This is Bloomberg Law with June Brussel from Bloomberg Radio. I just want you to walk me through the whole thing again and how it works. We helped the wealthiest families in the US get their kids into school. So I've done seven hundred sixty one what I would call side door. The front door means getting in on your own. So I've created this kind of side door, and because my families want to guarantee and it works every time.
The Varsity blues sting exploded into public view in with dozens of parents across the country arrested for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their kids into elite universities. There was a Netflix documentary, Books Countless Stories, and even a Saturday Night Live skit. The vast majority of the parents pleaded guilty, but a handful decided to fight the charges in court, and now, nearly two and a half years later, the first trial of two parents is starting
in Austin. Here to tell us about what's ahead is Bloomberg Legal report of Patricia Hurtado, who has been covering the case since the beginning. So pat tell us about the two fathers who are going to be tried. Forty parents were indicted by the U S Attorney in Massachusetts. Thirty three pled guilty. Six of them are fighting the charges and one got a partner from President Trump just before he left office. Two dads are fighting the charges
in this first trial. It's John Wilson, the private equity investor who is a former Staples and Gap executive, and the Maal app del Az, a former executive for Win Resort and he operated in Acal and Hong Kong left at the time. I understand Rick Singer, the mastermind of this day, had two different schemes. One was to boost the college entrance test scores of kids whose parents paid money, and he would get a test with to take the test for the kids. The second scheme is called the
side door. The back door would be if your parents donated stepanmillion dollar and you get into the college of your choice because you've given them a new athletic building. Or are you Jim. This side door is you don't have to donate as much money. You could give the two hundred thousand dollars to Rick Singer as a charitable donation and he would help with friends and connections at all these universities and get the applicant students and as a purported athletic recruit, so it's like a jock for
a designated sport. Wilson is accused of paying Singer a total of one point two million dollars for his three kids. A Della dizz is accused of paying Singer three hundred thousand dollars and more to a USC athletic coach for his daughter's admission, and they don't deny they made the payments. John Wilson is accused of trying to get his three kids into colleges, the first with a son who he allegedly paid Singer two hundred thousand dollars to get a kid in as a water polo player. The dad says,
but my kid really was the water polo players. There was no faking involved. I gave a few hundred thousand dollars to Singer. He told me he was going to give it to USC, and as a matter of fact, a hundred thousand ended up at USC, and I gotta thank you know for my donation. Meanwhile, Singer pocket at
the next hundred downs. And then he's accused of allegedly paying a million dollars to singer five hundred thousand dollars a pop for the two twin daughters to get one into Stanford as a purported athlete and one into Harvard as a purported athlete. The dad Wilson says that his two daughters tstoo dutifully and had excellent, if not near perfect, college board scores, so they could have gotten into the
college of their choice. Then the dad Gamal at la Zi's he's accused of trying to get his daughter into USC as a reported basketball recruit. He says he didn't need to pay abroad because she was good enough athletes. Is USC on trial here in a sense? Well, it's USC and the process, and USC was one of the schools that everybody wanted to get into. It was like
a hot popular school for these West Coast parents. So some of these parents went after USC and its admissions processes, and it just p the documents and eventually they got what they call a smoking gun, which is an eight page spreadsheet of names of students who they knew at USC. It was called the v I P List, and it was submitted for admissions over a period of years. And
I think there's several dozen students. It's like an eight page Xcel spreadsheet, and it explained their connection whether they were good for quote unquote fifteen millions to the men's golf team, for three millions to the USC Sporting Center. It's just stunning to see this all written down in this list. There was a magistrate at one point and she was questioning what this c I P list was
and USC said, oh, there's nothing wrong. These are people we just consider v I P. And the judge was saying, well, why do you even have this list. So some of these parents say this is an accepted way. Many schools operate that if you just kick in enough cash, you know, for a reasonable donation, you can get your kid into the college of their choice if you know the right people.
So they're arguing their children were just part of this group of people that are on the v I P list and there was nothing wrong with what they were doing and it's not criminal. So it seems like a two pronged defense. The first is we did nothing wrong, and the second is the mastermind Rick Singer misled us right,
and there's a big question. I was actually really shocked when I covered the final pre trial conference for the judge on August eating, and the government slipped in on a footnote and a filing the night before said we don't know if we're calling Rick Singer the mastermind. I was kind of looking forward to hearing what his story was, because the parents are saying he double talk to us, he lied to us what we want to question him and thrilled him on class examination. And there's also some notes.
