Supreme Court blog publisher Tom Goldstein, a high-stakes poker player, indicted on tax charges

WASHINGTON (AP) — The publisher of a prominent blog about the Supreme Court was indicted Thursday in a multimillion-dollar scheme to evade federal income taxes and use money from his law firm to cover gambling debts from high-stakes poker games.

SCOTUSblog publisher Tom Goldstein, who also has argued 44 cases before the high court, took part in poker games in Beverly Hills, Asia and elsewhere involving millions of dollars, hid winnings, concealed losses and misrepresented expenses, according to the 22-count indictment filed in federal court in Maryland.

Prosecutors said Goldstein, 54, also submitted false applications to two lenders when seeking a mortgage for a $2.6 million house in Washington, omitting from one more than $14 million he owed at the time. He also had his firm pay salaries and health insurance premiums for women with whom he had personal relationships, but who did little or no work for the firm, according to the indictment.

The allegations in the indictment span seven years, from 2016 to 2022, a period in which Goldstein was regularly appearing in front of the nation’s highest court.

In 2016, for example, Goldstein understated his gambling winnings by $3.9 million, the indictment said.

Two years later, he returned from Macau to a Washington-area airport with nearly $1 million in cash in a duffel bag. Although he acknowledged to a customs officer that the cash represented gambling winnings, he failed to report the money on his tax return for that year, the indictment said.

In 2020 and 2021, he denied on his tax filings making any trades in cryptocurrency, despite more than $10 million in such transactions, according to the indictment.

John Lauro and Christopher Kise, lawyers for Goldstein, released a statement Thursday night saying: “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.”

A biography on the blog’s website notes that Goldstein retired from appellate advocacy in 2023. He has taught Supreme Court advocacy at Harvard’s and Stanford’s law schools.

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