Rare Federal White Collar Acquittal

Episode transcript:

Note: This transcript is generated from a recorded conversation and may contain errors or omissions. It has been edited for clarity but may not fully capture the original intent or context. For accurate interpretation, please refer to the original audio.

JOHN QUINN: This is John Quinn, and this is Law, disrupted, and today we’re gonna be talking about a criminal trial that our firm did, and we’ll be talking to two members of the team. We got an acquittal in this case. We’re talking to Avi Perry, who’s a partner in our Washington, DC office, and Brett Raffish, who’s an associate, one of our superstar associates in our Washington, DC office.

And they’re gonna tell you all about this criminal case that they tried. I … This was in federal court, wasn’t it, guys?

AVI PERRY: Yeah, it was right here in DC.

JOHN QUINN: Right here in DC. I mean, how often are there cases tried in federal court and there are acquittals? It’s a small percentage, isn’t it? Do you happen to know?

AVI PERRY: Yeah, John, first of all, great to be here with you, it’s a very vanishingly small percentage of federal criminal trials that result in an across-the-board acquittal for the defendant.

JOHN QUINN: Less than 5% if memory serves.

AVI PERRY: Less than 5%, and certainly in white collar federal criminal trials, significantly less than 5%, I believe.

JOHN QUINN: So, I mean, this was an extraordinary accomplishment, and we wanna hear all about it. I mean, who wants to set the stage for us Avi or Brett, to tell us what this case was about? What were the charges? What was our client indicted for? Just give us an overall picture of the case and who the players are…

AVI PERRY: Yeah I’ll jump in and give a little bit of background here. So Charlie Kim was our client and Charlie and his co-CEO, Meghan Messenger, run a technology company, very successful technology company, based in New York City called Next Jump and the company for years, provided pro bono services, leadership training services principally, to various branches of the US government, the United States Air Force, and as will become relevant, the United States Navy.

Their biggest proponent within the Navy was an admiral named Robert Burke. No relation to our own Bill Burke. Admiral Burke spelled it B-U-R-K-E. And he rose to become a four-star admiral and at one point the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, which is the second highest flag officer in the entire United States Navy. Charlie and Meghan had developed a close working relationship with him over the course of years, beginning in twenty eighteen and he was from day one, and this was undisputed at trial, a big proponent of bringing Next Jump into the Navy and having Next Jump perform leadership training services for the Navy.

He saw a lot of value in the company. He was a big believer in what they could do and a big believer, in Charlie and Meghan in particular in mid 2021, Admiral Burke, unbeknownst to our clients at the time was starting to look to retire from the Navy, by that point, Charlie and Meghan had been trying to get a contract for Next Jump for years.

They’d gotten a couple smaller contracts, single million-dollar contracts, and now they were looking to upgrade, significantly and get a much larger contract. They were talking to Admiral Burke in 2021 about trying to get, you know, a contract in the neighborhood of the tens of millions of dollars from the Navy.

And in the course of those conversations, he mentioned to them that when he retired, he’d like to come work at Next Jump. And so these two separate conversations started happening in parallel, where Charlie and Meghan were trying to get a contract for Next Jump, and Admiral Burke was initiating conversations with them about would they be interested in hiring him.

And the government saw in this a quid pro quo. They saw in this a scheme where Charlie and Meghan allegedly were trying to bribe Admiral Burke by offering him this lucrative post-Navy employment in exchange for him getting them, this contract that they’d been looking for for years from the Navy while he was still in his role.

So that’s kind of the broad strokes background. In about two years ago at this point, all three of them were indicted together. The government indicted Admiral Burke, they indicted Charlie Kim, they indicted Meghan Messenger, and they charged all three of them with a conspiracy to commit bribery, and they charged Meghan and Charlie with bribing the admiral. And that indictment was returned by a federal grand jury here in Washington, DC, and it was, the government, you know, put out a big splashy news release, you know, four-star Navy admiral indicted, and Charlie Kim decided he needed the best representation that he could get. And he came to us, and in particular, he came to our partner, Bill Burke, who is, you know, one of the absolute pre-eminent, the best, right?

