A day after Trump commuted Esformes’ sentence, Trump issued a pardon to Kushner’s father Charles, a real-estate mogul who was sentenced to two years in prison in 2004 after pleading guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering and making unlawful campaign contributions.
Charles Kushner, in an effort to intimidate his own brother-in-law from acting as a witness against him, hired a prostitute to lure the other man into a sexual tryst. Charles Kushner then sent a secretly recorded videotape of that account to the man’s wife, the sister of Charles.
In a 2006 press release, the Justice Department said Philip and his father Morris, along with a third man, had paid $15.4 million to settle federal and Florida civil health care fraud claims related to kickback and medically unnecessary treatments at Larkin Community Hospital, which they had owned.
And an August 2013 article in The Chicago Tribune reported that Philip and Morris Esformes agreed in principle to pay the U.S. government $5 million to settle claims that they “took kickbacks related to the sale” for $32 million of a pharmacy partially owned by Philip to the pharmaceutical giant Omnicare.
In April 2021, months after Philip Esformes was released from prison as the result of Trump’s commutation, federal prosecutors in Miami told a judge they intended to re-try Esformes on the counts where jurors had failed to reach a verdict.
In August that same year, a judge set a $50 million release bond for Esformes, which was co-signed by his father and children.
The decision to retry Esformes outraged his legal team at the time, and still does more than a year later.
In an appeals court brief filed last year, Esformes’ lawyers said, “the text and context of this grant of clemency reveal an intent to end the prosecution and incarceration of Esformes for the conduct at issue in this case.”
Those attorneys also argued that a re-trial was barred under the double-jeopardy clause of the Constitution because the judge, when sentencing Esformes, had factored in conduct that was the basis for the major criminal count on which jurors deadlocked.
“Simply put, there can be no retrial of Philip Esformes,” lawyers wrote in their appeals brief.
Tacopina, in an interview this week, said the alleged misconduct by prosecutors in using information against Esformes that was protected by attorney-client privilege, and which was “illegally obtained in violation of his Constitutional rights,” underscores the unfairness of retrying him.
“It would be a gross miscarriage of justice to let these same prosecutors thumb their noses at the president’s grant of clemency to retry Mr. Esformes on any part of their infected case,” Tacopina said.
Asked why the public should feel sympathy for Esformes, given his conduct, Tacopina noted that, “Mr. Esformes always maintained his innocence.”
“The president granted him clemency, and now, after a change in administration, the new Biden Justice Department wants to undo that,” Tacopina said.
“The public should be very concerned when prosecutors — more interested in career advancement and political games — violate the law and pervert justice for those reasons,” Tacopina said.
“Because that circumstance puts us all in jeopardy.”
Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/12/doj-plans-to-retry-philip-esformes-despite-trump-commuting-sentence-.html