The government seized over $150 million in assets and claims. They froze every account. Then they prosecuted a man for conduct the Supreme Court explicitly ruled legal in 2008. Once they took everything, admitting error became impossible — unwinding the seizures, vacating the orders, acknowledging the prosecution should never have happened. The cost of correction grew every month. So instead of justice, they chose cover-up.
Four years later, Joseph Cammarata sits in federal prison. No court has ruled on his appeals. No judge has explained why binding Supreme Court precedent doesn't apply. The Third Circuit has ignored unopposed motions for 21 months. The Constitution exists on paper — they follow none of it.
This is what happens when prosecutors have unbridled power and judges choose self-preservation over justice. The failure isn't one bad actor — it's every level of the federal judiciary, from the District Court to the Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court, refusing to do what the Constitution demands: decide cases. They stay silent because the truth would unravel everything. This website exists because sunlight is the only disinfectant left.
Every one of them is dispositive. Any one of them, answered correctly, ends this case. In four and a half years, no court has answered a single one of them on the merits.
The entire prosecution was built on the exact conduct the United States Supreme Court held lawful, unanimously, in Sprint Communications Co. v. APCC Services, Inc., 554 U.S. 269 (2008) — the assignment of securities class-action settlement claims to an assignee who then files as beneficial owner. That holding, together with Pennsylvania's law of assignments, settled for more than a century, made the charged offense a legal impossibility.
Paragraph 11 of the indictment told the grand jury that only claimants who personally traded and personally lost money were eligible to recover. That was a material misrepresentation of the governing law. Once it was proven at trial that the trades were real, that Mr. Cammarata owned them, and that they were lawfully assigned and filed by a fully disclosed beneficial owner, no crime remained. The government did not disclose Sprint. It never cited it — not once in thirty-five pages of post-trial briefing.
The district court never entered the order mandated by Fed. R. Crim. P. 5(f) and the Due Process Protections Act of 2020, Pub. L. No. 116-182 — the safeguard Congress enacted for the express purpose of preventing prosecutorial suppression. The docket contains no Rule 5(f) entry. That omission is what permitted the government to bury Sprint, the controlling exculpatory authority that invalidated Paragraph 11 and the case in chief. Favorable material under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), and Strickler v. Greene, 527 U.S. 263, 281–82 (1999), includes authority the prosecution knows undermines the theory of culpability it is advancing. Here the prosecution's lead counsel recognized that authority on the record — and moved to strike his own recognition. The total absence of the Rule 5(f) order is structural error. United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725 (1993).
The same judge presided over the criminal fraud prosecution and the parallel SEC civil action. 28 U.S.C. § 455 is mandatory and self-executing. At least six independent grounds required his disqualification. He disqualified himself on none of them. The remedy is vacatur. Liljeberg v. Health Services Acquisition Corp., 486 U.S. 847, 862–64 (1988).
“I, I, I have invested, I've made a claim . . . you're going to get the portion that you lost.”
Admitted from the bench, and corroborated by his own financial-disclosure reports. The judge purchased Apple on Dec. 24, 2018 — inside the class period of In re Apple Inc. Securities Litigation, No. 4:19-cv-02033 — and held it at value code K ($15,001–$50,000) through 2020; that action settled Sept. 18, 2024, while the direct appeal was pending and he remained a class-eligible holder. He purchased Boeing (Dec. 24, 2018; Feb. 14, 2019) inside the class period of In re The Boeing Co. Aircraft Securities Litigation, and Exxon Mobil (same dates) inside the class period of Yoshikawa v. Exxon Mobil Corp., No. 3:21-cv-00194-N (N.D. Tex.). Section 455(b)(4) asks whether the judge holds a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy — securities class-action claim eligibility and recovery, the very activity he admitted engaging in. Section 455(d)(4) defines that interest to include ownership “however small,” foreclosing any de minimis argument. His 2008–2018 disclosures have never been produced.