The pre-eminent white collar defense law-lawyers. If you’re in trouble anywhere in the country, but especially here in Washington, DC, you’re gonna try to talk to Bill Burke. Bill from day one saw a viable defense strategy here. We took on the case and fought it aggressively for over two years.

And I know we’re gonna get into this, but a lot of ups and downs in this case and ultimately, Admiral Burke went to trial first.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah, let me interrupt you for a second, Avi. So Brett, do we have any sense about how the government got onto this case, that there was a case here? I mean, how does this thing begin from the government side? I mean, sometimes there are whistleblowers, sometimes, you know, the government trips over something.

Do we have any visibility into how the government decided, well, this is a case they ought to bring?

BRETT RAFFISH: Yeah, John, I, like Avi, thank you very much for having me today. My understanding is the case began with a whistleblower, and who was in fact the admiral’s, partner or someone who he was having an extramarital affair with. And after the affair had ended, this person had complained to an investigating agency about the things that she had heard and saw.

And specifically in, and in very general terms, had suggested that she had witnessed a bribery attempt at a lunch in July of twenty twenty-one in Washington, DC, wherein Charlie and Meghan had met with the admiral and this person, and at this lunch, there was a discussion about a job and a contract.

Later in time, after the relationship between herself and the admiral had ended, she suggested that she had witnessed a bribery attempt

JOHN QUINN: So she was at this lunch?

BRETT RAFFISH: Correct. She was at the lunch.

JOHN QUINN: She claimed she had actually heard a bribe being agreed to or solicited or something like that?

BRETT RAFFISH: That’s right, John. She suggested that she heard Mr. Kim and Ms. Messenger sort of entertain a job at Next Jump, and that she had also heard the admiral entertain a contract with the Navy. And these things were happening in the same discussion, and she felt that this was improper.

JOHN QUINN: Right? And our client, Charlie Kim, how did he come to us? I mean he had just heard about our partner Bill Burke, or is there any further backstory?

AVI PERRY: Yeah. There is a bit of one. Charlie’s a guy who does a lot of research, a very cerebral guy, very smart guy, he interviewed 40 different law firms. That’s not an exaggeration. Interviewed 40 different law firms, and, you know, before finally making a decision. And his initial conversation with Bill, was really the difference maker.

He was impressed by the aggressive approach. He was very impressed by sort of the broad strategic thinking and Bill’s ability, to map out a strategy really from day one, which would take us all the way through trial.

JOHN QUINN: All right. Okay, so we have an indictment returned against Charlie Kim, who is the co-CEO of this technology company, Next Jump. I guess his co-CEO, Meghan Messenger, and a four-star admiral, Robert Burke. And we’re in this case from the beginning for Mr. Kim. Is that correct?

AVI PERRY: Right. And Meghan Messenger, I should say, was represented during trial, during all the critical stages here by our good friend and co-counsel Reed Brodsky at Gibson Dunn, who was just phenomenal also.

JOHN QUINN: All right, so what as you sized up this case and the indictment and you say that our partner Bill Burke, had a strategy from the beginning, can you talk a little bit about that? How did you size up the case? What did you see as the strategy? Brett, maybe you could address that for us?

BRETT RAFFISH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this case was unique and I think Bill recognized its difference from maybe other cases in that throughout the course of Charlie’s relationship with Admiral Burke, Charlie was broadcasting his conversations with the admiral to scores of people, and he was incredibly transparent about these discussions, with investors, family members, and others.

And so even though there were discussions about a job and a contract, he was telling people, he was open with them, letting them know, “Look, we’re having these discussions, both of these things are great. We want a contract. We also want to hire Admiral Burke.” And I think our Burke, the good Burke, saw that and how.

JOHN QUINN: If you’re paying a bribe, if you’re doing something, something like that, something criminal, the idea would be you wouldn’t be broadcasting this, basically?

BRETT RAFFISH: Exactly. It’s completely antithetical to what you’d expect, you know, someone who is, who believes they’re doing something wrong, committing a crime would do, they would conceal it. They would hide it. They wouldn’t broadcast it. Whereas Charlie, he was open with everyone.

JOHN QUINN: Right. So Avi, what were the challenges that you saw in this case? You’ve got three defendants all separately represented, indicted in a single indictment.

