“…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?” Matt Levine · 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
shout out to Pablo and his staff. That's good reporting. But also, you know what? Credit goes to Wachtel, your former bosses. I feel like, am I, Matt? In my mind's eye, this is probably very, very wrong. You'll be disappointed with me for having thought this, but in my mind's eye, I thought that when you go to like an external law firm to do an independent review, I was like, a part of me like imagine that was a way of like trying to get 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 something bad. And often the way to do that is to serve up some sacrificial victims to the Justice Department and be like, this is the guy who did the crime and here's all the evidence against them. So charge him. And then like the company gets credit for cooperating. And so, you know, you're right that the point of a law firm investigation is to make, is often to make the company look good. But often the way to do that is to make some selected person look as bad as possible. That's not what's going on here because like, first of all, there's probably no like, you know, this is just like a scandal. It's not like the Justice Department is going to shut down the NBA. And secondly, like, it's not clear what the NBA's incentives are here. Like, maybe it would be better for the NBA to be like, nope, nothing wrong here. But they do seem to have given Wachtel a free reign. And Wachtel seems to have had a lot of. Fun. And like, you know, they found a lot of bad stuff. Allegedly. I mean, like, you know, the Clippers still say this was a biased investigation and everything was fine. But it's like, it's really like they find these consulting fees and then they go interview the people at the companies who say, well, we don't do any consulting. And we thought it was pretty weird to get these consulting fees and like, you know, paid them all up front. And so there's a lot of bad stuff.
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.