SCOTUSblog Founder Tom Goldstein Rearrested On Tax Evasion Charges After Feds Say He Hid Millions In Crypto

Following up on my previous post, SCOTUSblog Founder Tom Goldstein Hit With 22-Count Federal Tax Evasion Indictment:  Law360, Goldstein Rearrested After Feds Say He Hid Millions In Crypto:

U.S. Supreme Court lawyer and SCOTUSblog publisher Tom Goldstein was arrested again Monday following his earlier release on criminal tax evasion charges, after prosecutors alleged that he secretly made millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency transactions in recent days and was a serious risk to flee. ...

Goldstein has pled not guilty to a 22-count indictment alleging he schemed to avoid paying taxes for years, including by hiding winnings from high-stakes poker games. The charges were filed a little less than two years after Goldstein retired from private practice, capping a distinguished career in which he argued more than 40 cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, including the historic copyright case Google v. Oracle, and also taught Supreme Court litigation at Harvard Law School.

Prosecutors have outlined new allegations against Goldstein in recent days, alleging that he tampered with potential witnesses during the government's investigation and recently made a series of surreptitious transactions that raise concerns he could try to evade justice.

In the filing unsealed Monday requesting that Goldstein be taken into custody, prosecutors accused him of "failing to disclose the existence of two cryptocurrency wallets through which he received over $8 million in cryptocurrency and sent more than $6 million of cryptocurrency over the last five days."

Bloomberg Law, Gambling With the Law: How SCOTUSblog’s Goldstein Risked All:

On a freezing January morning in 2016, Tom Goldstein arrived at the US Supreme Court to argue the first case on the docket.

It was a First Amendment dispute involving a Paterson, N.J., police officer demoted because of his perceived political activity. Victor Afanador, the lead attorney who picked Goldstein to persuade the justices that city officials didn’t break the law, thought he seemed “real,” unlike other, stuffy Beltway lawyers. Afanador was impressed by Goldstein’s record of arguing more than 30 cases at the Supreme Court at the time.

Before their case was called, the Newark attorney snapped a selfie. Goldstein appeared tense. A lot was on the line. If Goldstein lost, he wouldn’t get paid. That was the agreement he made with city officials.

Afanador didn’t find that unusual. He just didn’t realize how badly Goldstein needed the money.

Goldstein seemed like someone who didn’t need anything. He’d climbed to the top of the legal profession despite a modest upbringing and without an Ivy League degree. He lived in one of D.C.'s wealthiest suburbs and drove a Ferrari 458. His SCOTUSblog was required reading in law schools across the country. On the weekends, Goldstein mixed with celebrities, models, and billionaires in the exclusive club of ultra-high-stakes poker—a hedonistic world of brash men with money to burn.

But Goldstein’s poker obsession was getting out of control, according to an indictment filed last month in the US District Court for the District of Maryland. He was winning about half of his Supreme Court arguments, a good track record among appellate lawyers, but was on a vicious losing streak at the poker table.

Goldstein, the sole owner of his firm, was regularly wiring money from his law firm accounts to pay off gambling debts and illegally writing off the payments as business expenses, according to the indictment. He’d just missed the deadline to pay back millions of dollars to a California businessman who extended him a $10 million line of credit.

Goldstein’s taste for betting big would take him from Macau to Montenegro, plunging him into a shadowy world of alleged organized-crime figures and offshore bank accounts. His appetite for risk would jeopardize everything he built: his law practice, his reputation, and his award-winning blog about the nation’s high court. Given a choice between paying his gambling debts and paying his taxes, according to the indictment, he was choosing the former.

Air Mail News, Tommy Supreme and the Blitz:

Tom Goldstein was a star in arguing cases before the Supreme Court. He was also one of the world’s highest-rolling—and most reckless—poker players. Then his worlds collided.

Tom Goldstein is slight, pale, and bald. Look in the dictionary, and next to the word “lawyer” you’ll find a picture of him. But in the legal circles of Washington, D.C., he is regarded with awe. That’s because Goldstein is one of the most successful Supreme Court advocates of the age.

Appearing just once in front of the Supreme Court of the United States—SCOTUS, for short—is, for most lawyers, the pinnacle of their career. Goldstein has done it 44 times, more than all but three lawyers in private practice in the Court’s modern history. His most recent case, Google v. Oracle, was described as the “copyright case of the century.”

So, it was a surprise when, three weeks ago, Goldstein was hit with a 50-page, 22-count federal indictment accusing him of massive tax evasion and listing a panoply of wild stories, including one-on-one poker games played with billionaires, multiple women he allegedly had “intimate personal relationships” with on his company’s payroll, and tens of millions of dollars won and, ultimately, lost.

To say it caused a stir in the Washington legal community is an understatement. But for those outside the capital, at the ultra-high-roller tables of Las Vegas, the glistening casinos of Macau, and the private poker games of Hollywood, it may not have come as a surprise at all. ...

