all back over to the government when he… hadn’t. It’s this key detail that made Trump’s case materially different than then-president Biden discovering a briefing document from his VP days, no matter what right-wing podcasters try to spin.

Mar-a-Lago club members had better access to U.S. secrets over the last four years than Covington does now. The message is that Covington lawyers need to get in line behind Vladimir Putin and any other deep-pocketed foreign power who might’ve sent agents to hang out at the club over the last four years. Priorities!

Why does Covington even need clearances? Trump already said he silently declassified everything relevant to this case with his presidential mind powers on his way out the door. Is he now saying he’s magically reclassified them?

While the immediate impetus is to prevent Smith from having access to his choice of attorneys by hobbling Covington’s ability to effectively defend him, the move undermines Covington’s capacity to do any work involving secret material [UPDATE: to clarify, others in the firm still have their clearances to the extent work is done by other lawyers at the firm — though Peter Koski and his team who work largely on “sensitive, high-stakes government” matters will not be in a position to assist with that work to the extent it involves secret material] and sends a more pronounced chilling message to the Washington legal community as a whole.

From CNN:

“This is nothing less than a petty and vindictive attack on the legal profession, and particularly the ability of a select group of cleared lawyers to defend the interests of officials across the intelligence community,” said Washington national security attorney Bradley Moss in response to the White House’s move. Moss is a law partner of Mark Zaid, who also has had his security clearance revoked. “The bigger question is, how far is he going to take this war against the legal profession, and against anyone who stands for the rule of law?”

So this is how the rule of law dies… on the gilded toilet of a tacky resort.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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We also had an opportunity to check out the new look for the White House. It’s not Jackie Kennedy showing off new drapes or anything, but it’s a start.

Then Brian Baez noticed something…

OMG DID Y’ALL SEE THIS? LOOK CLOSELY!!!! 👀 pic.twitter.com/VRp4g80Gpc

— Brian Baez (@MentallyDivine) February 14, 2025

Honestly, I refused to believe it despite trusting Baez’s work. But…

Hey defense lawyers? How excited would you be to learn that your client framed their mugshot and hung it up in the office?

That’s the New York Post cover of August 25, 2023 featuring Trump’s mugshot when he turned himself into Fulton County, Georgia authorities. The Oval Office is adorned with official portraits and sculptures of presidents at their most heroic — even if they were, in fact, scumbags — and Trump’s decision is to place his mugshot outside the office as a monument to managing to call election officials to ask them to conjure up non-existent votes and suffer zero consequences.

Presidents normally don’t place portraits of themselves in the White House because that’s a symptom of narcissistic psychosis. Not that there haven’t been presidents with narcissistic psychosis, but they’ve historically had the bare minimum of connection with reality to not celebrate that condition.

Though if a president were to post up a self-portrait, you’d think he’d pick something vaguely flattering. Something, I don’t know, presidential. Not a memento from when they got their buddies convicted. Why would he want to celebrate that every day and — more to the point — remind every dignitary of his felonious background? The most likely reason is that he sees it as an accomplishment. He won. He was hauled into court on serious criminal charges and nothing happened. Even when he lost and got convicted of felonies in another case he still won because nothing happened. He probably wants to remind himself and everyone else that he’s the real Teflon Don.

Look, if he posted that stupid “something nicked my entirely unblemished ear and let’s just pretend it was a bullet” picture it would be childish but at least it supports a messianic narrative. It’s actually sort of telling that he views “beating the rap in Georgia” as more of a monument to his strongman brand than “surviving a failed assassination.” A mugshot that one of his own lawyers admits makes the president look like a Batman villain highlights the gaping chasm where a basic sense of decorum should reside.

But if you’re the kind of guy who reads national security documents on a gold toilet perhaps we ask too much.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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Goldstein, the Supreme Court litigator charged with a number of tax and fraud claims stemming from an alleged second life as a high-stakes poker fiend, will resume his prior scheduled release with several additional caveats covering his use of electronic devices. IPPC, which is like ExamSoft but for proctoring pretrial defendants, will have its software installed on his devices to remotely monitor his computer activity. He will also have to report all cryptocurrency wallets he “owns, has access to, and/or controls” including “hard wallets and soft wallets” (whether it’s stored on hardware or software for the folks unfamiliar with fake money).

The focus on cryptocurrency is the story of Goldstein’s week, having gone to jail after prosecutors deemed him a flight risk upon discovering some $8 million in crypto and transfers involving $6 million of it all while he was pleading poverty as a pro se in an effort to convince the court to let him use his house — which the indictment identifies as a product of mortgage fraud — to hire lawyers.

Now represented by Munger Tolles, Goldstein argued that those wallets didn’t belong to him and the government couldn’t prove he did anything but send money to them in the past. Emails like “tom need to wire USDC to me, please give him a address,” Goldstein argued do not establish that he owned the wallets involved in these transactions and, if anything, proved that he didn’t because — basically — “If Mr. Goldstein shared ownership of the wallet, then
there would have been no need for the individual requesting the payment to instruct [REDACTED] to ‘give’ Mr. Goldstein ‘a address’ to send the payment.”

That proved enough for Chief Magistrate Judge Timothy Sullivan to grant Goldstein’s release with assurances that no one would be blindsided by additional crypto transactions. It goes without saying that the revised order includes an edict that the defendant not “access, receive, send, and/or transfer any cryptocurrencies.”

But, for now, Goldstein will have to put off any nascent jailhouse lawyer aspirations.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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But Trump is now using the extraordinary power of the executive in a superficial nonpartisan, but still decidedly corrupt ways.

Tuesday, Trump issued a full pardon for former Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Blago was convicted of trying to sell Barack Obama’s senate seat after he won the 2008 presidential election amongst other crimes, as reported by NBC News:

Blagojevich was convicted in 2009 of lying to an FBI agent. Jurors deadlocked on other counts. At his 2011 retrial, he was found guilty on all counts, after government recordings revealed his attempts to sell Obama’s seat. He was also convicted of shaking down a children’s hospital executive for campaign contributions and holding up a bill involving the horse-racing industry in exchange for campaign contributions.

NBC helpfully follows this up with a particularly relevant tidbit: “In between the trials, he was a contestant on Trump’s reality TV show ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ in 2010.” Ahhhh, there you have it.

In Trump’s first term as president, he commuted Blagojevich’s sentence — after watching the disgraced former governor’s wife on TV talking smack about his enemies (Robert Muller and James Comey) while she pleaded for her husband’s release.

But that’s not the only victory yesterday for Democrats accused of being on the take.

Trump’s Department of Justice directed prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to drop their case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Adams was to face trial in April on charges of conspiracy, bribery, and solicitation of foreign campaign contributions. But Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed the dismissal of the case “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based,” because Adams needs to “devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.”

And, of course, let’s not forget the time and effort Adams spent being a sycophant, and blessing Trump’s agenda.

These moves are a victory for the twin pillars of the Trump administration — corruption and obsequiousness. And a blow for justice.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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According to reporting by Law360, the government alleges since Goldstein’s release he’s made millions of dollars worth of crypto transactions, a fact he kept hidden. As per government filings, Goldstein “fail[ed] to disclose the existence of two cryptocurrency wallets through which he received over $8 million in cryptocurrency and sent more than $6 million of cryptocurrency over the last five days.”

Goldstein is currently awaiting a bail review hearing.

Goldstein was first arrested January 16th. He faces a 22-count indictment alleging his side career as a high-stakes poker player fueled crimes of tax evasion and financial fraud. His release was initially secured by his residence, but Goldstein is seeking to use other properties as collateral, claiming he needs the assets in his marital home to fund his defense.

Prosecutors opposed that motion, claiming Goldstein posed a “significant” flight risk. I guess now we know why the government thinks that.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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Goldstein secured his release with his marital home, but is seeking to modify the conditions of his release. In a filing (notably filed pro se, despite retaining John F. Lauro of Lauro & Singer and Stuart Berman of Lerch Early & Brewer Chtd. for his arraignment), Goldstein is seeking to put up another property fas collateral or his release, claiming he needs the assets in his residence to fund his defense. The government opposes the motion — they say despite Goldstein’s claim to have a negative net worth in the neighborhood of $3.3 million, he poses a “significant” flight risk. Prosecutors also countered claims about Goldstein’s financial condition, pointing out he has a bank account with $250,000, and large monthly outlays including $5,000 a month for a housekeeper, $8,000 on a personal assistant, and an apartment in Dallas he’s spending $20,000 monthly on.

As reported by Bloomberg Law, government attorneys also say Goldstein did some interfering with their investigation:

They also say Goldstein poses “a potential danger to the administration of justice,” claiming he has instructed potential witnesses to destroy evidence and suggesting he has attempted to pay off would-be witnesses.

After learning of the federal investigation, Goldstein “offered things of value, including cryptocurrency, to a potential witness in the case who has intimate knowledge of his and his law firm’s finances and income,” they allege. There “was no other credible reason for doing so than to attempt to prevent the potential witness from assisting in the investigation.”

But Goldstein counters the government’s accusations he’s a “very real risk” with the fact he’s “a deeply respected member of the bar who practiced at the highest level for decades.” He also says he’s known about the government investigation for years, has traveled extensively worldwide during that time, but “always returned home.”

A hearing on Goldstein’s collateral, and the matter of his representation, will be held later this week.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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Yesterday, an appeals court upheld Scott’s conviction and sentence, rejecting Scott’s claims that he was unaware of the nature of the OneCoin fraud.

Scott left his international mergers and acquisitions and private equity practice in Biglaw to work at OneCoin, and prosecutors say he had a key role in the plot to launder $400 million from the cryptocurrency. According to the government, Scott created shell companies, offshore accounts, and fraudulent investment funds on behalf of OneCoin to launder money in what has been described as, “classic Ponzi scheme with no blockchain or real underlying technology.”

Prosecutors said Scott made bank for his role at OneCoin, even bragging about making $50 million before he was 50 years old. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said, “Indeed, Scott accomplished his goal, but by fraud and deception, and will now spend a decade in prison and has been ordered to forfeit all of his illegal proceeds.”

In 2017, as the scheme was unraveling and the investigation into OneCoin was heating up, “Cryptoqueen” Ruja Ignatova (the founder of OneCoin) disappeared after boarding a plane to Athens. Theories have circulated that Ignatova was murdered on the orders of Hristoforos Nikos Amanatidis, known as Taki, an underworld figure also linked to Ignatova’s escape. She remains on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list, and the agency has said they operate on the assumption Ignatova is alive.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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This turn of events became inevitable on November 5, when Trump won the election. But it’s an exceptional fuck you in light of everything that happened in the past three weeks.

