Philip Esformes, whose prison sentence Trump commuted, loses appeal and faces retrial on health-care fraud charges

“Rather, the Court held that – as an appellate court – it lacked the necessary jurisdiction to decide the clemency argument at this point in time, expressly stating that it was not reaching the merits of the argument,” Watterson said.

Esformes’ effort to have his case dismissed had backing from a group of Republican former U.S. Attorneys General, among them Edmund Meese, John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzalez, as well as Louis Freeh, a former FBI director and federal judge.

That group said prosecutors in Esformes’ case had violated rules that barred them from using communications between defendants and their lawyers.

In its ruling, the appeals court panel noted that prosecutors “not only reviewed privileged documents
but also tried to use them against Esformes before trial on two occasions.”

And the panel also said that a lower-court judge had found the prosecutors engaged in misconduct, as well as a “bad-faith” effort to obfuscate that conduct.

But the appeals panel noted that that judge, and a federal district court judge “rejected Esformes’s request to dismiss the indictment or to disqualify members of the prosecution team.”

The panel said that it agreed with prosecutors’ arguments on appeal that Esformes had “failed to prove ‘demonstrable prejudice’ from the intrusions on his privilege” of privacy in communications with lawyers.

“So dismissal of the indictment or disqualification of the prosecution team would have been improper,” the panel ruled.

Esformes, who had been in prison at the time, was one of the dozens of people to receive executive clemency from Trump in his last months of office.

The Justice Department has said Esformes’ fraud scheme spanned two decades and involved an estimated $1.3 billion in losses as the result of fraudulent claims to Medicare and Medicaid.

With the proceeds of that scheme, Esformes bought a $1.6 million Ferrari Apera automobile, a $360,000 Greubel Forsey watch, and also paid for female escorts, the indictment said.

Prosecutors also have said Esformes paid out $300,000 in bribes to Jerome Allen, who at the time was the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s basketball coach, who helped get Esformes’ son admitted to the university’s prestigious Wharton School of Business by falsely claiming he was a prized basketball recruit.

When Esformes was convicted in 2019 at his trial of 20 criminal counts he faced, an FBI agent in charge of Miami’s field office said he “is a man driven by almost unbounded greed.”

“Esformes cycled patients through his facilities in poor condition where they received inadequate or unnecessary treatment, then improperly billed Medicare and Medicaid,” the agent said.

“Taking his despicable conduct further, he bribed doctors and regulators to advance his criminal conduct,” the agent said.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/philip-esformes-whose-prison-sentence-trump-commuted-loses-appeal.html