Podcast
Investigative audio journalism on legal ethics, attorney discipline, and accountability in the legal profession.
The List That Doesn't Exist
There is a list. The government will not show it to you. It will not confirm your name is on it. It will not tell you why you were added, who added you, or what evidence — if any — was used to justify your inclusion. There is no hearing. There is no appeals process that functions. There is no lawyer you can call who has the legal authority to force disclosure. The list does not officially exist. And yet it has ruined careers, grounded planes, frozen bank accounts, ended marriages, and in at least several documented cases, contributed to the deaths of people who spent years trying to prove they had been wrongly placed on it. This episode is about the federal government's secret watchlisting system — the constellation of lists, databases, and designations that operate entirely outside the constitutional framework that is supposed to govern how the United States treats its own people. It begins with the Terrorist Screening Database, which the FBI maintains and which currently contains over two million records. It examines how names get added — a process that requires no criminal conviction, no indictment, no charge, no judicial review, and in many cases no evidence that would survive even the most permissive evidentiary standard. It looks at the No-Fly List, the Selectee List, and the lesser-known TIDE database — the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment — which feeds all of them and which has been documented to contain names added on the basis of a single informant's unverified tip. This episode names the Americans who have fought back: Rahinah Ibrahim, the Malaysian architect who spent nine years in federal court and finally proved that an FBI agent had checked the wrong box on a form and placed her on the list by mistake — and that the government spent nearly a decade in litigation to avoid admitting it. Mohamed Sheikh Abdirahman Kariye, the Portland imam who was placed on the list and told nothing. Abe Mashal, the Marine veteran and dog trainer from Illinois who discovered he could not board a flight home and spent years demanding to know why. Their stories are not anomalies. They are the system working exactly as designed. This episode also investigates what happened to the watchlisting system after January 2025 — the expansion of domestic terrorism designations, the targeting of immigration attorneys and civil rights advocates, the documented cases of journalists and activists who have begun experiencing unusual screening delays at airports and border crossings after covering stories the current administration found inconvenient. And it asks the question that no senator has been willing to ask in a committee hearing, that no bar association has issued a formal opinion on, and that the mainstream press has largely treated as too complicated to explain: if the government can place your name on a list that destroys your life, without telling you, without charging you, without giving you any meaningful way to challenge it — what exactly is left of the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the due process clause that every law school in America still teaches as foundational? The answer, this episode argues, is less than you think. And the people who designed it that way knew exactly what they were doing. Independently reported. No advertisers. No corporate sponsors. Just the truth.
How Big Law Was Broken: Nine Firms Surrendered. Four Fought. Every Court Ruled the Same Way.
In the spring of 2025, the President of the United States signed executive orders targeting specific named law firms — stripping their lawyers of security clearances, terminating federal contracts with their clients, and banning them from federal buildings. The orders named Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie, Jenner and Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey by name. The grievances were not about misconduct. They were about cases the firms had taken, clients they had represented, lawyers they had once employed. Within weeks, nine of the country’s largest and most prestigious law firms surrendered. They went to the White House, sat across from Donald Trump, and cut deals. Nine firms pledged nearly one billion dollars in free legal services for causes of the president’s choosing — Paul Weiss committing million, Skadden million, Latham million, Kirkland and Ellis million, Sullivan and Cromwell million. In exchange, he agreed not to sign orders against them. Four other firms refused. Perkins Coie, Jenner and Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey sued. Every single one of them won. Federal judges — appointed by Republicans and Democrats alike — unanimously ruled the orders unconstitutional: retaliatory, a tool of personal vengeance, a violation of due process and separation of powers. Every competent constitutional lawyer in the country knew the orders were illegal from the moment they were signed. The settling firms had the same constitutional law partners, the same access to the same case law. They settled anyway. This episode is about what that choice means. It is about the lawyers who folded and the lawyers who refused. It is about a profession that claims to exist to serve the rule of law — and what happened when the rule of law actually came under attack. It is about Brad Karp of Paul Weiss, who built a career describing himself as a defender of progressive values, and what he did when his firm’s survival was on the line. It is about Danielle Sassoon, a 38-year-old federal prosecutor who resigned rather than file a dismissal motion she believed was corrupt. It is about where the American Bar Association was when all of this happened. And it is about what a billion dollars in capitulation has already cost the profession — in talent, in client trust, in the federal courtroom, and in the silence of every bar association that watched it happen and chose to say almost nothing. Independently reported. No advertisers. No corporate sponsors. Just the truth.