To refresh: Trump’s favorite jurist, Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida, used the pending appeal as justification to bury half of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report. Her theory was that the report could not be released, even in camera, to the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committee, lest its conclusions leak and damage the integrity of the trial.

Of course, there was never going to be a trial. Judge Cannon dismissed the case last summer on the theory that special counsels are somehow illegal — a conclusion which managed to elude every other jurist who examined it, including the ones at One First Street. That dismissal was on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, which would appear to divest the trial court of jurisdiction. But lack of jurisdiction has never stopped Judge Cannon before!

The Eleventh Circuit declined to intervene to stop the special counsel from publishing Volume 1, which dealt with the election interference case, or from sharing Volume 2 with Congress. But the appeals court refused to tell Judge Cannon to knock it off, so she dutifully dove on the grenade. On the Friday before Trump’s inauguration, she held a hearing — complete with oral argument by amici, natch — before deciding that release of the report would compromise the cases of poor Nauta and De Oliveira. But that decision came after Trump was safely sworn in, at which point the prospect of anyone seeing that report was functionally nil.

Acting Attorney General James McHenry fired a dozen experienced prosecutors who worked on the special counsel investigation, writing “Given your significant role in prosecuting the President, I do not believe that the leadership of the Department can trust you to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully.” (Is the Justice Department supposed to be “implementing the President’s agenda faithfully?”) 

Ed Martin, the interim US Attorney for DC, is now investigating the January 6 prosecutors for charging so many defendants with obstructing an official proceeding under 18 USC § 1512, calling it the “great failure of our office,” and dubbing his quest “Project 1512.” Martin, a former Trump PAC official who marched on the Capitol on January 6, seems unbothered by the fact that every trial judge but one agreed with the DOJ’s interpretation of the law, and upwards of 100 defendants were convicted by juries under it.

And no one expects Pam Bondi to concern herself much with 28 CFR § 600.9 and its mandate that “The Attorney General will notify the Chairman and Ranking Minority Member of the Judiciary Committees of each House of Congress” of the special counsel’s declination decisions, along with an explanation. She’ll probably be too busy indicting Jack Smith for malicious jaywalking and cutting Trump a $100 million check in his tort suit against the DOJ for the “illegal” judicially authorized search of Mar-a-Lago.

Dismissing the appeal means the DOJ is now stuck with Judge Cannon’s fakakta precedent on special counsels. It’s a small price to pay to blow up the last vestiges of accountability for the man who tried to mount a coup to stay in power. The Trump administration can always ignore the ruling when they want to appoint a special counsel to prosecute Jack Smith — they’re certainly not averse to ignoring laws and precedents as the situation requires.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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And that’s before one factors in the unpaid bills, public humiliation, and professional ruin that came along with the role.

Back then, one of the firms that reportedly told Trump “no” was… Sullivan & Cromwell.

But now Sullivan & Cromwell will step in as Trump prepares another challenge to his conviction in the New York hush money case. What a difference eight years and a dose of obsequiousness can make.

Unlike eight years ago, this time all those big-money corporate clients got seats right behind Trump at the inauguration. The best strategy the Democrats have come up with is “Jesus take the wheel.” All those hard-charging #Resistance folks have largely settled into detached horror. Firms can read the room and see an opportunity to cozy up to the ascendent autocrat without fear of compromising their client base. The cost of open collaboration has gone down, and Sullivan & Cromwell is wasting no time cashing in.

Robert Giuffra, the firm’s co-chair, will quarterback the effort. Politico reports that James McDonald, Morgan Ratner, Jeff Wall, and Matthew Schwartz will join the effort. This marks a turning point for Trump — trading in parking garage lawyer Alina Habba for one of the most prestigious firms in the world. A real representational glow-up.

“President Donald J. Trump’s appeal is important for the rule of law, New York’s reputation as a global business, financial and legal center, as well as for the presidency and all public officials,” Giuffra said in a statement. “The misuse of the criminal law by the Manhattan DA to target President Trump sets a dangerous precedent, and we look forward to the case being dismissed on appeal.”

The legal foundation of the hush money case — weirdly bootstrapping a misdemeanor into a felony — may be bizarre, but it’s nonetheless exactly what the New York law says. Last year, I argued that it was a case of “coulda but shouldna” because it struck me as a Catch-22 that if campaign funds couldn’t legally be used to pay hush money, it seems unfair that a personal payment for this purpose could be an illegal campaign contribution. But despite my misgivings, that is how the law reads. The legislature may want to change it but as far as the “rule of law” goes, Trump violated this statute.

Looks like the legal profession’s brief flirtation with principles ended with a quiet ghosting.

Earlier: The Biglaw Firms That Said No To Trump

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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The correct answer is Donald Trump’s defense team, whose client managed to embody ALL of that criminal activity (and more!) and slide right out of it unscathed. And sucking up to lawyers with the president’s ear when it comes time to beg for a pardon is at least as useful as writing an obsequious essay in the New York Times about winning Wisconsin being basically the same as an acquittal.

Supreme Court litigator and SCOTUSblog co-founder Tom Goldstein found himself on the wrong end of a harsh criminal indictment yesterday. The allegations of high stakes gambling, $15+ million in personal debts, and paying four mistresses from the firm coffers approached “Wayne Brady on Chappelle’s Show” levels of surprising pimp turns. Josh Blackman has a piece in the Volokh Conspiracy today comparing Goldstein’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court with the timeline of the indictment and suggests that he was losing millions and then turning around and arguing twice before the Supreme Court in the course of a month all while juggling multiple relationships and, folks, this is what peak performance looks like.

Facing all these charges, the self-professed Democrat — as of his NYT essay arguing that the criminal justice system should yield to the Electoral College — ran right to Trump’s team.

View the original article to see embedded media.

Lauro and Kise, probably the only personal Trump lawyers who aren’t expected to take over the Justice Department, successfully ran out the clock on Trump’s various criminal cases. While Kise stumbled in the New York hush money case, it didn’t matter when the court sentenced Trump to the criminal justice equivalent of a divorced dad handing his kid two bottles of Jack and the keys to his car. Meanwhile, in the D.C. interference case, the Supreme Court delivered a solid for the team in rewriting the Constitution to retroactively legalize coups and in the Florida classified documents case Aileen Cannon did Aileen Cannon stuff. All in all, a pretty successful run.

Which is not necessarily a knock on their lawyering skills in a straight up litigation — it’s comically clear Kise wasn’t in full control of the New York case — but as they say, good lawyers know the law and great lawyers know someone with federal pardon power.

Making this — if the indictment is to be believed — the best bet Goldstein’s made in awhile.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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Where to even begin with this thing? It’s really like Rounders in reverse except Teddy KGB has names like “California Businessman-1” and “Law Firm-2.”

Over the course of several years, the indictment says that Goldstein racked up big winnings and bigger losses in high-stakes underground domestic and international poker matches. By the time of the alleged loan fraud, the feds say Goldstein was around $16 million in the hole and failing to disclose that. And while he didn’t report all his gambling income, a good deal of the tax problems revolve around using the firm, Goldstein & Russell, as a piggy bank to move money from firm coffers to pay personal gambling debts.

And, just for good measure, the indictment includes some extra personal and financial shenanigans:

Paying four affairs while working with your wife… gotta say this has a real “Behind The Music” feel to it and man there are some storm clouds are on the horizon here.

Also, the infamous if apocryphal Biglaw memo where a partner asked a young lawyer to write a lengthy memo of local lunch options is now officially the second most lawyerly nonsense memo ever:

View the original article to see embedded media.

You can check out my liveblog of my initial reading of the indictment here.

Across 50 pages, the indictment describes heads up games in Macau, interfirm deals to use fees to offset debts, helping an actor get a Texas billionaire to pay up, using a litigation funder to cover losses, and crossing the border with a duffel bag filled with $968,000.

And here we thought writing comical letters to porn stars threatening to sue was Goldstein’s wild side.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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After wresting three postponements from the court, including one in September because it would be “political interference” to sentence him while people were voting, Trump immediately pivoted and claimed it would be “political interference” to sentence the president-elect.

His lawyers John Sauer (the future solicitor general) and Todd Blanche (the future deputy AG) made bizarre claims of “president-elect privilege” that attaches during the transition.

Sitting-President immunity extends into the brief transition period during which the President-elect prepares to assume the Executive Power of the United States, and the courts thus lack authority to adjudicate criminal claims against him.

They demanded an immediate stay to appeal the denial of their motion to disappear the verdict because it was secured using official acts evidence. And they spent the past week racing from court to court in an effort to stop their client from facing a modicum of responsibility.

But they got out-maneuvered by Justice Juan Merchan, who made the sentencing so un-burdensome that they had functionally nothing to complain about. The promised punishment of unconditional release, along with a dispensation to appear virtually, cut the legs out from under their claim that wasting even a second of Trump’s precious time during the transition compromised national security.

Sentencing a President during his transition “creates a constitutionally intolerable risk of disruption to national security and America’s vital interests.” And if anything is to be taken from the trial court’s decision to let President Trump appear virtually and its indication that it will not incarcerate him, it is that everyone agrees there are such risks. But letting the sentencing go forward sets the precedent that those are permissible risks.

Trump filed emergency motions with the First Judicial Department and the New York Court of Appeals, before finally belly flopping onto the steps at One First Street demanding that his pals bail him out. But just this once, the answer was “no” … barely.

The application for stay presented to Justice Sotomayor and by her referred to the Court is denied for, inter alia, the following reasons. First, the alleged evidentiary violations at President-Elect Trump’s state-court trial can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal. Second, the burden that sentencing will impose on the President-Elect’s responsibilities is relatively insubstantial in light of the trial court’s stated intent to impose a sentence of “unconditional discharge” after a brief virtual hearing. Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Kavanaugh would grant the application.

(Did Justice Kavanaugh also get some personal attention from the president-elect, or was that just Alito?)

And so the once and future president whined and sighed his way through the sentencing hearing this morning, complaining that all the legal scholars at Fox know the charges were bullshit, and no one had ever been treated as badly as him. WITCH HUNT!

View the original article to see embedded media.

And then the once and future President Crimetime loped off to take comfort in all the Republican governors who trooped down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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In New York, Trump demands that his sentencing be adjourned so he can pursue an interlocutory appeal of the denial of his motion to dismiss on immunity grounds. He insists that the conviction for creating false business records to cover up a hush money payment rests on official acts evidence, and thus he is entitled to an automatic stay until 2029 (or preferably never). Alternatively, his lawyers John Sauer and Todd Blanche have invented a theory of president-elect immunity that they can just about argue with a straight face.