Singer took notes on his iPhone just as he was beginning to cooperate with the government, with the SBI and I r S agents in the fall of and he says the FBI agents told him to quote unquote telesps to the parents to get them to implicate themselves and why he was recording their calls. So the parents are arguing Singer is a wire and basically fabricated all these
things that he said to us on the telephone. So he told us one story before he cooperated, that everything was on the up and up and was totally a pure and riable and honest way of getting your kid into college. But the minute he started cooperating and he realized his neck was on the line, that's when he started line and telling the different version, and we never agree to what he was saying on the wire tap.
So because Singer may not testify the parents, probably you cannot bring in those I phone notes because that witness will not be on the stand. So it's a big question. I've thought the lawyers about whether or not the parents can make hay of those iPhone notes would prove or help their arguments. The Singer was basically concocting stories the
minutes the FBI was listening. I can see how not calling Singer will help the prosecution keep those notes out, But how do you not call the alleged mastermind of the scheme? Won't the jersey that as a hole in the case and ask why are they not calling Singer? They must be hiding something. And some people who ask me, well, why don't the parents call Singer? But rules of evidence and probably agree with me. If you call someone, you can't impeach your own witness unless the court declares them
a hostile witness. And it's like a whole procedure you have to go through. And the parents lawyers have never spoken to Singer ever, so they don't really know what his story is. It's not like the prosecutors who crept somebody for days or weeks, having twenty six sessions and knowing they asked a question, they exactly know what the answer is. This would be like flying blind and asking a question that might be a trap door for the parents because then Singer could turn on the defense lawyer
and say, will your clients to criminal or whatever. So the parents may not necessarily want to call Singer, but they could make argument that there's a missing witness. You know, they want to have the jury note that Singer is missing and maybe make him out to be the fall guy or the real villain of this whole scheme to Rebut those wire taps, some of those recordings are very you know, the parents are talking about, oh can I get a two for one? Oh? How much is it
going to cost me? And it sounds like the parents are scheming. A jury could considerue that that's evidence of a father entering into an elicited ringment with Singer. So the prosecution could introduce the tapes because the FBI recorded them, But normally wouldn't you have the person who recorded them on the stand to explain them, right, and you think of doubt. Sometimes there's mob cases where they have a wire tap, and they don't have a person that says
the wire taps. They just have the FBI agent saying, yeah, we put a wire in the Ravenied Social Club and that's how we got John Dotty Cockey. They already made a request to the court to authenticate and the usage of the case the consensual recordings that Singer made without Singer. Do you know if either of the fathers are going to take the stand. Of course they don't have to. That remains to be seen. I guess how the case
plays out for the government side of it. One of the things that's really interesting is a couple of parents are going to testify for the government, a couple from California named Bruce and Dzana Isaacson, and they were the first to play guilty of all the parents. They immediately did a deal and now they're going to testify what they were thinking, to give the jury some perspective of what parents may have been thinking, of what these two
fathers may have been thinking. They're also going to call some coaching staff that played guil See and other co conspirators with Singer in his business to give insight. This was a gam that Singer was milking money. I mean the government when they announced this case said Singer had been doing this for years and had made twenty five millions. We've added up the bound of bribes in this case. I think we got to maybe ten million or eight millions.
We've talked about this case several times, and initially I thought the prosecution has a slam dunk case, but it seems like the defense might knock some holes in the prosecution's case. What you can do get a plea deal is different from how it will play before a jury. I mean some people have said, oh, this is going to be so impalatable to the general public ensured that they're going to immediately convict and the judge. I'm in more than two hundred people to courts in Boston to
have people fill out a questionnaire. And it's the thirteen page questionnaire that asked, how much do you know about this case? Have you ever had a child applied to college? Have you remember worked in the college system, you have work at fundraised? Do you have anything against cooperators? So they're going to try to weed out those with opinions that might be swayed one way or another, and to read out those people and try to get a fair
and impartial jury. Thanks Pat, That's Bloomberg Legal reporter Patricia Hurtado. Another group of charismatic fish are the darters. Darters are a small, wonderfully colored bottom dwelling fish that looks more suited to live in a coral reef for tropical aquarium than the cold, fast flowing streams of the Smokies. The snail darter is a tiny Tennessee fish that made big
waves in legal waters. That is, the three inch fish became famous when the case to save it went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the court's first decision on the landmark Endangered Species Act in articulated an expansive interpretation of the law in favor of protections for the little fish. Now, after nearly fifty years, the snail darter has been taken off the endangered species list, joining me as a lawyer who took that case to the
Supreme Court. Zig Platter, professor at Boston College Law School,
tell us about the snail darter. The snail darter was a tiny perch that was found in the last thirty miles of big flowing, clean river in Tennessee because sixty seven other damns basically eliminated wherever else it lived, and the Tennessee Value Authority decided they wanted to build their last damn to impound this river and the darter, it turns out, was you know, a perfect illustration two humans canary in the coal mine, that this was the last
place left for humans who having credible trout fishing and boy Scouts and girl Scouts could do the float trips there, and the history of the Cherokee Indians. The little fish was in effect a barometer for a lot of really strong public values right at the edge of the Smoky Mountains National Park, and so the farmers fought to protect their farms by protecting the fish. Um there were three family farms that were condemned by the government agency, most of them for resale, not most of them not for
the little lake. So it's a complicated story because you got to explain the agency was not building this for hydropower, It wasn't building it for flood control. It was it had to justify it by inventing a pretend city that they said would be built on the land that they had condemned. It never was, and also if this would be a recreational lake, it's not a Ydro lake in terms of his justifications that everything is connected to everything else.
