Monday, December 18, 2017

Judge Alex Kozinski Retires Suddenly After Being Accused By Many Women of Sexual Misconduct

Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, pictured in 2003. Six women — all former clerks or externs in the 9th Circuit — alleged to The Washington Post in recent weeks that Kozinski, now 67, subjected them to a range of inappropriate sexual conduct or comments. (Paul Sakuma/AP)
One down, and all the rest of the judges we know who are corrupt should be worried. But we know they are not.
Judicial corruption is rampant in America, and the quick departure of Judge Kozinski gives us at least some hope that more people in the judicial arena will follow.

See 

Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is Accused by Six Women of Sexual Misconduct


and,


Betsy Combier
betsy@advocatz.com

Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski
Judge Alex Kozinski, Apologizing Amid Harassment Claims, Retires Immediately
Federal appeals judge Alex Kozinski, beset by allegations of sexual misconduct, on Monday announced his retirement effective immediately.
By Marcia Coyle | December 18, 2017 at 09:40 AM | Originally published on The Recorder


Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski
Federal appeals judge Alex Kozinski, beset by allegations of sexual misconduct, on Monday announced his retirement effective immediately.
The Washington Post reported Friday evening that nine women, in addition to six who earlier lodged allegations against the longtime Ninth Circuit judge, accused him of making inappropriate comments. Four of the women claim he touched them inappropriately.
Those allegations followed action by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. on Friday in which he transferred a complaint initiated by Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Sidney Thomas to the Second Circuit. The Judicial Council of the Second Circuit would have overseen the misconduct investigation.
In a statement released by his lawyer, Susan Estrich of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Kozinski said he “always had a broad sense of humor and a candid way of speaking to both male and female law clerks alike. In doing so, I may not have been mindful enough of the special challenges and pressures that women face in the workplace. It grieves me to learn that I caused any of my clerks to feel uncomfortable; this was never my intent. For this I sincerely apologize.”
Kozinski said family and friends had urged him to remain on the bench, at least long enough to defend himself from the sexual misconduct allegations.
“But I cannot be an effective judge and simultaneously fight this battle,” he said in the statement. “Nor would such a battle be good for my beloved federal judiciary. And so I am making the decision to retire, effective immediately.”
Kozinski was appointed to the appeals court in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan. He served as chief judge from November 2007 until December 2014.
Kozinski’s full statement is posted below:
It has been an unparalleled honor to serve as a federal judge for more than thirty-five years. I firmly believe that a strong judiciary, free from political pressures, is vital to the preservation of this great nation. I found in this country, and in my work, opportunities and satisfaction that I never thought imaginable when I arrived here, at the age of 12, a refugee from Communism. I am grateful to my colleagues with whom I have had the privilege of serving, and to the countless hard-working lawyers who have appeared before me. I have learned so much from them all and will be forever grateful for their professionalism, intellectual rigor, and in many instances their steadfast friendship.
It has also been my privilege to help train the best and the brightest of several generations of new attorneys. I was made better by working with them. My clerks went on to stellar careers in law, business and academics. Their success has made me proud and I am gratified by the outpouring of support I have received privately from so many of them.
Still, I’ve always had a broad sense of humor and a candid way of speaking to both male and female law clerks alike. In doing so, I may not have been mindful enough of the special challenges and pressures that women face in the workplace. It grieves me to learn that I caused any of my clerks to feel uncomfortable; this was never my intent. 
For this I sincerely apologize.
A couple of years ago, as I reached the age when several of my colleagues had decided to take senior status or retire, I began considering whether the time had come for me to move on as well.  Family and friends have urged me to stay on, at least long enough to defend myself. But I cannot be an effective judge and simultaneously fight this battle. Nor would such a battle be good for my beloved federal judiciary. And so I am making the decision to retire, effective immediately.
Read more:


Saturday, December 9, 2017

The Story Now is Attorney David Boies, the New York Times, and the RICO Lawsuit

I find it interesting that the New York Times had a "relationship" with David Boies' law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.

