SCOTUSblog Founder Tom Goldstein Hit With 22-Count Federal Indictment

A lengthy indictment accuses the once high-flying Supreme Court lawyer of massive tax evasion—tied to multimillion-dollar poker losses and multiple affairs.

Tom Goldstein and me, at an October 2014 event for Above the Law.

Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.

In January 2006, after leaving the U.S. Attorney’s Office as well as the practice of law, I moved down to Washington to write for the politics blog Wonkette (which I did for a few months before launching Above the Law). I didn’t know many people in D.C. at the time—so I was grateful for the warm welcome of Tom Goldstein and Amy Howe.

At the time, Tom and Amy were on top of the legal world. They were the husband-and-wife team behind SCOTUSblog, the must-read website that they founded in 2002, and Goldstein & Howe, a thriving Supreme Court and appellate boutique. To be honest, I was starstruck to meet Tom: a prominent SCOTUS advocate, with more than a dozen oral arguments under his belt by that point, as well as the creator of a site that helped change my life by inspiring my own interest in legal blogging.

In March 2006, Tom and Amy invited me to their home for one of Tom’s legendary poker nights. I met several legal luminaries, including the legendary Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg—for whom Tom interned while in law school, an experience that led him to fall in love with SCOTUS—and I actually made a little money too.

Tom and I stayed in touch and remained friendly over the years. In 2014, I moderated a SCOTUS event for ATL featuring Tom Goldstein and his good friend and fellow Supreme Court advocate, Lisa Blatt—who were both brilliant and hilarious. In November 2023, I interviewed Tom for my Bloomberg Law column—and having recently retired from the SCOTUS bar, after arguing 40-plus cases before the Court, he was even more candid than usual.

Although I can’t say I knew him well, I always liked and admired Tom. He struck me, as Nina Totenberg put it, as “a quintessentially decent person as a human being.”¹

But as I’ve learned over the years, people are complicated—and lawyers are people too. The Tom Goldstein that I have known—who has shown nothing but personal kindness to me, who was a distinguished and successful lawyer, who represented underdogs before the Supreme Court (many of them pro bono), and who co-founded SCOTUSblog, a great service not just to the legal profession but to the country—could have another side.

Yesterday, a federal grand jury in the District of Maryland issued a 50-page, 22-count indictment against Thomas C. Goldstein. The legal community is abuzz with the allegations—in the first few hours after the news hit, I was bombarded with texts and emails—and the indictment has been covered by numerous outlets, including but not limited to the Associated Press, Reuters, CNBC, Law360, and the ABA Journal.

Here’s a summary of the charges, by Dan McLaughlin of National Review:

[Goldstein] “was also an ultrahigh-stakes poker player, frequently playing in matches or series of matches in the United States and abroad involving stakes totaling millions, and even tens of millions, of dollars.” He financed that by “borrowing millions of dollars” or getting people to stake him in exchange for a share of his winnings—if he won. At times, he won big: The indictment recites a $13.8 million win in Hong Kong in 2016 and taking a California businessman for $26 million in Beverly Hills that same year. But he also frequently held gambling debts approaching $10 million.

Then there’s women: He “was involved, or pursued, intimate personal relationships with at least a dozen women, transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars to them” in addition to the other costs of their travel and expenses. He allegedly “hired” four of them as sham employees of his firm to get them health insurance. He was otherwise allegedly using the firm as a personal piggy bank to cover his lifestyle….

Where the law gets involved is mostly tax evasion—19 counts of unpaid taxes, willful failure to pay taxes, and false and fraudulent tax returns. There are also three counts of false statements on mortgage loan applications he took out to cover his debts.

If this whets your appetite, read the whole indictment—which, for an indictment centered on tax charges, is a gripping read. Many tax indictments are dry recitations of dates and numbers, but this is a speaking indictment—and it tells quite a tale.

In the words of Joe Patrice of Above the Law, the charging document “describes heads-up poker games in Macau, interfirm deals to use fees to offset debts, helping an actor to get a Texas billionaire to pay up, using a litigation funder to cover losses, and crossing the border with a duffel bag filled with $968,000.” Yes, that’s right: according to the indictment, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer at Dulles International Airport found almost one million dollars on Goldstein after he flew in from Hong Kong, which he admitted was gambling winnings (but allegedly never reported as income to the IRS).

