I am biased here, I admit. I like Tom and am rooting for him. I think the trial was way overblown and the consequences are absurd. I'm glad to see that he has a great appellate lawyer and lots of amicus supporting him. You can read those briefs here and here.
A former federal prosecutor who once served as personal counsel to President Donald Trump backed a new trial for convicted former Supreme Court lawyer Thomas Goldstein, in a friend-of-the-court brief outlining pervasive “prosecutorial misconduct.”
The brief, filed by amicus John Dowd in support of Goldstein’s Fourth Circuit bid for a new trial on federal tax and mortgage fraud charges, condemns what it calls the government’s “convict-by-any-means-necessary approach.”
Goldstein’s appeal identifies what it calls “fatal flaws” in the prosecution — withheld evidence, problematic jury instructions, and improperly excluded evidence — but the conduct underlying those problems “was only part of a far broader pattern of impropriety,” Dowd wrote.
From start to finish, he said, the Justice Department “withheld evidence, mischaracterized the facts, and unpredictably shifted positions to find any workable way to target Goldstein.”
The amicus brief also claims the government misled the court repeatedly, including in its efforts to extend the statute of limitations on some of the charged offenses.
Dowd was a prosecutor in DOJ’s Tax Division and chief of an organized crime strike force in the Criminal Division before entering private practiceHe is well-known for representing Trump, for a time, in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion with Russia. He resigned while the investigation was still underway.
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