CEO Gets Nine Months In Prison For Forging Court Documents Ordering Google To Delist Negative Reviews

from the nowaythisplancouldfail.pdf dept

Fake court orders have landed a businessman real jail time. Michael Arnstein, CEO of Natural Sapphire Company, pled guilty last year to forging court orders he sent to Google to delist negative reviews. This was apparently the lesson Arnstein learned from his single, successful defamation suit: it's cheaper and easier to forge documents than jump through judicial hoops for several months to achieve the same ends.

In fact, he said as much to others seeking solutions to negative review problems -- all preserved as evidence used against him by the DOJ:

"No bullshit: if I could do it all over again I would have found another court order injunction for removal of links (probably something that can be found online pretty easily) made changes in photoshop to show the links that I wanted removed and then sent to 'removals@google.com' as a pdf — showing the court order docket number, the judges [sic] signature — but with the new links put in," Arnstein wrote in a July 2014 email, according to his criminal complaint. "Google isn't checking this stuff; that's the bottom line b/c I spent $30,000 fuckin thousand dollars and nearly 2 fuckin years to do what legit could have been done for about 6 hours of searching and photoshop by a guy for $200., all in ONE DAY".

Well, Google must have been "checking this stuff," because the DOJ's press release about Arnstein's nine-month prison sentence specifically thanks the company for its "helpful assistance in this investigation." To add irony to self-inflicted injury, Arnstein's sentencing was delivered in the same court he impersonated. Arnstein gets nine months for forging court orders, and three years of supervised release following his prison term.

There may be more indictments and sentences on the horizon. The DOJ press release doesn't name names, but makes it clear it wasn't just Arnstein participating in this fraud.

In furtherance of this scheme, ARNSTEIN and others forged the signature of a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York on more than 10 counterfeit court orders.   

Those would presumably be the unnamed employees referenced in the criminal complaint who helped Arnstein edit PDFs he would later forward to Google for URL delisting. Now that Arnstein is a convicted criminal, I wonder if his position on lawyers has changed. From another Arnstein email contained in the criminal complaint:

I think you should take legal advice with a grain of salt. I spent 100k on lawyers to get a court order injunction to have things removed from Google and Youtube, only to photoshop the documents for future use when new things 'popped up' and google legal never double checked my docs for validity… I could have just saved 100k and 2 years of waiting/damage if I just used photoshop and a few hours of creative editing… Lawyers are often worse than the criminals.

Sure, but in this case, the criminal might have wanted to run his reputation management plan past a competent lawyer first and saved himself the trouble. Arnstein wanted to clean up his company's reputation but only managed to destroy his. Whatever nasty things online reviewers said about Natural Sapphire Company, they're always going to pale in comparison to its CEO's federal prison sentence.

Filed Under: delisting order, doj, fake court orders, forgeries, michael arnstein, reputation management, reviews
Companies: google, natural sapphire

No Immunity For ICE Attorney Who Submitted A Forged Document In A Deportation Hearing

from the christ-what-an-asshole dept

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to extend qualified immunity to a former ICE attorney who forged a document submitted into evidence in a deportation hearing. (h/t Mark Stern) While still with ICE, Jonathan M. Love produced a document claiming Ignacio Lanuza had agreed to voluntary departure to Mexico, thus undermining the ten years of residency needed to avail himself of a removal order cancellation. Here's what was submitted and its effect, from the appeals court decision [PDF]:

On May 11, 2009 at Lanuza’s actual immigration hearing, Love submitted an I-826 form agreeing to voluntary departure, purportedly signed by Lanuza on January 13, 2000, making Lanuza ineligible for cancellation of removal. See id. Based solely on that I-826 form, the immigration judge issued an order of removal on January 5, 2010; the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) affirmed on November 15, 2011.