What does it mean the NYT had a relationship with a major law firm and one which covered up Harvey Weinstein's actions?

Betsy Combier
betsy@advocatz.com

David Boies

The New York Times said late Tuesday that it had ended its relationship with David Boies and his firm after new details emerged about Boies’ work for Harvey Weinstein.
By Miriam Rozen | November 07, 2017 | Originally published on The American Lawyer

UPDATE: The New York Times said Tuesday night that it had “terminated its relationship” with Boies Schiller Flexner. The paper’s statement said in part: “We never contemplated that the law firm would contract with an intelligence firm to conduct a secret spying operation aimed at our reporting and our reporters. Such an operation is reprehensible, and the Boies firm must have known that its existence would have been material to our decision whether to continue using the firm. Whatever legalistic arguments and justifications can be made, we should have been treated better by a firm that we trusted.” Our earlier story is below.
In a message to lawyers and employees at his firm on Tuesday, David Boies said that Harvey Weinstein is no longer a client, and that Boies “would never knowingly participate in an effort to intimidate or silence women or anyone else.”

But law school ethics professors said that multiple questions arise for Boies in the wake of a New Yorker report that the Boies Schiller Flexner chairman contracted with former Israeli Mossad agents to stymie efforts by The New York Times to expose Weinstein’s pattern of alleged sexual harassment.
“These are all serious issues. David Boies has a great reputation. I’m not going to say he crossed the line, but there are some serious issues,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
Top among those issues, according to Levenson: Could Boies’ actions on Weinstein’s behalf have deterred women from coming forward, potentially even skirting the line of suppressing witness testimony?
Levenson said The New Yorker article also raises questions about Boies’ adherence to obligations to clients and former clients about confidentiality, and about potential conflicts of interest if his work for Weinstein undermined the work of the Times, which was also a Boies Schiller client.
Boies did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Tuesday. In his email to staff, Boies said his firm’s engagement letter with the newspaper “made clear that we needed to be able to continue to represent clients adverse to the Times on matters unrelated to the work we were doing for the Times.”
“There is a lot coming at us fast and furious here,” Levenson cautioned. And she noted that a fine line separates lawyers’ efforts to determine what allegations they may face on the one hand, and actual suppression of witness testimony on the other.
Almost immediately after The New Yorker story was posted, The New York Times lashed out at Boies, whose firm represented the newspaper in two pending matters and a third that has been concluded, according to a Times spokeswoman.
“We learned today that the law firm of Boies Schiller and Flexner secretly worked to stop our reporting on Harvey Weinstein at the same time as the firm’s lawyers were representing us in other matters. We consider this intolerable conduct, a grave betrayal of trust, and a breach of the basic professional standards that all lawyers are required to observe. It is inexcusable and we will be pursuing appropriate remedies,” the Times said late Monday.
Levenson said the conflicts question is “attenuated,” since Boies was not representing the newspaper on a matter directly related to Weinstein. But, she said, “Clearly he has a client who feels like he was playing both sides.”
In his own statement on Tuesday, Boies described what he told Weinstein when he learned about the Times running a story with allegations about the movie producer’s predatory behavior to women:
“I told Mr. Weinstein at that time that neither I nor the firm would represent him in this matter, and he hired several other lawyers to represent him. I also told Mr. Weinstein that the Times story could not be stopped through threats or influence; the only way that the story could be stopped was by proving it was not true.
Mr. Weinstein, together with the lawyers representing him, selected private investigators to assist him and drafted a contract. He asked me to execute the contract on his behalf. I was told at the time that the purposes of hiring the private investigators were to ascertain exactly what the actress was accusing Mr. Weinstein of having done, and when, and to try to find facts that would prove the charge to be false and thereby stop the story. I did not (nor did the firm) select the investigators (at least one of which had been used by Mr. Weinstein previously) or direct their work; that was done by Mr. Weinstein and his other counsel.”
Such a fulsome account of what Boies told a client and what that client asked raises questions about client confidentiality, Levenson said. “Has he been revealing confidential information, information he learned by helping a client on a case?” she asked.
Ronald Minkoff, a partner in Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz who leads the firm’s professional responsibility group, raised a separate concern about the activities of the investigators Boies hired. He said they appeared to engage in “pretexting,” or contacting people under false pretexts and identities. “It’s pretty clear that is something to avoid,” he said.
He suggested that Boies retained the investigators, rather than Weinstein doing so directly, to keep the information they gained under attorney-client privilege protections. Because Boies signed the contract, Minkoff said, “He was responsible for them.”
“He was either not supervising them and they were off doing things they should not be doing. Or he was supervising them. Either way, he was not steering the ship the way he should have been,” Minkoff said.
Deborah Rhode, who directs the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford Law School, offered an even harsher assessment.
“What was he thinking? This is a clear violation of ethical rules and ethical norms to run opposition research on a current client,” Rhode said.
Boies’ statement that he did not supervise the investigators “is a mitigating factor,” not necessarily an entirely persuasive one though, she said.
“You have to have known that if you are working with organizations like those, there will be ethical issues,” she said.
If there’s a broader lesson based on what’s known so far, said Loyola’s Levenson, it’s that there are limits to client service.
“The biggest problem is getting sucked in by a client,” she said. “You might put on blinders and take risks you wouldn’t ordinarily take and not look as closely at ethical issues.”

