It only makes sense that Matthew Kluger was disbarred in Washington D.C. After all, he was already disbarred in New York as of January, and besides, he just received 12 years in jail for his career-long multimillion insider-trading scheme. He was a “career criminal” as the judge said when defending the sentence, not as “excessive” as Kluger tried to argue, but right on the dot.
He was trading inside information from the very start, during his summer associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and continued the criminal habit working for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom, Fried, Fran, Harris, Shriver, & Jacobson, and lately at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich, & Rosati, as the Blog of Legal Times reported.
This is an objective lesson in the importance of starting a career on the right foot, in how small misdeeds early on sprout and grow and overcome one’s whole life. That is why the court found him guilty of a “crime of moral turpitude,” and felt no qualms in disbarring him, which he didn’t bother to contest.
He was accused in obstructing justice of “knowingly or intentionally disregarding the system of law and due process that defines our civilized society,” as the court said, making him into an enemy, in effect, of the entire world.
“[I]t is really quite remarkable that Kluger could not even wait to graduate from law school before using his employment at a law firm to initiate his illegal activities, and it is equally remarkable that during most of his legal career he was involved in criminal activity,” Judge Morton Greenberg wrote.