So far, they’re not getting any takers. Justice Merchan just rolled his eyes, after which Trump filed an filed an emergency petition with the New York’s Appellate Division, which was summarily rejected by Associate Justice Ellen Gesmer after a brief hearing on Tuesday. Trump then made a token feint in the direction of the New York Court of Appeals before racing to SCOTUS and demanding that it enjoin his sentencing, which is currently scheduled for Friday morning.

“Forcing President Trump to defend a criminal case and appear for a criminal sentencing hearing at the apex of the Presidential transition creates a constitutionally intolerable risk of disruption to national security and America’s vital interests,” vamped future Deputy AG Blanche and future solicitor general Sauer. “By contrast, the State of New York’s asserted interest in proceeding with the criminal sentencing of the President-Elect of the United States on politically motivated charges at breakneck speed at the apex of a Presidential transition should be accorded no weight.”

They blame the trial court for the last-minute filing, omitting to mention that Trump himself demanded three delays of sentencing, which was originally scheduled for July, and then waited three weeks after Justice Merchan rejected his immunity claims to assert said “automatic” stay: “Because it is highly questionable whether the New York Court of Appeals will act in the next 48 hours, filing applications in both courts appears to be the only viable option.”

Justice Sotomayor, who fields emergency requests from New York, has given District Attorney Alvin Bragg until 10 a.m. Thursday to respond. Then we’ll find out if the Supreme Court’s six conservatives want to hang Trump v. People of New York next to Trump v. US on its wall of shame before the outrages of the next four years even get underway.

Meanwhile in Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon purported to stay the release of the special counsel report, despite apparently lacking jurisdiction over the documents case. Trump’s dimwit henchmen, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, simultaneously filed in the Eleventh Circuit, where they bizarrely asserted rights under the Presidential Transition Act and the Executive Vesting Clause. This may have something to do with the fact that at least one lawyer representing them, Stan Woodward, is headed to a job in the upcoming Trump administration.

The Eleventh Circuit, which does have jurisdiction, gave the DOJ until this morning to respond. And so today the government warranted that it will not be publicly releasing Volume 2 of the Special Counsel report detailing Trump’s efforts to steal government records and hide them in his pool locker until such time as the pending case against the dimwit henchmen is resolved.

“The essential premise of defendants’ emergency motion—that, absent this Court’s intervention, ‘Attorney General Garland is certain to make [the Final Report] immediately public’ and thereby cause irreparable prejudice to defendants’ criminal proceedings (Mot. 1)—is thus mistaken,” the prosecutors write, adding that “Defendants Nauta and De Oliveira have no cognizable interest in that volume of the Final Report, however, nor any plausible theory of Article III standing that would justify their asking this Court to grant relief with respect to it.”

This highlights the absolute insanity of allowing a trial judge who dismissed the case to order the DOJ to do anything at all, much less retain jurisdiction over the Justice Department for three days after the Eleventh Circuit’s disposition of the emergency motion.

“To avoid the potential need for further emergency litigation in this Court, the United States respectfully requests that this Court make clear in denying the motion that its resolution of this question should be the last word (absent review by the en banc court or the Supreme Court),” the DOJ notes pointedly. “The United States respectfully requests that, if this Court agrees that no injunction against the Attorney General is warranted, the Court should say so in an order binding on the district court and vacate the district court’s temporary injunction.”

Nauta and De Oliveira offered to respond to the DOJ’s motion by 10 a.m. tomorrow, only to be told that they can get their homework in by 5 today. Will they be asserting henchmen-to-the-president-elect privilege?

Probably!

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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“Dangerous rhetoric is not a welcome form of argument and will have no impact on how the Court renders this or any other Decision,” Justice Merchan wrote.

Yesterday, Blanche and Bove, who are soon to be leading the Justice Department, threw up two middle fingers to the court again, describing “grave constitutional problems with this proceeding raised in our prior pleadings, including forcing a jury on the Defendant in record time and without proper process.”

Screeching about a “politically-motivated prosecution that was flawed from the very beginning, centered around the wrongful actions and false claims of a disgraced, disbarred serial liar former attorney, violated President Trump’s due process rights, and had no merit,” they added that “While it is indisputable that the fabricated charges in this meritless case should have never been brought, and at this point could not possibly justify a sentence more onerous than that, no sentence at all is appropriate based on numerous legal errors—including legal errors directly relating to Presidential immunity that President Trump will address in the forthcoming appeals.”

So much for decorum.

In today’s nastygram, Blanche and Bove demand that the court stay all proceedings under Trump v. US to allow their client to take an immediate appeal. As per usual, the pleading is a bit muddy on the facts and the law. In fact, this is not a response to last week’s ruling, in which the court refused to adjourn sentencing based on retroactive presidential immunity that extends backward into the presidential transition period — or at least, not really. Trump does demand an automatic stay to litigate the claim of “absolute sitting-President immunity from criminal process, extended to the President-elect.” But his main claim is that he’s entitled to a post-trial stay to appeal Justice Merchan’s December refusal to vacate the conviction because it rested on evidence of official presidential acts, which should have been excluded.

Blanche and Bove go to great lengths to fudge the line between being charged for official conduct and being convicted of non-official conduct based on evidence of official acts. Justice Merchan ruled that those claims were: untimely, because raised too late; incorrect, because the presumption of immunity was overcome; and irrelevant because the evidence of Trump’s guilt was overwhelming and so inclusion was harmless error.

In essence, Trump isn’t making an immunity claim, he’s making an evidentiary one. This may be a distinction without a difference — the law is whatever the Supreme Court says it is, and these days that’s a moving target. Moreover, the purpose of a pretrial stay to litigate immunity is to spare officials from the burdens of trial — which is wholly irrelevant at this juncture. But Blanche and Bove bluster their way through it, huffing that “undergoing a criminal sentencing is the most extreme example of ‘hav[ing] to answer for his conduct in court,’ — exactly what the doctrine of Presidential immunity forbids and why an automatic stay is mandated.”

A cynical person might suggest that Trump’s lawyers had gamed the system by not appealing the immunity ruling in December when it was issued, instead waiting until the last possible second to seek review in hopes of running out the clock. That person might also note the inherent tension between the claims that it violates presidential immunity to force Trump to litigate criminal appeals after he’s sworn in, and the demand that sentencing be stayed to allow him to litigate his criminal appeals.

Trump demanded a response from the court by 2pm, warning that he’ll “file an Article 78 proceeding as well as a direct appeal in the Appellate Division, First Department, seeking review of the Court’s two recent incorrect rulings on Presidential immunity” if he doesn’t get his way. As of this writing, neither Justice Merchan’s response nor any appeal has hit the public docket.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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A suspect, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, has been caught and has been charged with murder and various other crimes in both state and federal courts. He has been living with back pain even after undergoing surgery. His motive could be his personal frustration with his health insurance company. But he may have done it in the hopes that it will bring changes.

Some consider him a hero for doing what they couldn’t do. On the internet, there are alibi memes, people on social media declaring “I condemn murder but….” and then explaining or justifying his action. There is even art and merchandise depicting Mangione, although someone has been aggressively using DMCA to take them down.

Because of Mangione’s sudden popularity, some have speculated that even if the evidence points to his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, a sympathetic jury could still let him walk. This is known as jury nullification.

When this case goes to trial, both sides will probably talk about United Healthcare’s business practices and possibly the health insurance business in general, which can get very complicated.

While insurance executives and medical directors probably do not maliciously deny claims and let people die solely for profit, they have a finite amount of money and so they cannot give everyone what they want. This means they must make “trolley problem” decisions on a massive scale.

The health care industry is not perfect and unfortunately many people will not get the care they think is best. But does this broad problem justify one person killing someone else? It is possible that he could have instigated change through nonlethal means.

Whatever the prosecutor’s strategy is, they will have to minimize the chances of jury nullification or a hung jury. While people are understandably upset at health insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare for various reasons, letting a killer walk because they hate the system probably won’t bring the change they want.

Instead, it may make things worse. Good people with solid business ethics are less likely to take health insurance executive positions. Those who do will want exponentially higher pay to live in gated communities in addition to full-time security. If one company gives these perks, other insurance companies will take the same steps to protect their executives. Where will that money come from to cover those costs? Higher insurance premiums.

Finally, if the killer did what he did as a form of protest, then he must be willing to accept the consequences of his actions.

Brian Thompson’s tragic murder was committed by someone with severe personal issues. But some people see it as the only way to effect real change to a business model that cares more about profits at the expense of its customers. But now, there isn’t a perfect model of health care for the masses. If there was, then every country would follow it. Until that perfect model is found, insurance companies should be more responsive to their customers’ grievances. And those who kill should be held accountable.

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at stevenchungatl@gmail.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

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The pair are currently bumstumbling through two contempt motions in front of Judge Lewis Liman in the collection action brought by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. One involves Rudy’s failure to comply with discovery, for which the plaintiffs would like to bar him presenting evidence that he lives in Florida and is thus entitled to assert that state’s unlimited homestead exemption. (Giuliani appears to have declared himself a Florida resident in July, just before he got himself booted out of bankruptcy, allowing the plaintiffs to resume collection efforts. Convenient!)

The other issue involves Giuliani’s refusal to comply with Judge Liman’s turnover orders, despite strong signals from the court that something very unpleasant would happen if he didn’t. Rudy and his lawyers have essentially thrown up their hands in dumbfounded astonishment when instructed that they needed to deliver not just the car but the title as well. Who knew that handing over the keys to the apartment, but not the deed (which is still in joint tenancy with his ex-wife, several years after the divorce) would not get him full credit?

But Cammarata, whose practice consists largely of divorce cases, has come up with ONE WEIRD TRICK to make all that unpleasantness go away. What if nothing counts because Freeman and Moss forgot to say the magic words first?

It appears that according to the Court docket, Plaintiffs as the Court appointed receivers failed to comply with CPLR § 6402, and never filed an “Oath” with the Court as required by CPLR § 6402 before entering their duties to act as receivers. Hence, the receivership has not yet technically or legally begun. The New York Civil Practice Law and Rules applies to the Judgment being enforced herein. The Oath was required to be signed by Plaintiff Ruby Freeman and Plaintiff Wandrea’ Moss as the receivers and an oath must have been administered by any person authorized to take acknowledgment of deeds by the real property law of New York State, and then filed with the Court before the Plaintiffs undertook the duties as Receivers.

Checkmate, libs!

Or … not.

Indeed, NY CPLR § 6402 does require temporary receivers to take an oath. But there’s no requirement that such an oath be docketed with the court. In their reply, Freeman and Moss’s lawyer Michael Gottlieb, a litigation partner at Willkie Farr (along with five other lawyers), attached said oaths, signed three days after the court’s receivership order, noting that “there is no requirement that the oaths be filed—but even if there were, now that the oaths have been filed, any merit in Mr. Giuliani’s argument would be moot.”

