“Lori Loughlin case should be dismissed if the prosecutors cheated”

That’s the title of my latest piece in the Hill. Here’s the intro:

Putting aside whether we really want cheating on a test or lying on a resume to count as a federal crime, we can all agree that prosecutors should not be able to cheat to obtain a conviction — especially in a case about cheating.
Yet it now appears that federal prosecutors and agents in the Lori Loughlin case may not only have been cheating but then suppressing the evidence of their cheating until after they failed in trying to get her to plead guilty.Recall that Loughlin and her husband are accused of bribing coaches at the University of Southern California with $500,000 to get their two daughters admitted. The money, according to the prosecutors, would go through the mastermind of the whole affair, Rick Singer, and then to the coaches. Loughlin has said from the beginning that she never thought that her money was going directly to a coach; instead she thought she was making a donation to the school or to the athletic department, which would be entirely legal. The prosecutors openly scoffed at this defense, saying that they had recordings of Loughlin and her husband which demonstrated that they knew the money was going to bribe the coach.They did so even though there was documentary evidence that appears to back up exactly what the defense was saying.