But it's a complicated story. How did the farmers take up this battle? Well, the farmers really were quite sophisticated, for you know, Appalachian farmers, who most of them had not gone to college. They got a lawyer to bring an environmental impact statement case first of all, and the government agency, we don't have to do an impact statement because we're an emergency agency or something. Uh. They went
to court and they got an injunction. So for sixteen months, the Tennessee Valley Authority had to prepare an environmental impact statement. But once you do that, it's a procedure. They've they've done the procedure, they can go ahead and flood the valley. Um even though the farmers said, the valley, the agriculture, the tourism, the history is worth much more than than the last most marginal dam. But once they lost, they
had about given up. And then suddenly this little fish was discovered, and the guy who discovered it was in the middle of a river. He bent over, and the shallow, beautiful, clear river he picked up this fish in his fingers. Then he walked over to the bank and he said to the farmer, this is an endangered fish and this might save your farms. And so they basically carried the case. My students and I did the law of it, and we had a local attorney on the trial as well.
But the farmers, they went to Washington. They testified, this was grassroots democracy, an incredible story. And then you know, we won in the Supreme Court. Tell me how it got to the Supreme Court. Well, at trial, the judge in Tennessee, of course, decided in favor of the Tennessee Valley Authority, but he said, this dam is going to jeopardize the survival of the fish and it's going to destroy its natural habitat, but I'm not going to stop it.
And then in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeal said, excuse me, but those are both separate violations of the Endangered Species Act. So they stopped the project, and the agency took it to the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Supreme Court said, well, Congress said, you cannot destroy an endangered species or destroy its habitat if you're
a federal agency. Meanwhile, Of course, there was a firestorm going because this is the only law that most citizens could bring a suit for that would question the rationality of a project. Normally, all they have to do is do the paperwork. That's what an environmental impact statement was. So eventually, after the Supreme Court there was a cabinet level economic study about what was worth more the river development that the farmers wanted, or the dam develop but
that the agency wanted. I mean, this was the God Committee, is an extraordinary tribunal that most people don't know about. Unanimously, they said the dam was never worth building in the first place, and it isn't worth completing because the river with agriculture, with the historical stuff, with tourism, with an industrial park. The farmers really made an amazingly good argument,
and so it was vetoed. And then in Congress, the industries that were worried about the Endangered Species Act and the government agencies that build dams were able to change the law. The river died and the fish was wiped out in its major natural habitat. It was really heartbreaking politics because every member of Congress got a message from the Department of Interior and this high level committee saying this dam will destroy more than it will ever create.
