Letitia James
Image by Thomas Good

NBC News is reporting that New York Attorney Gen.-elect plans to launch sweeping investigations into President Donald Trump, his family and “anyone” in his circle who may have violated the law once she settles into her new job next month.

“We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well,” James, a Democrat, told NBC News in her first extensive interview since she was elected last month.

NBC reporter writes that James campaigned on passing a bill to change New York’s double jeopardy laws with an eye on possible pardons coming out of the White House. That change would allow her to pursue state charges against anyone the president were to pardon over federal charges or convictions and whose alleged crimes took place in the state.

Read the NBC News article.

A former federal prosecutor has been disbarred for posting anonymous online comments about cases being handled by himself or by his office, according to reports from the ABA Journal and the Legal Profession Blog.

The Louisiana Supreme Court ordered the disbarment of Sal Perricone, finding he had violated ethics rules because his “caustic, extrajudicial comments about pending cases strikes at the heart of the neutral “dispassionate control which is the foundation of our system.”

“Perricone had posted more than 2,600 comments on nola.com, the website of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, between November 2007 and March 2012. Between 100 and 200 comments related to matters being prosecuted by Perricone’s office,” according to Journal reporter Debra Cassens Weiss.

Read the ABA Journal article.

The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department charged four people Tuesday with scheming for decades to hide tens of millions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service — the first U.S. indictment over alleged tax evasion revealed in 2016 through the Panama Papers.

Post reporter Devlin Barrett writes that those charged include a former investment manager, a former U.S. resident, an American accountant and a Panamanian lawyer who once worked for the “firm at the center of the case, Mossack Fonseca.

“The 11-count indictment unsealed in New York marks the first time the U.S. government has charged anyone with tax crimes related to the firm — and authorities suggested others could soon be charged,” according to Barrett.

Read the Washington Post article.

Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta is out of the running to be President Donald Trump’s attorney general following a Miami Herald report that he oversaw a sweetheart deal for a wealthy financier accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls, according to two people close to the president.

Acosta was a federal prosecutor in Florida before going to Washington, the two advisers said.

Herald report Anita Kumar explains:

The investigation, which reported that Acosta, then U.S. attorney, cut a secret deal to allow billionaire Jeffrey Epstein to serve only 13 months in a county jail, is “clearly something” that is being widely circulated among Trump aides, one of the people said. The agreement “essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe” and granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators,” according to the story.

Read the Miami Herald article.

A Louisville lawyer with a history of drug and alcohol abuse has been charged with threatening to kill two attorneys involved with his child custody case, reports the Louisville Courier Journal.

Brendan McLeod, who advertises himself as an “aggressive criminal attorney” on his Facebook page, was charged with retaliating against participants in a legal process, for allegedly threatening attorneys Mark Dobbins and Forrest Kuhn, according to the report by Andrew Wolfson.

“In the criminal case against McLeod, Louisville Metro Police Lt. Mike O’Neil said McLeod told a third party he would kill both Dobbins, who represents McLeod’s ex-wife, and Kuhn, a lawyer appointed as guardian ad litem for his children,” writes Wolfson.

Read the Courier Journal article.

Former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane must report to jail by Thursday morning to begin serving her sentence for convictions on perjury and other charges, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer.

She also was convicted of abusing the power of her office in an attempt to smear a perceived political enemy, according to Inquirer reporter Angela Couloumbis. She faces a 10-to-23-month sentence.

Kane, 52, was in the spotlight when she was elected in 2012. At the time, she was considered the Democratic Party’s rising star, and her name was often floated for higher office.

Read the Inquirer article.

The former chief financial officer of Dewey & LeBoeuf spent a night in jail after missing the first of three payments on a $1 million fine, but was released early Friday morning when his current law firm paid the entire $1 million, reports the ABA Journal.

“[Joel] Sanders was sentenced in October 2017 to 750 hours of community service and ordered to pay the $1 million fine over a three-year period,” reports the Journal‘s Debra Cassens Weiss. “Sanders did not get any jail time, but Stolz had said failure to pay the fine would land Sanders in jail until he pays up, for up to one year.”

He was convicted for misleading lenders and bond buyers about the firm’s finances before its 2012 collapse.

Sanders missed his first payment and asked for resentencing because of “dire financial circumstances” and also alleged the fine was unconstitutionally excessive. A New York judge ordered Sanders to jail.

The next day, his current law firm paid the entire $1 million.

Read the ABA Journal report.

