MEG: Welcome to the Stand With Meg Show. This is our very first formal show. Last time, somebody commented that we looked like we weren’t dressed nice, which is funny, because we worked all day on this area. We were building things. We were hot and gross. Anyway, this is how we do like to dress: very professional. And hopefully, as time goes on, we’ll keep at it. We like to match, but we haven’t got that yet, because we like to be together like that. So we might be switching over to Shawn’s place sometimes, or here. We’re kind of trying to figure out what’s better. We live about half an hour apart. And what do you call it? Driving out here is like what?
SHAWN: It’s forever.
MEG: What did you say at first? It’s like Jupiter?
SHAWN: It’s like going to Jupiter. It is like a different planet. It’s a long way.
MEG: Anyway, this is episode one of season one. If you don’t know the history, Shawn partnered with me as he saw all my surveys and what everyone’s going through, and he said, “We’ve got to tell people about how to report fraud.” So give me a little bit of background: what you specialize in, and who you are.
SHAWN: Thank you for asking, and for having me, and for working with me on this. I consider fraud in our virtual courts to be an existential crisis for our country, and we have to discuss it. My background: I started practicing law in 2014. However, I had an honest profession before that, as a soldier.
MEG: He’s a soldier. You can go see his pictures. They’re on our website.
SHAWN: So I have a different mentality. I’m not part of the good old boys club. I’m not somebody’s kid from a prestigious law office. And I consider our courts to be absolutely essential. They have to function. In the last six years, I’ve been practicing criminal law and civil law, and I’ve started to see the trends. It’s clear to me that people don’t understand that they are victims, in fact, and that they have the power to address that through the courts, through their legislative process, and through law enforcement agencies.
Specifically, I practice a lot of criminal law. I don’t think criminal law is being applied to our family courts, or some of our civil courts, as it should be. If you file something intentionally false, you artificially inflate your fees, you engage in a conspiracy to artificially inflate fees, you teach a witness to commit perjury, you forge documents, you obstruct justice. Well, you can ask your lawyer to address that in your case, but you can also file a complaint with law enforcement, and those people could be indicted.
MEG: So what we’re doing here… on the next episode, you’ll see a fun little thing that Shawn did. Sneak peek! There you go. You can’t see it. It’s the next one. We’re trying to teach you guys how to recognize this, from a professional attorney who does trials. He has a trial tomorrow, don’t you?
SHAWN: The next two days. I had a trial a week and a half ago, and I have a trial tomorrow, and they’re criminal cases. So I am a full-time trial lawyer.
MEG: And so Shawn is taking his expertise and going to teach all of us. So we are going to try to create… he’s busy. Okay, let’s just say he’s very busy, and we’re trying our hardest to get together to record these for you guys. But if you go to standwithmeg.com, and on TikTok, Instagram, and my business Facebook, you can go to subscriptions and watch these full episodes until we can get him monetized, so he can get a little bit of income. We’re going to have to do it like that. Do we dream of putting it all on YouTube, the whole show? Yes. But as of right now, we’ve got to pay him for his time, and so that will go into that.
We’re also going to create challenges for everybody every week. Every week, we’re going to give people a task, and this week, the task is: get your invoices. Figure out everything you spent, everybody you spent it on, every time a judge told you to pay someone. Ask them. You have that right to ask them. Now, in my case, the GAL decided not to do it and didn’t want to do it. And so he missed all the months and still didn’t produce them. So that’s the problem there. Now, what would that be?
SHAWN: Let me walk you through lawyer trust account basics. If there is one way, universally, in America, to yank a lawyer’s meal ticket, pull their bar license, get them sanctioned and thrown out, it is to find out that they are messing with the client trust account. That is a hard, hard bye-bye.
MEG: Does every GAL have a client trust account?
SHAWN: I do believe that is a fact, if they are a lawyer.
MEG: So, okay, they’re lawyers. So all lawyers have trust accounts?
SHAWN: All lawyers have client trust accounts.
MEG: I never knew that. So what does that mean?
SHAWN: So the trust account is the account that you have to maintain as a lawyer.
MEG: Per client?
SHAWN: It’s the same account, but you have to have individual accounting for each client. So think of it like a pot. A client gives you money for their case. You take their money, you put it in the pot. Now, you did some work on the case. You spent some time, sent some emails, and you generate an invoice. There are rules on how you take money out of the pot. So let’s say I spend half an hour with you, and I’m billing at $500 an hour, and I generate an invoice. That invoice will say $250. I earned $250. So if you gave me a $1,000 retainer, I have to withdraw $250, consistent with the invoice. If they do anything else, they can be disbarred.