AVI PERRY: Yeah. So really it’s two challenges and one of them was procedural and one of them was substantive. The first procedural issue, and honestly what set us up for success was we had to sever the case from Admiral Burke. There was no question we could not go to trial sitting next to Admiral Burke.

There were a lot of reasons for that. One of them was that the evidence against him was overwhelming, he had been approached in what’s called a recorded knock and talk by federal agents, during which he had made a number…

JOHN QUINN: Tell us what a knock and talk is…

AVI PERRY: Yeah. A knock and talk is sort of what it sounds like, which is when a federal agent knocks on your door and tries to interview you with no advance notice.

So he didn’t have a lawyer, he wasn’t prepared for it, and they interviewed him.

JOHN QUINN: Did he know he was being…

AVI PERRY: You know, John, it’s a good question. I don’t recall, I suspect that they advised him, but I don’t know for sure. But he made a number of quite inculpatory statements as to his own state of mind.

And look, this is a federal criminal case, and it’s a bribery charge. And what matters here, no one was disputing that there was a conversation about a job and that there was a conversation about a contract. That was… we couldn’t have disputed it. We didn’t wanna dispute it.

What we were disputing vigorously, to put this into the sort of legal jargon, the element of the statute, is that we acted corruptly in any way, right? That we acted in bad faith or with bad intent. And what matters in these types of criminal trials is sussing out what each individual state of mind was.

And you can have, and it actually happened this time, that two different people who are engaged in the same conversation, the same course of dealing, have very different states of mind. And so while our case turned on Charlie Kim’s good faith and his absence of corrupt intent, these statements that Admiral Burke had made during his knock and talk by federal agents while they were investigating the case were very strong probative evidence of his corrupt state of mind.

So we knew that we had to sever the cases. And what we did is we filed a motion.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. Just so everybody gets this, if you’re going to trial and you’re representing, Charlie Kim, and sitting next to you, is the admiral who’s made, inculpatory statements about his intent, obviously in the jury’s eyes, it’s hard for that not to bleed over into how the jury sees our client.

AVI PERRY: That’s exactly right. And, there were two other really critical facts here which led us to want to sever. One of them was Admiral Burke was also charged, in addition to bribery and conspiracy, with basically submitting false documents to the Navy. And what that charge involved was he, in the course of his retirement paperwork, made a representation to the Navy that his job discussions with Next Jump had started in two thousand and twenty-two.

Now, that wasn’t true, right? There was very strong documentary evidence, we never disputed that these conversations happened in twenty twenty-one, but Admiral Burke had lied to the Navy about that. Now, there was no evidence that Charlie Kim lied to the Navy about that, no evidence that Meghan Messenger lied to the Navy about that.

But to your point, there was a huge risk of prejudicial spillover here, right? And then the other point, and this was really the key here, our defense was, and there was substantial corroborating evidence about this, that Charlie had asked Admiral Burke several times whether it was permissible to be having these two conversations in tandem, in parallel, and Admiral Burke had assured him that there was no conflict and that they could do that, right?

And so our defense essentially had been to sort of take this into non-legal terms, a reliance defense. We asked this guy, who knew better than anyone else because he had functionally run the US Navy, “Can we do this?” And he had said yes. Now, Admiral Burke was a Navy ethics expert, right? At one point he had had this mantle of chief ethics officer.

Charlie and Megan were not experienced government contractors and they trusted him and they relied on him. And so we said to the judge, “Judge, we have mutually antagonistic defenses here,” right? “and we need to have this case severed so that Charlie and Megan go to trial together and Admiral Burke goes to trial separately.”

And I will tell you, the judge commented in evaluating our motion, and the government acknowledged that these motions are almost never granted. Neither the government nor the judge could find a precedent for having granted a severance motion in a criminal case in the district court in DC.

JOHN QUINN: That strikes me as extraordinary.

AVI PERRY: It was extraordinary.

It was warranted. The judge made, you know, an extensive ruling on this, walked through the facts, walked through the law methodically, and found that, even though it was quite unusual, it was warranted on the facts of this case. And so what that set us up for was we were no longer tied to the admiral for purposes of trial.

JOHN QUINN: And so who went to trial first? Did the admiral go to trial first, or did Kim and Messenger go to trial first?