Will Biglaw Firms Get Caught In The Weinstein RICO Lawsuit?

Which firms could be involved?

Harvey Weinstein, David Boies
| December 06, 2017


newly filed racketeering lawsuit claims several law firms, including K&L Gates and Boies Schiller Flexner, were key participants in an alleged scheme to cover up widespread sexual misconduct on the part of disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
Six women, represented by Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, filed a proposed class action in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, accusing Weinstein, the Weinstein Co., the company’s board members, Miramax Film Corp. and others of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The complaint parallels a similar one filed last month in California, with both complaints alleging that advisers and others in Weinstein’s orbit—referred to as members of a “Weinstein Sexual Enterprise”—helped “facilitate and conceal” a pattern of unwanted sexual conduct perpetrated by the film producer.

Prominent litigator David Boies and his law firm Boies Schiller had already been in the public spotlight over his work for Weinstein following a New Yorker report that the lawyer contracted with an Israeli private intelligence agency, Black Cube, as it was trying to derail a potential New York Times story about Weinstein’s predatory behavior toward women. That scrutiny continued this week when Boies’ actions came up again in a lengthy New York Times article looking at people who helped Weinstein keep his misconduct under wraps.
But the successive RICO suits also suggest that the fallout from the Weinstein scandal is expanding to include other legal advisers.
Although it does not specifically name lawyers or law firms as defendants, Wednesday’s complaint casts the lawyers and law firms surrounding Weinstein—including Boies Schiller, K&L Gates, U.K.-based BCL Burton Copeland, and Israel-based Gross, Kleinhendler, Hodak, Halevy, Greenberg & Co.—as central figures in the alleged scheme to cover up his misconduct. The firms are described as “co-conspirators” along with others that included Weinstein’s business associates and private intelligence firms.
“The law firm participants provided cover and shield to the Weinstein participants by contracting with the intelligence participants on behalf of the Weinstein participants and permitting the Weinstein participants to protect evidence of Weinstein’s misconduct under the guise of the attorney-client privilege or the doctrine of attorney work product when that was not the case,” the complaint said. “The law firm participants also approved the intelligence participants’ ‘operational methodologies,’ which were illegal.”
In an emailed statement on Thursday, K&L Gates described the complaint’s allegations about the firm as untrue and denied that it ever worked for Weinstein.
“We are aware of the lawsuits filed against Harvey Weinstein and others that mention K&L Gates. K&L Gates is not named as a defendant in the lawsuits but the suits attempt to claim that the firm was involved in a scheme to facilitate or cover up Mr. Weinstein’s activities. The claims relating to K&L Gates are false. K&L Gates has never represented Mr. Weinstein or any other person or entity concerning investigations or inquiries relating to Mr. Weinstein,” the firm’s statement said.
Representatives for the other law firms did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Previously, Boies Schiller provided a statement to affiliate publication The Recorder indicating that it would refrain from commenting on Weinstein-related matters in connection with a request from the producer’s current defense lawyer, Benjamin Brafman.