I reached out to Tom for comment. I received the following from Risa Heller Communications, the public-relations and crisis-communications firm led by Risa Heller, a go-to publicist for people in deep doo-doo (and in some ways the Tom Goldstein of PR, a brash upstart going up against more staid, established rivals):

Mr. Goldstein is a prominent attorney with an impeccable reputation. We are deeply disappointed that the government brought these charges in a rush to judgment without understanding all of the important facts. Our client intends to vigorously contest these charges, and we expect he will be exonerated at trial.

The statement was issued on behalf of Goldstein’s lawyers, John Lauro of Lauro & Singer and Christopher Kise of Continental—whose names might sound familiar because they’ve also defended Donald Trump.²

Lauro and Kise are talented and experienced attorneys, but I can’t help wondering whether Goldstein might have hired them in part because of their ties to Trumpworld. Also recall, as highlighted by Joe Patrice, that Tom Goldstein wrote a New York Times guest essay back in November calling for all the criminal cases against Donald Trump to be abandoned. As Professor John P. Collins tweeted posted on Bluesky, could Goldstein be hoping for a pardon from Donald Trump?

With its allegations of massive tax fraud, womanizing, and luxury shopping sprees, the Goldstein indictment reminds me of the indictment of Hunter Biden—who (in)famously escaped liability through a presidential pardon, courtesy of his dad. And even though Tom’s Times piece was published two months ago, the indictment covers conduct going back to 2016, suggesting that Tom at least had an inkling that he might someday be hit with federal criminal charges.

At The Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Josh Blackman raised an issue that’s on the minds of many:

I worry that this news may spell the end of SCOTUSblog. Indeed, the indictment will seek criminal forfeiture of “any property, real or personal, which constitutes or is derived from proceeds traceable to the offenses.”

Does SCOTUSblog fall in that category? If so, I hope someone else acquires SCOTUSblog. It would be a shame to lose this valuable resource.

SCOTUSblog is mentioned nowhere in the indictment, and there’s no suggestion that it was involved in any of Goldstein’s alleged transgressions. But the indictment does contain a (boilerplate) reference to “substitute assets” (pp. 49-50), in which the government claims that if it can’t access assets related to the alleged offenses, it “shall be entitled to forfeiture of substitute property up to the value of the forfeitable property described above.”

That said, I’m less concerned than Blackman. The government has significant discretion when it comes to forfeiture, and I suspect that the prosecutors handling this case are smart and fair-minded enough to realize that it would serve no good purpose to seize and shut down SCOTUSblog—a resource beloved not just by lawyers and judges, but by poli-sci professors, high-school civics teachers, students (such as the authors of High School SCOTUS), concerned citizens, and Court watchers, not just in the United States but around the world.

My guess is that regardless of what happens in Tom’s criminal case, SCOTUSblog will endure. Tom scaled back his involvement with the site years ago—if the indictment is to be believed, he had a lot of other things on his plate—and today SCOTUSblog is really run by Amy Howe, its main courtroom reporter, and Ellena Erskine, its editor. I see no reason why Amy, Ellena, and SCOTUSblog’s nine regular contributors can’t continue their excellent and invaluable work.

I don’t know—and can’t imagine—what’s going on in Tom and Amy’s marriage right now. The indictment references tax liens against their home, which Amy was presumably privy to, and applications to mortgage lenders to finance their $2.6 million house, which Amy apparently signed. But it’s unclear what Amy knew, if anything, about Tom’s alleged gambling debts, extramarital affairs, or misrepresentations in mortgage docs. (In our family, I handle all our finances and taxes—so if there’s any problem in our tax returns, it’s entirely my fault, and Zach is the innocent spouse.)

If some or much of what’s in the indictment was unknown to Amy, I could see her and Tom getting divorced. If Tom and Amy go their separate ways (or even if they don’t), they should squarely place all ownership and control of SCOTUSblog in Amy’s hands. She could then continue operating SCOTUSblog—which shouldn’t go down even if Tom Goldstein does.