Now, where lawyers get in trouble is they don’t generate invoices, or they take all the money out but they don’t explain why they took the money out, or they take more money out than they needed because they’re in financial trouble, or they take the money in advance of earning it, thinking to themselves, “I’ll put it back when I’m done.”
MEG: And just so you know, on the next episode, he’s going to run down the invoice. He’s going to show you guys with his pen and teach you what to do with your invoices. So that’s on the next episode, episode two. We have a fraud folder, and we will take you step by step on how to do this.
If you guys go to standwithmeg.com and look on The Shawn Lee Report, you’ll be able to see our website. You’ll be able to ask to have a consult with Shawn. You can also ask to have a consult with me. Mine is not legal advice. Mine is just helping you navigate how to organize, what to do, how to find things online. I’m kind of a techie with that, but I do not give any legal advice. That’s all Shawn. And also, we have an About page on there, and the documents: any document we talk about on the show is there for you to download for yourself. So make sure you go there. And you can also subscribe to get newsletters from Shawn Lee and me about updates and new things.
I honestly would recommend you guys subscribe, because there’s so much fraud information coming out. Just last week, I called Shawn. I said, “Shawn, did you see this?” He’s like, “What did you say? I pretty much know everything going on in that area.” Because it’s his side, his legal side.
Now, what’s the difference between a criminal attorney and a family law attorney? It’s a big question people don’t understand.
SHAWN: Sure. When you’re a lawyer, you’ve got to feed yourself, and there are some basic skills that you can take anywhere. If you practice criminal law, you could go to Alaska, you could go to Florida, you could go to Hawaii, you could go to Europe. Doesn’t change much. The statutes might change a little bit, the wording, the formalities, but by and large, asserting a defense in a jury trial is largely the same everywhere you go. And so that’s a skill a lot of people come out of law school with: they either go to a prosecutor’s office, or a public defender’s office, or a private firm, and they learn criminal law.
Family law is similar. You can go just about anywhere, throw up a shingle, throw up a sign, say, “I’ll do family law,” and there’s going to be a need. There’s going to be a demand, and you can feed yourself off of that. Now, some people do both. They’ll do criminal law, they’ll do family law. The key is being competent. You have to be competent. Theoretically, a person can come out of law school and walk right into a jury trial on a murder case, so long as they are putting the time, the effort, the research in to be competent on what they’re trying to do.
Now, a person doesn’t have to have a history in family law to take a family law case. They have to put the time, the effort, the research in. And so what you have is lawyers who spend so much time, so much effort, they only do criminal law because they’re really good at it and that’s what they know how to do, or they’re really good at family law. That’s what they do. That’s how they know it. But what you also wind up with is lawyers who have tunnel vision. All they know is family law. All they know is that tiny little cast of characters. And those are the lawyers who can find themselves in trouble if they don’t realize that some of the tricks and relationships they have could be criminal.
MEG: And that’s funny that you say that. When I was in federal court, I had an attorney, and I was talking to the GAL’s attorney and the therapist’s attorney. They pretty much thought I was stupid, and they told me all these lies in the email, and I was like, “No, you’re wrong.” And it’s almost like they’re so used to being able to do whatever they want that they’re not used to anyone standing up and saying, “You’re absolutely incorrect.” And so that is where I’m finding a lot of attorneys don’t even know the laws or the rules, because it’s pretty much all opinion-based between two attorneys. Does that make sense? They can decide what they want to do. “Oh, you’ve got to do this. Oh, let’s mandate you to do this.” And people follow.
And I think that is the difference sometimes. Like you, you’re very, very smart, but you have to be smart in criminal law, because you have people’s lives at stake, right? It’s huge. And also, you have a jury, and a jury trial is totally, completely different from family court, when it’s just one judge. And so I think that’s my perspective on the difference, but I loved hearing his side of it. I had no idea. I thought with the bar, you had to have a family license.
SHAWN: It’s just one bar. One bar license covers everything except for patent law.
MEG: Okay, good to know.
SHAWN: You’ve got to apply to be part of patent law. So I can do family, I can do probate, I can do criminal. I can do that.
MEG: Wow. The more you know. I had no idea. So when someone specializes as an attorney in certain things, they worked hard… let’s say they only do criminal law. They know that very well. So they can do family law; they just don’t know the law. And vice versa.
SHAWN: You can carve out a niche for yourself.
MEG: Okay. Interesting. It’s kind of like how the social worker… the social worker, licensed therapist. You can be a social worker, or you can literally run a huge million-dollar therapy session for reunification and make millions of dollars with the same license.