Gottlieb et al also documented Rudy’s ongoing shenanigans regarding his sports memorabilia,

With respect to the signed Joe DiMaggio shirt, Mr. Giuliani now claims there “is no Signed Joe DiMaggio shirt that I possess” and that “the Signed Joe DiMaggio shirt was hanging in the New York Cooperative apartment at the time the apartment was turned over.” Mr. Giuliani’s claim to have suddenly lost track of the signed Joe DiMaggio jersey is not credible for multiple independent reasons. First, Mr. Giuliani’s former counsel represented to the Court at the November 7 Hearing that the signed Joe DiMaggio shirt was located at the CTS facility in Ronkonkoma. Second, the signed Joe DiMaggio shirt was not present at the New York Apartment when counsel for PlaintiffsReceivers visited on October 31, 2024, as evidenced by comparing the photo of the real estate listing of the room where the framed, signed Joe DiMaggio jersey was hanging with the one Plaintiffs’ counsel submitted from the October visit. Third, one of Mr. Giuliani’s trial witnesses and oldest friends, Monsignor Alan Placa—who Mr. Giuliani recently testified would be a credible and trustworthy witness testified under oath during his recent deposition that he had not traveled to New York in seven years but that he had personally seen the framed, signed Joe DiMaggio shirt within the last two years, and specifically “at the apartment – actually, it was here in Florida” at the Palm Beach Condo. Similarly, Mr. Giuliani’s claim that there “was no Reggie Jackson picture” is belied by his own Bankruptcy Schedule, and his former counsel’s representation to this Court that the signed Reggie Jackson was present at the CTS facility in Ronkonkoma. And even if Mr. Giuliani’s claims about either signed sports memorabilia had any indicia of credibility, he fails to describe any efforts he has made to locate them, as he must to avoid contempt.

Placa is a former priest who retired under interesting circumstances which were always going to make him a … problematic witness. In a deposition he testified variously that he: was a lawyer; understood his role as deponent; kept calendar entries of Rudy’s travel to Florida; and yet failed to produce them because “I read through [the subpoena] quickly and didn’t feel that I had anything that was responsive at all.” He also insisted that he had no idea how a LinkedIn profile showing him as senior VP at Giuliani Partners came to be, since he never drew a salary or went into the office more than a few times. Although he did admit that six FEC disclosures in the name of Alan Placa, VP at Giuliani Partners came from him.

Rudy’s deposition went similarly swimmingly. Asked why he failed to renew his drivers license, he said “I have fatwas issued against me by the Ayatollah, personally.”

He refused to disclose his email address because:

Ninety-nine percent of it contains matters that have nothing to do with this case and a lot of them are privileged. A lot of them are personal and it would seem to me that it constitutes overbroad discovery, prying into things — using this litigation for the purpose of prying into things that are frankly none of your business, that have been utilized in the past for leaking, for giving information to other people, so I don’t give my email out generally anyway. I give it out to people that I believe will use it for a proper purpose.

Cammarata instructed him not to answer, because “I believe we have a protective order with that information.” (Nope.)

Also, it does not seem to have occurred to them that discussing his testimony over lunch might waive the privilege to said conversation.

“Any discussions I had during the break with my attorney and beyond what I said, which I probably shouldn’t have said at all, is privileged,” he shouted, after admitting that he had, indeed, talked about the deposition with his lawyer. “But the answer is I will not answer questions about what I talk to my attorney about. I think I’m entitled to that privilege as an American citizen.”

TL, DR: Giuliani is an amazing witness, who will certainly have the discipline not to, say, invoke the advice of counsel defense and waive privilege about why his prior lawyers ran for the hills. Or lie on the stand. Or assert non-existent privileges in defiance of the court’s prior order. Or shout at the judge.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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Trump’s lawyers John Sauer, Todd Blanche, and Emil Bove (the future solicitor general and top two deputies at the DOJ) turned in their usual pile of incendiary gobbledygook, claiming, for example, that “President Trump himself did not attend the trial given the fact there was absolutely no physical evidence in support of Plaintiff’s claims and the only direct evidence of liability was the incredible testimony from Plaintiff who failed to provide a month or even year when this supposed event took place.”

In reality, Trump’s trial lawyer Joe Tacopina was desperate to keep him out of the courtroom, aware of his client’s effect on a jury. Indeed, in the second case, Carroll I, which was delayed thanks to Trump’s two-year quest to claim he was just doing his presidential duty when he said Carroll was too unattractive to assault, the defendant did show up in court. There the verdict was $83 million, as compared to the $5 million from the first trial.

But Trump’s claims on appeal — even the ones that didn’t blatantly distort the record — were little more than halfhearted gestures in the direction of an argument. He claimed (again) that it was error to admit testimony by Jessica Leeds, who says that he attempted to sexually assault her on an airplane, because somehow propensity evidence doesn’t count unless you’re on the ground.

“Mr. Trump’s reading is wholly inconsistent with the rationale advanced in Congress in adopting Rules 413-415, which centered on the nature of the other conduct, not the specific location in which the conduct occurred,” the three-judge panel countered.

Trump insisted that Natasha Stoynoff should not have been allowed to testify that he threw her up against the wall and kissed her, ignoring her protest and only stopping when a butler walked in, because it’s not sexual assault until you try to touch the victim’s genitals.

“That the alleged assault showed no signs of terminating until a third party interrupted it also supports the conclusion that a jury could have reasonably found that Mr. Trump intended to bring his body into contact with Ms. Stoynoff’s genitals and that he took substantial steps toward doing so,” the court scoffed.

The “Access Hollywood” tape was properly admitted because, “The jury could have reasonably concluded from those statements that, in the past, Mr. Trump had kissed women without their consent and then proceeded to touch their genitalia.” And the lack of DNA testing on the dress was appropriately excluded, “especially considering that the pretrial discovery period had closed by the time Mr. Trump offered to provide a DNA sample, and both parties had had ample time to develop DNA as an issue, yet both had failed to do so.”

In short, there was no abuse of discretion, and Trump has to pay Carroll the $5 million. Of course John, Clarence, Sam, Brett, and Neil haven’t weighed in yet, so the most important jury’s still out on whether, when you’re a star, they really just let you do it.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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A ransomware attack is a major headache for any organization, but the destructive effects are particularly calamitous for attacks waged against healthcare organizations, the report noted. These attacks force healthcare providers to take their systems offline, making it difficult to provide care and access patient data until the hackers are paid a fee or IT specialists remove the ransomware.

It’s no secret that these disastrous ransomware attacks are becoming more and more common in the healthcare sector. The report pointed out that there have been 654 individual ransomware attacks on medical organizations since 2018 — with 143 individual attacks being recorded last year alone.

 Last year’s 143 ransomware attacks resulted in more than 26.2 million patient records being exposed, the report noted.

The rate of ransomware attacks in the healthcare industry is likely to increase even more in 2025, predicted Rebecca Moody, Comparitech’s head of data research.

“With the likes of LockBit revealing its latest version [last] week and an influx in new ransomware gangs making key claims this month (e.g. Interlock claiming the attack on Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center which breached nearly 1.5 million patient records), ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations remain just as much of a threat as they have in recent years — if not more so,” Moody wrote in an emailed statement.

Comparitech’s report revealed that the average ransom amount demanded during a healthcare cyberattack is $1.18 million. But the cost of an attack goes far beyond just the ransom.

Even if an organization pays the ransom fee to decrypt its systems, it is “highly likely” the organization will still face a slew of expensive recovery costs, Moody pointed out.

“Recovery costs include those required to restore systems, the cost of specialist teams to help overcome the attack (and overtime for employees), lost revenue due to downtime, and the cost of providing identity theft protection to people impacted in a data breach,” she explained.

All healthcare providers need to have a clear plan in place in the event that their systems are impacted by a ransomware attack, Moody declared.

This includes establishing an incident response team, creating a strong communication plan, and crafting step-by-step instructions for how the threat should be managed — such as removing infected systems from the network and how to recover data — Moody stated. She also said carrying out regular backups is critical when it comes to limiting downtime from cyberattacks.

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Thankfully @alchemy2123 isn’t the only one that managed to make this astute observation; Luigi’s attorney has done the same:

Luigi Mangione’s Attorney is not messing around calls out NYC Mayor Eric Adams for trying to influence the jury pool with prejudiced statements and says his client is being treated like a spectacle whose right to a fair trial is being violated. pic.twitter.com/6lq25gnNX4

— Power to the People ☭🕊 (@ProudSocialist) December 23, 2024

This is going to be a high-profile case. Full stop. But that does not mean that the state gets to cut corners or put their thumb on the scale. And before you make an argument that there’s no real difference between Eric Adams poisoning the well by calling Luigi a terrorist who killed a man and the recent attempts to inform the public about jury nullification, just know that the people’s power to nullify is a bedrock principle in our country’s history that has the power to change how we govern ourselves. An allegedly corrupt mayor trying to swing public opinion so that his CEO friends feel safe and may even slide some money toward his re-election campaign is just a bad day for due process.

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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At first, they drew attention to the calling cards the killer left at the scene: bullet casings labeled “Deny, Defend, Depose.” They upsold their wit and whimsy by informing the public that the killer dropped a book bag filled to the brim with monopoly money in Central Park. Oh, and did I mention they did everything they could to frame him as hot? There’s was no shortage of thirst-posting about the picture of the suspect caught flirting at the hotel, but once the police arrested Luigi Mangione on suspicion that he was the killer, it only got worse:

mind you they could’ve said luigi stuns in newly released mugshot instead https://t.co/NfYLjIAlHa

— darius ★ (@dariusjrob) December 9, 2024

Not long after he was arrested, people began openly sympathizing with Luigi and his back pain — even the new CEO of UHC dropped a nothingburger damage control recognition about how healthcare needs to change. Hell, the guy is so likable that, evidence be damned, getting a guilty verdict could be a real uphill battle.

It’s called jury nullification. Tell your friends. pic.twitter.com/szxJeRujKI

— People's City Council - Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) December 19, 2024

Before getting too in the weeds of jury nullification without talking about how it works, here’s a quick breakdown. Jury nullification, coupled with voting and that little bit in the Declaration of Independence about the right to abolish tyrannical governments, goes to the very heart of the powers vested in the people to fight tyranny. Given the power that judges and prosecutors wield, how might the people stand up to the application of laws or unruly authority they consider unjust? Well, when the time comes for juries to decide the fate of the defendant, they are told by the judge if they are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crimes that they have been accused of, they must return a verdict of guilty. Thing is, that must there is all bark and no bite. Juries cannot be punished for the verdict(s) that they hand down and double jeopardy prevents the prosecution from just re-accusing the defendant until they find a jury willing to say guilty. Ipso facto, a jury cannot be punished for handing in a verdict of not guilty even if they have no reasonable doubts that the accused committed the crimes they were accused of.

