Ryan Salameh, a former FTX executive, tried to withdraw his guilty plea. Later, he asked to withdraw his resignation. His original petition cited a rarely used legal concept.
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Greetings! Ben Here.
Ryan Salam, a former FTX executive sentenced to more than seven years in prison, likes to play legal yo-yo.
In September 2023, he pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations and unlicensed operation of a money-transmitting business.
Almost a year later, he tried to withdraw his conviction. And, on Thursday, he withdrew his plea to withdraw his guilty plea.
Confused? Also Louis Kaplan, the judge presiding over Salameh's case.
Despite the former FTX executive's cold feet, Kaplan ordered the Justice Department to file its brief against Salam's attempt to overturn his conviction.
And Kaplan still wants both sides to appear in court on Sept. 10.
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“The defendant here is what we defense lawyers call 'pleader's remorse,'” Joel Hirschhorn, a longtime defense attorney, told me.
Star-crossed lovers
Salameh is the key to a straw donor scheme — or when funders obscure their political donations through intermediaries — allegedly run by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
Amidst his political cycle and dealings, Salam teamed up with Michelle Bond, who accepted donations from Salam to fuel her failed bid for Congress in 2022.
The federal government investigated the pair, and Salameh alleged that a prosecutor suggested the DOJ would revoke his bond if he pleaded guilty.
However, the government charged her on August 22.
So, Salameh petitioned for a writ of error corum nobis, a legal order in which an unconvicted convict can seek to overturn a conviction when evidence was not available at the time of conviction.
Unsurprisingly, the government backtracked and said Salameh's petition was “self-serving” and false.
Quorum nobis
Lost in legal wrangling, there is history behind the rarely successful legal maneuver that Salame tried to use.
“It was an act of desperation,” Hirschhorn, the defense attorney, said of the former FTX executive's attempt to overturn his conviction.
Hirschhorn said the last time prosecutors successfully invoked coram nobis was in the case of Fred Korematsu, a civil rights activist who resisted imprisonment in a Japanese internment camp in the US during World War II.
In 1943 the Supreme Court ruled against Korematsu for refusing to go to a concentration camp, but a Pro-bono The legal team was able to overturn his conviction in 1983 through a coram nobis petition.
And, in 2014, South Carolina Judge Coram Nobis granted a petition for innocent George Stinney Jr., a 14-year-old black boy, was executed in 1944 for the murders of two white girls.
I don't know if I put Salam in the category of a victim of state-sanctioned torture.
And perhaps, given his attempt to withdraw his petition for a writ of error corum nobis, Salam knows this too.
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