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Flynn Judge Preparing His Own Defense for U.S. Appeals Court

Greg Farrell
Bloomberg
May 30, 2020

John Moscow was quoted in Bloomberg on the predicament of the federal judge presiding over Michael Flynn’s criminal case.

For some lawyers, the matter centers on whether improper influence was exerted inside the Justice Department. Along with Fokker, an appellate court decision involving Citigroup Inc. could be invoked, suggested John Moscow, who headed complex fraud investigations for the late Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.

In that civil case, the government negotiated a settlement with Citgroup Global Markets over its sale of mortgage-backed securities to investors. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan refused to accept the settlement, saying that the proposed financial penalty, and the lack of any meaningful admission of guilt by the bank, wasn’t in the public interest.

The appeals court ordered Rakoff to proceed with the settlement. But it said that district judges could refuse to accept a recommendation by the government if they found that it was “tainted by improper collusion or corruption of some kind.”

“The judge has the power to make sure one side or the other is not going into the tank,” said Moscow, who’s now an attorney at Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss.

The full article can be found here.

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