Lanuza hired a new lawyer who examined the document and found something highly suspect about it. Most glaringly, it was supposedly signed in 2000 by someone from the DHS. Here's the problem:

From the court:

[The document] referred to the “U.S. Department of Homeland Security” at the top of the page, an agency that did not exist at the time Lanuza purportedly signed the form on January 13, 2000. Congress created DHS in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the agency did not begin formal operations until 2003. Therefore, it would have been impossible for Lanuza to sign the DHS I-826 form in January 2000, because that form did not then exist.

Notably, the government did nothing to the ICE attorney until after he was sued by Lanuza. Only then did it find he had violated Lanuza's rights by forging the document. For derailing a model immigrant's life and forcing him into a decade of litigation, Love received a 30-day sentence and a 10-year ban on practicing law.

Now, it's Lanuza's turn to obtain compensation for Love's fraudulent actions. The ICE attorney tried to protect himself from being sued directly by laughably claiming his document forgery naturally flowed from ICE policies and directives. This was Love's attempt to dodge Lanuza's Bivens claim. The court makes short work of his argument.

Love argues that all actions taken by immigration officials in the course of their duties—even criminal acts— are necessarily intertwined with the execution of immigration policy. We decline to entertain such a broad reading of immigration law, as the illogical nature of such a reading is demonstrated by the absurdity of its results. If, for example, an immigration official physically forced himself on an asylum-seeker and offered to help her obtain relief if she kept quiet, we would have no trouble concluding that such criminal conduct bears no relationship to the legitimate execution of immigration policy. Likewise, we will not allow an officer of the immigration court to cloak himself in the government’s protection when he commits the crimes of forgery and perjury.

Love also argued that allowing this claim to continue would result in the court being swamped by similar complaints from aggrieved plaintiffs. The government feels this would be an unacceptable burden on ICE and the courts. The court, again, finds this argument ridiculous. If the court were to take the government's assertions seriously, it would suggest there's something horribly wrong with ICE, not the extension of a Bivens remedy in a non-criminal case.

[W]e do not foresee a “deluge” of potential claimants seeking to avail themselves of this particular Bivens action. [...] Recognizing a Bivens action here will produce widespread litigation only if ICE attorneys routinely submit false evidence, which no party argues is the case. And if this problem is indeed widespread, it demonstrates a dire need for deterrence, validating Bivens’s purpose.

With the Bivens claim established in a new context (immigration hearings rather than just criminal trials), the ICE attorney's qualified immunity assertion is quickly dispensed with.

There can be no doubt that Love—who intentionally, and illegally, submitted falsified evidence in an immigration hearing—is not protected by qualified immunity, as the district court properly held.

[...]

For these reasons, we hold that a Bivens remedy is available here, where a government immigration attorney intentionally submitted a forged document in an immigration proceeding to completely bar an individual from pursuing relief to which he was entitled. Failing to provide a narrow remedy for such an egregious constitutional violation would tempt others to do the same and would run afoul of our mandate to enforce the Constitution.

Love will be held personally responsible for violating the rights of an immigrant seeking naturalization. The record shows Lanuza was exactly the kind of person we want to welcome to the US -- a person who was useful, productive, and by all accounts a model citizen. The only thing he was missing was the citizenship. And an ICE lawyer tried to take it all away and separate Lanuza from his family by submitting a forged document into evidence. The brazen dishonesty is shocking. The capricious cruelty of this move -- completely unwarranted by Lanuza's behavior during his decade in the US -- is what really sticks in your throat.

Filed Under: 9th circuit, deportation, dhs, forgeries, ice, ignacio lanuza, jonathan love, qualified immunity

More Prosecutors Abusing Their Access And Power To Illegally Eavesdrop On Conversations

from the give-'em-enough-leash dept

Last time we checked in with (former) Brooklyn prosecutor Tara Lenich, she was facing state charges for abusing wiretap warrants to listen in on conversations between a police detective and one of her colleagues. This stemmed from what was termed a "personal entanglement" between her and the detective.

