FBI, SEC investigate Mickelson in insider trading probe

He may be mentally tough in that they showed up twice to ambush him (once at an airport last year, this time during the tournament), tried to threaten him with "We are going to destroy your public image if you don't give up Billy Walters and Carl Icahn," and by all appearances he didn't give them anything. I don't think he told them to go F themselves, but he also didn't give them anything, which is how an investigation that should be private unless they are ready to charge someone with something turned into leaked newspaper fodder to try to hurt him. Those are just dirty tactic.s

Covered in very little detail, compared to this story, was the fact that that Nelson Obus beat the Feds in his insider trading case last week. Everything that happened to him showed how shitty their tactics are,. They smear you in public, then use their unlimited ability to keep coming at you to force you to have to spend millions of dollars defending yourself if you don't admit some sort of guilt. In Obus' case, it took him 9 years to clear his name. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/fund-manager-found-not-liable-in-insider-trading-case/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

 

Insider trading laws are ridiculous.

But what has been publicly reported isn't even insider trading. This is how random these prosecutions are. Icahn wasn't an insider. He had no fiduciary duty to the company. He wasn't on the board of directors and not a part of management. He had just accumulated a large stake in a company, and not even the 10 percent threshold they sometimes point to (why 10 percent even?). If I buy stock in XYZ Corp. and turn around and tell one of you that I like the stock and I think its prospects are good, have I done something illegal? Or is it only illegal if you are Carl Icahn?

In the case of Walters and Mickelson, let's say Icahn told Walters I am piling into Clorox and am going to try to boost the value of the stock through shareholder activism. And Walters turned around and told Mickelson to buy Clorox options because a little birdy told him something good might happen to the stock. You get back to the fact that Icahn breached no fiduciary duty to anyone in the first place. But even if they somehow pin some BS on Icahn--because they tend to make up rules as they go along--Mickelson would have had to have known that the info came from Icahn and that Icahn betrayed a fiduciary duty, in order for Mickelson to be guilty of anything.

Which leaves this as the story: The Feds picked a high-profile target and went out grasping at straws. They got zilch that would lead to a successful prosecution of any sort, and rather than letting it go, they decided to try to publicly hurt reputations in what really amounts to a McCarthy-like tactic (if you don't see it is because you are blinded by the fact that you personally don't find their targets sympathetic).

So they leaked the whole thing (the only possibility the Feds didn't leak it is if they approached someone else and that person is the source of the stories coming public. something that may be the case, but doesn't seem likely) to see if someone would panic and hand over something -- made up or otherwise. All because they threw out a fishnet and got nothing in the first place.