FEDERAL CRIMINAL LAWYERS

federal grand jury subpoena

The Subpoena Just Arrived

Todd Spodek isn’t just another federal defense attorney, look – Lawline.com designated him their “Grand Jury Expert” after he created the comprehensive educational course that teaches attorneys across the country how these secretive proceedings actually work. Not the textbook version, the real version where prosecutors have been building their case for months before you ever see that subpoena. Since 2010, Spodek has appeared in federal court daily throughout the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, where more grand jury subpoenas originate than anywhere else in America. He’s handled hundreds of grand jury matters, from healthcare fraud sweeps to cryptocurrency investigations to the ongoing January 6 cases that continue generating subpoenas years later. When that federal subpoena arrives at your door, you need someone who understands the intricate dance between cooperation and self-preservation, someone who knows which prosecutors want cooperation and which ones view every witness as a potential target. Spodek Law Group maintains offices at 85 Broad Street in Manhattan’s Financial District, walking distance from both federal courthouses where these grand juries convene every week. The firm’s perfect Avvo rating and Super Lawyers recognition reflect what federal judges and prosecutors already know – when someone gets a grand jury subpoena, Todd Spodek knows exactly what happens next.

Your Timeline and Deadlines

Federal grand juries meet on schedule. Eastern District of New York: Tuesdays and Thursdays. Southern District: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Your testimony date aligns with these schedules, typically several weeks from service, though document production usually demands a couple weeks. Miss these deadlines without proper legal process, you’re in contempt. Last November, a corporation faced $50,000 daily fines for ignoring a subpoena, accumulating $1.5 million before compliance. Last October, a witness spent six months in civil contempt, jail time for refusing to testify without valid Fifth Amendment grounds. The investigation behind your subpoena started long ago, that’s what people don’t understand. Grand juries sit for eighteen months, extended to three years for complex cases. By the time you’re subpoenaed, prosecutors have presented evidence, heard testimony, reviewed thousands of documents, they’ve built timelines and theories and narratives about what happened. In last year’s healthcare fraud sweep, the average investigation ran over a year before the first subpoena issued. Cryptocurrency cases averaged a year and a half of blockchain analysis before witness subpoenas. You’re entering a process midstream, where prosecutors know more than they’re revealing, where other witnesses might have already testified about you, where documents you forgot about have already been produced by third parties. Recent cases show escalating enforcement. Last December: the tech executive who destroyed documents after receiving his subpoena, thinking deleted emails couldn’t be recovered, learned that Google maintains deletion logs prosecutors can subpoena. Last month: a Miami businessman ignored his grand jury subpoena, assuming distance from New York protected him, arrested at Miami International Airport on a material witness warrant. Early this year: a doctor produced documents but redacted sections she deemed irrelevant, charged with contempt when prosecutors discovered the alterations through metadata analysis.

Response timeline starts now. Not when you hire an attorney, not after you’ve gathered documents, not when you feel ready. Prosecutors track every day between service and compliance, they note who responds quickly, who delays, who hires counsel immediately versus who attempts self-representation. These observations influence their decisions about targets, charges, cooperation credit.

Three Critical Decisions

Sometimes you sit with the subpoena for hours, reading it over and over, trying to understand what they already know and what they’re fishing for and you’ll drive yourself crazy doing this because the document doesn’t tell you anything useful. Federal prosecutors don’t reveal their hand when they’re still building the case. They’ve been gathering evidence for months before your name appeared on this subpoena, interviewing people you haven’t thought about in years, pulling records from institutions you forgot you dealt with, analyzing transactions you made without thinking twice about them at the time. That uncertainty – not knowing whether you’re the target or just a witness, whether cooperation helps or hurts, whether hiring an attorney makes you look guilty or smart – that’s part of the process, that’s intentional, prosecutors use your confusion and fear to their advantage. The clock is running and every hour you wait without legal counsel is an hour prosecutors spend building their case stronger, finding more witnesses, analyzing more documents, developing more theories about what you did or didn’t do. Full compliance means produce every document, answer every question, hold nothing back, trust that honesty will protect you even when you’re not sure what they’re investigating. Cooperation might earn leniency if you’re a target, might keep you from becoming one if you’re not, but here’s what they don’t tell you in those crime procedurals: testimony under oath carries perjury risk under 18 U.S.C. § 1621, up to five years for each false statement, and what counts as “false” isn’t always what you’d think. Prosecutors compare your testimony against documents you haven’t seen, against witnesses you don’t know testified, against electronic evidence you forgot existed, against records you didn’t know were kept. One misremembered date, one forgotten email, one inconsistent detail becomes a felony, becomes additional charges, becomes leverage prosecutors use to pressure you into pleading guilty to the underlying offense. In last year’s PPP fraud prosecutions, roughly three-quarters of defendants who testified before grand juries were later charged with perjury or false statements in addition to underlying crimes and that statistic should make you think twice about walking into that grand jury room without serious preparation. The prosecutors already know the answers to most questions they’ll ask. They’re testing whether you’ll tell the truth or whether you’ll become their next obstruction charge, they’re listening for inconsistencies that give them leverage, they’re building their case while you think you’re defending yourself.