The wiretap warrants couldn't be obtained without a judge's signature. Since there was no probable cause for the warrant, no judge would sign them. Lenich had a solution. She just forged the judge's signature on the warrant. And then she kept forging judges' signatures, stretching out her illicit surveillance for more than a year, with a faked signature on every 30-day renewal.

Lenich is now facing federal charges. An indictment handed down by DOJ pretty much repeats the allegation of the state charges, detailing Lenich's long-running, extremely-personal wiretap operation.

As alleged in the indictment, for nearly 16 months between approximately June 2015 and November 2016, Lenich created fraudulent judicial orders as part of her illegal wiretapping scheme. Specifically, she forged the signatures of multiple New York State judges onto the illicitly created judicial orders -- orders that purportedly authorized the KCDA to intercept communications occurring over two cellular telephones. Lenich then misappropriated KCDA equipment to intercept, monitor, and record the communications to and from the two cellular telephones. In furtherance of her scheme, Lenich also created fraudulent search warrants, which she then used to unlawfully obtain text messages relating to the two cellular telephones.

Prosecutors have plenty of power and plenty of tools at their disposal. At some point, they'll be abused. Sometimes the damage is minimal and goes unnoticed. Other times, the abuse is discovered inadvertently. Inevitably, when the discovery is made, it's always something that's been happening for months or years, rather than a recent one-off where someone just made a very poor decision.

This time it's federal prosecutors who may be facing charges for illegal eavesdropping. It's not just a few prosecutors and a few isolated cases of misconduct. As Justin Glawe reports for The Daily Beast, it's an entire prosecutors' office and a whole lot of illegal activity.

A court-appointed investigator has found that the United States Attorney’s Office for Kansas is in possession of hundreds of phone and video recordings of communications between attorneys and their clients, inmates at a privately run prison facility in Leavenworth.

At least 700 attorneys are believed to have been recorded without their knowledge, the investigator’s report submitted to a federal court said. Last week Special Master David Cohen asked to expand his probe to determine whether prosecutors regularly listened to and compiled attorney-client conversations. Already, 227 phone call recordings and at least 30 videos of attorney-client meetings have been discovered in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas City.

These recordings, captured by Securus equipment and obtained by prosecutors from private prison company CoreCivic, contained privileged conversations between inmates and their legal representatives. The US Attorney's dirty little eavesdropping secret was exposed when it hauled in a defense lawyer to accuse her of wrongdoing.

Jackie Rokusek told The Daily Beast she was called to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Kansas City last August, where she said she was told by prosecutors that they had video evidence of her providing her client with confidential information about a drug ring case. Rokusek was given a computer and she watched the video, then she says she accidentally clicked on another file. A window opened, and a video showing another attorney meeting with their client at Leavenworth played. Stunned, Rokusek immediately went to the Federal Public Defender’s office in Kansas City and told them what she’d found.

Prosecutors were hoping to push Rokusek towards recusing herself from a case with this supposedly-damning recording. Instead, it showed federal prosecutors had been listening in on discussions between defense attorneys and their clients and possibly using these to stack the prosecution deck.

It's common knowledge prison phone calls and personal visits are recorded. Signs are posted prominently in prisons informing inmates and visitors of this fact. But just because recordings exist doesn't mean prosecutors can avail themselves of privileged conversations between lawyers and clients. Everything else is fair game.

But the recordings do exist. Securus and CoreCivic aren't going to shut off cameras and mics simply because there's a lawyer involved. And if the recordings exist, sooner or later someone's going to abuse this access. The only side that has this access is the prosecution. The side with the most power can eavesdrop with the willing assistance of those in the incarceration business. If they're careful, this abuse could go on indefinitely. If not, they'll enjoy a good run of slanted prosecutions before the hammer falls.

Filed Under: abuse of power, district attorneys, eavesdropping, forgeries, prison conversations, prosecutors, tara lenich, wiretaps