The cover-up counts are the easiest to charge - and the thinnest to prove.
Section 1001 makes it a felony to lie to a federal agent. Section 1512 reaches witness tampering. Perjury reaches the grand jury room. All three turn on words, context, and intent - our terrain.
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.
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.
A 302 that reads wrong and a proceeding still being assembled - counsel engages before the process counts multiply.
Brief materiality and nexus, challenge the transcription, argue Fischer’s limits - the government wrote your words, and we make them defend the record.
No oath is required for a § 1001 charge - just a statement an agent writes down as false. That is why the interview, not the underlying conduct, becomes the case. Materiality and willfulness are elements; ambiguity, faulty memory, and literal truth are defenses. These counts are charged because they are cheap. They are beatable because they are thin.
The agent interview.
FBI agents do not record most interviews; a form 302 written afterward becomes the government’s memory of what you said. Never sit for a federal interview without counsel. If you already have, the fight is over what was actually asked, what was actually meant, and whether any of it was material.
Materiality and literal truth.
Bronston v. United States has protected literally true answers for fifty years: an unresponsive answer, even a misleading one, is not perjury. Questions that are ambiguous cannot support a conviction for the answer. We reconstruct the transcript question by question, because that is where these cases collapse.
Obstruction after Fischer.
The Supreme Court’s Fischer decision cut § 1512(c) back to conduct that impairs evidence - not everything a prosecutor considers uncooperative. Counts pleaded under the old, broad reading are motion targets, and sentencing enhancements built on them fall the same way.
The §1512 family, after Fischer.
Obstruction spans §1503 (influencing jurors and officers), §1512(b) witness tampering (twenty years), §1512(c) evidence impairment, §1519 (twenty years for records destruction), and §1001’s five-year false-statement count. Fischer cabined §1512(c)(2) to evidence-focused conduct - a reminder these statutes have edges. Materiality and nexus to an actual proceeding are elements; anxious tidying of your own files, before any proceeding exists, is not federal obstruction.
The interview that creates the case.
Decline the “informal” agent conversation; a 302 memorializing an unrecorded chat becomes the false-statement count. If documents were deleted in panic, tell counsel exactly what and when - forensic recovery framed by us reads very differently than discovered by them. And stop all contact with anyone who might be a witness; a supportive text message is Exhibit B in a tampering count.
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.
No allegiance to U.S. Attorneys, agents, or agencies. The client is the only constituency.
Every district in the country, one client portal - documents, invoices, counsel, in real time.
We decline more federal matters than we accept - and every accepted case gets the whole bench.
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.
On the record, on the wire.
Get ahead of the case.
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