Friday, December 8, 2017

Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is Accused by Six Women of Sexual Misconduct

Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, pictured in 2003. Six women — all former clerks or externs in the 9th Circuit — alleged to The Washington Post in recent weeks that Kozinski, now 67, subjected them to a range of inappropriate sexual conduct or comments. (Paul Sakuma/AP)
Prominent appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski accused of sexual misconduct
 
A former clerk for Judge Alex Kozinski said the powerful and well-known jurist, who for many years served as chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, called her into his office several times and pulled up pornography on his computer, asking if she thought it was photoshopped or if it aroused her sexually.
Heidi Bond, who clerked for Kozinski from 2006 to 2007, said the porn was not related to any case. One set of images she remembered was of college-age students at a party where “some people were inexplicably naked while everyone else was clothed.” Another was a sort of digital flip book that allowed users to mix and match heads, torsos and legs to create an image of a naked woman.
Bond is one of six women — all former clerks or externs in the 9th Circuit — who alleged to The Washington Post in recent weeks that Kozinski, now 67 and still serving as a judge on the court, subjected them to a range of inappropriate sexual conduct or comments. She is one of two former clerks who said Kozinski asked them to view porn in his chambers.
In a statement, Kozinski said: “I have been a judge for 35 years and during that time have had over 500 employees in my chambers. I treat all of my employees as family and work very closely with most of them. I would never intentionally do anything to offend anyone and it is regrettable that a handful have been offended by something I may have said or done.”
When Bond was clerking, Kozinski was on the precipice of becoming chief judge for the 9th Circuit — the largest federal appeals court circuit in the country, handling cases for a large swath of the western United States as well as Hawaii and Alaska. The other people who alleged that Kozinski behaved inappropriately toward them worked in the 9th Circuit both before and after her, up to 2012.
Bond said she knew that she was to come to the judge’s office when her phone beeped twice. She said she tried to answer the judge’s inquiries as succinctly and matter-of-factly as possible. Bond was then in her early 30s and is now 41.
If the question was about photoshopping, Bond said, she would focus on minor details of the image. If Kozinski asked whether the images aroused her, Bond said, she would respond: “No, this kind of stuff doesn’t do anything for me. Is there anything else you need?” She said she recalled three instances when the judge showed her porn in his office.
“I was in a state of emotional shock, and what I really wanted to do was be as small as possible and make as few movements as possible and to say as little as possible to get out,” Bond said.
Bond, who went on to clerk for the Supreme Court and now works as a romance novelist writing under the name Courtney Milan, and another clerk, Emily Murphy, who worked for a different judge on the 9th Circuit and is now a law professor, described their experiences in on-the-record interviews. The other four women spoke on the condition that their names and some other identifying information not be published, out of fear that they might face retaliation from Kozinski or others.
Kozinski, who served as the chief judge on the 9th Circuit from 2007 to 2014, remains a prominent judge, well known in the legal community for his colorful written opinions. His clerks often win prestigious clerkships at the Supreme Court.
Murphy, who clerked for Judge Richard Paez, said Kozinski approached her when she was talking with a group of other clerks at a reception at a San Francisco hotel in September 2012. The group had been discussing training regimens, and Murphy said she commented that the gym in the 9th Circuit courthouse was nice because other people were seldom there.
Kozinski, according to Murphy and two others present at the time who spoke to The Post, said that if that were the case, she should work out naked. Those in the group tried to change the subject, Murphy and the others present said, but Kozinski kept steering the conversation toward the idea of Murphy exercising without clothes.
