Setback to FBI Case Against Leleand Yee?

This story came out while I was away in London, but evidently Leland Yee’s defense attorney is claiming that the FBI’s lead informat is unreliable because he has some baggage of his own:

the attorney for former San Francisco school board President Keith Jackson, one of 29 defendants caught up in the case, said the FBI had removed an unnamed undercover agent from the probe and reprimanded him because of his own financial misconduct.

A source familiar with the government’s case identified the agent as the man who went by the last name King when he showed up in the Bay Area in fall 2011 saying he was looking to invest in Bay Area commercial real estate projects.

The agent paid $37,000 in consulting fees to Jackson, who was raising money for Yee’s mayoral campaign, to help him pursue the real estate opportunities, according to Thursday’s filing in federal court by Jackson attorney James Brosnahan.

As we earlier reported, King Funding Group was the Atlanta employer listed by an undercover FBI agent who, supposedly with Jackson’s help, allegedly laundered $500 checks to Yee’s campaign in October 2011.

“King” disappeared from the scene in mid-2012, telling targets in the case that his father had died and he was working on business interests in Panama, Brosnahan’s filing said.

The filing by Brosnahan, however, suggests that was about the time the agent’s “financial misconduct” was landing him in trouble with the FBI.

This may or may not be true, and may or may not hinder the FBI’s case against Yee, Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow and their other co-defenders. But it seemed at least worth mentioning…

In other Yee indictment news, both defense attorneys and prosecutors agree that the massive case will be split up for separate trails, but there’s no detail yet on when and how. This is not an unusual move for a case with 29 separate defendents…

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One Response to “Setback to FBI Case Against Leleand Yee?”

  1. […] only getting him to cop to one count suggests the case may have had some shaky planks. (Maybe an unreliable witness?) Or that there was so much more they could nail Chow on that they didn’t want to keep spending […]

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