One tricky bit: since the capacity to nullify is widely regarded as an unfortunate structural consequence of how jury trials work and not a proper right, you can’t just tell your fellow jurors — or even jurors sitting on other trials — that they should just ignore whatever the prosecution is doing and nullify. But what you CAN do is inform the general public about the power and see what happens.

Once people start openly discussing jury nullification as a real Hail Mary, you’d think that the cops would wise up and stop depicting this guy like some sort of icon. But that’s not how New York’s Finest work. Instead, they graduated the representation from an attractive folk hero to a dangerous superhero who threatens to save us all from healthcare woes. No seriously, dude looks like Superman:

why is this so dramatic 😭 pic.twitter.com/bprndOY8zO

— kira 👾 (@kirawontmiss) December 19, 2024

That was one big performance by the NYPD and it backfired spectacularly. Their goal was to make Luigi Mangione look like a Batman villain. Instead it made him look like a folk hero who fought back against the system that puts profits over our own lives. pic.twitter.com/qUgQALdYVU

— Power to the People ☭🕊 (@ProudSocialist) December 19, 2024

luigi stepping out with a fresh cut/shave, possible death penalty charges, and an nypd photoshoot is the craziest thing in the fucking world. are they actively trying to make him a martyr?

whether you're for or against him, they're making it SO easy for everyone to lionize him

— izack (@thatguyuptown) December 20, 2024

We’re at the point that how-tos on how to survive voir dire long enough to get to the point that you can nullify Luigi are widely being shared:

View the original article to see embedded media.

It will be hard to gather a neutral jury for this case. Right now, Luigi’s approval rating (weird to say for an alleged murderer, but alas) among young Americans is ~41%. Do you think the prosecution is going to want anybody whose family member was denied a claim by their insurance company? Anyone with a preexisting health condition? Some estimates put that at about half of Americans. Let’s be honest, do you think the prosecution wants anyone who’s recently had internet access? The public has been flooded with all sorts of UHC horror stories that would make Cruella de Vil shudder:

Hey @UHC. Completed a hysterectomy yesterday afternoon, discharged her home in the evening (saving @UHC and everyone some money). Discharge medications included 12 Vicodin. (retail cost $30). Vicodin DENIED pending prior authorization. Patient in pain all night. Way to go.

— DrByronHapner (@DrByronHapner) December 10, 2024

When you feel sorry for UHC CEO, yes sad for his kids. However, this was a letter replying to a denial for anti-nauseating meds for a CHILD with cancer. THAT is something to be upset about. pic.twitter.com/mDVFOX732W

— Titans fan in Colorado! (@nnaydolem) December 5, 2024

finding out that united healthcare coded my friend giving birth to her child as “medically unnecessary”. every single person with any meaningful decision making capacity there deserves whatever happens.

— David Forum, MKULTRA victim (@zlingerrr) December 4, 2024

Innocent until proven guilty and all that. But even then (according to 41% of young Americans):

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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If it is really the health insurer filing these notices, it wildly oversteps any legal rights the company might have, but if there’s any company willing to preemptively breach the law and dare the other side to spend their limited resources trying to protect their rights it would be a health insurer.

404 Media reports that a number of DMCA takedown requests from “United Healthcare” have hit artists depicting the newsworthy event. The publication reached out to the company to confirm that it’s behind the filings but didn’t hear back.

For those keeping score at home, the DMCA provides that a copyright owner must inform an internet entity that their intellectual property is being abused and the service provider then has an opportunity to expeditiously remove the material and avoid possible liability. That said, the DMCA only provides a shield against legal action and if the copyright claim is — to use the precise legal term — “utter bullshit,” they don’t have to comply. Unfortunately, hosts routinely err on the side of caution and remove content when there’s zero cognizable claim.

If this is someone acting on behalf of United Healthcare, what an irony to lodge a falsified claim without it getting denied.

From 404:

An entity claiming to be United Healthcare is sending bogus copyright claims to internet platforms to get Luigi Mangione fan art taken off the internet, according to the print-on-demand merch retailer TeePublic. An independent journalist was hit with a copyright takedown demand over an image of Luigi Mangione and his family she posted on Bluesky, and other DMCA takedown requests posted to an open database and viewed by 404 Media show copyright claims trying to get “Deny, Defend, Depose” and Luigi Mangione-related merch taken off the internet, though it is unclear who is filing them.

It’s a bizarre and grimly ironic turn if United Healthcare wanted to own the words “Deny, Defend, Depose.” The takedown request for that piece objects to the artist styling the “D” with elements of the United Healthcare logo… which would be the very definition of protected parody. The 404 story has images if you want to see what these all look like.

Beyond tying itself to the gunman’s catchphrase, the idea of UHC trying to own any and all fixations of the alleged shooter’s likeness would be a wild leap. An artists’ depiction of Mangione could only belong to the artist (Mangione might be able to assert some rights to his likeness — a dubious claim under the circumstances and in light of the First Amendment — but in no case would UHC have such a claim).

“What is the circumstance under which United Healthcare might come to own the copyright to a watercolor painting of the guy who assassinated their CEO?” tech rights expert and science fiction author Cory Doctorow told 404 Media in a phone call. “It’s just like, it’s hard to imagine” a lawyer thinking that, he added, saying that it’s an example of “copyfraud.”

It is illegal to file DMCA notices if you don’t own the copyright (or at least have a good faith belief that you do). The idea that UHC now owns every depiction of the guy accused of killing their employee is laughably frivolous and one hopes that its legal department understands this and these requests are coming from a third party troll impersonating the carrier.

An independent journalist posting a photo of Mangione with his family also received a DMCA request — from a lawyer claiming to represent a family member holding the copyright — even though the image was “originally posted on the campaign website of Maryland assemblymember Nino Mangione.” That site apparently deleted the image and turned around to threaten anyone using it now which is… not how fair use works. But at least this request can claim they have a “good faith” claim, though the system probably shouldn’t reward people for trying to retroactively claim rights after they try to memory-hole their internet history.

But the disturbing thread running through all these requests is how easy it’s become for copyright trolls to leverage the DMCA to intimidate providers into accepting facially invalid requests. The statute has given way to a sort of asymmetrical warfare over IP where bad faith actors can pepper sites with ownership claims and trust that their targets will back down rather than deal with the litigation risk. As 404’s coverage notes, this doesn’t bode well in a country about to inaugurate an administration openly encouraging retribution against journalists in an effort to silence criticism.

This sure looks like a company (and a local politician) trying to use copyright law as a “square peg-round hole” solution to erasing any humanizing or sympathetic depiction of Mangione. And unfortunately, everyone seems to be obeying in advance.

Copyright Abuse Is Getting Luigi Mangione Merch Removed From the Internet [404 Media]

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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But Judge Reed O’Connor is not a typical judge, so he rejected the deal because the parties agreed not to engage in discrimination when choosing the independent monitor.

The oft-reversed Republican judge has tried to strike down Obamacare (reversed), strike down other parts of Obamacare (reversed), strike down the Indian Child Welfare Act (reversed), invent a constitutional right for crybaby anti-vaxxers — and, well, you’re not going to believe this, but he got reversed. Now he’s hearing the Boeing case and settled upon the dumbest possible reason to reject the deal.

The plea agreement provides that the retention of an independent compliance monitor is a special condition of probation, meaning if Boeing fails to retain the monitor, it will violate its probation. But the plea agreement prohibits imposing as a condition of probation a requirement for Boeing to comply with the monitor’s anti-fraud recommendations. Additionally, the independent monitor is selected by and reports to the Government, not the Court. Moreover, Boeing will have the opportunity to prevent the hiring of one of the six monitor candidates chosen by the Government. And finally, the Government will select the independent monitor “in keeping with the Department’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.”

(Relevant language in bold)

Note that this agreement does not say that the DOJ will actually hire a diversity-enhancing candidate for this job or even that it will employ some sort of affirmative action policy. It’s just the standard boilerplate used by entities both public and private to say, “Hey, we’re not going to discriminate.”

By way of confirmation, one need look no further than the fact that — in living by this vague pledge — the Department of Justice includes a whole lot of white guys. Specifically, the DOJ is around 40% women and 67% white. But research is hard when you’re more interested in putting out a Townhall article than a considered legal opinion.

O’Connor notes that existing law prohibits discrimination ipso facto including these words in contract MUST signal something beyond the strictures of the law. This is not how agreements work in the real world, but let’s let him cook for a second.

Critically though, the plea agreement does not define the terms “diversity” and “inclusion.” For that, the Government directs the Court to a 2021 Executive Order to clarify the meaning of these terms. The stated purpose of this Executive Order was to “further advance equity within the Federal Government” and “cultivate a workforce that draws from the full diversity of the Nation.” The Executive Order defined “diversity” as “the practice of including the many communities, identities, races, ethnicities, backgrounds, abilities, cultures, and beliefs of the American people, including underserved communities.” Similarly, “‘inclusion’ means the recognition, appreciation, and use of the talents and skills of employees of all backgrounds.”

These quotes are taken from the general summary and definitions section of Executive Order 14035. O’Connor uses this language to give the impression that the federal government is willy-nilly stacking the workforce with women and minorities. But definitions hold little probative weight outside of their contextual usage, and the order commits the government to adhere to “merit system principles” first and foremost while vaguely promising to find strategies to increase diversity and inclusion.

It does not commit to race-based “hiring” except to the extent someone with a diverse background interviewing for the job that otherwise might not have ends up winning the position on the merits.

While the Government assures the Court that the Government will consider all possible monitors (i.e., all backgrounds, etc.) but will choose a monitor solely based on merit and talent, the Court is skeptical of this assertion.

This is just an astounding sentence. It rests on the premise that there’s a fundamental disconnect between considering women and minorities for a job and merit. It’s not the quiet part out loud, but it’s certainly the quiet part pushed to a distractingly loud whisper.

Despite the Government’s efforts to divorce the Executive Order from the plea agreement, the Court is not convinced in light of the foregoing that the Government will not choose a monitor without race-based considerations and thus will not act in a nondiscriminatory manner.

He’s not convinced that they will not. Stop for a second and consider how one proves this negative. There’s no consistent method of complying with his new standard other than making sure only straight white dudes are considered. Because if you think this opinion would be different if the DOJ showed up with a bunch of minority candidates but had just avoided ever saying “diversity” or “inclusion” out loud… you must have a lot of trouble with the wallet inspector.