AVI PERRY: Yeah, Brett, go ahead.

BRETT RAFFISH: Yeah, the admiral went to trial in May 2025 and was ultimately convicted and then subsequently sentenced to, I believe, six years in prison.

JOHN QUINN: Wow.

A big fall for a four-star admiral.

AVI PERRY: Big, big fall, and that sentencing happened, I believe in August of 2025. The other event that happened in August of 2025, or maybe it was right around the same time, might’ve been September, is we went to trial once, in August, and a two-week case.

Charlie actually testified in that case, and the jury deliberated, after two weeks of hearing evidence for six full days, before they deadlocked. And what that means is that the jury couldn’t come to a unanimous verdict, and so they hung. The judge had to declare a mistrial.

JOHN QUINN: I assume four-star admiral gets convicted and sentenced, I assume there’s a lot of press about that. I think I even remember some of the press. So how, I mean, it must have been a big concern about whether the jury pool had been polluted by that.

AVI PERRY: Well, look, the judge here is Judge McFadden, who’s just a really excellent judge, you know, admonished the jury repeatedly to, you know, not listen to or, you know, even risk contamination with, you know, anything that could sway their view outside of the courtroom. The jury appears to have taken that seriously.

JOHN QUINN: Did the jury know about that conviction?

AVI PERRY: No, no. The jury did not know about the conviction but of course, our client did, right? And, and it was sort of looming, you know, looming in the back of everyone’s mind during this trial. The government had just won its sort of big marquee case against the big first name defendant and we went to trial…

You know what? Look, I think in those kind of circumstances, you know, you might well consider, well, you know, can we extract some kind of plea deal here? The government already has you know, one its major kind of headline grabbing victory. Can we extract some kind of plea deal here? You know, maybe a couple years of prison but less than the admiral got.

And that was just never really contemplated. Charlie was adamant that he would be exonerated. You know, we believed in him. We were committed to fighting hard for him, to seeing it through however long it took. And we fought that first trial. Those were some long nights, weren’t they, Brett, for you especially?

JOHN QUINN: Yeah, Brett, tell us about that, what that was like for you. I mean, had you been through a trial before?

BRETT RAFFISH: Before our first trial, I had never been through a trial before, so I was learning things for the first time. That said, I was learning from the best, with Avi, Bill, and Fritz Scanlon, and, and Chris Clore, who are all experienced and very talented trial lawyers. And so I was sort of like a sponge soaking it all in and learning truly how the job is done.

AVI PERRY: I need to jump in here for a second. Brett, I think at the time, was a third-year associate. We had a good team sort of behind the scenes that helped with, you know, discovery and brief writing and all that. Brett was functionally the only in-court associate that we had on that first trial, and so, you know, he’s got me and he’s got Bill and Fritz and Chris, you know, who all had been former DOJ prosecutors and were of counsels and partners.

And Brett, more than anyone else, was the one that the client came to trust and to rely on because he was… he just established himself so quickly as a master of all of the facts. He sat at the table with us, and Brett, I think you handled two witnesses in that trial, right?

You did one cross and one direct. Is that right?

BRETT RAFFISH: I handled one witness during the first trial and three during the second trial.

AVI PERRY: Right. And Brett did the Rule 29 argument. I mean, John, look, you know better than I do, ’cause you built this firm, right? We really prioritize and take every opportunity to give in-court stand-up experience to associates who prove themselves and Brett not only took the opportunity, but knocked the cover off the ball.

We’ll talk more about his performance in the second trial, but, you know, he was so polished and so good up there that the lead AUSA who ran the fraud and corruption unit at the DC US Attorney’s office said after the trial, I remember this ’cause we’re all standing out in the hallway outside of the courtroom.

He said, “Brett, you gotta come work with us as a prosecutor. You know, let me know when you’re interested, and I’ll hire you.”

JOHN QUINN: Brett, we hope you’re not, we hope you’re not considering taking him up. I mean…

AVI PERRY: No, I accused him of offering a bribe.

JOHN QUINN: But Brett, all right, so you’ve never done a trial before, to say nothing of a criminal trial. You’ve gotten to know this man, Charlie Kim. I assume you’ve established a human friendship relationship with him, maybe got to know his family, maybe, you know, I’m sure a personal connection.

