MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: It’s been more than a week since the U.S. seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and took them to New York to face trial. The Justice Department says Maduro played a central role in a conspiracy to traffic cocaine for decades. NPR’s Ryan Lucas reports on the challenges for prosecutors in trying to prove those

A Practical Guide from Fridman Fels & Soto LLP Federal investigations focused on white collar crime and regulatory enforcement nearly always begin with compulsory demands for documents. At Fridman Fels & Soto LLP, we routinely advise clients who receive grand jury subpoenas, SEC subpoenas, and other regulatory document requests. A critical constitutional protection in this space is the Fifth Amendment’s

Last March, the Supreme Court limited the federal government’s use of a familiar weapon in the arsenal against white-collar crime, 18 U.S.C. § 1014.  The decision, Thompson v. United States, 604 U.S. 408 (2025), eliminated culpability under the law if an individual provides misleading, but not literally false, information to a bank or financial institution in connection with a loan.

We recently discussed the Wells Process, that procedural crossroads where advocacy and enforcement meet. And as it turns out, what’s old is new—and newly open—again. Under Chair Paul Atkins, the SEC has begun to revisit an idea first floated nearly two decades ago: the “open jacket policy”—a term that, in all my years as both an SEC Trial Attorney and

No subject of an SEC investigation wants to be “Wellsed.” A Wells notice from SEC staff signals that an enforcement action is probably coming, and with it, sleepless nights, tough conversations, and a sense that the agency’s spotlight has found you. Yet, unsettling as it is, the Wells Process also opens a narrow but meaningful window—an opportunity for experienced SEC