SHAWN: These therapy companies are entirely unregulated, and I think that they’re ripe for investigation. I think if you look at the Conahan case, the Kids for Cash scandal, these therapy companies and these supervision companies, they’re making their money based on orders from judges. Almost nobody is saying, “Hey, you know what, co-parent? I think I agree to supervision.” It’s all orders, court orders.
MEG: And once you get in, you can hardly get out. I had a friend who was in there for two years. $200,000, and she was still supervised, and nothing was wrong.
SHAWN: Yeah. And they’re not regulated. And more importantly, they’re not subject to sunshine requests.
MEG: What’s a sunshine request?
SHAWN: With a governmental entity or a quasi-governmental entity, you can send an open records act or sunshine law request. You can say, “Look, under the law, you’re a governmental entity. I want to see your meeting minutes. I want to see your budgets.” I’ve done that to one of them here, and they never responded, because they’re private companies. They don’t have to respond. And so they could conceivably be paying kickbacks and campaign donations and all these terribly unethical but not necessarily criminal things, and they’re not having to disclose that, because they’re private companies.
MEG: So one thing… I think when we first started talking, I said people need to really start looking for criminal attorneys and not family attorneys anymore.
SHAWN: I’ve thought about this, and I think you’re right. But I think it needs to be a team effort. Right now, I’ve received thousands of comments’ worth of engagement: emails, texts, calls.
MEG: Welcome!
SHAWN: It’s hard. I can’t take people’s cases on individually. But what I can tell you is that if someone could get their family law attorney on board to partner with a criminal law attorney, to address the fraud from a civil standpoint, and to interface with a criminal law attorney to get at the crimes being committed, then they could address it all around. You can’t go into family court and get an undercover agent. But you can get that out of law enforcement.
MEG: So we have the Connection Circles on my website. You can go there and check it out, where families are coming together and talking about the same court actor. Would that be another benefit for them, to get multiple people together to file a complaint together? Can they do that with the FBI and stuff?
SHAWN: Filing complaints together is one way to go about it. But filing complaints, period, is essential.
MEG: Yes.
SHAWN: They can’t investigate what they don’t know about, right? So everyone…
MEG: Yeah. So when I worked on my complaint, I stated that a lot of the parents have the same, similar things as well. And so you can do that. But if you don’t want to, you can still just do it by yourself. But it is good to do it with someone else, just because you’ve got someone doing it with you. So you guys are then on the same complaint, and if they start interviewing and processing it, then you guys will be interviewed regarding the same court actor. Does that make sense?
SHAWN: Yeah. So what you’re kind of getting into is remedies. In family court, what is your remedy? You can ask the judge to deny the requested relief, the motion that your co-parent filed. You can ask the court to strike pleadings. You can ask the court for attorney’s fees and sanctions, and you can ask for certain fees, and that’s about it. That’s all you can get out of family court.
But when you file a complaint with law enforcement, you could open up a whole host of things. You could have a lead investigator assigned. You could get a joint task force: if this is organized crime affecting courts, you could get a joint task force between state and federal agents. You could get confidential informants. Some of these insiders could flip. They could be aware of it. They could be tired of it. You could have cooperating suspects. Maybe they catch one of these court actors committing another crime. They flip them and say, “Look, you roll over on your co-conspirators, we’ll go easy on you.” They can send law enforcement agents undercover. They could infiltrate courts. They could infiltrate law offices. They could make up fake marriages to see how the case works when they go through the process. They could also do mathematical predictive modeling. They could get access to the court records, see who the really bad actors are, see how much longer their cases take than everybody else’s, how much more their cases cost than everybody else’s, how much worse the outcome is. So when you switch from the family court side to the criminal side, you open up a suite of resources designed to take on perjury, forgery, wire fraud, mail fraud, obstruction.
MEG: Yep. All right. So one of the first things Shawn taught me was this law, and I wanted him to introduce it himself and talk about it. And why is this so important for you to memorize? He made me memorize it. Go ahead, Shawn.
SHAWN: Sure. I think that this is going to be the defining issue of our generation. What is remote work? Remote work is wires. Well, we have a law for wire fraud. And I think the time is ripe for wire fraud charges over what some of the people have done in our virtual courts and our virtual medical system with their wires. So 18 U.S.C. § 1343 is a law which prohibits any scheme or artifice to defraud by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, through the use of a wire. [unclear]
So what could that be? That could be two people billing for a service that was never rendered, or was so recklessly and negligently rendered as to be fraudulent. Or they did perform the service, but they had a secret agreement amongst one another not to sanction one another for filing false information. Conspiracy to commit wire fraud has historically been used against organized crime syndicates, because they like wires. Getting together in person and having a conversation can expose you to surveillance. You get a big organization, one that’s in the metro, or a state, or even nationwide, or even international: you need wires. So wire fraud is the statute for charging people who are engaging in a fraud through wires.