A Texas county is adding more controls after fees to an attorney representing indigent clients this past fiscal year topped $460,000 — more than double the amount of any other court-appointed lawyer in Collin County, reports The Dallas Morning News.

Attorney Marc Fratter, 46, also earned significantly more than anyone on the county payroll, including the district judges who approved his pay sheets, according to reporter Valerie Wigglesworth.

“Fratter said he put in long hours — billing as much as 100 hours a week at times — with his one-man firm handling the workload of as many as six attorneys. He pointed to judges’ signatures on all of his pay sheets. “I’m not hiding anything,” he said.

Read the Dallas News article.

A former precious-metals trader said to have worked at JPMorgan Chase & Co. admitted he engaged in a six-year spoofing scheme that defrauded investors in futures contracts with the help of his colleagues and bosses, Bloomberg Law reports.

Prosecutors said John Edmonds placed hundreds of orders he never intended to execute — orders designed to move the market, but were canceled before being matched. Edmonds and other traders sought to manipulate futures markets for gold, silver, platinum and palladium on the Nymex and Comex exchanges for their own benefit.

The Bloomberg article continues: “Edmonds, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, said he learned the spoofing strategy from more senior traders at the bank and said his immediate supervisors approved of it, according to the Justice Department.”

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

After losing his bench in a Democratic sweep, Harris County Juvenile Court Judge Glenn Devlin released nearly all of the youthful defendants that appeared in front him on Wednesday morning, simply asking the kids whether they planned to kill anyone before letting them go, the Houston Chronicle reports.

“He was releasing everybody,” said public defender Steven Halpert. “Apparently he was saying that’s what the voters wanted.”

“The longtime Republican jurist — whose seat was among 59 swept by Democrats in Tuesday’s election — is one of two juvenile court judges in Harris County whose track records favoring incarceration contributed heavily to doubling the number of kids Harris County sent to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department in recent years, even as those figures fell in the rest of the state,” writes Chronicle reporter Keri Blakinger.

Four of the juveniles released were facing aggravated robbery charges.

Read the Houston Chronicle article.

An Iowa criminal defense lawyer has removed a Facebook post in which he called a client an “idiot” and “terrible criminal” who deserved to be jailed, reports the Associated Press.

Chad Frese said his post was being misinterpreted by other lawyers, who said the rant was highly inappropriate and likely violated ethics rules governing the profession. He said that he shared the post only with his Facebook friends and that he didn’t think it crossed any lines, according to AP reporter Ryan J. Foley.

The post also included: “He needed to shut his mouth because he was the dumbest person in the conversation by 100 times.” And he added, “You wonder why we need jails huh?”

Read  the AP article.

A former partner at Balch & Bingham has been sentenced to five years in prison for a scheme to bribe an Alabama state legislator to oppose expansion of a site designated for an environmental cleanup, reports the ABA Journal.

Gilbert was part of Balch & Bingham’s environmental and natural resources practice, according to reporter Debra Cassens Weiss. Prosecutors had alleged he and a co-defendant, coal company executive David Roberson, funneled $360,000 to the state lawmaker through a consulting contract with his private foundation.

The lawmaker, former Alabama State Rep. Oliver Robinson, was previously sentenced to 33 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud and tax evasion, the Journal reports.

Read the ABA Journal article.

The Dallas Morning News reports that Texas businessman Christopher Faulkner, better known by his now infamous moniker “Frack Master,” has admitted to securities fraud, tax evasion and money laundering and faces up to 12 years in prison, federal officials said Tuesday.

Reporter Jess Mosier writes that Faulkner, the former CEO of Dallas-based Breitling Energy, became a star in business circles for his high-profile media appearances defending hydraulic fracturing or fracking. He used fake college degrees and skimpy business experience to convince Dallas business elite and Texas political elite that he was an oil and gas expert.

“The SEC effectively shut down Breitling Energy and related businesses after suing Faulkner and 11 others in 2016 for misusing $23.8 million of the $80 million they raised for oil and gas investments,” according to Mosier. “Besides the prison time, Faulkner must pay back the nearly $24 million made from his schemes, under the terms of his settlement.”

Read the Dallas News article.

Newsday is reporting that federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have charged a Queens-based defense lawyer with bribing a witness in an effort to alter the outcome of a notorious 2015 Suffolk County gang-related double-murder trial that involved the execution of a construction flagman who had “disrespected” the killer.

