A Blog About Current Issues in White Collar Defense

Federal prosecutors recently responded to an appeal filed by former U.S. Representative Rick Renzi before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which seeks a dismissal of Renzi’s February 2008 extortion indictment. The indictment stems from a government land-swap deal that prosecutors say illegally benefited Renzi’s former business partner. Prosecutors claim that Renzi,… Read More

Late last month, we noted a highly unusual decision by U.S. Magistrate Judge Alan Kay in the District of Columbia to order the Federal Trade Commission to respond to interrogatories about a subpoena it had issued to Paul Bisaro, the CEO of Watson Pharmaceuticals, in a generic-drug investigation. Normally, that sort of inquiry into the… Read More

In the wake of the conviction in federal court in Chicago of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on one criminal count of lying to the FBI and the mistrial on 23 others, mostly involving political corruption, the question of the complexity of many white-collar crime cases has been widely discussed. In one newspaper account, a… Read More

Conservative columnist Michelle Minton just wrote an interesting op-ed piece for Forbes.com on why Republicans, and by extension, conservatives in general, should favor legalized Internet gambling. Minton’s arguments come in the wake of the recent passage by the House Financial Services Committee of a bill that would legalize Internet gambling, including online poker, in the… Read More

Federal prosecutors often take very seriously the prohibitions on illegal lobbying and on withholding the truth from the FBI. That’s one of the lessons that former U.S. Rep. Mark Siljander probably learned last month when he pleaded guilty to two federal charges relating to his alleged ties to an Islamic charity claimed to have funded… Read More

The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles just took an interesting and nuanced position concerning a very high-profile request for community service as part of a guilty plea. Disgraced plaintiffs attorney William Lerach pleaded guilty in 2007 to a charge of conspiring to obstruct justice and make false statements in many of his law firm’s… Read More

We wrote recently that the very recent Supreme Court decision in United States v. Skilling, limiting the reach of the federal “honest services” statute, may have an immediate impact on the ongoing case against Kevin A. Ring, a former associate of Jack Abramoff. See “Skilling Having Impact on Pending Honest Services Fraud Cases,” July 28,… Read More

The Senate Judiciary Committee recently held confirmation hearings for Jim Cole, a partner at Bryan Cave and well known D.C. white-collar defense lawyer, who is President Obama’s nominee for deputy attorney general. During the confirmation hearings, an interesting back-and-forth occurred between Cole and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) regarding the use of deferred prosecution agreements. Sen…. Read More

The D.C. Circuit recently handed a significant victory to anyone with assets in the U.S. – especially anyone under investigation in another country for violation of that country’s laws. As reported on the Blog of Legal Times, the D.C. Circuit issued a decision on July 16 holding that the Department of Justice could not seize… Read More