We've told you that Joe Cassano, who ran the AIG unit that made those credit default swaps, has hired a lawyer in connection with an ongoing Justice Department investigation.

And from the looks of the lawyer in question, Cassano is taking the charges very seriously indeed.

F. Joseph Warin, who works out of the Washington, DC office of the prestigious Los Angeles-based law firm Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, is, according to his bio, a former assistant US Attorney who specializes, perhaps unsurprisingly, in white collar crime and securities enforcement, and chairs the firm's White Collar Defense and Investigations Practice Group*.

Investigators are reported to be examining, in particular, whether Cassano and other AIG execs committed fraud by intentionally making misleading public statements about the firm's level of exposure to losses on its credit default swaps.

Warin didn't return a call from TPMmuckraker. But his assistant asked, unprompted, whether we were calling about Cassano.

Sounds like he's getting a lot of calls.

*This sentence has been corrected from an earlier version, which incorrectly reported that Gibson, Dunn is based in Washington, DC.