Reporter John Riley explains: “Lawyer John Scarpa, 65, of Hauppauge, represented defendant Reginald Ross, a Crips leader from Yaphank ultimately convicted in Suffolk Supreme Court of the 2010 murders of flagman Raymond Hirt and John Williams, whose killing was designed to lure a friend who owed Ross drug money back to New York.”

Prosecutors allege Scarpa plotted to bribe a witness who had pleaded guilty to participating in the Williams murder, to perjure himself at the Ross trial.

Read the Newsday article.

Six of the seven members of the Arkansas Supreme Court were formally charged Thursday with violating the state’s judicial canons, an unprecedented action that stemmed from a complaint filed by Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen, reports the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The Arkansas Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission accused the justices of failing to provide sufficient chance for Griffen to defend himself as they weighed whether to remove him from all cases involving the death penalty. Griffen’s subsequent removal stemmed from his participation in a public protest against executions.

“Griffen attracted a whirlwind of attention in April 2017, when he issued an order that temporarily halted the state’s plans to carry out executions, and that same day he participated in a public protest against the death penalty,” writes reporter John Moritz. “The protest was held in front of the Governor’s Mansion.”

Read the Democrat-Gazette article.

A federal grand jury has indicted three men for what officials describe as a $364 million Ponzi scheme to defraud investors, reports The Dallas Morning News.

Jay B. Ledford and Cameron R. Jezierski of Texas, along with Kevin B. Merrill of Maryland, raised money from investors who thought they were buying into cheap portfolios of consumer debt on credit cards and student and auto loans, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Securities and Exchange Commission said.

“The defendants lured investors through an elaborate web of lies, duping them into paying millions of dollars into this Ponzi scheme,” said U.S. Attorney Robert K. Hur in a statement.

The report by Lison Joseph says the trio spent more than $73 million of investors’ money at casinos and to buy diamond jewelry and luxury cars including Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Bentleys and Bugattis.

Read the Dallas News article.

Above the Law reports that a former partner at Locke Lord and founder/CEO of MSS International Consultants Ltd., a private equity fund headquartered in the British Virgin Islands, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

According to the indictment, Mark S. Scott was part of a conspiracy to conceal the source of $400 million in process from an alleged pyramid scheme involving a purported cryptocurrency, OneCoin. Prosecutors allege he transferred money in and out of the country in order to hide the origins of the money, reports Above the Law editor Kathryn Rubino.

A judge set Scott’s bail at $1 million, secured by $200,000 cash, and placed Scott on home detention with an electronic monitoring device.

Read the Above the Law article.

A federal judge on Thursday refused to overturn the fraud and conspiracy convictions of four former executives for the only financial institution to be criminally charged in connection with the federal bank bailout program, the Associated Press reports.

Judge Richard Andrews refused to enter judgments of acquittal or set new trials for the former Wilmington Trust executives.

“Former bank president Robert Harra Jr., former chief credit officer William North, former chief financial officer David Gibson and former controller Kevyn Rakowski were convicted in May on charges of fraud, conspiracy and making false statements to federal regulators,” writes reporter Randall Chase

Read the AP article.

A federal administrative law judge arrested last week, accused of threatening the mother of his child with a rifle, shot and killed himself early Friday morning, ending a tense 10-hour standoff in Florida, reports the Miami Herald.

Police and federal agents had already confiscated a weapons cache from the home of Timothy Maher a few days before he took hostages and then killed himself. Three hostages were unharmed.

“The standoff was the culmination of a 10-day cat-and-mouse game between the troubled judge and local and federal law enforcement that began with Maher being arrested on firearms charges and included the shutdown of a downtown Miami Social Security office,” reports the Herald.

Read the Miami Herald article.

Image by James Tourtellotte

Above the Law reports that Cardinal Donald Wuerl has tapped Jones Day to represent him on matters relating to a grand jury report that alleged the sexual abuse of thousands of victims at Catholic dioceses across Pennsylvania.

Wuerl, as the former bishop of Pittsburgh, allegedly failed to remove priests accused of abuse from their ministries, according to the report.

Editor Kathryn Rubino quoted from a Law.com report that Wuerl has already been on the offensive:

“[Archdiocese of Washington general counsel Kim Viti Fiorentino], Wuerl’s in-house lawyer, has attacked the Pennsylvania grand jury report and its depiction of Wuerl. In an interview with her archdiocese’s weekly newspaper published Tuesday, Fiorentino said the investigatory process and resulting report, ‘narrowly targeted the Catholic Church in six dioceses in Pennsylvania and was generated in a process that suffered from significant legal flaws.’”

Read the Above the Law article.