There are two broad types of Supreme Court advocate. The first is what is termed in legal circles a “heater,” a lawyer who ramps up the temperature of an argument, aggressively asserting that disaster will follow if the Court should be so foolish as to rule against them. Then there is what is known as a “cooler,” such as Goldstein, who often approaches the bench with no notes, keeps a level tone, and tries to make it as easy as possible for the Court to rule in his favor. Nevertheless, some Court-watchers say he can seem a little too pleased with himself, even condescending.

Unlike the vast majority of Supreme Court advocates, Goldstein didn’t attend an Ivy League university, clerk for a Supreme Court justice, or work for the solicitor general’s office. A star debater at the University of North Carolina, he failed to get into any top-notch law schools and had to call on family connections to squeeze his way into American University in Washington, D.C., according to a 2012 Atlantic profile.

While at A.U., he spent two summers interning for N.P.R.’s longtime Supreme Court correspondent, Nina Totenberg, the first of Goldstein’s many influential connections, gathering statistics about the voting patterns of the newest justices. She, in turn, gave him the perfect introduction to the institution in which he would spend most of his professional life.

Appearing just once in front of the Supreme Court of the United States is, for most lawyers, the pinnacle of their career. Goldstein has done it 44 times.

After Goldstein graduated, in 1995, he joined Jones Day, a large international law firm, as an associate. He was assigned the task of finding cases that the Supreme Court might accept (SCOTUS accepts less than 1 percent of the petitions it receives) to raise the firm’s prestige. Usually, this was done by seeking decisions in the U.S. Courts of Appeal—the courts one level below SCOTUS—when two or more courts disagreed, causing “a circuit split.” Within two years, by creating his own predictive algorithms, Goldstein found five cases that the Supreme Court took up.

But when Goldstein put himself, a lowly associate, forward to argue one of them, he was promptly slapped down. Supreme Court cases are like golden apples that go to only the most senior members of a law firm. Goldstein hadn’t argued a single case in any court, let alone the Supreme Court. It was an early sign of his supernatural chutzpah.

Goldstein quit and formed his own law firm. Identifying possible Supreme Court cases, he cold-called the plaintiffs to offer his services. At the time, it was generally believed that lawyers should be sought out by plaintiffs, not the other way around. One Supreme Court justice dismissed Goldstein as an “ambulance chaser.” Chief Justice John Roberts, then in private practice, allegedly remarked about him, “If I’m going to have heart-bypass surgery, I wouldn’t go to the surgeon who calls me up,” according to The American Lawyer in 2000.

Traditionally, law firms representing big corporations were the predominant filers of “cert petitions,” the documents in which a lawyer lobbies the Court to take a particular case. Goldstein, by contrast, sought individuals with SCOTUS-friendly cases. And he offered to represent the plaintiffs for free.

So it was that, in 1999, he found himself standing before SCOTUS arguing not just his first Supreme Court case, but his first case of any kind. He lost 9-0. But he won the next case, and he went on winning. He said that he only made $8,000 from his first eight cases, but the stature it gave him in Washington was priceless.

“He was young,” Totenberg says of Goldstein in this period. “He was brash. He talked too fast. He had a little bit of an attitude.” But he was good at making contacts and brokering deals. He assisted David Boies and Laurence Tribe, the top litigators on Al Gore’s legal team, on Bush v. Gore in 2000. Impressed, they sent clients his way.

Soon he established first-of-their-kind Supreme Court litigation clinics at Stanford and Harvard, teaching the students the tricks of the trade while using their unpaid labor to help him prepare for his upcoming cases. He was, by all reports, welcoming and open, even playing poker for quarters with the students during their downtime. Many of his students went on to become high-powered lawyers and solicitors general themselves.

But just as revolutionary as his law practice was his creation, in 2002, with his wife, Amy Howe, of SCOTUSblog. Up until that point, SCOTUS was a closed book. If you wanted to read one of the Court’s judgments you had to wait a week for the Court to send you a paper transcript. The Court had no Web site and was in no hurry to get one.

Sensing an unmet need, Goldstein and Howe started live-blogging SCOTUS proceedings, rushing from the courtroom when opinions were read out—where computers and phones are forbidden—and revealing the result in near-real time. They also digitized the Supreme Court’s previous opinions, allowing instant access. Their blog soon became an essential resource not only for lawyers but also, it was said, for the Supreme Court justices themselves, who found it much more convenient than the Court’s own library.

SCOTUSblog’s greatest success came in 2012, when SCOTUS was set to rule on whether Obamacare was constitutional. In the rush to report the judgment, both Fox and CNN misreported that the Court had shot it down. But they hadn’t understood the complex decision. Within 10 minutes Goldstein and Howe had parsed the judgment and revealed that the law had been, in fact, affirmed. Almost 1 million unique users accessed the blog that day. The Web site later won a Peabody Award for excellence in electronic media.

• ABA Journal, SCOTUSblog Founder Tom Goldstein Accused of Transferring Millions in Cryptocurrency After Tax Indictment
• Reuters, Supreme Court Lawyer Tom Goldstein Is Detained as Flight Risk in Tax Case

(Hat Tip:  Howard Bashman)

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