The lawyer at the center of a federal investigation into whether she defrauded both her firm and client MasterCard for millions of dollars is a major Democratic donor who has made nearly $100,000 in political donations.
Keila Ravelo resigned from her law firm late last year after it learned that a U.S. Attorney in Newark, N.J., was investigating whether she and her husband set up multiple sham companies that were used to bill her own firm and MasterCard fees totaling more than $5 million. The settlement for the case was filed for approval in April 2014.
In the same timespan that Ravelo was working on the MasterCard swipe fee case, she was shelling out big money to the Democratic Party. In 2012 alone, Ravelo contributed $30,500 to the Democratic National Committee and made additional contributions to liberal groups such as Priorities USA, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and ActBlue.
Ravelo has doled out a total of $68,400 to the DNC, all coming since 2008.
Ravelo also made contributions to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008, and both of Barack Obama's national campaigns.
New revelations in the case show that Ravelo was also illegally communicating with a lawyer in a parallel lawsuit regarding American Express that was ongoing as she worked on her own case. She was a personal friend of the lawyer prior to the communication and was sent confidential documents that she was barred from seeing.
Due to what Reuters' Alison Frankel called "one of the most inexplicable cases of improper lawyer conduct" she has ever seen, the entire settlement could be undone.