A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. has indicted a criminal defense attorney and two investigators for what they say was an attempt to steer charges away from their client by tampering with witnesses and a juror.
Attorney Charles F. Daum, and investigators Daaiya Pasha and Iman Pasha were charged with corruptly trying to influence a juror. Daum also faces charges of tampering with a witness and two counts of inducing perjury.
The charges stem from Daum’s representation of Delante White, who was indicted on drug trafficking charges by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. The indictment states that the three developed a plan to show that drugs seized at the home of White’s grandmother in March 2008 did not belong to him. It states that Daum and the investigators made arrangements to take staged photos of White’s brother, using duplicates of some of the items seized, including what appeared to be rock cocaine. Daum submitted those photos during White’s trial, in an attempt to convince the jury that the items belonged to White’s brother.
Daum also is charged with attempting to prevent a government witness from appearing during the trial and with presenting the perjured testimony of two witnesses.
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A lawyer caught up in the Raj Rajaratnam investigation stood in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday and admitted to a “horrible mistake” in relaying confidential information about corporate acquisitions to a trader in exchange for — what else?– money. Unfortunately for the lawyer, Jason Goldfarb, what he did wasn’t just a mistake. It was a crime.
“I can assure you my life of crime is over, your honor” Goldfarb told U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan of the Southern District of New York shortly before pleading guilty to one count each of securities fraud and conspiracy, according to an account by Ashby Jones of The Wall Street Journal.
Alas, his law career might be over too. Goldfarb, 32, pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy and securities fraud, crimes that could send him to prison for up to 25 years, although prosecutors and the defense agreed to recommend a sentence of between three and four years.
Goldfarb had been scheduled to go on trial next month. Instead, he became the 20th defendant in the Rajaratnam-related cases to plead guilty.
The Sidney Hillman Foundation has recognized USA Today for “Exemplary Reporting that Fosters Social and Economic Justice,” for a series of stories on misconduct by federal prosecutors.
The series, entitled “Justice in the Balance” and written by Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy, examined 201 criminal cases across the country. In all of these cases, federal judges had found that prosecutors had in some way broken the rules.
In many instances the result was that the guilty went free and the innocent were sent to prison, the newspaper reported.
Attorney General Eric Holder pushed back against the newspaper’s findings, saying in December that the “overwhelming majority” of Justice Department prosecutors handle their cases properly.
The Sidney Hillman Foundation was created in 1950 to award to “journalists, writers and public figures whose work fosters social and economic justice.”
The U.S. Attorney’s office in Arizona has subpoenaed a report on the investigation into possible misconduct involving three top commanders in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, which is headed by the controversial Joe Arpaio, The Arizona Republic reported.
The sheriff’s department has until May 4 to provide the report, which was prepared by Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu and has not been made public. The sheriff’s department has not decided how it will respond to the subpoena, the newspaper reported.
A federal grand jury has been meeting since December 2009 and is examining allegations that Arpaio and officers from his department have abused their power. The newspaper said the U.S. Attorney’s office declined comment about the subpoena.
The investigation of Arpaio’s advisors began in September after a high-ranking officer in the department wrote a memo alleging mismanagement, favoritism, systematic abuse of government policies and potential criminal conduct.
If nothing else, the case of Winchester, Va., attorney Paul Hampton Thomson should dispel any notion that the practice of law in a small town is placid and without many surprises.
Try to follow: Thomson, a former commonwealth’s attorney for Winchester (population about 27,000), is accused of buying cocaine from clients and then illegally trying to cover his actions. Now, his lawyer is accusing the chief judge for the Western District of Virginia, James P. Jones, of being in cahoots with prosecutors.
Thomson’s lawyer, John P. Flannery II, who is representing the 56-year-old Thomson in U.S. District Court, sent a letter to Jones on Tuesday asking for information from what Flannery alleges were secret meetings between the judge and prosecutors, according to a report by Sally Voth on Northern Virginia Daily.Com.
Flannery’s letter says the secret meetings were “apparently to advance an ongoing post-indictment grand jury investigation,” according to Voth’s account.
Thomson’s client, Oscar Alberto Salvatierra-Jovel, of Winchester, is accused of selling cocaine on numerous occasions to Thomson through his legal assistant, Nannette Susan Boden, also of Winchester, Voth reported. Boden pleaded guilty last month to distribution of cocaine and conspiracy to tamper with evidence and is cooperating with the prosecutors, who have denied Flannery’s accusations of impropriety.
House Democrats are raising cost, transparency and ethical questions about the Republican leadership’s hiring of an outside attorney to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.
In her latest letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) lists a series of questions about the hiring of the hiring of the law firm of King & Spalding for the defense of the law that restricts the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. George W. Bush Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, a King & Spalding partner in D.C., will lead the defense.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced in February that the Justice Department would no longer defend the 1996 law, drawing ire from Republicans, who then decided to hire a firm themselves
In her latest letter to Boehner, Pelosi asks whether bids were solicited for attorneys and why Democrats on the House Administration Committee were not consulted about the contract. She also asks Boehner how the attorney fee–$520 an hour– was established and whether the House Ethics Committee was consulted about the hiring. Finally, she asks whether the law firm has agreed to restrict lobbying efforts on behalf of clients to ensure that “no conflicts of interest arise on behalf of its extensive list of corporate clients while that firm is employed by the House.”
Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said, “The minority leader’s new-found concern for saving taxpayers money is encouraging. We hope it means we can count on her support for reducing DOJ’s budget to recoup any costs incurred by the House so that taxpayers will bear no added cost for the administration’s refusal to defend the laws of the United States.”
Clement on Monday filed paperwork in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to intervene in a DOMA case on behalf of the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the House. The advisory organization voted along party lines to defend the act.
