(image via Getty)
You have three guesses for which town in America elected a district attorney facing a major federal tax fraud case and the first two don’t count.
Yes, Orleans Parish DA Jason Williams was a prominent criminal defense attorney and city council member in New Orleans before seeking the district attorney job on a reformist platform. For an office with a troubled history of evidence suppression and wrongful convictions, putting the job in the hands of a defense attorney committed to cleaning shop was a welcome development.
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Alas, because New Orleans cannot avoid controversy, Williams is locked in his own federal criminal case over claimed business expenses over the last several years:
In 2014, for example, Williams paid more than $50,000 in mortgage expenses on two homes he owned, paid approximately $12,000 on car loans for a BMW and Range Rover, made more than $18,000 in life insurance payments and paid $15,000 toward student loans, the government said. In addition to those $95,000 of expenses, Williams withdrew or spent more than $45,000 from his Chase bank debit account, including at least $13,000 on “meals and entertainment.”
All told, Williams ran up at least $140,000 in personal expenses that year, while claiming income of only $85,000 in his tax return, the filing said.
Note that the prominent defense attorney, politician, and now district attorney was still throwing down over $1000/month in student loans in his 40s. And he attended undergrad on a football scholarship so it’s just law school bleeding him dry years after the fact. That really should be a bigger part of this story.
Prosecutors are trying to get evidence of that personal spending in front of the jury.
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For his part, Williams wants the jury to hear about the feds’ rush to charge.
Williams and [firm partner] Burdett argue that the feds quickly pivoted to targeting Williams, then an at-large councilman, while ignoring evidence that [accountant] Timothy bloated business expenses across his stable of tax clients.
“The government ignored the ample evidence — in the form of Henry Timothy’s hundreds of other clients with similar errors on their returns — that Henry Timothy was the wrongdoer here, and that the government rushed to charge based upon a shoddy and incomplete investigation,” they argued.
It would seem as though the existence of a pattern of similar questionable deductions across multiple clients would put a significant wrinkle in the argument that the DA masterminded an effort to game his own tax bill. If he’s like most people — at least those with accountants as opposed to a TurboTax account — he probably handed this accountant a bunch of documents and walked away blissfully unaware of what happened between that moment and the IRS dropping his refund check in his account. Without some compelling evidence that Williams was unique, it seems hard to imagine why this is his fault as opposed to the accountant who already pleaded guilty to a bevy of tax crimes.
Regardless of how the trial, scheduled for January, turns out, congratulations again to New Orleans for failing to go even a year without a major scandal plaguing local government. Never change.
Federal prosecutors ask to show jury details of lavish spending at DA Jason Williams’ tax fraud trial [Fox 8]
DA Jason Williams wants jury to hear evidence of ‘rush to charge’ at federal tax trial [NOLA.com]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.