Now, here’s what’s really cool. This has a special provision for wire fraud which occurs in conjunction with a presidential declaration of emergency. We just saw that: COVID-19. All these virtual courts are the result of a proclamation of emergency by the president. And so all the fraud that is committed secondary to remote workers can get elevated penalties.
MEG: So, real quick, one question. This is COVID, so this is still in play?
SHAWN: This is still in play. These orders have not expired.
MEG: Okay, that was my question.
SHAWN: Many of these COVID orders are still in place. The judges who enacted these orders really did not have any sort of substantive public debate. In fact, it seems like what they did was they had video conferences and emails where they talked about shutting their courts down in favor of video conferences and emails. So one could even look at some of these judges and say, “Did you commit conspiracy to commit wire fraud so that you could commit conspiracy to commit wire fraud?”
MEG: Wow. That’s… okay. So you were saying that this made that law’s penalties even higher?
SHAWN: Yeah. Ordinarily, you can be fined or imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both. But if you committed an act of wire fraud in relation to a presidential declaration of emergency, or affecting a financial institution, such as a lawyer’s trust account or an insurance company, you’re eligible for elevated penalties of $1 million per violation or 30 years in prison, or both, per violation.
MEG: Per violation. So, one thing I just talked about last week: my court therapist got in trouble, and she could have been fined up to $1,000 per violation. Of course, they didn’t make her do that. They just said she had to take six extra hours anyway. But this is not the courts going after them. These are our agencies that protect us, and we are telling them what’s going on. So it’s a whole different thinking in your brain, because everyone’s used to going to another judge and asking for the judge to help you, or going to the committees. This is not that. This is where you’re just going to have to open up your mind and really learn from Shawn, because he has done this for years.
SHAWN: Yeah. This is different. This is a different route. You’ve got to be able to put the evidence together in order to convince a federal agent and a United States attorney to file a criminal charge. And they’ll do that. That’s what they do. But you’ve got to put the homework and the time in to explain to them that you have a real case.
MEG: And I want you guys to go… there’s another reel that I made about this, about what just came into effect, what got signed this year. In this reel, which you’ll see up here, I talk about how Todd Blanche put into effect making every state have a fraud prosecutor. And actually, the end date was July 6. You and I figured that out once we did all the math, right? So if you go watch that video, it goes into more detail. Those guys are now the ones who would be looking at the fraud that Shawn is going to teach us how to file. They modified the Department of Justice manual. That’s huge.
SHAWN: Yeah. You’re getting the federal government to change its own prosecution manual to account for all of the wire fraud being committed.
MEG: That’s why it’s so exciting. And so now it’s past July 6. Start getting your evidence. Start watching the shows, and start figuring out and thinking about how you can file your claims and file your complaint. I have put mine together, and I’m going to the FBI and filing it, so you can kind of see what it’s like. Shawn will go with me. We’re excited for that to come, but we kind of want to teach you first on all of this.
Again, welcome to the Stand With Meg Show. We are now hosting The Shawn Lee Report. Go to the website and check it out. Sign up for email, so when Shawn finds something, has something cool, he’ll email it out to you guys. If you want to watch us, the full-on video is on standwithmeg.com. It’s subscriptions only on TikTok, Instagram, and the Stand With Meg business Facebook. We can’t pay Shawn, and he’s taking his valuable time. So as of right now, it’s going to stay on the subscription, and we do pray one day we can make an income for him, so he can actually then do this all just on YouTube, and you guys can see everything. But until then, we’ve got to pay this guy a little bit of money so that he can take off some time from work, because tomorrow you’ve got trial.
SHAWN: I’m going into a trial. But I will tell you that an essential piece of this profession is advocacy. And the work that you do, sometimes you don’t get paid for, and it’s still essential work. So when I do bill clients, I know that sometimes I’m going to have to do some work because it’s absolutely essential. And this is an existential crisis.
MEG: Yes, it is.
SHAWN: For the American court system.
MEG: Yes, it is. Absolutely. Thank you for joining the Stand With Meg Show, where we do have a voice for the voiceless. I’m Meg, and this is Shawn with The Shawn Lee Report. And what’s the last slogan you like to say? Now let’s do it. Come on, get some peppiness in your step. There you go.
SHAWN: There’s less criminals in criminal law than in family law.
MEG: Thank you! He’s getting better, everybody. Do you think he’s getting better? I think he’s getting better. So, all right, signing off. Sing with me! (The show’s sung sign-off plays.)