Fraud Chief Brings C-Suite Lessons to DOJ White-Collar Cases

The Justice Department’s criminal fraud chief is applying lessons learned as a senior executive at Hewlett Packard Enterprise as he steers an office at the center of white-collar enforcement.

Glenn Leon’s past nine years in-house at a Fortune 500 business are framing his early months back in government—whether it’s assigning his senior team to read a Silicon Valley venture capitalist’s book on leadership, evaluating arguments from companies seeking DOJ’s leniency, or determining when to end long-running investigations.

Leon, who returned to the fraud section in September, routinely referenced his tenure as the technology company’s chief ethics and compliance officer in an interview with Bloomberg Law.

But the former federal prosecutor and senior supervisor in the section he now leads made it clear to companies that he’s “certainly not a pushover.”

Discussing the challenges for businesses to partake in DOJ’s latest policy push on preserving employees’ encrypted messaging, Leon said his sympathies are limited.

“It’s possible to give text messages, because when I was doing this in-house, I was able to do it,” said Leon, who designed HPE’s policy on communicating over WhatsApp, Signal, and other apps. “A company that comes in, says, ‘Yeah, it’s hard. We can’t do it'—gotta give us a lot more.”

Impact Over Stats

By assuming office well into the Biden administration as a career official, Leon is responsible for implementing a recent wave of corporate crime policies. That includes boosting incentives for companies who voluntarily report misconduct and clawing back pay of executives who engage in misconduct.

He’s inherited a team of prosecutors enforcing securities fraud, overseas bribery, and health-care schemes who are coming off a record high trial year in 2022. But they also experienced declines in number of corporate resolutions and individual indictments.

Leon said that while year-to-year figures matter, he is “not going to chase numbers.” He explained his priority on impact over stats by noting that he asked his supervisors to read “Measure What Matters” by original Google and Amazon board member John Doerr. The management book lays out a goal-setting technique to drive growth—known as objectives and key results.

“We’re the fraud section. We’re supposed to do the biggest and most impactful white-collar cases in the country and for the world,” Leon said. “So that’s what I’m most concerned about.”

To that end, Leon’s applied “a bit more rigor” in conducting regular check-ins on case review with his attorneys.

Some former fraud section attorneys and other members of the white-collar defense bar have complained of cases dragging on without charging decisions, hindering prosecutors from initiating new corporate probes.

“I’m not going to agree or disagree with that hypothesis,” Leon said. “But I will tell you one of the things I learned and was very helpful to me, being the chief ethics and compliance officer for a major company with limited resources—you have to do that all the time. It’s always about making sure your team is spending their time and attention in the right places” and asking if they’re “spending too much time chasing cases that aren’t going to become cases.”

“That is something I learned in-house and that I think it’s fair to say that’s something I’ve brought and am bringing to the fraud section,” he added.

Compliance Emphasis

Leon’s HPE pedigree also positioned him to advance DOJ’s emphasis on empowering corporate compliance officers and encouraging companies to invest in their internal protocols that root out misconduct.

He’s mostly impressed with how the corporate community has responded.

Leon said DOJ is seeing “strong presentations” in some instances from companies as part of their efforts to resolve a case, noting “a level of sophistication and preparedness that I don’t think we saw years ago.”

Leon’s reputation as a fairminded leader with a balanced background on both sides of the corporate enforcement equation will be tested. The fraud section is trying to overcome defense attorney skepticism over the department’s revised policy to encourage companies to self-disclose potential criminal behavior.

Defense lawyers have sought greater clarity and are intrigued about the prospect of DOJ declining to bring charges in exchange for “extraordinary cooperation.” But they’ve cautioned it may be a leap of faith that they’d rather let other companies try first.

“I respectfully challenge the suggestion that there exists any reason for a lack of trust between the corporate and white-collar community and the DOJ,” Leon said. “In fact, across administrations, and particularly over the last decade, the Criminal Division has demonstrated a great deal of transparency and candor regarding our policies, priorities, and decision-making process.”

He teased that “upcoming corporate resolutions” will “continue to show how our policies apply in a predictable manner.”

Transparency will give Leon an opportunity to show his expectations of corporate behavior and how his C-suite years are being brought to bear. It may arise, for instance, when prosecutors evaluate a company’s ability to produce employee chats.

“When we resolve cases—and we will continue to do so in the days and weeks and months ahead—as part of our plea paperwork, we put more and more thought into the relevant considerations and why a company did extraordinary cooperation or full cooperation,” Leon said. “We’ll explain some of the reasons. And I can tell you, companies that want to give us WhatsApp information or ephemeral messaging information—if they’re motivated to do so, they often can figure it out.”