Underprivileged

In re Grand Jury Subpoena Dated July 6, 2005, No. 05-6891-cv (2d Cir. November 16, 2007, posted December 10, 2007) (Pooler, Parker, Wesley, CJJ)

In January of 2005, an Eastern District AUSA contacted counsel for the unnamed appellant, a former mortgage broker, and advised that appellant was the subject of a grand jury investigation. Appellant proffered on January 12, 2005, and, sometime after that date, surreptitiously recorded his telephone conversations with another broker, who was also a subject of the investigation. At later proffer, appellant told the government about the tapes, which he said he had made “on advice of counsel to protect himself.” When the government subpoenaed those recordings, appellant resisted, claiming that they were privileged. The district court ordered compliance, and the circuit affirmed.

Appellant’s primary claim was that the recordings were work product. The circuit concluded that the recordings were “fact” work product, that is, the result of a factual investigation, and not “opinion” work product, which is entitled to greater protection, because opinion materials might reveal the mental impressions of counsel. On this point, the court faulted appellant’s presentation to the district court; he relied solely on a conclusory affirmation from counsel that claimed that appellant was acting on his instructions, but did not give the court the tapes themselves for in camera review.

The court then grappled with the degree to which the work product doctrine applies to grand jury proceedings, which fall into a gap between Civil Procedure Rule 23(b)(3), which privileges materials prepared in anticipation of civil litigation, and Criminal Rule 16(b)(2), which privileges materials prepared by the defendant or counsel during the investigation or defense, but only in a “pre-trial proceeding in which there is a known defendant.” The court held that a “grand jury is entitled to fact work product where the government shows that the grand jury has a ‘substantial need’ for the materials and that it has ‘exhausted other means of obtaining’” them.

Here, both prongs were satisfied, although the court’s reasoning is a bit skimpy. For the first prong, the court simply held that a grand jury must have “access to the data it needs,” which “clearly includes” the recordings. Thus, there was “no doubt” that the need was “substantial.” Not the most satisfying analysis: the grand jury needs it, thus its need is “substantial.” With respect to the exhaustion prong, the court did better. It rejected appellant’s argument the government could have asked him about the contents of the recordings; this would not likely have been productive, since appellant had already claimed that they were privileged. Moreover, the government could not get what it needed from the other participant in the conversations, since his own account of the conversations would not replicate the “unique memorialization” contained in the tapes themselves.

In a separate summary order, the court rejected appellant’s alternative arguments. With respect to the Fifth Amendment, since the tapes were voluntarily prepared, there was no compulsion. And appellant could not claim an act of production privilege; the government knew enough about the existence of the tapes and their location – most likely they were either with appellant or his counsel – and requiring him to produce them would not require him to incriminate himself by admitting these facts. Nor would production “implicitly authenticate” the recordings. Finally, the recordings could not be deemed memorializations of appellant’s own communications with his counsel, since they did not involve the attorney himself.