And he’s not happy about Boeing’s generic diversity policies either and cites them as a compounding feature:

Accordingly, based on Boeing’s supplemental briefing and its policies, the Court is concerned Boeing will exercise its strike of one of the Government’s six chosen monitor candidates in a discriminatory manner and with racial considerations.

The purest conservative argument against affirmative action is that it impairs freedom to contract. If a private party wants to hire only white people — the Goldwater-Reagan foot soldiers argued — that may be unfortunate, but it’s their right as Americans! In fact, Judge O’Connor sees it this way when an employer discriminates against LGBTQ+ employees because employers are free “to regulate the sexual conduct of their employees… including sodomy, premarital sex, adultery, and any other kind of sexual activity that occurs outside the context of a marriage between a man and a woman.”

But in this case, the contractual artifice crumbles. Boeing, as a sophisticated private entity represented by competent counsel, cannot be trusted to enter a contract if there’s any chance that it might not hire a white guy to do this job. It’s an inescapable loop: it’s wrong to stop private companies from hiring straight white guys if that’s what they want… but also it’s wrong to allow companies the freedom to hire a women or minority if that’s what they want.

Remember, he could’ve gotten the same result by rejecting the deal as unfair to the victims and instead contrived this strained reading of diversity and inclusion. Which makes statements from the families so much more tragic:

Ike and Susan Riffel of California who lost their two sons Melvin and Bennett, reacted to the judge’s opinion: “The judge did the right thing throwing this terrible plea deal out. This plea deal was nothing more than a get out of jail free card for Boeing. This deal didn’t hold anyone accountable for the deaths of 346 people and did nothing to protect the flying public. I’m very happy with Judge O’Connor’s decision and now we can move forward with real justice for our loved ones. This is another step forward in holding the people accountable for the deaths of 346 people.”

Will the ultimate deal result in a better outcome for the victims’ families? Hard to imagine when he couldn’t be bothered to make these deficiencies a feature of this order. He seems entirely on board with the woefully insufficient award as long as the monitor isn’t a diversity hire.

Almost like he doesn’t care about the victims as much as he cares about generating a headline…

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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Trump’s not going to be imprisoned: He’ll be president for the next four years, and he’ll be an 82-year-old man at the end of his second term. That’s no recipe for prison.

Trump’s not going to be bankrupt: You were hoping that COVID-19 had undercut the value of real estate and that Trump wouldn’t be able to make his debt payments. Nope.

Elon Musk, or someone else who wants to ingratiate himself with the president, will buy Truth Social at an inflated price. Trump will invest in cryptocurrency and then cause government to support crypto. Trump will be the center of power, with rich folks itching to pay top dollar to join Trump’s country clubs and rub elbows with him.

Trump is going to be rich and famous for as long as he lives.

You lose.

I also have a sad message for most of the folks who voted for Trump: You lose.

You chose not to vote for Kamala Harris because of the war between Israel and Hamas. You lose. Did you see who Trump’s appointing to posts in the Middle East? The Palestinians ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

You voted for Trump because he said that inflation was too high. You lose. Inflation might have been too high, but Trump has no plan to reduce it. Cutting taxes and imposing tariffs is a recipe for increasing inflation, not decreasing it. If you were hoping that inflation was going down, you lose.

You voted for Trump because he was going to stop illegal immigration. A military crackdown on illegal immigrants may help achieve that goal, but the disruptions to the economy and the ferocity of the resulting protests and the deportation of law-abiding noncitizens who’d been living in your town for years were not what you expected. You lose.

You voted for Trump because he was going to reduce the size of government. You lose. Once you get past the military budget (which Trump won’t touch) and Social Security and Medicare and repayment of the national debt, there’s not much room for cutting. And you probably don’t want Trump to cut what’s left; it helps you. You’re white and male and high-school educated: You lose.

You voted for Trump because vaccines suck. You lose. The Senate may confirm a Secretary of Health and Human Services who opposes vaccines, and red state governors may choose to weaken the vaccine requirements for kids entering school. If the vaccine requirements are weakened for the 2025 school year, then by 2026 and beyond, it’s your kids who will be coming down with measles and diphtheria and all of the other diseases that we’ve conquered. You lose.

You’ll be disappointed, and you’ll be able to take out your rage in the 2028 elections. But by then, Trump will have served his two terms, and pocketed the dough, and moved on to whatever’s next.

You’ll be left holding the bag.

And only then will you be certain: You lost.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and later oversaw litigation, compliance and employment matters at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

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Hunter Biden was convicted on firearms charges in Delaware in June, related to a gun permit from 2018 on which he falsely denied being a habitual drug user. In September, he pled guilty in California to failing to pay his taxes on time between 2016 and 2019. Sentencing was pending in both cases.

In an official statement, his father noted that “the charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them” and that those opponents openly took “credit for bringing political pressure on the process” that unraveled the plea deal negotiated last summer:

From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted. Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.

The ten-year period is important, since Trump’s henchmen will soon be controlling the Justice Department, and they’ve made no secret of their intention to try to prosecute the president’s son for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In fact, the plea deal fell apart because Special Counsel David Weiss backed away from a promise that Biden would not be prosecuted for FARA if he pled to the gun and tax charges. Coincidentally, this change of heart came about roughly five minutes after Republicans in Congress complained about the “sweetheart deal.”

Sunday night, Hunter Biden docketed notice of the pardons in Delaware, where he’s charged with lying on a gun permit application, and California, where he’s charged with tax crimes.

“The President’s pardon moots Mr. Biden’s pending and yet to occur sentencing and entry of judgment in this case and requires an automatic dismissal of the Indictment with prejudice,” his lawyer Abbe Lowell wrote, adding that “this Court must dismiss the Indictment against Mr. Biden with prejudice and adjourn all future proceedings in this matter.”

But Weiss, who was appointed by Bill Barr, isn’t ready to give up the ghost just yet. In an opposition filed in California, he argued that “The defendant’s motion should be denied since there is no binding authority on this Court which requires dismissal.”

“As a matter of past-practice in this district, courts do not dismiss indictments when pardons are granted,” Weiss wrote, citing such luminaries as Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Joe Arpaio, and Ollie North. “Instead, it has been the practice of this court that once an Executive Grant of Clemency has been filed on the docket, the docket is marked closed, the disposition entry is updated to reflect the executive grant of clemency, and no further action is taken by the Court.”

And although Weiss purported not to have seen the pardon itself (which Lowell inexplicably failed to docket), he took particular umbrage at the suggestion that the prosecution was politically motivated, huffing that “The court similarly found [Biden’s] vindictive prosecution claims unmoored from any evidence or even a coherent theory as to vindictiveness.”

Judge Mark Scarsi of the Central District of California has taken no action, thus far. But in Delaware, Judge Maryellen Noreika said in a minute order that she intends to terminate the proceedings, and instructing the government to say by today if it objects to termination by dismissal. Presumably it does, although no objection has hit the docket as of this writing.

Meanwhile over at Truth Social, the guy who pardoned Vanky’s father-in-law for campaign finance violations and tax evasion and then named him ambassador to France has thoughts.

It’s gonna be a long four years.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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Leech’s process went something like this. Like certain other highly successful septuagenarian bond gurus, he lives in California. So he gets up bright and early—5 a.m. West Coast time—and places a few dozen trades in the early hours of the trading day back east.

Now, the rules at Western Asset Management, where he served a co-CIO, require fund managers to allocate those trades right away. Unless that fund manager was Ken Leech. In that case, the procedure involved Leech’s brokers sending trade confirmations to WAMCO, the trading assistant in receipt of them frantically calling Leech to find out which of his three funds the trades were going to, Leech being on a long lunch or having a swim or whatever and not responding until just around market closing time, when he would then discuss with the harried assistant which trades went where.

 By then, of course, Leech would have a pretty good idea of how the bonds he bought and sold had performed that day. And wouldn’t you know it, but the most successful of a day’s trades had a strong tendency to wind up in his flagship Macro Opportunities fund rather than in the other two. You know, the Macro Opps in which he’d boosted his owned deferred compensation stake while cutting it in the other two, the same Macro Opps fund whose fee structure generated so much more revenue for WAMCO than the other two, with half of the profit produced by that revenue going straight into Leech’s pocket.

How strong a tendency?

Statistically, the probability that these differences in first-day returns occurred by random chance is less than one in 1 trillion….

Well, that’s simply too much of a coincidence—actually about 17,000 coincidences—for WAMCO, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department to ignore. Especially since those “coincidences” seem to have started just when Macro Opps hit a rough patch, with bad bets on interest rates, Russian debt and Credit Suisse combining with outflows to drive the fund’s assets down by 80%—and Leech’s bonus by a quarter or more with it. And wouldn’t you know it, but once the Feds started looking at those coincidences, coincidentally trades with $600 million in first-day gains would up in Macro Opps, and trades with $600 million in first-day losses wound up in the other two.

Quite a series of coincidences!

Now, Leech’s lawyer says all of the stuff in the SEC lawsuit and fraud indictment is nonsense. That being said—and given the odds involved—he doesn’t actually deny that Leech sent the good trades one way and the bad ones the other way, hours after they were made, in contravention of company policy and best practices everywhere. It’s just that doing so didn’t matter.

“These unfounded allegations ignore key facts, including the fundamental differences between distinct fixed-income strategies and the irrelevance of first-day performance to managing these strategies. Mr. Leech received no benefit from the alleged misconduct,” the statement said.

Still, less than one in a trillion! If it didn’t matter, why was he (allegedly) doing it?

Leech Shunted $600 Million to Favored Portfolios, US Claims [Bloomberg via Yahoo!]
Federal Prosecutors Charge Star Bond Investor Ken Leech With Fraud [WSJ]

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“Immediate dismissal of this case is mandated by the federal Constitution, the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, and the interests of justice, in order to facilitate the orderly transition of Executive power following President Trump’s overwhelming victory in the 2024 Presidential election,” they huffed, adding that “dismissal is necessary here” because “the Constitution forbids ‘plac[ing] into the hands of a single prosecutor and grand jury the practical power to interfere with the ability of a popularly elected President to carry out his constitutional functions.’”

That quote is from an Office of Legal Counsel memo from 2000 opining that a sitting president is immune from criminal indictment or prosecution. Of course, Trump has already been indicted and convicted, and he won’t be the president again until January. But in his telling, the pendency of his appeals bars the state judge from sentencing him. Also, he’s basically president now, since he’s in the middle of the transition and has to go find another sex crimer to serve as Blanche and Bove’s boss.

