Legal News

The Feds? Latest Belly Flop

By Dionne Searcey

On your daily surf of legal blogs you may come across attorney Pierce O'Donnell's most recent post on pierceodonnell.com about a vindicated defendant on the West Coast: "Charges Dropped in Campaign Finance Case Against L.A. Attorney." You'd never know it from the innocuous headline, but the attorney in question is none other than O'Donnell himself.

O'Donnell (pictured) had been charged with funneling $26,000 in contributions to the John Edwards campaign in the 2004 presidential election through employees of his law firm and others. O'Donnell allegedly reimbursed the donors for their contributions. A judge Monday tossed out the most serious charges against the prominent attorney.

U.S. District Judge S. James Otero ruled that prosecutors had improperly charged O’Donnell with two violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act because that law doesn't prohibit such activity, according to this LA Times story.

“Under the First Amendment, when Congress restricts or regulates election-related activity, it has to do so narrowly and with precision. The charges were dismissed because the U.S. attorney overreached in an attempt to use the law far more broadly than its terms allow,” O’Donnell’s Washington, D.C.-based attorney, White & Case’s George Terwilliger, said in a prepared statement. (Terwilliger, of course, is a very accomplished lawyer, but his Web page is — without question — the lengthiest we’ve seen.)

According to the judge's written decision, the law “is unambiguous and does not prohibit soliciting and reimbursing contributions."

Another charge against O’Donnell remains: that O’Donnell “knowingly and willfully” caused the treasurer of a political action committee to make false statements about the contributions in question.

Prosecutors told the L.A. Times they were reviewing Otero’s 11-page order and were considering their options, including the possibility of seeking a review by the Ninth Circuit. One commentator who might like to see an appeal: Ken Silverstein over at Harper’s. In a post titled: “Federal Court Legalizes Illegal Campaign Contributions,” he writes: “In other words, the judge gutted a major provision of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which bans making "contributions in the name of another." Now apparently you can make exactly these sorts of contributions, you just can't the give straw donors the money in advance.”

The charges hadn't halted O'Donnell's practice, Terwilliger said. He recently wound up a month-long trial in New Orleans where he was lead counsel representing four Katrina hurricane victims who accused the Army Corps of Engineers with negligence in the way it maintained and operated the Mr. Go shipping channel. O'Donnell argued the shipping channel played a major role in worsening the flood damage during Hurricane Katrina. A judge's ruling in the case is pending.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 10, 2009 (boomark / email).