Articles · Oversight and fraud counts
Reported article
The Fraud Police Take a Partnership
How the lawyers who ran pandemic-fraud oversight for Congress and the Justice Department went on to congressional-investigations and white-collar-defense practices.
There is a sentence in the December 2022 staff report of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis that became the report's title, because it was too good to leave buried in a footnote. A fintech executive, asked to do more about the fraud washing through the Paycheck Protection Program, had written back: "We are not the fraud police."
The line was written to damn the company. Many of the subcommittee's senior counsel later joined firms that defend companies in congressional investigations. The report and its letters issued over members' names, and several of those counsel had left before the subcommittee's final reports.
Nothing described here is illegal or unusual; the law firms on the receiving end advertise the service. The revolving-door chart lists each move with its source.
The product is called "When Congress Comes Calling"
When a company gets a hostile letter from a congressional committee (the kind that begins "I am deeply troubled by reports alleging…" and ends with a list of fourteen document demands and a two-week clock), that company needs a lawyer who knows how the committee thinks. The most valuable such lawyer is one who, until recently, was the committee.
Big Law has productized this. Jenner & Block publishes a defense handbook titled "When Congress Comes Calling." Morrison & Foerster has a dedicated Congressional Investigations practice; so does Arnold & Porter. They work as job listings, and the pandemic-oversight class filled them.
The congressional cast
Carlos Uriarte was Chief Counsel for Investigations on the Select Subcommittee. The title means he ran the investigations. From there he went to Main Justice as an Associate Deputy Attorney General, then was Senate-confirmed as Assistant Attorney General running the office that manages DOJ's entire relationship with Congress. And in June 2025 he landed at Morrison & Foerster as a partner in its Congressional Investigations practice.
The move is bipartisan. Ashley Callen, a top Republican staffer on the subcommittee, went through general-counsel jobs for Majority Leader Scalise and Speaker Johnson. She is now a partner co-chairing Jenner & Block's congressional-investigations practice, the "When Congress Comes Calling" shop. Her colleague Jon Skladany, oversight counsel there from 2020 to 2022, went through the IMF and joined her there.
A second tier went into the companies. Funmi Badejo, the subcommittee's General Counsel, became Head of Compliance at Palantir. Beth Mueller went through Kirkland to Eli Lilly. Counsel Kadeem Cooper and Alex Kiles both landed policy-counsel seats at Airbnb.
The agency cast
Congress writes letters; the Justice Department brings cases, and DOJ's pandemic-fraud principals ran the identical play.
Kevin Chambers was the Justice Department's first Director of COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement, appointed in 2022. He then returned to Latham & Watkins as a white-collar defense and investigations partner.
He had company. The second Director of COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement, Michael Galdo, who ran the regional Strike Forces, went to King & Spalding. The two Assistant Attorneys General who oversaw the Criminal Division across the effort, Kenneth Polite and Nicole Argentieri, went to Sidley Austin and Cravath, respectively. Glenn Leon, chief of the Fraud Section that prosecuted the PPP cases, went to Jenner & Block. Craig Carpenito, the U.S. Attorney who chaired DOJ's early COVID task force, went to King & Spalding. That is six of the most senior names in federal pandemic-fraud enforcement, and six moves to white-collar defense.
The pattern repeats one level down, among the U.S. Attorneys whose offices brought the marquee cases. The U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted Blueacorn, Leigha Simonton of the Northern District of Texas, went to Dykema.
The lobbyists
Pamela Thiessen, a former staff director of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, went to the lobbying shop theGROUP DC, where her client roster includes the crypto exchange Coinbase.
From the fintech inquiry to a fintech advisory firm
Alex Zerden was a counsel on the subcommittee that spent eighteen months documenting how financial-technology firms facilitated fraud. He left to found Capitol Peak Strategies, an advisory firm whose clients are regulated fintech and crypto companies working through the anti-money-laundering, sanctions, and enforcement questions he had been policing. He is not a registered lobbyist.
The people who didn't cash out
The inspectors general, the career civil servants who quantified the fraud, went the other way entirely, and several were pushed out the door rather than walking through it. On a single day in January 2025, the incoming administration fired 17 inspectors general by email, and the SBA's pandemic-fraud watchdog was on the list: Hannibal Ware, the SBA's inspector general. (A federal judge later found the firings unlawful but declined to reinstate them.) DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who chaired the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, moved into more oversight, becoming the inspector general of the Federal Reserve and the CFPB.
The FTC split clean down party lines. The Republican commissioners who oversaw the early pandemic-relief cases, Joseph Simons and Noah Phillips, and Bureau of Consumer Protection director Andrew Smith, went to Paul Weiss, Cravath, and (in a perfect round-trip) back to Covington. Of the Democratic commissioners, Lina Khan went to a law school and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter to a lawsuit over her removal. Samuel Levine, who ran the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, went deeper into consumer enforcement.
And on the congressional side, the two most senior investigators kept doing the work. Jennifer Gaspar, the subcommittee's chief investigative counsel, went up the ladder to the Democratic staff director's seat at the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Russell Anello, the Chief Counsel, went to the White House Counsel's Office; founding Staff Director David Hickton, a former U.S. Attorney, went back to academia. Zachary Schram, a Senate chief counsel on the fraud beat, went to the CIA's general counsel and then to a think tank devoted to strengthening congressional oversight.
Sourcing note: every career move described here is documented from public professional records: committee releases, DOJ/FTC/firm announcements, LegiStorm, and federal lobbying disclosures.