bribery Archives - Home Safety Tech Pros

Did 9 firms making deals with Trump violate bribery, anti-fraud laws? Democratic letters seek answers

homesafetytechpros — Tue, 06 May 2025 02:07:00 +0000

Law Firms

Did 9 firms making deals with Trump violate bribery, anti-fraud laws? Democratic letters seek answers

April 24, 2025, 2:26 pm CDT

Sixteen Democratic lawmakers have sent letters to nine law firms that ask them to disavow deals with President Donald Trump and to answer questions about their legality. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Sixteen Democratic lawmakers have sent letters to nine law firms that ask them to disavow deals with President Donald Trump and to answer questions about their legality.

Among the 16 Democrats are two lawmakers leading the effort: U.S. Rep. Dave Min of California and U.S. Rep. April McClain Delaney of Maryland, who are both lawyers, according to an April 24 press release and ABC News.

HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery posted a link to the documents on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The nine firms getting the letters are Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Milbank; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; Kirkland & Ellis; A&O Shearman; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; Latham & Watkins; and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.

Firms making the deals pledged to devote millions of dollars in pro bono hours to issues supported by the firms and Trump. Their agreements allowed them to avoid executive orders that, among other things, call for the suspension of lawyers’ security clearances and imperil their clients’ government contracts.

According to the letters, continued performance under the agreements may be unenforceable under contracts law, would have negative effects on the legal system, could expose the firms to civil and criminal liability, and creates potential ethics violations with respect to conflicts of interest and limits on future law practice.

Agreements of this kind “signal acquiescence to an abuse of federal power, raising serious questions about how or whether your firm would represent clients or take on matters that might be seen as antagonistic to President Trump or his agenda,” the letters said.

The letters asked firms to explain whether the deals open themselves up to liability for:

• Violating federal bribery laws by offering something of value to influence official acts.

• Aiding and abetting violations of the Hobbs Act, which makes it a crime to affect commerce by extortion.

• Violating federal anti-fraud laws that prohibit schemes to defraud the public of the honest services of public officials.

• Violating the federal law that prohibits participation in a racketeering enterprise.

• Violating state statutes that ban providing public servants with benefits to influence actions.

The April 24 letters follow inquiries sent to firms from U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who are both Democrats, according to Reuters and an April 22 press release.

The first batch of letters by Blumenthal and Raskin sought more information on attempts made to poach lawyers and clients from one of the targeted firms and asked six firms to retain records pertaining to the executive orders. A second group of letters asked five firms for more information while asserting that their “capitulation” allowed Trump to suppress their speech.

“Your agreement makes you complicit in efforts to undermine the rule of law and to turn private attorneys into President Trump’s personal law firm, ready to do whatever he decides,” Blumenthal and Raskin wrote.

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Trump pauses enforcement of foreign bribery law, cites harm to ‘American economic competitiveness’

homesafetytechpros — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 19:02:46 +0000

White Collar Crime

Trump pauses enforcement of foreign bribery law, cites harm to ‘American economic competitiveness’

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 11, 2025, 3:24 pm CST

President Donald Trump with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, and Vice President JD Vance after being sworn in Jan. 20. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday that that generally pauses enforcement of a law that bars companies operating in the United States from bribing foreign officials.

The Feb. 10 order requires U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to formulate updated guidelines for enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that “prioritize American interests, American economic competitiveness with respect to other nations, and the efficient use of federal law enforcement resources.”

Bondi has 180 days to work on the guidelines and has the option of extending the period for another 180 days, the order said. During that time, Bondi should stop new Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations or enforcement actions, the order said. She is also required to review existing investigations and actions, taking action to restore proper bounds on enforcement. Bondi can determine whether an exception to the pause should be made in individual cases, however.

A White House fact sheet said “unpredictable FCPA enforcement” makes American companies less competitive. Overenforcement of the law also interferes with Trump’s authority to conduct foreign affairs under Article II of the Constitution, the document said.

Bondi issued a memo Feb. 5 that directs Department of Justice lawyers to prioritize Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prosecutions in which foreign bribery facilitated crimes of cartels and transnational criminal organizations, according to an analysis by Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer. The law firm also said the statute of limitations in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases “outruns the Trump administration,” meaning that a prosecution could be fair game after Trump leaves office.

Publications with coverage of Trump’s order include Reuters, CNBC, Fox News and the New York Times.

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Gorsuch dissents in Mrugeshkumar Shah restitution case

homesafetytechpros — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:31:16 +0000

Justice Neil Gorsuch poses for an official portrait in the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court building on October 7, 2022 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

The U.S. Supreme Court denied the appeal of a more than $82 million restitution order imposed on a group of doctors convicted of a massive fraud scheme in Texas, but Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented from his fellow justices’ decision, saying that he would have chosen to review the lower court’s upholding of the restitution sentence.

Forest Park Medical Center was a physician-owned hospital in Dallas that was not part of any insurance company’s network and did not accept payments via Medicare or Medicaid. The practice made money by steering lucrative patients — those that distributed high reimbursements for out-of-network procedures — to its facility with the help of kickbacks paid to referring physicians. Forest Park’s owners were prosecuted and criminally convicted of a $200 million bribery scheme for its practice of illegally incentivizing doctors to perform surgery at the facility with referral kickbacks falsely characterized as “marketing money” or consulting fees.

The practice owners were prosecuted and convicted under the federal Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS). Seven of the defendants were sentenced to a combined more than 74 years in prison and ordered to pay a total of $82.9 million in restitution.

Mrugeshkumar Shah, Shawn Mark Henry, Michael Bassem Rimlawi, Douglas Sung Won, Jackson Jacob, and Iris Kathleen Forrest appealed the restitution portion of their sentence. They argued that the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act (MVRA) does not apply to their conviction because it was not “an offense against property.” Both the district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled against them

The defendants did not dispute that their conduct deprived private insurance companies of property by means of fraud or deceit, but they claimed that under the correct analysis, their actual conduct is not what matters. Rather, they said, the court must employ the “categorical approach,” and examine the statutory elements of the crime. Given that no element of the applicable statute involves fraud or deceit, the MVRA does not apply, according to the defendants.

The Fifth Circuit was unconvinced. Writing for the appellate court, Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Priscilla Richman, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that under the MVRA, the manner in which a crime was carried out is what matters for purpose of restitution — not the precise definition of the crime under the prosecuting statute.

“The categorical approach is inappropriate for this [restitution] statute and ‘the [district] court may look to the facts and circumstances of the offense of conviction to determine if the MVRA authorizes a restitution order,”” wrote Richman.

The justices denied certiorari in the case Monday, thereby leaving the Fifth Circuit’s decision standing as the final word on the issue of restitution.

Gorsuch, however, penned a brief dissenting statement in which he expressed, “I have my doubts” about a judge’s ability to legally order restitution in a criminal case based on their own factual findings, without the aid of a jury.

Gorsuch argued that the Sixth Amendment guarantees a trial by jury, and that this means that only a jury is entitled to make a finding on facts with the propensity to increase a defendant’s penalties. According to the justice, the founders agreed.

“And more than a little evidence suggests that, at the time of the founding, juries found the facts needed to justify criminal restitution awards,” Gorsuch wrote.

Gorsuch said that he would have granted review in the case to answer the question of whether the Fifth Circuit handled its analysis properly under applicable precedent, “and the Constitution’s original meaning.”

The justice ended his brief statement with something of a warning: “In the absence of this Court’s review, I can only hope that federal and state courts will continue to consider carefully the Sixth Amendment’s application to criminal restitution orders.”

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