Legal News

Ashcroft Lets His Eagle Soar; EDNY Squeaks Out ?Squawk? Box Win

By Amir Efrati

John Ashcroft, the U.S. attorney general during President Bush’s first term — and noted singer of “Let the Eagle Soar” (YouTube clip here) — is spreading his wings. Today Ashcroft (pictured, right) announced that his law and consulting firm, The Ashcroft Group, is opening four new offices across the country, each to be led by Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys leaving office to make way for appointees by President Obama. They are:

*Michael Sullivan (pictured, left), U.S. attorney in Boston and former acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives in Washington. Click here for a recent LB post on Sullivan.

*Catherine Hanaway (pictured, right), U.S. attorney, St. Louis

*Johnny Sutton, U.S. attorney in El Paso, Texas, who prosecuted two former border patrol agents for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler in 2005. (On his last day in office, President Bush commuted the agents’ prison sentences.)

*John Ratcliffe, U.S. attorney in Dallas.

In other DOJ-related news, U.S. attorney Ben Campbell (pictured, below) and his crew at the Eastern District of New York can breathe a sigh of relief.

Six former stockbrokers and traders were found guilty on Wednesday afternoon in a case that first made waves on Wall Street in 2005. Eastern District prosecutors alleged the defendants schemed to misuse information broadcast over brokerage-firm "squawk" boxes. The stockbrokers, formerly of Lehman, Citigroup and Merrill, were allegedly bribed to leave open telephone lines next to internal speaker systems at their firms so that traders could secretly eavesdrop on big orders of stock by the firms’ institutional clients. They profited by trading ahead of those orders.

The men face a maximum of 25 years in prison for their conviction on a charge of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. (Here’s the early WSJ.com story and background on the case.)

Several individuals initially pleaded guilty in connection with the scheme, but prosecutors ran into a wall when they prosecuted the six men in 2007. The jury acquitted them on most counts but deadlocked on the conspiracy charge. EDNY brought in senior prosecutors Paul Schoeman and Jay McMahon for this year’s trial.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 22, 2009 (boomark / email).