Bill Cosby’s criminal defense lawyer has admitted he hosted a fundraiser for a key witness in the comedian’s ongoing court battle in Pennsylvania, reports LawNewz. But it wasn’t illegal or shady in context, he claimed in court documents.

The report says attorney Brian McMonagle said he supported the failed 2015 reelection campaign of former Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor with a March fundraiser. He personally donated $2,500 while others in his law firm put out at least $1,500.

“Castor had been District Attorney from 2000 to 2008, during which he investigated Andrea Constand’s claim that comedian Bill Cosby sexually assaulted her,” the site reports.

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What Donald Trump says on the campaign trail might be crass, blunt and offensive but does it cross the legal line and make him liable for inciting violence? His critics point to a few examples like when he told a crowd at a February rally: “So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em, would you?”

Under the First Amendment, writes Rachel Stockman on LawNews.com, an effort to prosecute a politician on such a charge would be an uphill battle.

“I have little doubt that Trump’s language and general comportment does incite some of his followers to violent behavior, in the way we might use that word in lay English,” First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams told LawNewz.com. However, legal liability is a different story. Abrams also pointed out that speech must be intentionally done to incite violence.

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ABC News is reporting that Donald Trump and his campaign are not expected to face inciting a riot charges in connection with a violent incident at a rally in Fayetteville, NC.

The Cumberland County Sheriff’s office had been investigating the real estate mogul and his campaign but decided “that the evidence does not meet the requisites of the law as established under the relevant North Carolina statute and case law to support a conviction of the crime of inciting a riot,” the report says, quoting from a sheriff’s department statement.

A man who attended the rally last weeek allegedly sucker-punched a protester in the face as he was being escorted out of the venue. John Franklin McGraw, 78, faces charges of assault and disorderly conduct.

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A federal judge in Houston sentenced an Austin attorney to 17 years in prison for harboring and concealing his client who was a fugitive in Mexico and for conspiring to commit wire fraud in the client’s stock sale scam, reports The Houston Chronicle.

Patrick Lanier, 67, represented Harris Dempsey “Butch” Ballow, of Tiki Island in Galveston County, during proceedings before the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 and during the criminal case that led to Ballow to flee the country. The report says Ballow was indicted in 2003 on fraud and money laundering charges stemming from misrepresentations he made in connection with the sale of stock, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“A jury convicted Lanier on 16 counts in February 2014 for helping sell shares of stock purchased by Ballow’s corporation while Ballow was on the run,” according to the report.

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Photo by Michael Vadon

An alleged assault of a protester at a Donald Trump rally by a man who was later arrested after saying that the protester “deserved it” and “next time, we might have to kill him,” is only the latest in a series of violent and frightening incidents at Trump rallies of late, reports Vanity Fair.

Last week, some two dozen Black Lives Matter protesters were forcibly expelled from a Trump event in New Orleans, following a week in which the Republican front-runner initially refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and former K.K.K. leader David Duke.

Other incidents occured at a Trump rally in Georgia, in Louisville, and at a rally in Las Vegas where Trump said that he’d like to punch one protester in the face, reminiscing about the “good old days” when agitators would be carried out on a stretcher, the magazine reports.

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In last night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton dismissed a question about whether she would resign if indicted for mishandling classified information, saying “Oh for goodness … that’s not going to happen. I’m not even answering that question.”

A report by Christian Science Monitor staff writer Peter Grier addresses the question: Is Clinton right to be so dismissive?

“On the one hand, the FBI investigation of the issue could be a shield for Clinton,” Grier writes. “If she isn’t indicted, she can use that fact as an all-purpose dismissal. Something along the lines of, ‘The feds found no problem here, so move along, move along.’ ”

But Republicans will keep the issue alive, he adds, pointing to two new lawsuits seeking access to Clinton’s State Department communications.

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The U.S. Department of Justice filed a legal response on Thursday to Apple’s refusal to help the FBI unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, and Apple quickly responded, with general counsel Bruce Sewell delivering a tense and angry response in a conference call with reporters, reports Business Insider.

Sewell called the DOJ response a “cheap shot” and said that its tone “reads like an indictment.”

He was responding to the DOJ’s claim that “Apple’s rhetoric is not only false, but also corrosive of the very institutions that are best able to safeguard our liberty and our rights … .”

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A prominent Long Island attorney is accused of misusing up to $200,000 in funds that were awarded to his clients, reports CBS New York.