And as a loyal reader of SCOTUSblog pretty much since its inception, I hereby volunteer to do anything in my power to keep it up and running. For example, if at some point SCOTUSblog gets put up for auction—whether by Tom and Amy, the federal government, or a bankruptcy trustee—I’d be willing to put together a consortium to acquire the site and figure out how to keep it going in perpetuity.

SCOTUSblog has valuable content and a large and devoted audience, which I believe could make it self-sustaining (or even profitable) as a Substack newsletter—as I suggested to Tom back in 2023. But that’s not the only possible approach. It could also be run as a nonprofit news organization, an increasingly popular model in the economically challenged media industry, or acquired by a larger legal-news organization, which Tom previously told me they have explored at various points over the years. In short, there are several possible ways to #SaveSCOTUSblog.

The future of Tom Goldstein is more uncertain. Even if he beats the criminal charges against him, the complaint suggests that he might still owe $15 million in unpaid gambling debts, which could mean he’ll have to file for personal bankruptcy. And the case, even if he prevails in the end, will surely take a toll on his family and his health, mental and physical.

But I wouldn’t count Tom Goldstein out just yet. He’s only 54, and he still has the intelligence, hard work, and hustle that allowed him to launch a leading Supreme Court website and become one of the nation’s top SCOTUS advocates, even though he never clerked for the Court or graduated from an elite law school. And if the allegations are true, Tom has an unimaginable amount of energy: he was somehow able to argue before the Supreme Court, run a law firm, win and lose tens of millions in high-stakes poker, juggle a dozen women, oversee SCOTUSblog, and raise two kids. Those of us who struggle with “work-life balance,” barely keeping it together from day to day, can only marvel at what Tom stands accused of doing.³

And these aren’t the only things Tom Goldstein has been involved with over the years. He also helped develop a pitch for a television show based on his life and career, which got picked up for development by NBC in 2009. The program, tentatively called Tommy Supreme, never made it to the screen. But the rise of streaming has made it easier for shows to become reality—and Tom’s life story has gotten considerably more interesting in the past 15 years (or 15 hours).

Imagine this scenario. Tom somehow puts the criminal case behind him—whether through beating the charges, getting a pardon from Trump, or getting convicted and serving his time. He declares personal bankruptcy, wiping his financial slate clean. He overcomes any personal demons, including possible addictions to gambling or sex, that brought him low. He turns his incredible life story into a memoir or a novel, which gets turned into a hit TV series or movie—because Hollywood loves lawyer stories, poker stories, and stories of people who rise from humble beginnings, suffer great falls, and rise again.

While the allegations against Tom could mean that he’ll never practice law again—which perhaps he has no interest in doing, having already left behind the world of Supreme Court litigation, one of the most prestigious practice areas around—they wouldn’t prevent him from succeeding in Hollywood, which has given all sorts of people second chances. And the indictment suggests that Tom might have helpful contacts in the entertainment world, including actors he has played poker against or done legal work for.

Some of the finest shows in the history of television, like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, featured main characters who were… complicated. Could Tony Soprano and Walter White be joined in the pantheon of protagonists by Thomas Che Goldstein?⁴ It’s a long shot—but as we know from his legal and poker careers, Tom Goldstein has beaten the odds before.

1. I should mention, however, that I’ve never been the best judge of character. I can be naive at times, and I have a tendency to place too much weight on worldly success, especially fame or prestige—which has sometimes blinded me to faults of people that maybe I should have picked up on earlier. When a well-known or highly respected lawyer or judge gets caught up in a scandal, I’m pretty much always shocked, as I was in Tom Goldstein’s case—even though I’ve been writing about misbehaving members of the legal community for more than two decades now.

2. John “Attorney for the Damned” Lauro also represents Wendi Adelson, the ex-wife of murdered law professor Dan Markel. And now that Trump’s net approval rating is basically a wash, it’s probably fair to say that the President-elect is more popular than Wendi (because at least Trump has some people who like him, as well as some who worship him).

3. As this chronology prepared by Josh Blackman makes clear, the conduct alleged in the indictment overlapped squarely with Goldstein’s “day job” of arguing before the Supreme Court.

4. Yes, it’s true: as Dan McLaughlin wrote in National Review, “If I were writing a novel about a seemingly respectable lawyer who couldn’t outrun his fundamental character flaws, I could not ask for a better detail than the fact that his middle name is Che.”

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