…Nacchio is fighting charges that he illegally sold $101 million worth of Qwest stock in 2001. The 42 counts in the indictment against him carry a potential penalty of 10 years in prison each.<\/p>\n
The request by the NSA for phone records may lend credibility to Mr. Nacchio’s strategy to put his role in security-related government projects at the heart of his defense on the insider-trading charges. It also could give his attorneys an opportunity to argue that the criminal charges against him are retribution for spurning the NSA.<\/p>\n
According to filings with the U.S. District Court in Denver, a key element of Mr. Nacchio’s defense is his claim that he didn’t sell stock with insider knowledge that Qwest was headed for trouble. Instead, the filings say Mr. Nacchio was highly confident about Qwest’s prospects because he was privy to secret, national-security related government plans that were likely to result in large contracts for Qwest. Mr. Nacchio also might argue that the contracts didn’t materialize because he didn’t cooperate in turning over customer data.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Interesting. Did Nacchio engage in illegal insider trading? I haven’t the foggiest idea. But in 2001, Bush administration officials told Nacchio that it’d be in “his best interest” to cooperate with their legally dubious requests. Less than a year after he declined, Nacchio was facing federal criminal charges.<\/p>\n
Like I said, I don’t know a thing about the merit of the accusations against Nacchio, but by subtly threatening him in the first place, the feds have offered Nacchio an interesting defense — and at the same time, made the former CEO a champion of consumer privacy and individual rights.<\/p>\n
They can’t even prosecute a simple insider-trading case correctly….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When the government asked AT&T, BellSouth, and Verizon to turn over telecom records after 9\/11, they went along. When the Bush gang asked Qwest, the company and its then-CEO Joseph Nacchio said no. To be sure, as USA Today noted, the Bush gang used the hard sell, telling Nacchio that his decision could compromise national […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}