Steven Morelli, reported tolive in Manhasset and to own a home in Manhattan, is accused of pocketing settlement money meant for his clients, some of whom say they’ve been waiting for their payouts for more than a year.

“Somebody I know to be a good man and a good lawyer found himself in some trouble here,” Marc Gann, Morelli’s defense attorney, said to the news outlet. “I hope it doesn’t end this way. This is a guy who has fought for his clients for many years. I know the allegations are serious allegations, but my understanding is that everyone to this point has been made whole.”

One client was reportedly shorted $50,000 from a nearly $70,000 settlement. Irman Rubbani, a limousine driver in Brooklyn, told CBS2 that he has not seen “one penny” of the $50,000 Morelli owes him.

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FBI Director James Comey told a congressional panel on Tuesday that a final court ruling forcing Apple Inc. to give the FBI data from an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters would be “potentially precedential” in other cases where the agency might request similar cooperation from technology companies, reports Reuters.

Comey’s remarks at the hearing vary slightly from a statement he made last week that ordering Apple to unlock the phone was “unlikely to be a trailblazer” for setting a precedent for other cases.

“Tuesday’s testimony from Comey and remarks before the same U.S. House Judiciary Committee by Apple’s general counsel, Bruce Sewell, brought to Congress a public fight between Apple and the government over the dueling interests of privacy and security that has so far only been heard in the courts,” Reuters says.

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Aubrey McClendon, the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Chesapeake Energy Corp., was indicted on charges that he conspired to rig bids for the purchase of oil and natural gas leases in northwest Oklahoma, reports Bloomberg.

“McClendon is accused of orchestrating a scheme between two ‘large oil and gas companies’ to not bid against each other for leases, the U.S. Justice Department said Tuesday in a statement. From December 2007 to March 2012, the conspirators decided ahead of time who would win the leases and the winning bidder would then allocate an interest in the leases to the other company, the government said,” according to the report.

While leading Chesapeake, McClendon embraced the fracking shale revolution that helped the company develop into what was for a time the largest U.S. source of gas.

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A King County, Washington, judge has sanctioned two attorneys hired by Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist’s office, citing their “intentionally misleading conduct” during a long-running lawsuit, according to a report in the Tacoma News Tribune.

“The ruling Wednesday from Superior Court Judge Beth Andrus sanctions Seattle attorneys Richard Jolley and Stewart Estes,” the report says. “It orders them to pay $32,000 for withholding information from civil attorney Fred Diamondstone and conducting ‘misleading settlement negotiations’ that fell apart in December.”

The case involves false-arrest lawsuit filed by a former resident who was twice charged with sex crimes by Lindquist’s office.

“Those charges were dismissed initially in 2011 because of erroneous evidence: a picture wrongly identified as Dalsing. The charges were dismissed again by Pierce County Superior Court Judge Ed Murphy in 2015, due to a finding of prosecutorial vindictiveness,” the report says.

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A Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., lawyer has pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a scam to bilk clients out of more than $1.4 million, officials said, according to a report on lohud.com, a site of The Journal News.

Michael Lippman pleaded guilty on Monday to felony counts of second-degree grand larceny, second-degree criminal tax fraud and first-degree scheme to defraud, the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office said.

“Lippman, 71, who had a law office in the village, was arrested in September,” the report said. “He pocketed $1,487,462 from 13 clients between Jan. 1, 2010, and Sept. 15, 2015, officials said.”

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A Broward County, Florida, lawyer, arrested on federal child porn charges, is also accused of abusing two underage girls, according to court records, according to a report from the Sun Sentinel.

David Rothenberg, 47, was arrested Saturday at home after an undercover investigation revealed he was logging on to a “daddaughtersex” chat room from the Internet protocol address of his Fort Lauderdale law firm and trying to persuade a stranger to let him have sex with her 13-year-old daughter, authorities said. But in reality he was communicating with an undercover officer for about six weeks, investigators said.

“Authorities said they moved swiftly to arrest Rothenberg on the child porn charges when they found evidence he was sexually abusing a real teenage girl,” the Sun Sentinel reported.

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The Department of Justice plans to release a set of questions in the coming weeks that companies implicated in wrongdoing can expect to be asked by investigators concerning their compliance programs, reports Bloomberg BNA.

“Andrew Weissmann, chief of the DOJ Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, told a group of attorneys meeting in Washington Feb. 9 that the department plans to publicize the list of sample questions to give the public and companies an idea of what investigators and compliance experts are concerned with,” the article says. “The list will be continually updated based on experiences officials have with companies, he said.”