What was that like, your first trial and you know somebody’s liberty is gonna depend on what you do?

BRETT RAFFISH: It affected me very deeply and truly motivated me to put blood, sweat and tears into this thing and to give it everything I had so that Charlie, our client, could have his liberty back. You know, I spent a day with Charlie. I had interacted with him numerous times over a year and a half, and I believed his story.

I believed he was innocent, and I wanted to do everything I possibly could to achieve that result at trial. And so I, whatever that meant, whether it was reviewing documents, preparing outlines, writing motions, you name it, I was willing to do it to achieve victory for Charlie.

AVI PERRY: And, I’m gonna add one more thing here, which is, look, we are, you know, Bill and I, you know, we’ve done a lot of trials between us, a lot of federal criminal trials. But the real work that goes into a trial, is done long before your opening statements, long before jury selection, right?

It’s the hundreds, or in this case, thousands of hours that you put in ahead of time thinking about how you’re gonna cross-examine witnesses, putting together exhibits, thinking about the government’s exhibits, positioning yourself through motion practice to win key evidentiary issues. All of that work was led by our phenomenal associate team.

You had Matt Feibert, Rich Ong, you had Rachel Frank, and then, you know, e- ensuring that everything went smoothly, Chris Clore and Fritz Scanlon, you know, making sure that we were positioning ourself long before jury selection to win hotly contested evidentiary issues, to anticipate what moves the government might take, and to be able to counterpunch.

So Brett more than anyone was instrumental in that, and, you know, it was his first trial, but I’ll tell you this, honest to God, you couldn’t tell.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah. Okay, so you have a trial, hung jury, Brett. Did you get any sense … Sometimes you learn there was one holdout or two holdouts. You learn a little bit about what went on in the jury room. Did you learn anything in this case?

BRETT RAFFISH: Yeah, you know what, Avi? Do you wanna take this on? You were with the jurors.

AVI PERRY: Yeah. So the judge gave counsel from each side a chance to go back and talk to the jury afterwards. So, you know, we went back with Reed Brodsky, our co-counsel, and with some of the AUSAs, and, we had actually dropped a juror. Typically, you’ve gotta have a jury of 12, with some alternates in a federal criminal trial.

We had lost the alternates, and we’d actually gone down to 11 jurors by consent of the parties. So what we found out was it was a split of seven who had been prepared to vote, guilty and four who had been prepared to vote not guilty. And you know, we talked to them about sort of what had worked, what had been persuasive either direction, what they had questions about during trial that hadn’t been satisfactorily answered by either side.

It was quite illuminating. Typically, you don’t get to talk to a jury after there’s a verdict, and so this was really informative and, and helped us to, as we were preparing for the retrial, helped us to refine what ultimately became the winning strategy.

JOHN QUINN: All right. So you have a second trial. How much time before, you know, the hung jury and the time you start the second trial, how much time did you have?

AVI PERRY: Well, we wanted to go right away. We got the hung jury with the mistrial in September, I think early September and we wanted to go in October. You know, Charlie really wanted the chance to clear his name. The indictment had been hanging over them like a cloud, and he wanted to go immediately.

But for, you know, reasons, of, the court schedule and other reasons, I think it ended up being about, what was it, Brett? About seven months, right? Seven or eight months and so we went to trial again in April, just two months ago now, and really spent that eight months thinking about how we could plug the gaps.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah, let’s talk about that. I mean, we all learn from trying cases. You try a case and you, you know, you do an examination. Every time you do an examination, you sit down and you think of things I wish I had done, examination by examination. Here you’ve had a whole trial you’ve gone through. Obviously, you learn a lot from that experience.

You spoke to the jurors. How did you change strategy, Brett, in preparing for the second trial? What did you decide you’re gonna try to do differently?

BRETT RAFFISH: Yeah, during the first trial, our defense largely focused on why Charlie and Meghan did not think they were doing anything wrong. And I mentioned earlier, right? They were broadcasting, this alleged scheme to scores of people, and I think we hit that pretty hard. But during the second trial and just before, we all sort of realized we might wanna lean in more on there simply not being an exchange, and for a couple of key reasons.

