The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal of a Long Island lawyer who claims a First Amendment right to disseminate sealed documents he claims to have received from a whistleblower. Frederick Oberlander was hit with a series of gag orders after attaching sealed records to a civil racketeering suit. Those records confirmed that the John Doe of a 1998 pump-and-dump stock swindle was a defendant named Felix Sater. Records related to Sater’s conviction in connection with the $40 million scam were sealed in exchange for the defendant’s cooperation and assistance on matters apparently involving national security. Oberlander is representing plaintiffs in an unrelated Southern District matter, Kriss v. Bay Rock Group, 10-cv-3959, who allege they unwittingly invested in a business deal with Sater and were unaware of his criminal history.
A series of gag orders barred Oberlander from disseminating the sealed documents and both Oberlander and his attorney, former Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker partner Richard Lerner, are targets of civil and criminal contempt investigations. Yesterday, the Supreme Court refused to review the gag orders.
