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  • Point of Personal Privilege: Can the President Obstruct Justice? Yes and No.

    First, let's look at the precise words attributed to the President's outside counsel John Dowd in Axios: "The President cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution's Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case." Dowd does not appear to be speaking to the broad constitutional question of whether any

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  • Michael Flynn To Plead Guilty: First Take–UPDATED!

    Here is the Criminal Information. Here are Stay tuned for the Plea Agreement and Statement of the Offense which have now been yet to be filed. Here is what we can tell so far. Flynn is obviously co-operating. You don't get to plead to a Criminal Information unless you are cooperating. If even half of what has

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  • Australia Launches Royal Commission to Examine Banking Sector

    As detailed by The Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian government announced this week that it will convene a Royal Commission to examine potential misconduct by the Australian banking and financial services sector.  The announcement was made by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull after a letter was received from four banks asking that a commission be established.  The

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  • DOJ Issues New Guidelines on FCPA

    Rod Rosenstein announced new guidelines for FCPA cases. (here)  In his remarks he stated: I want to highlight a few of the policy’s enhancements. First, the FCPA Corporate Enforcement Policy states that when a company satisfies the standards of voluntary self-disclosure, full cooperation, and timely and appropriate remediation, there will be a presumption that the

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  • Drugs or White Collar Crime? – What Was Russia’s Role “in the massive sports fraud?”

    Check out Rebecca R. Ruiz, NYTimes, Nov. 28, 2017  The Olympic doping diaries: An exclusive look at a chemist's handwritten notes that could lead to major penalties for Russia. (esp)

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  • Senator Robert Menendez Jury Hangs: Mistrial Declared

    Here is a story from Max Greenwood of The Hill and another from Bill Wichert of Law 360. Make no mistake about it, this was a great and hard-fought victory for Menendez's lead defense attorneys Abbe Lowell and Raymond Brown and for the entire defense teams of Bob Menendez and Salomon Melgen. Despite all of the speculation concerning the impact of the Supreme Court's

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  • Special Counsels Are Sometimes Necessary

    Andrew McCarthy at National Review Online compares the aggressiveness of Special Counsel Bob Mueller's Russia collusion investigation to the disgraceful kid gloves DOJ-FBI treatment of Mrs. Clinton and her email server. He is right on all counts, but this is not Mueller's problem. Mueller is doing exactly what one would expect of a Special Counsel. History teaches us that a

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  • Fox News Reports Veselnitskaya-Fusion GPS Connection

    Fox News is reporting here that a co-founder of Fusion GPS met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya both before and after her June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., Jaren Kushner, Paul Manafort, and others. The Trump Tower meeting primarily involved a discussion of the Magnitsky Act, adoption, and/or dirt on Hillary Clinton, depending on whose

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  • Fusion GPS: Already Within Mueller’s Charter

    Senator Lindsey Graham called over the weekend for a new Special Counsel to investigate the Fusion GPS/Steele Dossier affair and the Uranium One transaction. He has a point about Uranium One, but Fusion GPS is squarely within the scope of Special Counsel Bob Mueller's authority as set out in the Order appointing him. That Order explicitly authorizes Mueller to "conduct the investigation confirmed"

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  • The Latest Weissmann Puff Piece

    In the course of a classic puff piece on Andrew Weissmann, Robert Mueller's number two man, New York Times reporter Matt Flegenheimer writes that the conviction obtained by Weissmann's Enron Task Force in the Arthur Andersen case was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court "over a narrow issue involving jury instructions." This is profoundly misleading, as anyone even remotely familiar

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