By: Sara Kropf Many of my white-collar clients are startled to learn how long a government investigation and criminal trial take. They think it will last a year, maybe 14 months. Instead, it can take years. Delay can work to my clients’ advantage, allowing us time to...
By: Sara Kropf Regular readers of this blog know that I resent when the government forces private industry to do the government’s job. Internal investigations are a good example. Companies spend millions conducting them into possible wrongdoing—hoping for leniency—and...
By: Sara Kropf Venue seems like one of those boring topics we learned in law school that doesn't have much practical application. But in a recent case out of the Fourth Circuit, a defendant won the dismissal of a charge based on lack of venue. Maybe you should have...
By: Sara Kropf Perhaps the most troubling type of criminal forfeiture is the pretrial restraint of untainted assets. The Department of Justice will seize assets, before proving a single allegation of wrongdoing, even where those assets are not linked to the...
By: Sara Kropf Having a business partner can be a wonderful advantage. But it can also be dangerous if your business partner turns out to be unethical. Karen Olson, a former Alaska executive director of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service...
By: Sara Kropf There has been a lot of talk in the media recently about obstruction of justice. Obstruction of justice is a fascinating topic, to be sure. But whether the President of the United States obstructed justice when he fired the Director of the FBI is not...
By: Sara Kropf Former FBI Director James Comey apparently wrote a memo summarizing his meeting with President Trump. The memo purportedly recounts the president’s statement saying he "hoped" that Comey would drop the investigation into the ties between his campaign...
By: Sara Kropf The Treasury Department and former MoneyGram Chief Compliance Officer Thomas Haider have settled their civil claims. This was the first-ever case against a compliance officer for failing to implement an appropriate anti-money laundering (AML) program at...
By: Sara Kropf The Department of Justice is always busy prosecuting fraud related to government contracts. The two obvious reasons why this is a DOJ priority are (1) a lot of public money is spent through government contracts, and (2) the size and complexity of the...
By: Sara Kropf Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit—love him or hate him—just wrote a(nother) scathing opinion. He remanded a criminal restitution order, concluding that Bank of America was not entitled to any restitution for fraudulent mortgage loans because...