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One the world’s largest telecommunications companies and its subsidiary agreed to fines and forfeitures with U.S. and Dutch authorities totaling more than $800 million to resolve a long-running bribery scheme involving a government official in Uzbekistan, USA Today reports.

The report says Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said VimpelCom, headquartered in Amsterdam, and its Uzbek-based subsidiary Unitel LLC, made “bribery a foundation of their business model” throughout Uzbekistan.

“More than $114 million in bribes, according to federal prosecutors, was funneled to the Uzbek official during a six-year period by the firm, which issues publicly-traded securities in the U.S. The companies concealed the bribes through various payments to a shell company that some VimpelCom and Unitel officials knew was owned by the recipient of the bribe payments,” the newspaper reports.

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The computers at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center have been down for more than a week as the Southern California hospital works to recover from a Ransomware attack, reports CSO.

Officials at HPMC said they’re cooperating fully with the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI in an effort to discover the identity of the attackers. But for now the network is offline and staff are struggling to deal with the loss of email and access to some patient data, the report says.

“The type of Ransomware responsible for shutting down the hospital remains unknown, but one local computer consultant said the ransom being demanded was about 9,000 BTC [Bitcoin], or just over $3.6 million dollars,” according to the report.

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Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement cases alleging violative behavior by corporate directors are rare and will only be initiated in clear cases of misconduct or when obvious signs of violative behavior are ignored, Lara Shalov Mehraban, associate director in the agency’s New York Regional Office, said in a report posted by BloombergBNA.

“Mehraban attempted to allay concerns voiced by corporations and their lawyers about the SEC enforcement cases against corporate directors and other gatekeepers, such as compliance officers, who may try to fix compliance problems and find themselves entangled in an agency investigation,” according to the report.

“While recent SEC enforcement cases have involved directors, Mehraban said such cases aren’t common and shouldn’t concern corporate directors and officers faithfully carrying out their mandates,” the report continues.

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The former in-house counsel of an Ocean County, New Jersey-based home health care company was sentenced Thursday to 18 months in prison for using his attorney trust account to steal more than $2.6 million from his employer, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced.

Matthew S. Neugeboren of Manalapan, N.J., pleaded guilty in May to charges of wire fraud and filing a false tax return before U.S. District Judge Mary L. Cooper.

According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court:

From 2006 through 2013, Neugeboren was in-house counsel for Company A, a home health care company in Ocean County. As such, Neugeboren maintained an attorney trust account to pay for Company A’s expenses. To cover those expenses, Neugeboren requested checks and wire transfers be made from Company A’s bank accounts into his attorney trust account.

As part of the scheme, Neugeboren caused Company A to transfer more money into his attorney trust account than was necessary to cover company expenses. Neugeboren admitted that he used the additional money for his personal benefit, including gambling. Neugeboren admitted that from January 2008 through December 2012, he stole $2,644,912 from Company A.

In addition to the wire fraud scheme, Neugeboren knowingly and willfully filed a false tax return that failed to include approximately $630,000 in gross income that he received in calendar year 2011 from his scheme to defraud Company A.

In addition to the prison term, Judge Cooper ordered Neugeboren to serve three years of supervised release, entered a forfeiture order of $1,404,963 and ordered him to pay restitution of $1,404,963 to the victim company and $474,814 to the IRS, the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement.

“Those who aspire to a life of white collar crime, and there are always a few misguided business-people out there, believe they have a full-proof scam that will go undetected, ” writes Walter Pavlo on Forbes.com. “Even in the unlikely event that their crime is discovered, they have an escape plan that includes some exotic, warm destination where they will live happily ever after.”

Pavlo tells the story of once-fugitive Lawrence “Larry” Hartman, a U.S. citizen and a Columbia Law School graduate who once thought himself a king of penny stocks.

“Hartman and some other scammers created empty-shell companies that had the appearance of being publicly traded, after which they cold-called elderly investors in the UK and Ireland to buy shares in the companies. The scam operated between July 2004 and March 2008.  According to his indictment, the group brought in $132 Million into a Costa Rican bank account” Pavlo writes.

The story describes Hartman’s  life on the run and his eventual downfall.

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A former partner at the law firm Fox Rothschild was found guilty on Friday of engaging in insider trading after learning that a client at his law firm was about to announce a merger, according to a Reuters report.

A federal jury in Philadelphia convicted Herbert Sudfeld, 64, on charges of securities fraud and making a false statement.

The Doylestown, Pennsylvania-resident faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia.

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