By Sara Kropf According to media reports this week, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office “has convened the grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict former president Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself, should...
By Sara Kropf Too many prosecutors think the solution to our broken criminal justice system is more punishment. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the recent article by a 27-year veteran of the Department of Justice in The Atlantic. Paul Pelletier’s big-picture...
By Sara Kropf I was sitting in a proffer a few days ago when they were asking my client about emails sent a few years ago. It occurred to me that prosecutors have a truly peculiar view of email. That's not a big deal until you realize that they use their oddball...
By Andrea L. Moseley In today's installment, I am breaking out a scaled-down preview of our firm's Pandemic Fraud Tracker for Federal Cases in Virginia. Virginia is divided into the Eastern (EDVA) and Western (WDVA) Districts. This chart includes prosecutions that DoJ...
By Sara Kropf The government has all sorts of advantages in a criminal case: FBI agents flash a badge and witnesses talk willingly; prosecutors freely use grand jury subpoenas to obtain documents; discovery rules do not require them to turn over all information in...
by Andrea L. Moseley DoJ issued a press release, on March 26, 2021, announcing that it had criminally charged 474 individuals for alleged fraudulent efforts to obtain $569 million in pandemic relief funds. "The impact of the department's work to date sends a clear and...
By Sara Kropf On March 31, 2021, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York asked the court to dismiss the indictment of two defendants in a complex accounting fraud case. The letter request said “we do not believe we can establish beyond a...
By Sara Kropf Hindsight is 20/20. In retrospect, we can often see what our OIG investigation clients could have done to prevent the investigation. The three ideas below won’t prevent every investigation, but they can help mitigate the most serious consequences to your...
by Andrea L. Moseley As National Public Radio co-host and producer Jesse Thorn put it recently, we are a year into this novel coronavirus and the novelty has worn off. We have passed the one year mark for when most Americans realized that COVID-19 was about to turn...
By Sara Kropf A year ago, I wrote a post lamenting the fact that prosecutors get every benefit of the doubt when it comes to whether they committed intentional Brady violations. My point was that judges routinely credit weak evidence of a defendant’s state of mind in...