First, the admiral had sort of promised or led Charlie and Meghan to believe that they were going to secure a much larger contract. And over time, this, you know, purported contract kept getting whittled down and whittled down and whittled down, and ultimately they didn’t secure a large all-Navy deal.

They didn’t even secure a large deal at all. It was this you know, contract worth simply a few hundred thousand dollars. And despite not getting what they really wanted, they hired Admiral Burke anyway because they wanted to hire him because he was great for their business. He would’ve been a champion for them.

He was a four-star Navy admiral who had previously headed up the Navy’s HR component. And since they run an HR sort of oriented business where they’re interacting with HR folks, he would’ve been an amazing fit for their business.

AVI PERRY: Brett, can I jump in just very, very quickly on that point? I mean, John, you know, you think about a typical bribery scheme, right? You’re giving something to get something, right? You want, you know, the zoning board to approve, you know, some permit or something, and so you’re gonna give cash.

You don’t wanna give the cash, but you have to do it to get something. And our narrative here was both of these things were things that Charlie very much wanted. He very much wanted the contract. He always had. He also very much wanted to hire, a transformational leader, right? So this wasn’t, you know, in any way like what a typical bribe scheme would look like.

And Brett, I think where you were going, we were gonna talk about this no contract, no job text message that the government trotted out at every moment. Why don’t you explain why that was significant here and what we did with it?

BRETT RAFFISH: Yeah, absolutely. So there was a text message between Charlie and Meghan where Meghan had said among other things to Charlie, this, you know, in this very large message, this snippet of words, “No contract, no job.” And the government…

JOHN QUINN: That sounds pretty damaging.

BRETT RAFFISH: Right. Right. Taken out of context, it sounds incredibly damaging.

And so the government put it up in their opening. They, you know, put it up in their closing. They hit this thing as hard as they possibly could. But we turned it completely on its head. During Avi’s cross of the government’s case agent, he was able to elicit an admission, a truthful admission, that in fact it was no contract, yes job.

They didn’t get the contract they wanted, but they hired him anyway. No contract, yes job.

AVI PERRY: And so John, look, I mean, when you think about the big picture, what we changed between the first trial and the second trial. In the first trial, we were very much trying to respond to and knock down these sort of scattershot arguments that the government had. And, and we really refined our focus in the second trial to sort of not paying attention to all of the noise and just focusing on our key themes, right?

One, Charlie had been open and transparent about these discussions, which is totally inconsistent with somebody acting in, in sort of bad faith or corrupt intent. Two, no one, no one of the eighty-five and ninety people that he’d told this to had ever raised any concerns. No one had, you know, said, “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t be having these discussions at the same time.”

Three, we were able to come up with corroborating contemporaneous evidence that Charlie had asked Burke, Admiral Burke, whether these discussions were proper and that Burke had assured him that they were okay. So we were able to really prove that point. Four, as Brett was saying, you know, we really played up that there was no connection between these things, right?

That even when this massive contract they’d been looking for fell through, they went ahead and hired Admiral Burke anyway because that on its own, not connected to or, you know, depending on anything else, that on its own was a good thing. And then look, you know, the advantage you have in a retrial is the government’s case didn’t change a heck of a lot, right?

They had already put on their witnesses. They didn’t have, you know, that many new witnesses in the second trial, and we’d gotten a number of good admissions on cross-examination from their witnesses. And when you’re armed with a transcript, it makes the cross the second time around that much more effective.

JOHN QUINN: Yeah, which you don’t usually have in a criminal case, unlike a civil case where you have a deposition. You don’t have that luxury. But you had a transcript, you had the testimony of the government’s witnesses. I mean, how did the length of the trials compare? First trial, second trial, Brett?

BRETT RAFFISH: The first trial lasted about two weeks, just over two weeks. And, I believe the second trial was just a tad shorter than that. But about the same. The second trial was definitely more streamlined. there was some evidence that couldn’t come in that came in during the first trial. The government put on evidence during the first trial that we needed to spend time rebutting.

Again, that was all sort of cut away during the second trial.

AVI PERRY: I wanna come back to me, what was one of the most interesting pieces of this. Brett touched on earlier this woman that Admiral Burke had been involved in an extramarital affair with and she, you know, was the one who sort of came forward in 2022, and sort of reported this internally. By the way, she didn’t report it at first as a bribes scheme.

