We think in the U.S. that a jury will provide us a fair trial despite the left dominating the legal system. But what if the judge doesn’t allow the jury to see all the evidence, including testimony from key witnesses? That is what happened a little over a week ago in a criminal trial against conservative attorney Jeffrey Moffatt, where he was facing up to 105 years in prison merely for checking the wrong box.
Moffatt was targeted by the State Bar of Arizona and disbarred, likely because he and his wife, Star, ran for office in California as Republicans. He’d sent an inappropriate message to a woman — who was not a client — and despite the fact that other attorneys who had done far worse, such as having sex with clients — were barely given a slap on the wrist, the bar’s disciplinary judge disbarred him.
Moffatt’s main line of work was helping disabled people obtain benefits from the Social Security Administration, something anyone can do, you do not need to be an attorney. However, when he inadvertently checked the wrong box on the SSA forms stating that he was a licensed attorney, something he’d routinely done for years, rogue federal prosecutors under the Biden administration filed felony charges against him.
Moffatt was likely targeted by prosecutors because he was a whistleblower. In 2017, he reported the head of SSA, Nancy Berryhill, for being improperly seated, since she was never confirmed by the Senate. The GAO issued a report that said everything Berryhill did after November 17, 2017, was voidable.
The jurors deadlocked on five of the six charges, which were wire fraud, but convicted Moffatt on one count of making a false statement, a class D felony, which can result in five years' incarceration. What likely happened is some of the inner city jurors — who were likely all Democrats — chose to believe the prosecution’s shoddy case because the Moffatts were Republicans, and wore down the other jurors who objected until they convinced them to “split the baby” — find him guilty on one charge.
Mistakenly checking the wrong box on a federal form rarely results in criminal charges. Out of billions of form submissions, criminal charges for a wrong box are exceptional (less than 1 in 1 million for non-fraudulent errors). Agencies like the IRS resolve over 99 percent via civil means.
Moffatt did not benefit from the mistakenly checked box, and the SSA’s rules allowed him to continue representing clients while he was litigating the disbarment. There were no victims.
In order to be a false statement, it must be material, and knowingly and willfully made. None of these applied. Moffatt checking the box made no material difference since he was allowed to represent clients without a law license, which is evident since the SSA continued to let him practice while he was disputing the disbarment. And the prosecution provided zero evidence that he checked the wrong box knowingly or willfully. And why would he have? He received no extra benefit from it.
Senator Wendy Rogers, the powerful chair of the Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator Mark Finchem, who also serves on that committee, traveled to Los Angeles for the trial to testify about how the State Bar of Arizona targets conservative attorneys. However, Judge John A. Kronstadt, who was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama, refused to allow them to testify, despite the distance they’d traveled. Both Rogers and Finchem have asked the DOJ to investigate the bar. The Executive Guidance Committee of the Maricopa County Republican Committee unanimously passed a resolution this summer calling for the DOJ to investigate the bar.
The judge denied 13 of Moffatt’s 14 pretrial motions. The only one he accepted was merely a procedural correction, not removing Moffatt’s sixth attorney from the record. All six attorneys who first represented him in the case had over 1,400 days to file pretrial motions and never filed even one.
They failed to issue a single subpoena and would not interview Moffatt's witnesses, so he ended up representing himself. In contrast, when Moffatt took over his own representation, the judge only gave him 18 days. Despite the old saying, “An attorney who represents himself has a fool for a client,” Moffatt beat five of the charges because the case against him was so bad.
The judge allowed 17,000 pages of government exhibits to be admitted, and did not provide them to Moffatt until the first day of trial. Moffatt submitted a mere 21 documents of evidence, and the judge only admitted four.
The special agent who built up the case against Moffatt and arrested him admitted during trial that he didn't know the SSA rules, didn’t bother to check that Moffatt was in a protected status, and during that status, the SSA doesn't care about state bars because it follows its own process.
If Moffatt hadn’t been wrongly disbarred, he would have never been prosecuted for checking the wrong box. But Moffatt was not allowed to talk about the disbarment during the trial.
During their deliberations, the jury kept asking questions about the law, questions that Moffatt could have easily answered during the trial if the judge hadn’t kept cutting him off by stating that everything was irrelevant.
The bar has come under intense criticism in recent years for its bias towards conservative attorneys. David Mast, the president of AZ Voters Rights, filed a lawsuit against the State Bar of Arizona last September, alleging it targets conservative attorneys.
Moffatt is appealing. He suffers from a Traumatic Brain Injury, and in 2024 was also diagnosed with a tumor on the outside of his brain and cysts forming inside his brain. He has been fighting the injustice since his disbarment in 2016. It is atrocious that rogue prosecutors at the bar and on the federal level have gotten away with this. There are likely going to be hearings on both the Congressional and state legislative levels to investigate the State Bar of Arizona for “barfare.” Stay tuned.
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