Because here’s the brutal truth nobody wants to say out loud: the federal criminal justice system isn’t designed to be fair to you when you’re sitting in front of a grand jury, it’s designed to give prosecutors maximum investigative power with minimum oversight, it’s twenty-three citizens who only hear the prosecution’s side of the story, who don’t have your attorney in the room, who vote on whether to indict based entirely on what the prosecutor chooses to present.

Fifth Amendment assertion lets you refuse to answer questions that might incriminate you, but this isn’t absolute protection, it’s complicated and contextual and easy to screw up without proper guidance. Prosecutors might offer use immunity, compelling testimony that can’t be used directly against you, though they can use it to find other evidence, it’s called derivative use and it means your immunized testimony becomes a roadmap to your conviction. Transactional immunity, broader protection, rarely offered anymore because prosecutors learned it gave away too much. That October cryptocurrency case: several witnesses asserted Fifth Amendment rights, prosecutors immunized some, all testified, a couple became defendants anyway based on evidence their immunized testimony led prosecutors to discover and that’s completely legal, completely constitutional, completely terrifying.

Document production generally can’t be refused on Fifth Amendment grounds unless the act of production itself is incriminating.

Taking the Fifth in front of a grand jury doesn’t look guilty to the jurors because grand jury proceedings are secret, but it might make prosecutors dig deeper into your affairs, start investigating things they weren’t looking at before. Moving to quash means challenge the subpoena’s validity, argue undue burden, claim privilege, fight back against what you see as prosecutorial overreach. Success rate in the Southern District of New York: around 8% last year, according to court statistics. Judges rarely quash federal grand jury subpoenas, viewing them as legitimate investigative tools with broad scope. Grounds that occasionally work: attorney-client privilege for lawyers subpoenaed about clients, reporter’s privilege in limited circumstances, demonstrable harassment. Motion to quash delays compliance deadlines but alerts prosecutors you’re fighting, sometimes triggering more aggressive investigation, they interpret resistance as consciousness of guilt, whether that’s fair or not.

Delete Nothing

Delete nothing. Destroy nothing. Alter nothing. Period.

The moment you receive a grand jury subpoena, preservation obligations attach to everything potentially responsive, every email, every text message, every document, every file, everything. Obstruction of justice, 18 U.S.C. § 1519, carries up to 20 years in federal prison. The December tech executive deleted emails Friday night, thinking Gmail’s trash folder meant gone forever, thinking Google wouldn’t cooperate with prosecutors, thinking he could make the problem disappear by making the evidence disappear. Prosecutors recovered them from Google’s servers Monday morning, arrested him that afternoon, proved he deleted them after receiving the subpoena by comparing timestamps on the deletion logs to the subpoena service date. Eighteen months in federal prison for obstruction, plus charges for the underlying crime he was originally being investigated for. “Destruction” includes more than shredding papers, it’s everything. Deleting texts, clearing browser history, wiping hard drives, using secure delete programs, asking others to destroy documents, moving files to different locations, changing filenames to make them harder to find – all obstruction, all additional federal charges, all things prosecutors love because it makes you look guilty of the original crime. Even organizing documents differently than they were maintained can raise questions, can make prosecutors suspicious, can turn a witness into a target. Prosecutors assume destruction means guilt, juries typically agree, judges impose harsh sentences.