“It wasn’t just clear that he was imagining me naked, he was trying to invite other people — my professional colleagues — to do so as well,” Murphy said. “That was what was humiliating about it.”
Murphy, who was 30 at the time of the incident and is now 36, provided The Post with a 2012 email showing that she told a mentor about what had happened at the time. Two of Murphy’s friends who were present at the time of the encounter, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also confirmed her account. Bond, similarly, provided emails showing that she told a friend what had happened at least as of 2008.
The friend, fellow romance novelist Eve Ortega, provided the same emails. She confirmed that Bond had told her years ago that Kozinski made inappropriate sexual comments and showed her porn.
Kozinski has previously been embroiled in controversies relating to sexually explicit material.
In 2008, the Los Angeles Times revealed that Kozinski had maintained an email list that he used to distribute crude jokes, some of them sexually themed, and that he had a publicly accessible website that contained pornographic images.
A judicial investigation ultimately found that Kozinski did not intend to allow the public to see the material, and that instead the judge and his son were careless in protecting a private server from being accessible on the Internet.
Anthony J. Scirica, then the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, wrote at the time that Kozinski’s “conduct exhibiting poor judgment with respect to this material created a public controversy that can reasonably be seen as having resulted in embarrassment to the institution of the federal judiciary.”
According to Scirica’s report, Kozinski said that he used the server to keep a variety of items he received by email, including TV commercials, video clips, cartoons, games and song parodies.
Of the sexually explicit files, Kozinski testified: “Some I thought were odd or funny or bizarre, but mostly I don’t have a very good reason for holding onto them. I certainly did not send them to anyone else or ask anyone to send me similar files,” according to Scirica’s report.
Kozinski also testified that he “does not visit and has no interest in pornographic websites,” according to Scirica’s report. He separately apologized for any embarrassment he had caused in maintaining the email list and said he had stopped sending the jokes.
Bond said the images Kozinski showed her seemed to come from his private server, because he pulled them from a site containing the term “kozinski.com.”
The other Kozinski clerk who said the judge showed her porn declined to provide specifics out of fear that Kozinski would be able to identify her. Bond said Kozinski also showed her a chart he claimed he and his friends from college had made to list the women with whom they had had sexual relations.
Bond said either Kozinski or his administrative assistant reached out to her around the time of the news reporting on his private server, asking if she would be willing to defend his character. She wrote Ortega about the inquiry in 2008, according to emails the women shared with The Post, and Ortega responded that it “sounds like a very bad idea to me.”
“I know he brought you into his office to show you porn, I know he made sexual innuendos to you. I know this because you told me so in DC, and you even used the words sexual harassment,” Ortega wrote. “You said you would warn off other women thinking of clerking for him. And if there’s a woman out there he harassed worse than you, do you really want to be pitted against her? Because that’s what it would be. I’m worried that this is what he’s asking you to do — to be the female, intelligent face of his defense and make whoever it is accusing him look like a stupid slut, and then he hopefully never has to actually address those allegations.”
Kozinski was born in Romania to Holocaust survivors in 1950, and the family fled the communist state when he was a boy. Decades ago, long before he was a federal judge, he appeared on the television show “The Dating Game,” planting a kiss on a surprised young woman who selected him for a date. He is married and has three sons.
Kozinski was appointed to the 9th Circuit by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He is an atypical federal appeals court judge — authoring irreverent opinions and not shying, as many of his colleagues do, from media appearances.
He styled one opinion in 2012 not as a traditional concurrence or dissent, but instead as “disagreeing with everyone.” He famously wrote during a trademark dispute between the toy company Mattel and the record company that produced the 1997 song “Barbie Girl,” “The parties are advised to chill.”
