“…the proper cynical interpretation of like law firm outside investigations is that they are designed to throw someone under the bus who is probably not the person writing the check to the law firm, right?”
Money Stuff: The Podcast · September 2026
Max Abelson had said he assumed companies hire outside law firms to get a clean bill of health in public, and was surprised the Wachtell report made the Clippers scandal look bigger rather than smaller. Levine gives the cynical reading: the deep purpose is often to hand prosecutors a named individual so the company gets credit for cooperating. He then says he does not think that is what happened here, since the NBA faces no real Justice Department threat.
Transcript
like, you get the sense that Aspiration is like kind of a big company and some people involved in it were not simply there to do fraud, but like the whole thing was kind of doing a lot of fraud. So
…something like a clean bill of health in public after the scare of a scandal. And then the Wachtel report comes out. It's like, is it worse? It made this look like a bigger scandal, not a smaller scandal. I was kind of amazed. I was sort of impressed, but maybe that's not fair to law firms in their
cynical, like the proper cynical interpretation of like law firm outside investigations is that they are designed to throw someone under the bus who is probably not the person writing the check to the law firm, right? So like in many internal investigations, like the upshot is this one bad apple did some real bad stuff. Like a classic law firm internal investigation is conducted in the shadow of some sort of regulatory investigation or like Justice Department investigation. And often the purpose, the deep purpose of the law firm investigation is to get the Justice Department not to charge the company with…
I will say I was watching live when Kawhi Leonard hit. I mean, this was for a different basketball. This is for the Raptors. The coolest shot of them I've ever seen.
Yeah. The Clippers got him right after that, right?
I think right after that. I think he left the Raptors. I mean, that was in the Eastern Conference. Semi-finals.
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