Ex-DOJ Prosecutor From the Office That Hounded Trump Advisor Michael Caputo Is Now Suing Him — From Inside Big Law

A cancer survivor newly named to advise the President says he is the first target of privatized DOJ lawfare.

Political operatives get sued all the time. That’s not news. What is news is who signed the complaint.

Longtime Trump adviser Michael Caputo, a focus of the “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax for a decade, has been hit with an 85-page civil suit.

The lawyer who filed it on September 8, Jack Korba, was until last summer a prosecutor in the National Security section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

That is the same small office that investigated Caputo for five years over alleged foreign-agent violations, secretly obtained the contents of his Google accounts, and closed the case last December without a single charge.

Now former prosecutor Korba works at Foley & Lardner, one of the most powerful law firms in the country, and Caputo is in his sights again. Caputo calls Korba “his family’s tormentor because the civil suit recycles the Russia theory Korba’s own DOJ office could never prove across five years.”

Caputo says this is a contract dispute on paper. Korba’s client, 88-year-old inventor Gilbert Hyatt, paid Caputo’s firm $100,000 to lobby the White House for an AI foundation and now alleges breach of contract and fraud. Caputo denies all of it.

But read the complaint, which Caputo has posted at LawfareDOJ.com. It tells the court that “Benedict Arnold merely conspired to deliver the American fort at West Point into British hands.” It quotes Vladimir Putin on artificial intelligence, three times. It alleges Russian “connections” on “information and belief.” All of this in a dispute over a PR retainer.

That’s where legal experts say this stops looking like an ordinary lawsuit.

The District of Columbia’s ethics rules say a former government lawyer “shall not accept other employment in connection with a matter which is the same as, or substantially related to, a matter in which the lawyer participated personally and substantially as a public officer or employee.” There is no waiver for a lawyer who moves to private practice.

And the complaint itself points to “a 2021 criminal investigation” of Caputo. That is the investigation run by the office where Korba worked.

Caputo isn’t waiting. He has taken the matter to the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, alleging that Korba has a conflict of interest and used material he could only have gleaned from the federal probe. If that is true, evidence the government gathered in secret, at taxpayer expense, in a case too weak to charge, is now working for a private client. Caputo calls it “privatized DOJ lawfare,” and he warns there will be “many, many more” cases like his if it is allowed to stand.

The legal argument is only half of this story. The other half is what a decade of it does to a family.

In September 2020, according to The Cancer Letter, the director of the CDC felt a swollen lymph node in Caputo’s neck. It was head-and-neck cancer. (Caputo has said for years that the stress of the Russia investigations is what gave him cancer in the first place.)

Nearly four months of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation followed. He could not swallow. He went from roughly 300 pounds to about 180. In January 2021, his doctors found no evidence of disease.

Caputo says he still lives with the downstream effects of the treatments that saved his life.

After he recovered, he moved his family to Ave Maria, Florida, on the edge of the Everglades. It is a town built around a Catholic university, founded by Tom Monaghan of Domino’s Pizza, and Caputo is studying theology there. By every account, the family found peace. “After ten years, we were just starting to breathe again,” he told Miranda Devine of The New York Post.

Then came the best news in years for Caputo. The White House has named him to the President’s Cancer Panel, where he wants to focus on survivorship. He shares that cause with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who recently wrote in USA Today about her own breast cancer treatment. Caputo told The Cancer Letter she “worked through cancer without skipping a beat.”

That appointment should have been the headline of his month. Instead, his family is reading an 85-page complaint that compares him to Benedict Arnold. “My wife and daughters won’t stop crying,” said Caputo.

Judicial Watch says it has moved to unseal the warrant materials targeting Caputo. We all deserve to see what the Justice Department collected and who handled it. That information belongs to the People and should be released immediately.