Miami Lawyer Ben Kuehne, Indicted by Feds, Returns Fire

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Last month, the Law Blog reported that high-profile Miami legal beagle, Ben Kuehne, the man who represented Al Gore in the 2000 election fiasco, had been indicted for approving a tainted $5.3 million legal payment from a drug kingpin to his defense attorney. In advance of today’s status conference, to be held before District Judge Marcia Cooke, Kuehne’s legal team filed two pleadings. One accuses the government of ignoring a 1988 Congressional mandate exempting defense attorneys from money laundering charges, while the other pleading claims that an obstruction of justice charge against Kuehne isn’t sufficiently backed by specific evidence. Here’s today’s story in Daily Business Review, and here’s past LB coverage.

The feds allege Kuehne broke the law in 2002-03 when he vouched for the fees paid by one-time Medellín drug lord Fabio Ochoa Vasquez to his trial attorney, Roy Black, of Black Srebnick Kornspan & Stumpf. Kuehne, who reportedly made about $200,000 for his work on the Ochoa case, concluded the money was clean. But prosecutors said they watched some of the funds pass through transactions tied to money launderers.

Now Kuehne’s team is arguing that the government is trying to chill the defense bar and that its position violates the Sixth Amendment. “If lawyers are at risk of criminal prosecution and jail sentences whenever it later turns out that their fees were tainted, lawyers will be deterred from representing even defendants who have clean funds,” one of the motions reportedly says.

According to the report, Kuehne’s defense claims prosecutors have willfully ignored a 1984 law, amended in 1988, that was meant to protect attorneys trying to sort bad money from good. “It is not that Congress thought it proper for a lawyer knowingly to receive proceeds of crime as payment for fees,” the pleading said. “The problem is that there is often uncertainty whether fees are clean.”

Kuehne’s legal team is led by Miami attorney Jane Moscowitz of Moscowitz & Moscowitz and Washington attorney John Nields of Howrey. The lead prosecutor is AUSA John Sellers in Washington.