Pras Michel, a founding member of the Fugees and the first hip-hop artist to be convicted on charges of working as a covert agent of the Chinese government, hasn’t entirely run out of ways to avoid going to federal prison, but he’s getting close.
On the Friday before Labor Day, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued her lengthiest ruling on the case since Michel was first indicted in 2019 on conspiracy charges for money laundering and election-law violations. Following Michel’s conviction last year, he upgraded to new lawyers, who immediately went after his prior attorney, former Death Row Records counsel David Kenner, for allegedly doing such a poor job defending Michel that he violated his right to a fair trial. Known as an “ineffective assistance of counsel†claim, it was one of more than a dozen arguments made by Michel’s new team for why he deserves a retrial. In her 77-page ruling, Judge Kollar-Kotelly responded to them all with one consistent and resounding message: nope.
“We’re disappointed with the decision,†Michel’s lead attorney Peter Zeidenberg said. “We think there were grievous and serious errors in the trial and they impacted the fairness of the outcome, and we will be appealing.â€
Media attention has focused on the fact that Kenner used experimental AI software to draft a bizarre closing statement at Michel’s trial last year; the chatbot’s glitchy hallucinations misattributed two chart-topping tracks, Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You†and Pras’s “Ghetto Supastar,†to the Fugees. In January, Judge Kollar-Kotelly called both sides back to court for a three-day evidentiary hearing about Kenner’s AI crutch and the rest of his questionable lawyering. Eight months later, her ruling finds that Kenner not only met his minimum obligations, but that he also argued a cogent, if ultimately unsuccessful, case in Michel’s defense. “[A] strategy’s ultimate failure does not mean an attorney is incompetent for pursuing it,†she wrote.
A more serious trial error receiving less attention was allegedly committed by government prosecutors and the judge herself when they informed the jury on several occasions that another judge in a related case had already determined that Michel was guilty. Consequently, Judge Kollar-Kotelly became an additional member of the prosecution and, according to Michel’s attorneys, exposed the jury to “extraordinarily prejudicial evidence.†Judge Kollar-Kotelly doesn’t deny that mistakes were made, but in her ruling, she explains that she fixed the problem when she “instructed the jurors that they were … to disregard any comments made by the Court that may have suggested an opinion as to Michel’s guilt.†The jury, she continued, “is presumed to have followed the Court’s instructions.â€
This ruling — that a jury can un-hear what one judge said about another judge’s final determination of the facts in a related case — amounts to a kind of magical legal thinking. It also shifts the burden of responsibility for fairness off of the judge and onto the jury, which no longer exists and cannot defend itself. It leaves Michel once again at the mercy of the court as he awaits sentencing. Due to his charges under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and assuming Judge Kollar-Kotelly follows sentencing guidelines, he is expected to receive anywhere from five to ten years behind bars.Â
It has been three years since the Justice Department hit Michel with a superseding indictment to include a madcap scheme that it alleges Michel coordinated between a group of top GOP fundraisers to secretly back-channel Chinese demands to then-President Trump, for which everyone in the crew expected to be paid tens of millions of dollars. This sort of bag job is generally not permitted in Washington — unless one has done the appropriate paperwork and registered with the State Department as a foreign agent, a critical step that Michel and most of his cohorts failed to complete. (Whether they knew that the payments were made with dirty money embezzled from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund known as 1MDB remains unknown.)
Last week, immediately following the Labor Day holiday and Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling, the Justice Department announced three new high-profile FARA indictments on three consecutive days. Brat summer is officially over, secret foreign agents!
The first alleges that New York governor Kathy Hochul’s deputy chief of staff, Linda Sun, received millions of dollars, real estate in Long Island and Hawaii, luxury cars including a 2024 Ferrari, and several shipments of gourmet salted ducks in exchange for influencing the governor’s office on Beijing’s behalf. According to the indictment, Sun ensured that issues unfavorable to Beijing — such as the future of Taiwan and the ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs — were kept off of Hochul’s radar. According to the FBI, Sun “never registered as a foreign agent†and intentionally concealed that she was working “at the order, request, or direction of the [People’s Republic of China] and the [Chinese Communist Party].â€
The second and most high-profile indictment in this month’s FARA fracas revealed that several prominent right-wing media agitators — including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin — received millions of dollars in laundered Russian money through Tenet Media, a start-up funded almost entirely by Russian state media. According to the FBI, Rubin was raking in $400,000 a month, while Pool took $100,000 for videos where he espoused such totally normal views as “Ukraine is our enemy, being funded by the Democrats!†Pool has since declared that he and his fellow propagandists “were deceived and are victims,†even though his employers at Tenet were sending each other messages such as, “So we’re billing the Russians from the corporation, right?†As for the cash, the influencers seem intent on keeping it.
Third, the Justice Department charged former Trump campaign adviser Dimitri Simes for taking more than $1 million while working for Russia’s Channel One, another Kremlin-controlled network, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
All of which brings us back to Michel, the most famous and culturally influential of the bunch (sorry, Benny Johnson), and whose foreign-agent charges are far murkier than those in this month’s indictments.
“Those cases are the types of FARA violations that go to the heart of why we have a FARA law,†said Paul Pelletier, a former federal prosecutor who has been following the case closely. “To me, Pras’s case just stretches FARA beyond its intended limits, and this is what ultimately makes for bad law.â€
Michel’s sentencing hearing is expected to be held before the end of the calendar year.