Whodathunk that these guys would demand that sentencing be moved until after the election to avoid looking political, and then turn around and claim that the entire case must be dismissed because of politics!

DA Bragg objects to dismissing the case, requesting instead that it be stayed until the end of Trump’s presidency. But he knows he got outmaneuvered here by sitting on this prosecution for two damn years.

Meanwhile across the street in federal court, Trump’s lawyers are singing a different tune. There the president-elect is suing Bob Woodward and Simon and Schuster for copyright infringement over an audiobook using tapes made during his first term. He’s alleging a conspiracy to “collate and cobble together more than eight hours of ‘raw’ interviews” and demanding $50 million to make him whole. In November of 2023, Trump filed an opposition to the defendants’ motion to dismiss his second amended complaint — third time’s a charm! — after which everyone wandered off to do literally anything else. But now Trump is hot to trot.

In a letter to Judge Paul Gardephe, his counsel Robert Garson wrote yesterday that Trump is eager to pursue this case:

The Court is aware that President Trump is soon due to be inaugurated as the 47th President of these United States of America.1 The issues in this case, namely the unlicensed for-profit use of President Trump’s voice that was recorded in an unofficial interview, is both timely and ripe, for fear of further unaccounted for profit being made from the President’s voice. In addition, we trust that the Court can accommodate a discovery process that will cause minimal interference with the President’s impeding obligations.

Indeed, Trump continues to vigorously pursue civil litigation against ABC and CBS, while threatening to sue the New York Times and Penguin Random House for $10 billion. He’s got time for that, of course. And he’s got time to hawk merch from the businesses he’s not even pretending to divest from this time around.

But criminal process? That’s a threat to a democracy.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker. 

It all began when a public company hired a new Chief Marketing Officer (“Mr. CMO”). Within days of arrival, Mr. CMO launched plans to take the company’s marketing strategy in new directions. He purportedly placed company funds on deposits for different endorsements, advertisements, and a billboard in Times Square. He then manipulated those contracts with vendors (including some that had undisclosed related-party ties to himself) to redirect funds back to his personal custody and control.

These funds were used on spending sprees including multiple lavish homes, numerous romantic partners, a private plane, plastic surgery, luxury watches, jet skis, and a Mercedes SUV.

A year later, the company went through a reduction in force, and Mr. CMO found himself out of a job–perhaps not surprising since his various marketing “investments” had never actually generated much of a return on investment. Only then did the company discover alarming signs of his nefarious activities.
CRA’s forensic experts were brought in by the company’s board to investigate what had happened, assist with civil recoveries, and give comfort to management and the external auditors that they were on the right path forward to fixing the financial statements.

Mr. CMO had exploited his position with a precision that was both daring and calculated. He had created fake accounts, fabricated invoices, and manipulated payment records to reroute company funds. Each fraudulent transaction was concealed under layers of legitimate payments, a smoke screen that would take weeks to clear. This was no opportunistic theft but had all the markings of a deliberate, calculated, premeditated scheme.

To add to the intrigue, CRA’s experts employed genealogical research, discovering information stemming from a 30-year-old murder case that linked Mr. CMO to a sibling who was also involved in the fraud. Mr. CMO had legally changed his name some years earlier, which had helped to obfuscate the related party nature of some of the key transactions.

Armed with this information, the company successfully pursued civil recovery of its stolen assets, and documentation was turned over to the U.S. Attorney for criminal charges. They obtained phone call recordings in which Mr. CMO was inquiring about countries without extradition treaties with the US, trying to figure out how he and his assets could escape.

Ultimately, Mr. CMO pleaded guilty to wire fraud and contempt charges, receiving a four-year prison sentence, five years of supervised release, and an order to pay restitution.

CRA’s Forensic Services Practice was proud to deploy the roster of technical skills, sophisticated tools, investigations experience, and professional judgment to nimbly bring this assignment to a successful close.

Kristofer Swanson is vice president and practice leader of forensic services, and Patricia Peláez is principal, forensic services at Charles River Associates.

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On that day, you should consider what life choices brought you to that point. Because lawyering can be unpleasant but dealing with this case must have been unbearable!

Kevin Underhill’s Lowering the Bar has details on a California Department of Insurance investigation dubbed “Operation Bear Claw” designed to get to the bottom of a series of insurance claims involving a bear roaming a well-to-do area of Los Angeles and ripping up the inside of a Rolls Royce and a pair of Mercedes to the tune of $141,839. The insurance companies involved apparently dragged the government into the inquiry as they stared at surveillance footage and wondered… maybe that’s not a real bear?

Bear with me for a second here. The insurance claims involved three separate ursine attacks upon three different cars at the same location, all made upon different insurance companies. That seems… curious.

The government thought so too and ran the footage by a biologist who was pretty sure this was a human in a bear suit. That proved enough to get a search warrant. Which, as investigative techniques go, is more straightforward than setting up a Honey Pot. Returning to Lowering the Bar’s coverage:

That (plus the biologist) was enough to get a search warrant, and if you assumed these suspects would have disposed of the bear costume after using it to commit three crimes rather than keeping it at home, you must be new here:

Four people have been arrested. I guess, in light of this costume, they lacked any pawsible deniability.

Insurer Thinks Bear Shown in Video Trashing Car Looks a Lot Like a Guy in a Bear Suit [Lowering the Bar]

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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In recent statements, Andreessen has threatened criminal charges against advertisers choosing not to associate with certain platforms and accused an imaginary “government-university-company censorship apparatus” of violating free speech rights. These authoritarian demands completely contradict the free market and free speech principles Andreessen claims to champion in his “techno-optimist manifesto.”

As a board member of Meta with inside knowledge of content moderation practices, Andreessen should know better. His descent into promoting baseless conspiracy theories and attacking the very rights he purports to defend is deeply troubling.

Over the last few years, Andreessen’s views on innovation have taken him down a path that often seems detached from reality. It started with him claiming that Elon Musk is “pro free speech,” when it was blatantly obvious that he was not even remotely supportive of free speech.

Things got worse last year when Andreessen published his bizarre “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which had plenty of good, but non-controversial, ideas in it, and then a few that made no sense, including claiming that “trust & safety” was an “enemy of progress.” I wrote a long response to it as my final post of last year, noting that avoiding breaking shit that doesn’t need to be broken (the role of “trust & safety”) isn’t holding back progress, it’s making sure that innovation and progress proceeds in a way that more people are willing to adopt rather than freak out about.

Earlier this year, Andreessen made a big bet on Donald Trump for President, and now he’s won that bet. He claimed he only supported Trump because he believed Trump was better for what he calls his “Little Tech Agenda.” Historically, I would have expected him not to leap to the gloating stage so quickly, but I was wrong. He’s spent a few days basically showing that his supposed “Little Tech Agenda” gets tossed out the window when he gets near the hands of power, to the point that he is looking to weaponize the criminal justice system to punish his perceived critics.

Andreessen seems to ignore that his plan to punish people completely obliterates what he claimed he believed in his “tech optimist manifesto.” So let’s go through a bit of it. In the manifesto, he writes:

We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit from the exchange or it doesn’t happen. Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand. Prices encode information about supply and demand. Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down.

I agree with that sentiment. But Andreessen’s recent actions contradict it. On ExTwitter, Andreessen wrote:

That’s him tweeting:

The orchestrated advertiser boycott against X and popular podcasts must end immediately. Conspiracy in restraint of trade is a prosecutable crime.

He’s wrong. To an extraordinary degree. Conspiracy in restraint of trade applies to collusive behavior to harm competitors. In 1982, the Supreme Court made clear that boycotts are a form of expression, protected by the First Amendment. The only exceptions are if those boycotts were done for “illegal aims.” And “sorry, we don’t want to advertise on your site” is not an “illegal aim.”

It’s especially galling since choosing not to advertise is clearly part of both the free market and the free speech right not to associate. The only cases where boycotts may be illegal is if they are in pursuit of something illegal, such as for antitrust purposes, like when Toys R Us used its (then!) dominant position to block toy makers from selling to Costco. But advertisers deciding “we don’t want our ads showing up on Elon Musk’s Hellsite” are making a business decision.

You know, like what free markets enable? Willing buyer. Willing seller. Except here, some of the buyers aren’t willing. And Marc is claiming that’s criminal.

His misunderstanding of free speech continued.

That’s him saying:

Everyone involved in the longstanding illegal joint government-university-company censorship apparatus should take care to preserve their files and communications. Sunlight is coming.

First of all, you don’t issue litigation holds by tweet. That’s not how any of that works. Second, there is no “joint government-university-company censorship apparatus.” That’s literally not a thing that exists. We’ve talked about this quite a bit here at Techdirt, and even the Supreme Court just recently pointed out (in a ruling written by Amy Coney Barrett) that there appears to be no evidence of such a thing existing (other than a bunch of made up nonsense by a bunch of grifters).

There were a bunch of university researchers studying the flow of disinformation, mostly around voter intimidation and the like. One government agency, CISA, did team up with some of those researchers to act as a clearing house for connecting election officials who might see potentially problematic voter information, such as false information about where, how, or when to vote. Through this effort sometimes that information would be flagged to companies to review against their own policies.

This was nothing controversial or problematic. Every company has their own policies on what they allow. Most companies don’t want to enable election interference, so they say “hey, maybe we shouldn’t allow information that tells people to vote on the wrong day, because maybe that violates our rules.”

As we’ve explained multiple times, even as these researchers flagged some content for the companies to review, the companies quite frequently did nothing in response and there were no threats or legal consequences as a result. Flagging is something anyone can do (still, to this day, if you find something that you think violates the rules on any social media platform, you can flag it, just like these researchers did).

Again, Stanford’s report on what happened stated that the social media companies kept up nearly every reported URL, and in the small number of cases when they took action, they mostly focused on adding more speech (which is a very “marketplace of ideas” concept) such as pointing out that mail-in ballots are, in fact, pretty damn safe and secure.

We find, overall, that platforms took action on 35% of URLs that we reported to them. 21% of URLs were labeled, 13% were removed, and 1% were soft blocked. No action was taken on 65%. TikTok had the highest action rate: actioning (in their case, their only action was removing) 64% of URLs that the EIP reported to their team.)

I need to repeat this because it seems to keep getting lost every time I write about this. Anyone can report things to social media companies. It’s the “report” button you see all over the place. These academic researchers did report stuff to the companies, and only 13% of that content was removed. And even that’s distorted, because TikTok removed 64% of URLs reported because TikTok doesn’t care. So, the reality is that the other companies (mainly Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) removed less than 10% of what was flagged by folks. Some of them they “labeled” which is just “more speech” in the marketplace of ideas. And the rest they left alone.