She reported it as Admiral Burke’s abuse of power for his relations with her and then over time, she sort of talked about the bribery scheme. You know, the government never called her as a witness. They didn’t call her as a witness in Admiral Burke’s trial. They didn’t call her as a witness in either of our two trials.

And that was a really interesting strategic decision by them. For us, she was actually a really helpful exculpatory witness, even in absentia, because we had access to, in the government’s discovery, private text messages between this woman and Admiral Burke, where they concocted a plan to conceal their relationship from Charlie and Megan.

And to tell Charlie and Megan ahead of this lunch meeting that they all had together, that she was a high-ranking official in the Department of Defense, that she was in the office of the Under Secretary of the Navy. And she was a civilian, DOD employee. But the way that Admiral Burke introduced her to Charlie and Megan was as this high-ranking, government official.

And so the point that we impressed on the jury is no one in their right mind, not Charlie, not Meghan, not anyone, would’ve openly and notoriously tried to bribe a four-star admiral in full dress uniform, by the way, in the middle of DC in a public restaurant, in front of a high-ranking DOD official, someone they thought was a high-ranking DOD official, that they’d never met before and didn’t know was in a romantic relationship with Admiral Burke.

And it was just so far-fetched that they would have knowingly and corruptly, you know, proposed this bribery scheme in front of this complete stranger who they thought was a government official. And I think that was a point that really resonated with the jury. Her text messages with Admiral Burke that we also introduced from after the lunch show that she was excited about the prospect of him working for them, that, you know, she wanted to go house hunting with him in New York for when he moved there.

You know, there was a text where she says right after lunch, “Ice the wine.” These are sort of celebratory messages, right? These are inconsistent with someone who just witnessed a bribery scheme or something they thought was completely inappropriate. And so, you know, even without her testifying, we were able to use her existence in these text messages, to sort of buttress our good faith arguments here.

JOHN QUINN: So Avi, you were a prosecutor before you joined.

AVI PERRY: I was for nine years.

JOHN QUINN: And looking at the government’s case and how you say, you’ve indicated they didn’t really change their case the second time around, let me ask, just do a thought experiment. If you had been a prosecutor, are there some things you would’ve done differently?

AVI PERRY: Well, I don’t think I would’ve charged this case. But, yeah, look, I think the most dangerous thing for a lawyer to do, whether a prosecutor or a defense attorney, is to try to run away from the facts. You know, I think, I think the government here did not embrace the actual facts. The facts were that Charlie and Meghan broadcast and disclosed the existence of these discussions to everyone within earshot, right?

Charlie is a guy who, if he has a thought, he’s putting into writing and he is, you know, sending it off, you know, to his investors, his friends, his wife. Meghan Messenger told her mom, her sister. They weren’t concealing this. You know, the government didn’t really have a good answer to that, right? They could have said, “Look how arrogant these people are.

Look how they’re acting with impunity,” right? “You have to hold them accountable.” You could have said, you know, “Telling all these people doesn’t excuse the conduct.” But they didn’t really have a good answer to that. You know, I also thought it was an interesting tactical decision, as I said, for them not to call this woman with whom Admiral Burke was involved in a relationship.

JOHN QUINN: She was the witness that…

AVI PERRY: She was the only eyewitness. And, and on my cross of the agent, I elicited that. I said, “She’s the only eyewitness to this bribery scheme, right?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “If there was someone who knew whether this actually happened, whether it was corrupt, how people were acting, it would be her, right?”

“Yes.” “Her and no one else, right?” “Yes.” Now, at that point, if you’re the government and you don’t call that witness, the jury thinks that you think that there’s a problem with your case, and they think that you’re trying to hide something from them. So I thought it was … And actually, at one point, after the first trial, after the mistrial, the judge had suggested that he might, on his own, call this woman and ask her questions ’cause he thought it was important for the jury to hear from her.

Look, I think the government was concerned, and this is in our public filings. At one point in her grand jury testimony, this is all public, she had said that she had been with the government for 30 years at that point in various roles. And she said, “Look, as I was sitting there at that lunch, I certainly knew you couldn’t have these discussions together.

