Philanthropist Philip Esformes attends the fifteenth Annual Harold & Carole Pump Foundation Gala on the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza on Aug. 7, 2015 in Century City, CA.
Tiffany Rose | Getty’s paintings
AND Nursing home owner in Florida whose sentence of 20 years in prison for a $1.3 billion Medicare fraud scheme was commuted by then-President Donald Trump in late 2020, lost a federal court appeal and now appears to face a retrial on six criminal health care charges where the jury has come to a deadlock.
Philip Esformes has appealed his convictions for fraud, money laundering and kickbacks, claiming that the indictment against him ought to be dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct and other reasons.
When charges were brought against him and two others in 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice called it “the one largest case of healthcare fraud ever brought against a person” within the department’s history.
A 3-judge panel on america Court of Appeals for the eleventh Circuit unanimously rejected Esformes appealed the ruling earlier this month.
The choice leaves him on the hook for $44 million in fines and forfeiture orders related to his conviction.
Esformes lawyers they identified they plan to hunt reconsideration of their appeals by the total panel of judges of the eleventh Circuit.
But such requests almost at all times face high possibilities of success.
The identical panel also said it had no jurisdiction to handle Esformes’ argument that Trump’s grant of clemency that freed him from prison barred prosecutors from trying him again on not less than one in all the six counts on which juries failed to achieve a verdict on his trial.
Esformes’ lawyers argued that a latest trial within the case would violate Trump’s pardon act in addition to the double jeopardy clause.
The appeals panel stated in its ruling, “We cannot get to the merits of this argument since the suspended numbers weren’t the idea for the ultimate judgment.”
“With limited exceptions that should not relevant here, we only review final rulings,” the panel wrote.
There is no such thing as a federal law that explicitly states that prosecutors cannot retry a defendant on charges where the jury has stalled after the president commuted the sentence for other charges they were convicted of. Neither is there any federal jurisprudence that addresses this issue.
If Esformes is convicted in a retrial in a South Florida federal court, his lawyers will likely resume arguing in an appeal that the retrial was prohibited by Trump’s clemency.
Esformes’ lawyer, Kim Watterson, said in an announcement to CNBC, “The Court of Appeals didn’t rule on whether President Trump’s pardon of Philip Esformes precludes further prosecution for any reason.”
“Moderately, the tribunal ruled that – as an appellate court – it didn’t have the obligatory jurisdiction to determine the clemency argument at this point, explicitly stating that it didn’t come to the merits of the argument,” Watterson said.
Esformes’ efforts to have his case dismissed had the backing of a bunch of Republican former U.S. attorneys general, including Edmund Meese, John Ashcroft, Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzalez, in addition to Louis Freeh, a former FBI director and federal judge.
This group said prosecutors within the Esformes case violated rules that barred them from using communications between defendants and their lawyers.
In its ruling, the appellate court panel noted that prosecutors “were not only reviewing privileged documents
but in addition tried to make use of them twice against Esformes before the trial.
The panel also found that a lower court judge had found that prosecutors had misconducted and had also attempted “in bad faith” to obscure that conduct.
However the appeals panel noted that that judge and a federal district court judge “rejected Esformes’ request to dismiss the indictment or disqualify members of the prosecution team.”
The panel said it agreed with prosecutors’ arguments within the appeal that Esformes had “didn’t prove ‘apparent bias’ because of interference together with his privilege” of privacy when coping with lawyers.
“Thus, it might be inappropriate to dismiss the indictment or disqualify the prosecution team,” the panel ruled.
Esformes, who was in prison on the time, was one in all dozens of individuals granted executive clemency by Trump in his final months in office.
The Department of Justice said the Esformes scam spanned twenty years and involved an estimated $1.3 billion in losses from fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims.
With the proceeds from this program, Esformes bought a $1.6 million Ferrari Apera automotive, a $360,000 Greubel Forsey watch, and likewise paid for ladies’s escorts, the indictment said.
Prosecutors also said Esformes paid $300,000 in bribes to Jerome Allen, who on the time was a men’s basketball coach on the University of Pennsylvania, who helped get Esformes’ son admitted to the celebrated Wharton School of Business by falsely claiming to be respected basketball player.
When Esformes was convicted in 2019 during a trial for 20 crimes he faced, the FBI agent answerable for the Miami field office said he was “a person driven by almost limitless greed.”
“Esformes transported patients at its facilities in poor condition, where they received inadequate or unnecessary treatment, after which incorrectly billed Medicare and Medicaid,” the agent said.
“Taking his nefarious conduct further, he bribed doctors and regulators to expedite his criminal conduct,” the agent said.