But America didn't know that because the firestorm of political rhetoric was all, you know, stupid little fish, gigantic hydro electric dam. The dam is a tiny little dam and it's not a hydro dam. And the cynical environmentalists who don't care about the fish, well, you know, we care about all living things, and in this case, this living thing was connected to economic values, and so it was
heartbreaking to lose the Little Tennessee River. People were coming from hundreds of miles away to fish this place before it died. Who relocated the fish? Well, once a species is endangered, if Congress has said you cannot save it in its natural habitat as they said here, then the Department of Interior put together a recovery team and they said, well, what can we do to keep the species from dying out? And working with tv A, and t v A said okay,
where can we transplant it? The Department of Interior worked out plan and so they put it in several rivers that weren't ideal. And so that's part of this story that you know, some people say, oh, well, when you have an endangered meansy to transplant it somewhere else. It took forty years. It took forty years. But the transplant now seems to be successful. But to fallback transplantation is you know, it's second best. No, it's not even second best,
it's third best. First best is to keep a species, to conserve it in its natural habitat second is to put it into a place where it can live without any more human investment, human actions. But the third best, I guess is what they did because these rivers in the summertime got hot, didn't have enough oxygen. So t v A now has to pump oxygen into the transplant
rivers to keep the fish alive. And they're pulsing their dams to wash the mud away so that the fish can have spawning beds, egg and children in the clean gravel below some of these dams. So the fish are surviving, but they depend on a government agency maintaining oxygen pumping into the water and a special flushing water pressure process and the dams. And that's not ideal. You you want a transplant that doesn't require human support forever. That's what
we've got. The government said it's no longer in danger of extinction. Is that true or not true? That's right. The scientist said, if the t v A keeps putting liquid oxygen into the water and keeps flushing the dams in a way it hadn't done before so as to clean alternative rivers where the fish could survive, then the fish can survive. It's no longer endangered. And that's science, and I believe it's true. It's just we have to be sure that those measures to conserve the species go
on how long? Forever? Forever? So wouldn't it have been better than to leave it on the endangered species list? Why did you file a petition to delist it? That's a really tough question, and there complicated answers and scientific terms. It was no longer endangered because the agencies were pumping oxygen and blowing the water clean. So, but this more to it. The prior federal administration was attacking the Endangered Species Act. It was cutting regulations this way and that
that the protected species. And we started hearing that there was a specific plan to delist the snail darter in a way that would not protect it, and so it's it's sort of preemptive. We don't like transplantation. But um, by filing the petition ourselves, we sort of get special standing. Two make sure that those measures continue, that the delisting
regulation will require those actions to go on forever. And you know, if there's ever a double cross, if the agency stopped protecting the fish, we will be able under the delisting regulation immediately to file for emergency relisting. And it's it's unfortunate that we have to talk about it in those terms, but I'm thinking that in the circumstances it was going to be delisted by the prior administration.
We filed in July, there was still a year and a half of the prior administration or more, and the safest thing to do was to try to be part of the process to make sure that maintenance of the protections could could be assured. What did environmentalists learned from the whole saga of the snail darter? Well, it's it's it's interesting. In spite of the tremendous criticism that was poured against the snail darter, I mean it really was. We were called fringe lunatics and Russia Limball called us
homo socialists. I mean, protecting a stupid little fish against a gigantic hydro electric dam. Of course that wasn't the case. But this is the point. Even when it was thought to be an extreme as the courts enforced the law. And that is a precedent that makes people pay attention to the law even if they don't like it, if they know that even in that case, the courts enforced it. So so there is that a really good precedent came
from it. And the species, you know, the Endangered Species Act is recovered a fair number of species over the years. The Act works. The Clean Water Act works because the water and the rivers where they put the fish is cleaner than it was um back forty years ago. So so it's one of those things where you make the best decision you can in the circumstances when the really best solution for everyone, for the farmers, for fisherman, for the Cherokee Indians that had their sacred sites in this
river area, and for the fish. You when you lose it there, you do the best you can somewhere else. Um. But the president in the law is a good strong one. Tell me what the precedent is and whether you think this Supreme Court would recognize that precedent today. Well, I mean, that's of course a complicated question. The present Supreme Court says, the members who have been put there recently say that they generally follow precedent. They don't overturn prior Supreme Court decisions.
Now we'll see with Roe versus Way, that will be of course a question. And but this was such a declaratory decision by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger, saying that the Endangered Species Act represents institutionalized caution. You don't destroy a species when if there's any possible alternative, and of course in most of these cases there are alternatives. The president is that the courts will enforce the protection of the species and of its habitat um. And that's
really something. It's it's cited all the time for the importance of not having a court overturn a law, and um, it's been used to protect many other species. But it's also been used in other settings too, where where there's a question of whether the Water Pollution Act is going to be Well, you cite t V a versus Hill, the Stale Darter case, and courts say, oh, yeah, that's that extreme case where the courts just enforced the law.
I guess that's what the law hust be. And if Congress is going to change it, and you know, Congress is always a question. It's it's but, but you know, the Congress doesn't easily change the law. Uh, it holds things together and over time, very often endangered species are sensitive little indicators of human importance, of human economics as
well as ecology. The the plan that the farmers did for the river had a tourism route from the Interstates, going up through the valley, through these historic areas, through the farmland into the Smoky's Park it which gets eleven million people a year. It would have been an incredible money maker for the local region instead of just one more damn the dam which is already getting polluted with algae. Thanks for being the Bloomberg Law Show. That's Zig Platter,
a professor at Boston College Law School. And that's it for this edition of The Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always at the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www dot Bloomberg dot com. Slash podcast Last Law. I'm John Rosso and you're listening to Bloomberg,