In more recent years, Kozinski wrote that using lethal injections to impose the death penalty was “a misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and beautiful — like something any one of us might experience in our final moments,” and he told the Los Angeles Times, “I personally think we should go to the guillotine, but shooting is probably the right way to go.”
The Post reached out to dozens of Kozinski’s former clerks and externs for this story. Many of those who returned messages said they experienced no harassment of any kind, and their experience — which entailed grueling work into the wee hours of the morning every day — was a rewarding one. They noted Kozinski’s wry sense of humor.
Those who talked to The Post about negative experiences said that they felt his behavior went beyond bad jokes or that they felt personally targeted.
A former Kozinski extern said the judge once made a comment about her hair and looked her body up and down “in a less-than-professional way.” That extern said Kozinski also once talked with her about a female judge stripping.
“I didn’t want to be alone with him,” the former extern said.
A different former extern said she, similarly, had at least two conversations “that had sexual overtones directed at me,” and she told friends about them at the time. One of the friends, also a former extern, confirmed that the woman had told her about the remarks — though both declined to detail them for fear of being identified.
One former 9th Circuit clerk said she was at a dinner in Seattle, seated next to Kozinski, when he “kind of picked the tablecloth up so that he could see the bottom half of me, my legs.” She said Kozinski remarked, “I wanted to see if you were wearing pants because it’s cold out.” The former clerk said that she was wearing pants at the time. The incident, she said, occurred in either late 2011 or early 2012.
“It made me uncomfortable, and it didn’t seem appropriate,” said the former clerk, who worked for a different judge.
All of the women The Post interviewed said they did not file formal complaints at the time. Bond said Kozinski had so vigorously stressed the idea of judicial confidentiality — that what is discussed in chambers cannot be revealed to the outside — that she questioned even years later whether she could share what had happened with a therapist, even though she had already talked with Ortega about what had happened.
Bond said Kozinski worked his clerks so hard that “there was no thought that I could see him as anything other than in complete control,” and she feared that not leaving with a good recommendation from him might jeopardize her career.
“I did think about walking away and concluded I just didn’t know what I would do if I did,” Bond said.
The other former Kozinski clerk who said the judge asked her to watch porn in his chambers said she both feared what the judge might do and knew that a complaint was unlikely to strip him of his influence.
“I was afraid,” the former clerk said. “I mean, who would I tell? Who do you even tell? Who do you go to?”
Murphy said she discussed what had happened with the judge for whom she was clerking, and he was supportive of her filing a complaint. But because the complaint would first go to Kozinski himself, then be referred elsewhere, Murphy said she chose not to proceed. The judge, Paez, declined to comment for this story through a representative.
As a judge, Kozinski has addressed the topic of sexual harassment in important ways. In 1991, he joined an opinion that decided such cases should be judged from the perspective of the victims, using what was then called the “reasonable woman” standard. The opinion, written by then-Judge Robert R. Beezer, noted pointedly, “Conduct that many men consider unobjectionable may offend many women.”
Beezer died in 2012. Kozinski himself wrote about sexual harassment in 1992, commenting on how legal remedies could come with unforeseen consequences.
He wrote that men “must be aware of the boundaries of propriety and lean to stay well within them,” while women “must be vigilant of their rights, but also have some forgiveness for human foibles: misplaced humor, misunderstanding, or just plain stupidity.”
He acknowledged, though, that the problem of harassment was a real one.
“But who knew, who understood, that it was quite so pervasive,” Kozinski wrote. “Apparently most women did, while most men did not. It was the best-kept secret of modern times.”
Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Thursday, December 7, 2017

