The government calls it corruption. The law demands a quid pro quo.
Bribery of public officials, § 666 program bribery, FCPA - corruption cases live and die on one question: was there an explicit exchange? The Supreme Court keeps answering no.
Netflix told the story. The defense was ours.
When Shonda Rhimes built Inventing Anna, the defense at its center was Todd Spodek’s - argued for the so-called fake heiress in a Manhattan courtroom long before Arian Moayed of Succession played him on screen. What 320 million hours of viewers watched is the method every client of this firm gets, in every federal district.
The record, dated and sourced.
Federal corruption law has been narrowed, term after term, by a Supreme Court skeptical of prosecutors criminalizing politics. McDonnell cut back “official acts.” Snyder held § 666 does not reach gratuities. The indictments have not caught up with the case law - which is precisely the defense.
What counts as an official act.
After McDonnell, arranging a meeting, hosting an event, or making a call is not an official act. The government must connect a thing of value to a specific exercise of governmental power. Most corruption indictments still plead the old, broader theory - and a motion practice built on McDonnell forces the government to prove the case the law actually requires.
Section 666 and the gratuities line.
Snyder v. United States drew the line: rewards given after the fact, without a prior agreement, are not federal program bribery. Timing, sequence, and the absence of an antecedent deal are now elements in everything but name. We build the chronology that keeps a thank-you from becoming a felony.
FCPA and cross-border exposure.
Foreign bribery cases add layers - jurisdiction over foreign nationals, the facilitation-payment exception, books-and-records theories that criminalize accounting. The voluntary-disclosure calculus is a decision to make with defense counsel, not with the company’s lawyers, whose client is not you.
The statutes stack: §201, §666, and the Travel Act.
Classic bribery of federal officials runs through 18 U.S.C. §201 (fifteen years); §666 reaches state and local officials whose agencies take $10,000 in federal funds - which is nearly all of them; and the Travel Act federalizes state-law bribery with any interstate hook. Percoco and Ciminelli pruned the government’s theories in 2023: private citizens and “right to control” schemes are no longer easy targets. Prosecutors respond by stacking counts; we respond by making each one carry its own weight.
When the first subpoena mentions a contract.
Public-corruption investigations leak - to auditors, to boards, to reporters. Say nothing to colleagues, preserve every document, and let counsel make the first call to the government; whether you are a subject or a witness is often decided in that call. Parallel ethics and procurement proceedings need managing too, because their transcripts end up in the criminal file.
Know who is on the other side.
The first 72 hours decide the next 72 weeks.
No interviews, no consents, no explaining, no deleting. The words said in hour zero are the exhibits at trial. Write down what was asked and by whom - then stop.
Privilege attaches, facts get mapped while memory is fresh, documents get preserved the right way, and nobody in your orbit talks to agents unrepresented again.
We contact the government as your counsel: target, subject, or witness gets confirmed, deadlines get calendared, and the defense - not the investigation - sets the tempo.
How your case unfolds.
THE FULL PROCESS →Risk-free, in person or by phone. Ask anything, for as long as it takes. Strategy starts the same day.
Wiretap notice, a subpoena about a contract - we engage the government while its official-act theory is still being chosen.
Challenge the recordings, brief McDonnell, cross the middleman - and if trial is the advantage, we try the quid pro quo the government cannot prove.
Todd A. Spodek is a second-generation trial lawyer whose defense of Anna Delvey became Netflix's Inventing Anna. He appears on Fox News and CNN as a legal analyst, authored "My Advice to Diddy" in The Spectator, and is quoted by the Associated Press when the biggest federal cases break. The record behind the profile: a complete acquittal in a $26M money-laundering trial, RICO charges carrying a 10-year minimum dismissed, and 6 months on a $12M Ponzi case.
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Why this firm.
Five decades of federal courtrooms. Whatever the government has charged, this firm has defended it before.
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We decline more federal matters than we accept - and every accepted case gets the whole bench.
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