Appeals court upholds 'Chip' Fattah conviction
A federal appeals court ruled Friday against Chaka "Chip" Fattah Jr.'s bid to overturn his 2015 conviction on bank and tax fraud charges. In a 38-page opinion, Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith, writing for a three-judge panel of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote that Fattah's Sixth Amendment constituional right to hire an attorney of his choosing to effectively defend him was not violated when an FBI agent leaked damaging information about him to the press. Fattah, 34, was sentenced to five years in prison after a jury decided that he had committed bank fraud, lied on his taxes, and participated in a scheme to ripoff taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to his employer, the for-profit education firm Delaware Valley High School.
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A federal appeals court on Friday ruled against Chaka "Chip" Fattah Jr.'s bid to overturn his 2015 conviction on bank and tax-fraud charges.
In a 38-page opinion, Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith, writing for a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, wrote that Fattah's constitutional right to hire an attorney of his choosing to effectively defend him was not violated when an FBI agent leaked damaging information about him to the press.
Fattah, 34, was sentenced to five years in prison after a jury decided that he had committed bank fraud, lied on his taxes, and participated in a scheme to rip off taxpayers of hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to his employer, the for-profit education firm Delaware Valley High School.
At his trial, the lead FBI agent testified that he had tipped off an Inquirer reporter to an FBI raid at Fattah's Ritz-Carlton condo in 2012.
Fattah argued that the leak cost him his job and ruined his reputation, making him unable to afford a lawyer of his choice.
Smith said that even if Fattah had maintained his income, it was questionable whether it would have directly funded his litigation expenses.
"He incurred lavish personal expenses, owed exorbitant gambling debts, and owed thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes," Smith said.
"Certainly if Fattah had continued his practice of lying in order to obtain new lines of credit, access to those funds would not have been protected by the Sixth Amendment," Smith wrote.
The judge also wrote that the agent's leak did not violate Fattah's Fifth Amendment right to due process.
Nevertheless, the agent's conduct was wrong, Smith said.
"To ensure the public trust, the government bears a serious responsibility to investigate any malfeasance and take appropriate action. We hope that the FBI and prosecutorial authorities have done just that," Smith wrote.
Fattah, who acted as his own lawyer during the trial, is serving his sentence at a federal prison in eastern Michigan.
His father, former Democratic U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, is serving a 10-year sentence at a federal prison in Pennsylvania following a conviction on federal racketeering and bribery charges in a separate case last year.