And even if you claim that the 13% of removed links is too much, the details suggest you’re wrong about that as well. The report showed that the largest % of content that was removed after researchers reported it was related to phishing scams. In other words, people posted election-related content that was made to trick people into giving up their personal info, and it was reported to the companies and they removed it to protect users.

This is not a censorship scandal. This isn’t a “joint government-university-company censorship apparatus.” This is “local election officials were scared about scams and election interference, and wanted to be able to report it to companies to review, and some academics who were studying disinformation helped.”

Sounds a lot less problematic that way, right?

And here’s the thing: Marc Andreessen knows all this.

Because Marc Andreessen, who claims he does everything in support of his “Little Tech Agenda,” is on the board of Meta, one of the biggest “Big Tech” companies there is. And, over the last few days, I’ve spoken to way too many current and former executives at Meta (many of whom are frustrated), who all made it clear to me that in Marc’s role on the board he has been directly briefed on what is happening regarding disinfo/trust & safety efforts and why it’s not nefarious.

I don’t know if Marc ignored those briefings.

I don’t know if he forgot those briefings.

I don’t know if he doesn’t care that he’s misrepresenting reality.

But I do know that Meta execs are not particularly thrilled that he’s now spreading a nonsense conspiracy theory suggesting that the very company he is on the board of is somehow engaged in First Amendment violating state action, a thing that every court that has looked at this issue fully has rejected completely.

Because this is not a thing:

That’s Andreessen claiming that “every participant in the orchestrated government-university-nonprofit-company censorship machine of the last decade can be charged criminally under one or both of these federal laws.” The “federal laws” he’s talking about are 18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242: “Conspiracy against rights” and “Deprivation of rights.”

These are both laughable claims.

Your “rights” do not grant you the freedom to use someone else’s private property for your own purpose. Again, you would think that Mr. “we believe in free markets” and “willing buyer meets willing seller” and “I’m on the board of Meta” would at some point realize that part of the free market where willing buyer meets willing seller is that private property rights matter. If the private property owner doesn’t want you on their property, they can get you to leave.

Even if we’re just looking at this through the free speech lens, the right of free speech has to include the right of association, and that includes the right not to associate.

Marc must believe that too, because I’m pretty sure that if I showed up at one of Marc’s many mansions and started screaming on his lawn, he would have me forcibly removed. That would be his right as a private property owner. Is that “depriving me of my free speech rights”? Of course not, because Marc has no obligation to allow me to speak on his property.

The same is true of Meta, on whose board Marc sits. It has no obligation to enable anyone’s speech. Their property. Their rules. And yes, it’s true that the government can’t forcibly remove speech, but there’s no evidence that happened. Instead, you had some academics and non-profits who used their own free speech rights (which Marc seems to think don’t exist) to share their thoughts with the companies, sometimes highlighting content they thought broke the company’s rules, or sometimes advocating for different rules. Which is their free speech.

The only way speech “rights” can be deprived is via state action, which has to involve the government. And yes, Marc wants to keep arguing that the government is involved in this “government-university-nonprofit-company censorship machine” but as the Supreme Court noted just a few months ago, what is happening does not, in any way, appear to be state action to deprive people of their rights.

At worst, government actors were trying to persuade private actors to act differently, which is allowed. The problem only comes in when the government tries to force action through threats and coercion. Yet no one has turned up any evidence of that.

Unlike Marc, the Supreme Court appears to be adept at differentiating between cases involving potential government coercion. In the Murthy case, the majority opinion authored by Justice Barrett found no evidence of coercion against social media companies. And the plaintiffs in that case tried every angle they could and threw a ton of ideas against the wall. Conversely, in the Vullo case, heard on the same day, the Court unanimously agreed that a New York official’s demand for insurance companies to deny coverage to the NRA constituted coercion and violated the First Amendment.

In short, the Supreme Court knows when the government is depriving people of their free speech rights and didn’t see that (at all) in how social media companies do content moderation.

Again, I know that plenty of internet randos and highly motivated partisans have been misrepresenting this reality for a few years now. And it’s pointless to respond to them.

But, of all the people in the world, Marc Andreessen should know what’s actually going on. Multiple Meta execs told me that he’s been told about it. Yet he’s making a mockery of his own “manifesto” by supporting the literal criminalization of being a “non-willing buyer” in a marketplace where he has a stake. He undermines his own claims of supporting free speech by suggesting it’s criminal for private property owners to decide whose speech to associate with. He’s further contradicting his free speech stance by threatening criminal action against academics and non-profits who use their free speech to criticize companies where Marc Andreessen is either an equity holder (ExTwitter) or a board member (Meta).

And that’s not “techno optimism.” It’s certainly not a “little tech agenda.” If you can force companies to do the bidding of the biggest tech companies out there, while simultaneously creating criminal charges for merely saying “hey, does this violate your rules?” you’re creating a world in which startups will be loathe to do business, out of fear of what arbitrary nonsense the Marc Andreessen/Elon Musk/Donald Trumps of the world will impose on them.

At Techdirt, we frequently call out hypocrisy and inconsistencies from public figures. In many cases, these stem from ignorance or misunderstanding of the complex issues around technology and policy. What’s so troubling here is that Marc is not ignorant of what has happened. He has had these things explained to him. Yet he is misrepresenting them to a very large audience, riling them up to believe things that are simply not true. This goes beyond mere inconsistency — it’s a direct distortion of reality from someone who should, and likely does, know better.

The end result may be that he gets to punish his perceived enemies if the Trump administration is willing to take such marching orders, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is misrepresenting reality. In doing so, he’s not just violating his own stated principles, but undermining public understanding of critical issues around free speech and platform responsibility. For someone who claims to be a “techno-optimist,” that’s a deeply pessimistic and damaging approach.

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AT THE VERY SAME TIME, HE IS REFUSING TO PARTICIPATE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION PROCESS BECAUSE IT WOULD REQUIRE HIM TO SIGN AN ETHICS PLEDGE TO AVOID CONFLICTS OF INTEREST ONCE IN OFFICE.

It’s … a lot.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan was scheduled to rule yesterday on Trump’s motion to set aside his conviction based on the presidential immunity decision in Trump v. US. The Supreme Court majority, in their infinite wisdom, ruled that evidence of official acts can’t be used to convict a president of crimes, even if those crimes have nothing to do with his office. Trump’s conviction was secured in part thanks to testimony from former White House aides Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout, so Trump demanded that the verdict be vacated. Trump’s own lawyers demanded that any ruling, along with Trump’s sentencing, be postponed until after the election to avoid the appearance of political interference.

But Justice Merchan did not issue that ruling. Instead he acceded to a joint request by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove to — once again! — stay all deadlines for a week to allow the DA to apprise the court of “appropriate steps going forward.”

In the attached correspondence, ADA Matthew Colangelo cited the “unprecedented circumstances” which “require careful consideration to ensure that any further steps in this proceeding appropriately balance the competing interests of (1) a jury verdict of guilt following trial that has the presumption of regularity; and (2) the Office of the President.”

Of course, Donald Trump is not the president, and requiring him to sit in a courtroom for an hour will make no difference to the presidential transition. Nevertheless, Blanche and Bove insist that “The stay, and dismissal, are necessary to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern.”

In support of this, they cite to the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, specifically this note:

The Congress declares it to be the purpose of this Act to promote the orderly transfer of the executive power in connection with the expiration of the term of office of a President and the inauguration of a new President. The national interest requires that such transitions in the office of President be accomplished so as to assure continuity in the faithful execution of the laws and in the conduct of the affairs of the Federal Government, both domestic and foreign. Any disruption occasioned by the transfer of the executive power could produce results detrimental to the safety and well-being of the United States and its people. Accordingly, it is the intent of the Congress that appropriate actions be authorized and taken to avoid or minimize any disruption. In addition to the specific provisions contained in this Act directed toward that purpose, it is the intent of the Congress that all officers of the Government so conduct the affairs of the Government for which they exercise responsibility and authority as (1) to be mindful of problems occasioned by transitions in the office of President, (2) to take appropriate lawful steps to avoid or minimize disruptions that might be occasioned by the transfer of the executive power, and (3) otherwise to promote orderly transitions in the office of President.

In 2020, Trump doggedly obstructed the presidential transition, refusing to allow the GSA Administrator Emily Murphy to sign the certificate of ascertainment which would allocate office space, brief the incoming administration, or release statutorily allocated funds to the incoming Biden administration. When Murphy finally did sign it, she insisted that she’d received no direction from the White House to delay her determination and whined that she “did, however, receive threats online, by phone, and by mail directed at my safety, my family, my staff, and even my pets in an effort to coerce me into making this determination prematurely.”

Trump’s absolute refusal to participate in the presidential transition last time forced Congress to modify the Electoral Count Act to remove the GSA Administrator’s ability to unilaterally hold up the transition process. And yet, just four years later, he is so deeply committed to ensuring a smooth transition that he can’t spare an hour for the orderly administration of justice on a day specifically requested by his own counsel just three months ago.

Sometimes cheaters win.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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No, what especially jumped out at us in the case of the United States v. Justin Murphy is this:

Murphy has also been accused of providing investors with account statements that falsely represented their account balances as well as federal tax forms that falsely reported business income for which the investors would need to pay taxes.

(Allegedly) ripping your investors off both in the usual way and also by making them pay taxes on returns that didn’t exist? Pure perfidious poetry. Not that Murphy is owning up to any of the offenses laid at his feet, although it must be said he wasn’t particularly eager to answer them in court.

He was extradited from Brazil where he had been detained since December…. A federal grand jury in New Haven had returned the indictment in 2022….

Stamford man bilked $3.5 million from clients of his Greenwich hedge fund, documents show [Greenwich Time]
CT investor apprehended in Brazil pleads not guilty to stealing $3.5M in hedge fund scheme [Hartford Courant via Yahoo!]

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That’s no small feat, given the difficulties China-based hedge funds have faced this year both in the markets and at the hands of Xi Jinping’s increasingly aggressive financial services regulators. And U.S. federal prosecutors think they might know how Pinestone has managed it.

According to the indictment, [Xiao] Zhang allegedly utilized a virtual private network in 2021 to access his employer’s network from China, which “enabled him to circumvent the company’s controls.” He then allegedly made copies of his employer’s code, projects and research, before using the items “with the intent of establishing his own investment firm” in China…. Zhang worked in the research department of Boston-based Arrowstreet Capital from July 2015 to August 2021….

Of course, unless Xi has a sudden change of heart about Chinese theft of American intellectual property, it seems Zhang has little to worry about.

The US doesn’t have an extradition treaty with China.

Chinese Hedge Fund Manager Indicted by US in Trade Secrets Case [Bloomberg via Yahoo!]

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