Lawyers for the parents indicted in the college admissions scandal are building an arsenal of defenses, taking aim at a conspiracy charge at the heart of the case as well as a money-laundering allegation the U.S. added last week.
As some parents, including former TPG executive Bill McGlashan, ex-Pimco chief Douglas Hodge and TV sitcom veteran Lori Loughlin, begin to marshal their arguments, others have already punched back. Most have the money to mount an aggressive, multi-front defense.
“When you take on well-heeled clients, you’re inevitably inviting a battle,” said Peter Henning, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. “This is not going to be easy for the government.”
The first salvo was fired on April 9, as parents learned they’d been indicted.
The 19 indicted parents are accused of scheming with admitted ringleader William Rick Singer, a college admissions strategist, in a brazen plot to cheat their kids’ way into some of the most selective schools in the country. Lawyers for the parents, who are from states including California, Florida and Massachusetts, wrote to the court complaining that prosecutors had engaged in judge shopping and adding that their clients shouldn’t be tried together with others they’d never met.
Ilene Jaroslaw, who once prosecuted federal crimes in New York, called the defense lawyers’ letter “a declaration of war.”
Back to 1946
Then, on Monday, lawyers for Gregory and Amy Colburn of Palo Alto, California, went further, seeking a dismissal of the two charges against them, which all the indicted parents face: a mail and wire fraud conspiracy and a money-laundering conspiracy.
The couple wielded several arguments -- notably that the government’s case is deficient.
They invoked a 1946 Supreme Court case, Kotteakos v. U.S., in which a broker was accused of conspiring with 32 loan applicants to defraud the government. The high court reversed the resulting convictions, noting the defendants had only the broker in common, not one another, and that there were at least eight separate conspiracies, not just one as alleged.
“This is where conspiracy law gets nebulous,” Henning said, adding that any convicted parents would do well to cite Kotteakos on appeal. “It’s not clear any of the other parents knew anyone else was doing it.”