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1 tax returns.
2 At the end of the day, the government's brief takes
3 you at great pains through each of those three backdating
4 transactions. And I should say, quote, backdating
5 transactions. What you learn is what is undisputed is that's
6 what happened. Mistakes in the craziness of this law firm
7 where you were churning these things out every December and
8 taking a portion of the losses into income, the tax loss, in
9 the craziness of that and mistakes were made. And trades were
10 done to try to correct the mistakes. You can't dispute that.
11 The only question at the end of the day, as I say in
12 the papers, is mens rea. And the mens rea when you read the
13 government's evidence, the bottom line is he must have known.
14 And he must have known because he was an accountant.
15 And what we know on that is I think for two years, in
16 the '80s, he was a junior accountant at 20 some thousand
17 dollars a year. There is not a shred of evidence that he ever
18 took a class that taught, quote, the annual accounting rule,
19 and I think the Court knows the Second Circuit precedent that
20 says "must have known" is an argument, but it's not of great
21 weight.
22 And I'll stop with this. I have to say, I wasn't in
23 the must've known category. This wasn't something that I was
24 taught in tax law. Maybe I forgot it and maybe the answer is
25 it's so obvious you didn't have to teach it. But I said to
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