The House Always Wins: Congressional Insider Trading and the Law That Was Never Meant to Work
On July 13, 2023, a stock disclosure was filed with the Office of the Clerk of the United States House of Representatives. It recorded the purchase of NVIDIA call options — a leveraged bet worth between $1 million and $5 million — by Paul Pelosi, husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, while the House was actively negotiating the CHIPS and Science Act, the most consequential semiconductor legislation in modern American history. Six months later, the position had returned approximately $5 million. This is where today's episode begins. For twelve years, the STOCK Act — passed with near-unanimous bipartisan support — has promised to hold Congress to the same insider trading rules as the rest of America. In those twelve years, there have been zero criminal convictions. Not one. This episode names the members and documents the trades: Senator Richard Burr, who sold up to $1.72 million in hospitality and airline stocks the same day he received a classified COVID briefing, while publicly saying the virus posed no serious threat. Senator Tommy Tuberville, who traded soybean and grain futures while sitting on the Senate Agriculture Committee, the body with direct oversight over commodity market regulation. Senator David Perdue, who executed over 22,600 individual stock transactions in six years — the highest trading volume of any Senator during that period. Senator Kelly Loeffler, who began selling millions in stock the same afternoon she attended a Senate coronavirus briefing, while simultaneously purchasing shares of a remote-work software company. Then this episode explains why the law doesn't work — the 45-day disclosure window that gives trades weeks to settle before anyone finds out, the 2013 amendment that quietly gutted the online searchable database, the reform bills introduced in every Congress since 2020 that follow an identical pattern: introduction, coverage, committee, dead. And finally: what every major democracy except the United States has already figured out, what a real ban would look like, and what you can do about it. Independently reported. No advertisers. No corporate sponsors. Just the truth.
The Watergate Office: How a President’s Personal Attorney Occupied Federal Property and What That Means for the Rule of Law
There is a law office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building — federal property, steps from the White House — being used by the President’s personal attorneys. Not government lawyers. Not White House Counsel. The President’s private legal team, working out of a taxpayer-funded building to conduct business that exists to protect one man from criminal and civil liability. This episode investigates what The Ethics Reporter is calling the Watergate Office: a pattern of using the physical and institutional infrastructure of the federal government to advance the personal legal interests of the president. We look at who is in that building, what they are working on, the ethics rules they may be violating, and why the line between official government business and personal legal defense has never been more deliberately blurred. From the use of federal staff on personal legal matters, to the weaponization of government resources for political and legal cover, to the silence of bar associations that should be asking hard questions — this is the story of accountability deferred, and what it costs when no one enforces the rules.
Signed in Silence: The One Big Beautiful Bill and the Corruption You Weren't Told About
On July 4, 2025, the President of the United States signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. The date was intentional — branding designed to make you feel like you were watching freedom. What you were actually watching was the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in modern American legislative history, hidden inside nearly 1,000 pages of budget reconciliation language that most members of Congress never read. This episode breaks down what the bill actually does: 70 million Americans losing Medicaid coverage, food assistance gutted nationwide, rural hospitals weeks away from shutting their doors, and a provision buried deep in the bill that strips federal courts of the authority to hold the executive branch in contempt — meaning a president who defies a court order can no longer be legally compelled to comply. The bill added $3.4 trillion to the national debt. It was passed by the same people who refused to extend the child tax credit because it would increase the deficit. It was signed on Independence Day, with fireworks in the background. The Ethics Reporter is here to tell you what was actually in it — because somebody has to. Independently reported. No advertisers. No corporate sponsors. Just the truth.
The Kill Switch, The Lone Dissenter, and the Government That Watches You Drive
In 2021, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — a 1,100-page bill that almost no one read. Buried inside Section 24220 was a federal mandate requiring all new vehicles to be equipped with technology that monitors your driving behavior and can slow or stop your car without your consent. No opt-in. No warrant. No notice. Just government-mandated surveillance installed in every American automobile. This episode investigates how it got there, who voted for it, and why almost no one in Washington has said a word about it — except one man. Thomas Massie, Republican congressman from Kentucky, has cast more lone dissenting votes against government overreach than nearly any member of Congress in modern history. He has voted alone against warrantless surveillance of American citizens, against NDAA provisions expanding military detention authority on U.S. soil, against the so-called Big Beautiful Bill's hidden gutting of Medicaid and SNAP benefits, and against the kill switch mandate while 434 of his colleagues voted yes. He gets attacked by his own party, mocked by mainstream media, and threatened by presidents. He keeps showing up anyway. This is a deep investigation into congressional corruption, civil liberties, the erosion of Fourth Amendment protections, and what happens when the people elected to protect your freedom become the greatest threat to it. Independently reported. No advertisers. No corporate sponsors. Just the truth.
NY Ethics Chair Linked to Corrupt Judge
An in-depth look at the troubling connections between New York's ethics oversight chair and a judge embroiled in corruption allegations. We examine the evidence, the institutional failures, and what it means for legal accountability in the state.