By Dan Portnov Office of Inspector General investigations don’t always make the news. After all, no one ends up in jail or paying back billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains as a result (usually). However, one federal agency’s OIG seems to garner an outsized amount...
By: Sara Kropf Given the position of the Office of Legal Counsel that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted, there has been some talk (including by me) about the possibility of indicting President Trump now but keeping the indictment under seal until he is no...
By Dan Portnov Last week, the government moved one tiny step closer to being able to “outsource” its criminal investigations to non-DOJ actors. In a post-trial order, Southern District of New York Chief Judge Colleen McMahon excoriated the government for effectively...
By: Sara Kropf If you read my Twitter feed, you may know that I am a bit left of center when it comes to politics. Ok, I'm a lot left of center. But, like so many criminal defense lawyers, I don’t judge my clients' politics. I have clients who are far right, far left,...
By Dan Portnov Here in DC, government contractors are everywhere and vital to keeping nearly all federal agencies running. Absent an Edward Snowden-level scandal, the integration of contractors and their day-to-day work in government offices largely goes unnoticed...
By: Sara Kropf I recently listened to Preet Bharara’s podcast on a long car ride. He’s the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. After months of conducting interviews of government-side subjects—prosecutors, FBI agents and the like—he...
By Dan Portnov Late last week the other shoe finally dropped for Theranos founder and ex-CEO Elizabeth Holmes, as she and fellow executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were indicted on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Following allegations...
By: Sara Kropf The Department of Justice has been humiliated in its misguided prosecution of over two hundred Inauguration Day protestors. It has lost every single case to go to trial. It has engaged in intentional violations of the rules. And it has cost taxpayers...
By Dan Portnov In certain legal (nerd) circles, coining a phrase or term of art is one of the surest ways to achieve immortality – think Tim Wu’s first use of “network neutrality” in a 2003 journal article or Justice Felix Frankfurter’s opinion in Rochin v....
By: Sara Kropf On April 9, 2018, news broke that the FBI had raided the office of President Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen. Apparently the search was the result of referral from Special Counsel Mueller’s team to the SDNY U.S. Attorney's Office. When I saw the news,...