Halpern

“I think it looks like he was trying to shore up evidence to find the result he was looking for. The fact that he went outside the office is an indication he wasn’t getting the support that he wanted from the prosecutors within the office,” said Carley Palmer, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, who is now a partner at Halpern May Ybarra Gelberg LLP.

Essayli’s move to offer a misdemeanor plea to a defendant who had already been convicted was extremely unorthodox, according to Carley Palmer, a former supervisor in the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles who is now a partner at Halpern May Ybarra Gelberg LLP.

“Career prosecutors who are past their probationary status have public service protections. That ordinarily means that before one of them could get fired, there would be a long, well-documented process,” said Carley Palmer, a former supervisor in the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles who is now a partner at Halpern May Ybarra Gelberg LLP.

Carley Palmer, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who is now a partner at Halpern May Ybarra Gelberg LLP, said Schleifer was fired via a “one line e-mail, and it came from a White House staff account.”

"A big message from our work," summarized Halpern, "is that the decisions we make about what we eat are important for reducing our environmental footprint, but other people may pay the price for those decisions."