The anti-Trump lawfare that nearly destroyed the Republic did not operate in a vacuum. It was part of a broader culture of prosecutorial abuse that the Biden Justice Department perfected and deployed against anyone who got in the way. Rishi Shah, the founder of Chicago health tech company Outcome Health, is another in a long line of examples. His case should horrify Americans of all political stripes, and it is long past time for the national press to pay attention.
A bombshell oral argument at the Seventh Circuit in USA v. Rishi Shah is making waves in legal circles. The judges were not merely skeptical of the government's conduct; they were bewildered by it. Judge Thomas Kirsch put it plainly: "I've actually never heard of anything like this." That is not a minor procedural quibble from a federal appellate judge. That is an alarm bell.
The DOJ brought criminal charges against Shah after a Wall Street Journal article reported that a sales executive at Outcome Health had been inflating numbers. The conduct that followed was extraordinary. The Biden DOJ illegally seized Shah's assets, including over ten million dollars in funds that could not be traced to any fraud. This was money Shah needed to pay his lawyers. The government later admitted it broke the law. But by then, Shah had already gone to trial without the counsel he wanted.
Judge Michael Scudder captured the injustice in a single, devastating question to the prosecution: the government made the error, then placed the burden on Shah to figure out the consequences and sort it all out. "How is that a fair or proper outcome here?" Good question. The Sixth Amendment does not guarantee you the lawyer you can scrape together after the federal government illegally freezes your accounts. It guarantees you the counsel you believe to be best, as the Supreme Court made clear in Gonzalez-Lopez.
The Biden DOJ violated that right. Then it shrugged.
It gets worse. The government's key witness originally said executives like Shah never knew about the fraud. After 18-plus meetings with prosecutors and facing decades in prison, his story flipped, and he got a favorable deal for pointing fingers at executives. That’s the pressure built into the system: Witnesses (fraudsters) who admitted in FBI interviews that executives had no knowledge suddenly reversed course to satisfy prosecutors’ bloodlust.
Then those prosecutors scripted their grand jury testimony.
When witnesses deviated at trial, confronted with irrefutable documentary evidence on cross-examination, the government simply read back the scripted statements. As Ron Coleman noted in his thread on X about this case, Shah's appellate counsel told the Seventh Circuit panel they had never seen anything like it either. Allowing this would mean the government has a wholesale ability to draft their witnesses’ grand jury testimony and introduce it later at trial – like something straight out of Kafka.
Two Constitutional Crises in One Case
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers filed an amicus brief that highlighted two distinct constitutional crises created by Shah’s case, among other issues. First, the illegal asset seizure violated Shah's Sixth Amendment right to counsel of choice; second, the scripted grand jury testimony violated his confrontation rights. The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected exactly this kind of prosecutorial overreach. The original prosecutor on the case, forced by the judge to take the stand, testified that he "knew that I didn't know the law well enough" on forfeiture. He seized millions anyway.
Elon Musk highlighted the case on X, calling Shah’s situation “Troubling.” Musk has often noted the broader crisis of weaponized federal prosecution in America. The Shah case is a horrific example of prosecutorial overreach: prosecutors so desperate to win that they will seize assets they know they aren’t allowed to seize, and script testimony that should be authentic.
Because when a case can transform your career, that creates incentives for prosecutors to bring trumped-up charges. The prosecutors in this case went from routine criminal work to $1,500-plus/hour white-collar practices right after securing a headline conviction.
Shah and his co-defendants remain out on bail pending appeal. The Seventh Circuit has not yet ruled. The panel's skepticism at oral argument is encouraging, but skepticism does not reverse a conviction. Judge Frank Easterbrook pressed the DOJ on why the government's admitted over-restraint of assets should not require automatic reversal. That is the right question. The answer is that it should. A structural error on the right to counsel of choice is not a harmless technicality. It unravels the trial.
While the slow wheels of the judicial system turn, there is one remedy that remains available to immediately right this wrong: a presidential pardon. The anti-Trump lawfare must never happen again, and neither must the broader culture of DOJ abuse that made it possible.
If the courts will not fully correct this injustice, President Trump should. A pardon would send an unmistakable message: the era of weaponized federal prosecution is over.
Will Chamberlain is a lawyer and commentator who is the former publisher of Human Events.
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