A federal judge in Brooklyn is requiring the Justice Department to provide a legal basis for dropping a long-running international soccer corruption case and explain the impact on related convictions and penalties.
In an overnight order Friday, US District Judge Pamela Chen gave prosecutors a Feb. 20 deadline to defend their recent request to dismiss two FIFA bribery indictments with prejudice “in the interests of justice.”
The demand for a government brief comes after Bloomberg Law reported last month that DOJ’s solicitor general effectively ordered Brooklyn prosecutors to abandon the sprawling case amid pushback from the district’s Trump-appointed US attorney. By directing the dismissal, the department’s top Supreme Court litigator John Sauer potentially unraveled dozens of other global soccer corruption cases and hundreds of millions of dollars in recovered penalties.
Judge Chen instructed DOJ to discuss the dismissal’s “impact, if any” on “the other defendants convicted of honest services wire fraud crimes in this case” and “on restitution paid to victims and forfeiture paid to the Government.”
Joseph Nocella, the US attorney in the Eastern District of New York, reached out to Sauer to urge him to reconsider, but his office wasn’t given the opportunity for a meeting to present arguments to continue the case, Bloomberg Law reported last month.
Nocella ultimately complied, asking the judge to overturn guilty verdicts of the former chief executive officer of Fox International Channels and an Argentine marketing company that were unanimously upheld by a federal appellate panel in July.
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