Pritzker and his co-investors stand to profit upwards of $260 million in lawfare payout — the clock is ticking for action to stop this travesty.
The Biden DOJ's weaponization of federal law enforcement was not limited to chasing political enemies of the Left's choosing. Sometimes the machine was turned on entrepreneurs who simply got in the way of the wrong billionaire. The story of Rishi Shah, founder of Chicago health-tech company Outcome Health, is one of the most flagrant examples of this abuse. It comes with a twist the national press has almost entirely ignored: the governor of Illinois stands to personally pocket a massive payday from the very prosecution he helped set in motion.
The DOJ brought criminal charges against Shah after candidate for Governor Pritzker and other investors pushed for control of a successful company after a Wall Street Journal article reported that a sales executive at Outcome Health had been inflating advertising metrics. It should be noted that the article ultimately reflected that there was no evidence senior leadership was aware.
What followed was a cascade of government misconduct that would have appalled any first-year law student, something Elon Musk called “Troubling.” Prosecutors illegally seized over $10 million of Shah's assets. This was money he needed to pay his lawyers, money the government itself later admitted could not be traced to any fraud. The original prosecutor, forced by the trial judge to take the witness stand, testified that he "knew that I didn't know the law well enough" on forfeiture. He seized the money anyway. Shah went to trial without the counsel he had chosen.
Then the government's cooperating witnesses, the actual fraudsters who received immunity or favorable plea deals, had their grand jury testimony scripted for them by DOJ attorneys. When those witnesses deviated from the script at trial, confronted with documentary evidence that contradicted it, the government simply read the scripted statements back into the record. Shah's own appellate lawyers told the Seventh Circuit panel they had never seen anything like it. Neither had the judges.
But here is the part the press has buried.
This prosecution did not emerge from nowhere. It was ignited when Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker's family venture capital firm sued Outcome Health to retrade the terms of their investment. Pritzker was clearly unhappy with his settlement and, at that point, triggered the federal case. Pritzker Group Venture Capital was an investor in Outcome Health. After the civil settlement in 2018, the Pritzkers and their co-investors received a controlling equity stake worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The company, rebranded as PatientPoint, went on to sell for billions in 2025. The Pritzker family did not lose. They won spectacularly.
And now they could win again.
The Biden DOJ's prosecution set the stage for a criminal restitution proceeding on top of the civil windfall the Pritzkers already collected. The government is seeking restitution potentially totaling $400 million, to be paid back to institutional investors in the case. Investors like Pritzker Group Venture Capital. Governor Pritzker, who already received an equity windfall from the settlement that preceded this prosecution, now stands to receive millions in criminal restitution funded by a federal case his firm helped push into existence. That is not justice. That is a double recovery engineered through the machinery of a captured Justice Department.
Shah's attorneys have filed a motion to terminate the restitution proceedings entirely, and they have the law on their side. The Supreme Court's recent Ellingburg decision makes clear that restitution is criminal punishment, and criminal punishment requires jury findings. The Outcome Health jury made no findings on victim losses. None. As Shah's attorney and forfeiture expert Richard Finneran put it: "The government did neither here." There is no legal basis for a $280 million restitution payout to investors, including the governor of Illinois, who already recovered through civil litigation and who stand to profit from a prosecution riddled with constitutional violations.
The scorecard here is damning. Federal prosecutors illegally seized millions. They forced a defendant to trial without his chosen counsel. They scripted their witnesses' testimony. They built a billion-dollar fraud case on what courts across the country have recognized as ordinary contract disputes. And now, after the defendant has been convicted in a trial corrupted by government misconduct, they want him to write a massive check to the politically connected billionaire whose lawsuit helped ignite the whole affair.
There is one man with the power to end this immediately.
President Trump has already demonstrated that he — as a target himself — understands the threat a weaponized DOJ poses to American liberty. Pritzker turned the DOJ into his personal attack dog to pad his bank account and prop up his campaign promises. Rishi Shah is a self-made entrepreneur who built one of Chicago's most celebrated startups from nothing. He was then systematically stripped of his constitutional rights by prosecutors who did not know the law, who scripted testimony for their witnesses to read, and who handed victory to a billionaire governor who now stands to profit from their misconduct.
Pardon Rishi Shah. Send an unmistakable message: the era of weaponized prosecution, whether aimed at a former president or a Chicago tech founder, is over.
Ken Blackwell was formerly Treasurer of State of Ohio.
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