The US Needs A National Standard For Public Corruption

From Courtbeat-New York Court Corruption Editor Betsy Combier:

I agree with the opinion of Bradley Tusk re-posted below from the Chicago Tribune, that there should be uniform national standards for public corruption.

But please let's make zero tolerance for corruption and for miscreants getting their pensions after conviction, the national standard, and nothing less.

Betsy Combier
betsy@advocatz.com
Editor, Advocatz
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Rod Blagojevich
Commentary: Blagojevich wants Supreme Court guidance on corruption. So do I.
Bradley Tusk, December 7, 2017

I have no particular desire to see former Gov. Rod Blagojevich released early from his 14-year prison sentence. And despite claims about bias by U.S. District Judge James Zagel, as someone who testified in both of Blagojevich’s corruption trials I found Zagel to be consistently fair, objective and reasonable.

Nineteen Illinois politicians signed a letter asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review Blagojevich’s case — and while I don’t see Rod’s fate as an especially valuable use of the court’s time, I do agree that virtually everyone working at high levels of government and politics across the nation could use clearer guidance as to what is legal and what isn’t.
The petitioners argue that the court needs to “distinguish the lawful solicitation and donation of campaign contributions from criminal violations of federal extortion, bribery and fraud laws.”

They have a point. For as long as politicians are allowed to freely solicit money for their political campaigns, there is always going to be an intersection of campaign donations, taxpayer funds and government spending. Giving elected officials, their government staff, their campaign staff and donors abundantly clear rules and guidance can only help reduce corruption, change the social norms around pay-to-play politics (especially in Illinois, where it’s still seen as a cost of doing business), and give the taxpayers far more confidence that the system is corruption-free.

I see this frequently in my work as a venture capitalist. I founded a firm that works with and invests in startups in a variety of regulated industries. My company does business with virtually every state, every major city and the federal government, so I’ve seen how things work pretty much everywhere. Time after time, the entrenched interests our startups are disrupting try to use pay-to-play politics and campaign donations to stifle competition, limit innovation and preserve the status quo.

Pay-to-play politics is a potent threat to innovation, and the lack of clarity about what is allowed and what isn’t only makes things worse.

After leaving Illinois, I moved back to New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio spent much of his first term under federal and local investigation for alleged corruption, almost all of it stemming from allegedly providing favors, benefits, grants, jobs and contracts to donors. When it came time for de Blasio’s re-election, viable competitors were stuck on the sidelines, waiting for the outcome from the offices of the U.S. attorney and the Manhattan district attorney.

In February, both prosecutors issued an unprecedented statement saying they believed de Blasio and his team violated the letter and spirit of the law, but they lacked enough evidence to bring charges. That’s fine — the prosecutors were just doing their jobs the best they could.

But the standards that brought Blagojevich to trial in Illinois were very different and much tougher.

That doesn’t make sense. What’s corrupt in Illinois should be corrupt in New York and vice versa. And while the U.S. Supreme Court did address the definition of bribery when it reversed the corruption conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, I don’t know anyone in government or politics who would say they now clearly know what elected officials can and can’t do when it comes to donors.

If the Supreme Court wants to make the standard much, much stricter and rule that no one who receives government contracts, grants, loans or business of any kind can donate (either as an individual or a business), that would make a lot of sense. If the court wants to prohibit contributions from those types of donors within 12 or 24 months of an election, that would make sense. And if the justices want something else, that could be fine too.

Just make it clear. And make it universal, so staffers in Springfield, Sacramento, Calif., Washington, D.C., Boston, Denver, Atlanta, Detroit, New York and everywhere else can easily know what’s permissible and what isn’t.

Obviously, there’s a lot of nuance and gray in politics. That’s part of what makes it so interesting. But in this case, the nuance only leads to institutionalized corruption and mass confusion. It doesn’t matter if the court addresses this in the case of Blagojevich or someone else, but the need for better nationwide rules and clear guidance is abundant. They should act on it.
Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures and Tusk Strategies, served as deputy governor during Rod Blagojevich’s first term as governor of Illinois.