Going the Wrong Path by Arthur Weissmann

In the email, Weissmann suggested Cogdell’s supposed conflict left Rice two options: “instructs his lawyers who they can speak to and who they cannot ” determine that his attorney has not acted in Rice’s best interests and gets rid of him.”

Weissmann’s email accused Cogdell of having a conflict of interest because Cogdell was seen talking with another defense lawyer. Still more troubling, though, was an email Weissmann sent to William Dolan, one of the two attorneys representing a cooperating witness, Ken Rice, concerning Rice’s second attorney, Dan Cogdell. In a just-unsealed affidavit, one lawyer stated that an FBI agent working for the Enron Task Force overseen by Weissmann warned his client against talking to the Enron defense team because “those are bad guys.” The second attorney stated that an FBI agent had made veiled threats against his client in a separate Enron trial.

Two attorneys, however, were willing to testify. However, because many of the attorneys would speak only off the record to Enron’s attorneys, the courts refused to consider the affidavits sufficient to prove prosecutorial misconduct. Several affidavits unsealed last week catalogued veiled threats made to witnesses the Enron defendants sought to interview. The now unsealed records expose efforts by Weissmann, and the Enron Task Force he led, to intimidate witnesses and to interfere in the attorney-client relationship of a cooperating witness.

Going the Wrong Path by Arthur Weissmann