Philanthropist Philip Esformes attends the 15th Annual Harold & Carole Pump Foundation Gala at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza on August 7, 2015 in Century City, California.
Tiffany Rose | Getty Images
Convicted Medicare fraudster Philip Esformes has reached a plea deal that could resolve a long-running, complicated criminal case that includes former President Donald Trump’s commutation of his 20-year prison sentence in 2020, court records show.
The terms of Esformes’ plea agreement with the Justice Department were not included in documents filed Thursday.
A Miami federal judge has scheduled Esformes’ change of hearing and sentencing for Feb. 22. When the hearing is changed, the defendant typically pleads guilty.
Lawyers for Esformes, who is free on $50 million bail, did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment, saying only: “Any agreement would have to be accepted by a judge.”
The expected plea comes after nearly two years of complaints from Esformes supporters that federal prosecutors, because of their anger over Trump’s commutation, unfairly punished him as they sought a new trial against him this year on charges that were not met in his first trial a verdict resulted in his prison sentence.
Esformes’ lawyers said they knew of no other case in which the Justice Department retried a defendant whose sentence was commuted by a president in the same case.
A plea deal in this case would allow Esformes to avoid another trial — and, if convicted, another potentially serious prison sentence — as well as appeals that could take years to resolve.
Esformes, who then owned more than 30 nursing and care facilities in the Miami area, was first indicted in July 2016 in what the Justice Department called a $1 billion, decades-long Medicare fraud and money laundering scheme.
Prosecutors at the time said it was “the largest single health care fraud case ever brought against individuals,” according to the DOJ.
“Esformes sent patients in poor condition through his facilities, where they received inadequate or unnecessary care, and then improperly billed them for Medicare and Medicaid,” FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Denise Stemen said in 2019.
“To further his despicable behavior, he bribed doctors and regulators to further his criminal behavior and even bribed a college official in exchange for his son being admitted to this university,” Stemen said.
Esformes, who was considered a flight risk, was detained after his arrest and remained there until his trial in April 2019.
Read more about CNBC’s politics coverage
At trial, a jury convicted him of 20 counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, receiving kickbacks, money laundering, bribery and obstruction of justice.
However, the jury was unable to reach a verdict in six other crimes.
A judge sentenced Esformes to 20 years in prison and fined him $44 million. Shortly thereafter, he appealed his conviction.
After his conviction, the Justice Department showed no apparent interest in retrying him on the six counts on which the jury deadlocked. In cases where a defendant has been sentenced to significant prison time for crimes for which he or she was convicted, prosecutors typically do not seek a retrial on stalled charges.
But the DOJ’s stance on Esformes after Trump commuted his sentence, but not his fine, as part of a series of other commutations and pardons the Republican president granted to numerous federal convicts in his final weeks in office in late 2020 and early 2021.
The DOJ said in April 2021 that it would seek to retry Esformes in the six stalled cases.
That decision was condemned by Esformes supporters who saw it as a circumvention of Trump’s commutation order, and a group of former Republican U.S. attorneys general supported his efforts to avoid a retrial.
Esformes’ lawyers argued that the retrial was prohibited because it would violate Trump’s clemency order and also the U.S. Constitution’s double jeopardy clause. They also argued that it was barred for prosecutorial misconduct because prosecutors reviewed confidential communications with Esformes’ lawyers before the trial.
Joseph Tacopina, a New York criminal defense attorney, told CNBC in August 2022, “There’s no question in my mind that…” [DOJ’s} flagrant disregard of President Trump’s clemency order is motivated by acrimony towards him.” Tacopina said that prosecutors had “an obvious vendetta” against Trump due to the Esformes’ commutation.
“He’s clearly a political casualty of partisan games,” the lawyer said of Esformes.
Tacopina later represented Trump in a New York criminal case, and a civil lawsuit, but recently ended his work for the former president.
The DOJ in court filings has noted that a commutation of a prison sentence, which releases a prison, is not the same as pardoning a defendant, which removes their criminal conviction. Prosecutors also said that Trump’s commuting of Esformes’ prison sentence did not bar them from retrying him on the criminal counts that jurors deadlocked on.
“If President Trump had intended to grant Esformes a pardon, or if the President had intended to grant Esformes clemency on the hung counts, he would have communicated as much in the clemency warrant,” prosecutors wrote in an appeals court brief.
Last year, an Atlanta federal appeals court rejected Esformes’ appeal of his original conviction in 2019. The same appeals court panel said it would not decide the question of whether a second trial on the deadlock counts was barred by Trump’s clemency because there had not yet been a verdict on those counts.
In December, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Esformes’ appeal in the case, a rejection that cleared the way for him to be retried in 2024 on the remaining charges.
That retrial would be canceled if Esformes follows through on the plan to plead in the case, as revealed in Thursday’s court filing.
Source link
2024-02-01 23:40:44
www.cnbc.com