By Sara Kropf In the last post, I explored whether bad-actor prosecutors and agents can avoid creating Brady material in interview memos. If an agent doesn’t take notes documenting exculpatory statements made by a witness in a criminal investigation, and those...
By Andrea L. Moseley Inspector General Hannibal "Mike" Ware sent a Spring message that we can hear loud and clear. The Small Business Association's (SBA's) tremendous role in the nation's pandemic response was "without precedent" according to the SBA's Semiannual...
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 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 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 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...
By Andrea L. Moseley As I have explained in previous blogs, there is a complex oversight structure created by the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) to address fraud related to pandemic relief funds. Multiple offices within the executive...
By: Andrea L. Moseley As you might see from the above, not-so-subtle, "light at the end of the tunnel" graphic metaphor, my answer to the headline question is a buoyant "yes." I continue to track the evolution of the Department of Justice's (DoJ's) pursuit of...