Philanthropist Philip Esformes attends the fifteenth annual Harold & Carole Pump Foundation gala on the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza on August 7, 2015 in Century City, California.
Tiffany Rose | Getty Images
A Florida nursing house proprietor whose 20-year jail sentence for a $1.3 billion Medicare fraud scheme was commuted by then-President Donald Trump in late 2020 has misplaced a federal courtroom attraction and now seems headed for retrial on six health-care legal prices {that a} jury beforehand deadlocked on.
Philip Esformes had appealed his convictions for fraud, cash laundering, and receiving unlawful kickbacks, claiming the indictment in opposition to him must be dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct, and on different grounds.
When prices have been filed in opposition to him and two others in 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice referred to as it the “largest single criminal health-care fraud case ever brought against individuals” in division historical past.
A 3-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the eleventh Circuit unanimously rejected Esformes’ attraction in a ruling earlier this month.
The resolution leaves him on the hook for $44 million in fines and forfeiture orders associated to his conviction.
Esformes’ attorneys have indicated they plan to request a rehearing of their attraction by your entire line-up of the judges on the eleventh Circuit.
But such requests nearly at all times face lengthy odds in opposition to success.
The similar panel additionally stated it didn’t have jurisdiction to deal with Esformes’ argument that Trump’s grant of clemency, which freed him from jail, bars prosecutors from re-trying him on a minimum of one rely of the six prices that jurors failed to achieve a verdict on at his trial.
Esformes’ attorneys had argued {that a} new trial on that may violate Trump’s clemency motion, in addition to the double jeopardy clause.
The appeals panel stated in its ruling, “We cannot reach the merits of this argument because the hung counts were not the basis of a final judgment.”
“With limited exceptions not relevant here, we review only final judgments,” the panel wrote.
There is not any federal statute that explicitly states that prosecutors can not retry a defendant on prices a jury deadlocked on after a president commuted their sentence for different counts on which they have been convicted. Nor is there federal case legislation that addresses that query.
If Esformes is convicted at a retrial in federal courtroom in Southern Florida, it’s possible that his attorneys will relaunch their argument on attraction that retrial was barred by Trump’s clemency.
Esformes’ lawyer Kim Watterson, in an announcement to CNBC, stated: “The Court of Appeals did not decide the question of whether President Trump’s grant of clemency to Philip Esformes bars further prosecution on any counts.”
“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 stated.
Esformes’ effort to have his case dismissed had backing from a gaggle of Republican former U.S. Attorneys General, amongst them Edmund Meese, John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzalez, in addition to Louis Freeh, a former FBI director and federal choose.
That group stated prosecutors in Esformes’ case had violated guidelines that barred them from utilizing communications between defendants and their attorneys.
In its ruling, the appeals courtroom panel famous that prosecutors “not only reviewed privileged documents
but also tried to use them against Esformes before trial on two occasions.”
And the panel additionally stated {that a} lower-court choose had discovered the prosecutors engaged in misconduct, in addition to a “bad-faith” effort to obfuscate that conduct.
But the appeals panel famous that that choose, and a federal district courtroom choose “rejected Esformes’s request to dismiss the indictment or to disqualify members of the prosecution team.”
The panel stated that it agreed with prosecutors’ arguments on attraction that Esformes had “failed to prove ‘demonstrable prejudice’ from the intrusions on his privilege” of privateness in communications with attorneys.
“So dismissal of the indictment or disqualification of the prosecution team would have been improper,” the panel dominated.
Esformes, who had been in jail on the time, was one of many dozens of individuals to obtain government clemency from Trump in his final months of workplace.
The Justice Department has stated Esformes’ fraud scheme spanned twenty years and concerned an estimated $1.3 billion in losses as the results of fraudulent claims to Medicare and Medicaid.
With the proceeds of that scheme, Esformes purchased a $1.6 million Ferrari Apera vehicle, a $360,000 Greubel Forsey watch, and likewise paid for feminine escorts, the indictment stated.
Prosecutors even have stated Esformes paid out $300,000 in bribes to Jerome Allen, who on the time was the University of Pennsylvania’s males’s basketball coach, who helped get Esformes’ son admitted to the college’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 legal counts he confronted, an FBI agent in control of Miami’s subject workplace stated 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 stated.
“Taking his despicable conduct further, he bribed doctors and regulators to advance his criminal conduct,” the agent stated.