By Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON, Jan 12 (Reuters) – Tom Goldstein was a prominent Washington lawyer who argued dozens of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court until a double life involving high-stakes poker games hijacked his career. Now, Goldstein is betting that jurors will throw out federal tax evasion charges against him and spare him prison time.
Goldstein will stand trial starting this week on federal prosecutors’ allegations that he filed false tax returns by failing to report millions of dollars in poker winnings, lied on mortgage applications and made improper payments through his Goldstein & Russell law firm to finance a lavish lifestyle.
He denied knowingly breaking the law, saying in court papers that the errors in his tax returns were due to the negligence of his bookkeepers and accountants. Goldstein, who has pleaded not guilty, has twice rejected a plea offer from the Justice Department.
The original indictment included allegations involving payments to women with whom he had extramarital affairs, but the judge in the case later dismissed the charge related to those claims.
Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday in the Washington suburb of Greenbelt, Maryland, and is expected to last about four weeks. Goldstein’s defense attorney, Jonathan Kravis, who is likely to present his opening statement to the jury on Wednesday or Thursday, did not respond to a request for comment.
Goldstein’s indictment surprised the legal community in the US capital, where he was known as a legal pioneer, said JP Collins, a law professor at George Washington University who does not know Goldstein personally but has followed his career.
“The allegations against him were unbelievable,” Collins said. “Fraud, tax evasion, high-stakes gambling, workplace mistresses — if a network aired a TV show with a character doing what Goldstein was supposed to have done, it would never make it past the pilot (episode) because no one would believe them.”
A LEGAL PIONEER
As a young lawyer, Goldstein perfected the technology for identifying cases that produced splits in how federal appeals courts had interpreted the law and were therefore good candidates for Supreme Court review. The Supreme Court is asked to hear thousands of appeals a year, but selects only about 60 cases.
Goldstein began cold-calling potential clients, offering to represent them in the Supreme Court at little or no cost. His salesmanship drew the scorn of other appellate lawyers at first, but it worked.
In 1999, when Goldstein was 28, he made his Supreme Court debut, despite lacking the usual credentials of an Ivy League education and prior tenure as one of the justices. Since then, Goldstein has argued more than 40 times before the Supreme Court, representing a wide range of clients, from indigent defendants to large corporations such as Google and Nike.
The Supreme Court-focused SCOTUSblog, which Goldstein founded with his wife and business partner Amy Howe in 2002, helped generate even more business for their law firm. Howe, who practiced law with her husband for many years, was not charged with wrongdoing.
“It’s hard to overstate how important SCOTUSblog was to the legal community in the 2010s when I was in law school and a practitioner,” Collins said.
In 2023, amid a federal investigation into his tax returns that was not yet publicly known, Goldstein retired from the firm he founded, Goldstein & Russell, which relaunched without him under a new name.
A SURPRISE PURCHASE
Goldstein’s passion for poker was well-known, but colleagues were surprised by the wild lifestyle described by prosecutors in his January 2025 indictment. According to prosecutors, Goldstein recruited investors to fund his high-stakes games, including one in 2016 where he won $26 million from a California businessman.
The indictment also alleged that “between 2016 and 2022, Goldstein engaged in or pursued intimate personal relationships with at least a dozen women, transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars to them.”
“There was never any indication of these things publicly,” Collins said. “So it was really quite shocking, and the reaction on social media when the indictment came out seems to suggest that I wasn’t the only one blindsided by his revelations.”
In their original indictment, prosecutors said Goldstein created sham jobs at his law firm for women he was romantically involved with, paying salaries and benefits through his firm despite the fact that they paid little or nothing.
U.S. District Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby dismissed a count of charges related to those charges last month, finding the charge too vague.
Goldstein had several taped interviews with New York Times reporter Jeffrey Toobin, who published an article about the trial last month. In those interviews, Goldstein admitted to extramarital affairs with several women he met online, but said prosecutors focused on that part of his life to publicly embarrass him.
“These fees have nothing to do with taxes,” Goldstein said. “They made those charges to smear me, to make the jury dislike me.”
Goldstein told the Times that he rejected a plea deal because it would have opened him up to a possible five-year prison sentence.
“I never, ever thought I did anything wrong,” Goldstein said.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)