David Keener faced up to six months behind bars on the misdemeanor charge, but U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta gave the Los Angeles entertainment lawyer one year of unsupervised probation and a $5,000 fine after he accepted responsibility in a guilty plea and sentencing deal. With prosecutors.
Kenner represented Michel last year during his trial on charges related to a sprawling foreign influence scheme linked to the looting of $4.5 billion from Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund.
“I am deeply sorry for standing before you, and I fully accept responsibility,” Keener, 82, told the judge in Washington in a video hearing. “I have had a wonderful 56-year career, and while I have tried to be a zealous advocate in my cases, including Mr. Michel’s, this is a low point.”
In court, Keener admitted responsibility for what the government alleged was that he posted a photo of Michelle at a 2012 fundraising dinner with President Barack Obama holding a poster to the grand jury in one of two Bloomberg News articles published on March 3, 2023, previewing his defense at trial later in the day. That month. The attorney also admitted to disclosing to two reporters evidence that prosecutors turned over to Michel's lawyers — such as grand jury witness testimony, investigative reports and communications — that was subject to a court protective order that they would use only in court.
“It was my responsibility to ensure that only individuals compliant with the protective order had access to the evidence database,” Keener said. “You were reckless in not taking the necessary steps to ensure that reporters' access to the database was terminated.”
Mehta initially declined to issue probation, saying it “sent the wrong signal” to attorneys who might “positively mislead the judge,” and called it at least “reckless” for Keener to initially tell Michel's judge that he had allowed reporters access to the venue. Defense “agents” as permitted by court order.
In fact, according to plea papers, Keener witnessed at least one of the reporters tear up a signed copy of the protective order in front of him, both expressing concerns about signing it. Kenner's authorized representative allowed journalists to access hundreds of documents through the database dozens of times, as shown in the invoice he received.
However, the judge said after imposing the maximum fine that prison would serve no purpose because Keener would retire and face disbarment or other disciplinary consequences from his criminal conviction.
Keener's attorney Barry Buss argued as much, adding that Keener was under financial constraints because he spent $1.4 million “out of pocket” defending Michelle and was not repaid. The president and Attorney General Liz Alloway also said that both sides acknowledged some mitigating facts regarding what Keener knew about what Bloomberg would publish.
Michele's new defense attorney with the law firm ArentFox Schiff claimed in court filings seeking a new trial that Keener was paid $750,000. But they accuse Keener of providing ineffective assistance for several reasons, saying that amount is insufficient and that Keener failed to adequately prepare for trial. In court filings, they also claimed that Keener — whose past clients have included Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Death Row Records founder Suge Knight — had a conflict of interest at trial because he faced his own contempt charge. As they claimed it He relied on artificial intelligence to help prepare his closing arguments.
In an emailed statement, Erica Dumas, Michel's spokeswoman, said: “While Mr. Keener says he was only trying to provide the best possible defense for Bras Michel, his client, Mr. Keener's reckless actions crossed critical ethical lines, and he failed in his duties as counsel.” And it cost him dearly in the end. This guilty plea conviction represents a violation of client trust that strikes at the heart of the attorney-client relationship.
Michel, 51, who rose to fame in the 1990s as a member of the hip-hop trio The Fugees, was convicted of 10 federal felonies for his role in a host of conspiracies that included money laundering, campaign finance violations, illegal lobbying and witness tampering. . He has not yet been sentenced.
Michel was not accused of participating in the massive looting of the Malaysian Development Fund known as 1MDB, but was secretly working on behalf of the alleged mastermind, a big-spending Malaysian financier named Low Taek Jho, and with authorities in China, where he was a fugitive and Low was believed to have taken refuge.
Michel earned more than $100 million through his dealings with Law, who lived a lavish and exotic lifestyle criss-crossing the world, landing him in the company of US presidents as well as Hollywood stars including director Martin Scorsese, reality TV star Kim Kardashian and the actor. Leonardo DiCaprio (who testified at the trial).
Through these connections, according to trial testimony, Michel Lu helped funnel illicit campaign funds to Obama and illegally pressured the Donald Trump administration to close the Justice Department's civil and criminal investigations into Lu and secure the extradition of Gu Wengui — a wealthy Chinese national. A prominent critic of the Chinese government, he was then living in New York – under the direction of the authorities in Beijing.
Low's celebrity friends have not been accused of wrongdoing, but DiCaprio testified that he used part of his embezzled fortune to finance the Scorsese-directed film “The Wolf of Wall Street” that starred DiCaprio.
Michel and Lou were co-defendants, and Michel was the only one of several alleged conspirators who took the government to trial while others pleaded guilty.
Of the money paid to him, Michel kept about $80 million. Elliot Broidy, a former fundraiser for Donald Trump, received $9 million, and his partner, business executive Nikki Maley Lum Davis, received nearly $11 million. Broidy and Davis separately pleaded guilty in 2020 to conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, known as FARA. Trump pardoned Broidy on his last day in office. In January, Davis was sentenced to two years in prison.
George Higginbotham, a former Justice Department employee, was paid $170,000, some unrelated to the scheme, and was sentenced to three months in prison in November and forced to forfeit $70,000 after cooperating with the government and assisting prosecutors in the Public Integrity Division in The United States decided to drop the case. Curtain on plan.