And Admiral Burke, from his position, he would’ve known that you couldn’t have these discussions together. But Charlie and Meghan were more private sector, and I don’t know whether or not they knew that.” Right? Now, that was extremely helpful exculpatory evidence for us because it negated any strong inference that they acted with corrupt intent.

I think the government was really worried that she was gonna, you know, provide similar testimony, if she were called during the trial, and that’s likely why they didn’t call her. But I’ll tell you, I’m not sure that her, you know, sort of perceptions of someone else’s state of mind would have been admissible over objection if she had testified to that.

I think the government might have kept it out with a motion in limine, which I was surprised that they didn’t try. And I think the better path for them, whatever she was gonna testify, exculpatory or inculpatory, would’ve been to call her and have the jury hear from her, the single eyewitness. At the end of the day, it’s the government’s job to pursue justice, right and to present the jury with the material facts.

In our country, we trust the jury system. We trust the jury to make the right decisions. And, you know, them deciding not to call her and not to give the jury the opportunity to hear from her when she had already been established as the only eyewitness, I think probably was the wrong tactical decision, and I think probably made a number of the jurors inherently skeptical about the strength of their case.

JOHN QUINN: So Brett, how long was the jury out in the second trial?

BRETT RAFFISH: In the second trial, less than 24 hours basically. We closed on a Friday, Friday afternoon. The jury was sent to deliberate, and then by Monday early afternoon, the jury returned a verdict: not guilty.

JOHN QUINN: So they didn’t have a hard time, back in the jury room reaching a verdict, obviously?

AVI PERRY: They didn’t, and there were two things actually that were stronger about the government’s case in the second trial. Okay? So one was, remember I said Charlie and Meghan were charged with a conspiracy and with bribery. In the second trial, the government added what’s called a lesser included offense of illegal gratuities.

And what that means is, if the jury, thought that, Charlie or Meghan had given Admiral Burke a benefit, or gift to which he wasn’t entitled because of his position, even if it wasn’t a quid pro quo bribery scheme, they could have convicted him on this lesser included offense. Okay? And it, there’s a lower statutory, you know, maximum prison term, but it’s still a felony, and it still carries up to two years of a prison term.

And so that could have made it easier for the jury, even in a compromised situation, to say, “All right, no conspiracy, no bribery, but, you know, we’re gonna ring him up and convict on this lesser included offense.” And they didn’t do that. The other thing that made the government’s case different in the second trial was Charlie had testified in the first trial in his own defense, and he had admitted on the stand that at Admiral Burke’s request and instruction, long before charges were filed, but after they knew about this whistleblower-initiated investigation, Charlie had deleted a text message and a WhatsApp message from Admiral Burke. And the government called an expert in the second trial who was there to testify that, that Charlie had lied about that, and in fact, it hadn’t been one text message and one WhatsApp, but that, in fact, Charlie had, you know, deleted, you know, a whole string of WhatsApp messages between them. And he extremely, you know, credentialed government forensic examiner, you know, testified for about 45 minutes about all of these deletions.

And Brett crossed him. Brett, you wanna talk about your strategy crossing him? ‘Cause it was masterful.

BRETT RAFFISH: Yeah. I hammered two main points. First, the expert was only able to point to preserved messages that were purportedly deleted from his device. Charlie had literally screenshot these messages, screenshot the messages that the expert said were deleted so there was a little bit of an irony that, irony there.

Second, the expert was unable to identify any other messages, aside from the ones that were screenshotted, that were deleted between himself, Charlie, and Admiral Burke. And I think with those two points hammered with the expert, the expert’s testimony certainly had less weight.

JOHN QUINN: So what was it like, Brett, when you heard not guilty?

BRETT RAFFISH: I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe the feeling. I mean it was just surreal. I had imagined it, but being there in person, hearing the foreperson say not guilty for the third count, which was illegal gratuities, I mean, I just… It was like a wave had overcome me. It was unbelievable, John.

JOHN QUINN: But congratulations. We’ve been talking to my partner, Avi Perry, and one of our superstar associates, Brett Raffish, about a remarkable and very rare criminal defense victory in federal court in Washington, DC. This is John Quinn, and this has been Law, disrupted.

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Published: Jun 26 2026