Ex-HUD official cites Jan. 6 opinion while asking SCOTUS for emergency review of obstruction conviction

WASHINGTON (CN) — A former official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development petitioned the Supreme Court Monday for an emergency review of his year-and-a-day sentence for concealing financial records.

Eghbal Saffarinia, a former assistant inspector general at the department, was convicted of engaging in a scheme to conceal his debt to a government contractor and personal friend to whom he steered tens of millions of dollars in government business. Without the high court’s intervention, he could begin serving his sentence on Thursday, he said in his petition.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Saffarinia’s conviction in May, basing its decision in part on the court’s holding in Fischer v. United States that a federal evidence-tampering statute could apply to obstruction of official proceeding prosecutions for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In June, the Supreme Court overturned that ruling, determining that the Justice Department’s interpretation of the statute should be narrowed and the statute applies to evidence tampering alone.

Saffarinia, who was convicted under a similar statute charged as obstruction of justice, argued in his request for a stay that the Supreme Court’s decision in Fischer should apply to his conviction. He said that the D.C. Circuit’s decision could cause “extensive mischief” by allowing a broad penal statute to be broadly interpreted and urged the high court to review his case to bring the law in line with precedent.

“Under the [D.C. Circuit] opinion below, the residual phrase ‘proper administration’ now has the broadest possible reach, stretch Section 1519 to reach obstruction of any routine administrative activity — from review of U.S. Postal Service certified mail forms to review of federal job applications,” Saffarinia said.

He also warned that without the court’s intervention, he would likely serve his full sentence before the justices could consider his petition and address the merits of the case.

Saffarinia worked as a high-ranking official in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of the Inspector General for five years. He was in charge of allocating the department’s information technology contracts, which spanned multiple years and were worth tens of millions of dollars.

In 2014, a contractor who lost out on one such contract filed a bid protest, which sparked an investigation that revealed Saffarinia repeatedly falsified his financial liability disclosures. He had borrowed money from the owner of an IT company that had been awarded department contracts at a time when Saffarinia had “near-complete power” over the agency.

One loan, from Saffarinia’s college friend and head of IT company Orchid Technologies in 2013, totaled $80,000. He received a second loan of $90,000 from a family friend who lived down the street from him in 2015.

Saffarinia was indicted on seven charges, four related to his failure to disclose the loans on his disclosure forms — he was required to file annual disclosures of financial liabilities over $10,000 — and two charges for falsifying those disclosure forms to HUD and the Office of Government Ethics “with intent to obstruct” their investigations.

In his request for a stay, Saffarinia pointed language in the statute under which the latter two charges fell that ties the law to the “proper administration of [a] matter.” The ex-HUD official argues it should be read only to mean a formal, adversarial or adjudicative proceeding.

Under that interpretation, Saffarinia argued, his obstruction convictions could not stand, as the review of his financial forms was “routine, limited and non-adversarial.”

“The D.C. Circuit’s decision in this case gives the phrase ‘proper administration’ of a matter in Section 1519 its broadest conceivable meaning, reading it to encompass any imaginable activity of a federal agency, no matter how workaday or routine,” Saffarinia wrote.

He warned that the appellate court’s reading would transform any knowingly false statement or omission on any government document, “from hiring to payroll to administration of U.S. Postal Service certified mail,” could lead to a felony obstruction charge and up to 20 years in prison.

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