Celeb Lawyer Thrown off Wilkes CaseFrom The San Diego Union-Tribune:
Mark Geragos, the high-profile lawyer for indicted Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes, was removed from the case by a federal judge yesterday because he refused to go through a background check that would allow him to see classified information.
Wilkes, remember, is accused of bribing Dusty Foggo, the former executive director of the CIA. Without access to classified information, Geragos couldn’t represent his client, prosecutors said. But Geragos, who represented Michael Jackson, Gary Condit, and other celebrities, took a stand, telling the judge, “I am just not going to, under any circumstances, submit myself to a security clearance so I can represent my client in federal district court.” So the judge tossed him off the case. The Union-Trib says that Geragos may appeal.
That puts Wilkes, who’s indicted for bribing Duke Cunningham in addition to Foggo, in a jam. Before Cunningham went down in 2005, Wilkes was swimming in government contracts. But it’s been a long time, and Geragos, you can be sure, doesn’t come cheap. Wilkes told the judge that his resources were “stretched beyond the point of breaking,” the SDUT reports.
But that wasn’t all the bad news Wilkes had yesterday.
Geragos had launched an offensive against the U.S. attorney’s office there, saying that Carol Lam, the fired U.S. attorney who indicted Wilkes just two days before she was forced to step down, had leaked word of the pending indictment to the media in order to strike back at her Justice Department superiors. Geragos argued that the leaks had so prejudiced the grand jury that the case against Wilkes should be dismissed.
Yesterday, the judge revealed that the U.S. Attorney in Sacramento, who’d launched an investigation into the leaks, said that “no further investigation was warranted.”