From whistle blower allegations, government inquiries and subpoenas to corporate due diligence, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) violations and financial fraud – corporate counsel must increasingly collect and produce greater amounts of data from around the globe.
At 1 p.m., Thursday May 5, Main Justice and FTI Consulting will team up to host a complimentary webinar entitled, “Resolving the Inherent Conflicts Between U.S. Investigations & European Data Privacy Law.”
Veeral Gosalia, a senior managing director in the Electronic Evidence Consulting group of FTI’s Technology practice, sat down with Main Justice’s editor-in-chief Mary Jacoby to preview what will be discussed during the webinar.
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For those that are interested in the free webinar, all they must do is click here to sign up and register.
The event will last an hour and will have an interactive question and answer session at the end. It will be moderated by Jacoby and the panelists includes Gosalia as well as:
- Craig Earnshaw, Managing Director, FTI Technology – London
- Joe Looby, Senior Managing Director, FTI Technology – New York
- William Long, Counsel, Sidley & Austin – London
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Monica Conyers must complete her 37-month prison sentence in prison , The Detroit Free Press reported.
U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn denied Conyers’ request, writing, ” As pointed out by the government in its response, the Court lacks jurisdiction to modify defendant’s sentence,” the newspaper reported.
Conyers, the wife of Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, pleaded guilty to accepting bribes in 2009 and was sentenced to 37-months, to be served starting in September of 2010 at Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia.
Recently she claimed that her sentence was unfair and the judge did not take into account her “age, education, vocational skill, employment record, family ties and responsibilities.”
In the meantime, she will continue to serve out her sentence at the prison which is known as ‘Camp Cupcake’ by the locals due to its comfort and settings.
Closing arguments are under way in the trial of Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire co-founder of the Galleon Group LLC hedge fund,who will be lucky indeed to stay out of prison, in the opinion of some former prosecutors.
As Main Justice noted a few days ago, some observers thought the defense team made a tactical mistake in the handling of Richard Schutte, a former president of Galleon Group who went out on his own to start a hedge fund — and received more than $25 million in investments from Rajaratnam.
That little detail was not disclosed by the defense on direct examination. Rather, it was left as a juicy morsel for prosecutors to pounce on in cross-examination. So, was that a tactical error by the defense?
It was worse than that, Richard L. Scheff, a former prosecutor and chairman of the Philadelphia-based law firm Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads, opined to The New York Times Dealbook people.
“Astounding” is what Scheff called the defense move, or non-move, that let the prosecution bring out the fact of Rajaratnam’s investment in Schutte’s fund. Scheff was a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for several years.
The Times said its poll of former prosecutors (if “poll” is not too formal a word) was that the government had made a very strong case against Rajaratnam over the six-week trial in the Southern District of New York. In closing arguments, prosecutor Reed Brodsky replayed excerpts of phone taps that he said were “overwhelming” evidence of guilt.
“You heard the defendant committing his crimes time and time again in his own words,” Brodsky told the jury, according to several news accounts. The government has used the taps and the testimony from a long string of witnesses who pleaded guilty in the hope of leniency to build its case.
A question that has never really been answered is why Rajaratnam, a billionaire, put himself at risk in the first place to make what the government says was a mere $63.8 million by using “tomorrow’s news today,” in Brodsky’s words.
Various accounts have described Rajaratnam, 53, as sitting calmly during the events that are surely costing him many millions in legal fees and could send him to prison for a couple of decades. Perhaps his lawyers told him to be careful how he acts in front of jurors whose collective wealth amounts to a tiny fraction of Rajaratnam’s.
The U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, Preet Bharara, has appeared frequently in the courtroom and listened to Brodsky wrap up the government’s case before Judge Richard J. Holwell. Bharara has been very public about his intention to go after insider trading, which he has called “rampant” on Wall Street.
But what is “insider trading,” exactly? Defense lawyers, led by John Dowd, have insisted over and over that Rajaratnam got rich not by using secret data but by shrewdly and tirelessly assembling a “mosaic” of information that was already out there, one way or another.
Dowd must try to deflate the impression of all those tape-recorded phone conversations and seemingly incriminating accounts from people who have pleaded guilty. He doesn’t have to prove his client “innocent.” All he has to do is convince the jurors that the prosecution didn’t prove him guilty.
A second Galleon-related trial with five defendants is scheduled to begin on May 16 before a different federal judge in the SDNY. The case of one defendant, Craig Drimal, a former Galleon trader, has already been embarrassing for the government, even though the trial hasn’t begun.
U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan rejected a pretrial request by a lawyer for Drimal to toss out evidence gathered from more than 1,000 intercepted calls on the grounds that the government abused the permission it received to eavesdrop on Drimal’s calls.
But the judge said he was disturbed by monitoring of several of phone calls involving Drimal, including a 52-second message from his wife in which she discussed, “in detail, intimate aspects of their relationship” and another four minutes in which Drimal and his wife had a “deeply personal and intimate discussion about their marriage,” according to a Reuters account.
The judge also cited calls involving conversations about the Drimals’ children, home renovation projects and one in which the last 49 seconds of the call make clear it was a marital spat, Reuters said.
“Sullivan said the agent who monitored the calls at a pretrial hearing provided no credible explanation for his failure to stop listening to the conversations once it became clear that the calls were privileged and not pertinent to the investigation,” Reuters reported. “Investigators are supposed to hang up if a call is not pertinent to their probe.”
Reuters said the judge declared himself “deeply troubled by this unnecessary and apparently voyeuristic intrusion into the Drimals’ private life.”
All that raises this question: Who should be more embarrassed, the Drimals or the government?