Nine months before trial, at a hearing the defendant had no notice of and did not attend, the judge placed him among those “who have been making money by illegal means” — before a word of evidence was heard — and resented that he had retained counsel rather than a federal defender. ECF No. 71, at 27 (21-cv-4845). Told the defendant's wife, a non-party, was not working, he answered “Res ipsa.” Confronted at sentencing with having called the case “a crime against the Courts” and the defendant's wife a beneficiary of “the fruits of this criminal enterprise,” he denied neither, saying only that “this Court was not biased.” ECF No. 310, at 76:7–14.
Since January 2024 the judge has been a named defendant in Cammarata v. Donnelly, No. 24-cv-1000 (D.N.J.), a civil action arising from the same conduct — and continued to preside.
He declared the matter “a crime against the Courts” at an ex parte TRO hearing, before any evidence was taken. He signed a 900-page-plus ex parte freeze of more than $78 million in under twenty-four hours — against alleged proceeds of roughly $16 million — with no finding of irreparable harm anywhere in its eighteen pages, as Rule 65(b)(1)(A) requires. He set the show-cause hearing for 9:00 a.m. on Nov. 9, 2021 in Philadelphia — the precise hour the defendant was compelled to appear at his bail hearing 1,200 miles away in the Southern District of Florida. The court memorialized it: “No one appeared on behalf of Defendants Joseph A. Cammarata.” ECF No. 17. The order was then extended past the fourteen-day limit without hearing or consent, and expired by operation of Rule 65(b)(2) at 11:59 p.m. on Nov. 24, 2021. Cf. SEC v. Antar, 71 F.3d 97 (3d Cir. 1995).
On May 28, 2026, the same AUSAs — David Ignall and Paul Shapiro — obtained a new indictment, No. 26-cr-238-CFK (E.D. Pa.), again assigned to the same judge. Its lead count charges criminal contempt under 18 U.S.C. § 401(3) for allegedly disobeying the very asset-freeze order that judge himself issued — an order entered without the required findings, unlawfully extended, expired by operation of law, and still on appeal in No. 24-1381, where the Commission has filed no responsive brief in over two years. A judge cannot preside over a contempt prosecution of his own order, brought by prosecutors the defendant has sued, while his authority to have entered that order is the question on appeal. That is self-dealing.
Where the government identified no individual victim, the judge manufactured one — declaring the settlement administrators “the victims” and applying a ten-or-more-victims enhancement on that basis. The author of the affirmance, Judge D. Brooks Smith, rejected that theory at oral argument: “He also called the administrators victims which can't be correct.” The judge then bypassed available domestic funds to liquidate a foreign-trust asset the defendant did not own. In the parallel civil case he granted summary judgment on a motion the docket proves was never received, on the legally untenable ground that securities fraud was collaterally estopped by a wire-fraud conviction — after expressly declining to decide the securities-fraud question in the criminal case. Allen v. McCurry, 449 U.S. 90 (1980); Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., 557 U.S. 868 (2009).
Any one of these grounds required disqualification. Their convergence in a single judge — who then imposed a 120-month sentence on conduct he conceded involved “real trades” — is the grave § 455 violation for which Liljeberg prescribes vacatur.
The Due Process Clause guarantees not only an impartial trial judge but impartial review. Every panel of the Third Circuit to consider these four related cases was operationally supported by the Executive Office of that court — where Jeanne Donnelly, spouse of John V. Donnelly III, the SEC prosecutor formally accused of the misconduct at issue, serves as an attorney providing administrative and legal support to those judges.
That relationship was never disclosed, in any of four appeals. A court whose own executive office employs the spouse of the prosecutor charged with misconduct cannot sit in impartial judgment of that misconduct. That is the precise circumstance 28 U.S.C. § 455(a) exists to prevent. The conflict was raised on the record repeatedly — motions to recuse, to transfer to an unconflicted venue, for reconsideration, to disqualify the entire Circuit, in Nos. 24-1381 and 25-1188 — and has gone undisclosed, uncontested, and unaddressed for two years.
The government's silence confirms it from the other direction. These allegations have gone unanswered in every forum: the mandamus was unopposed; the SEC has filed no merits brief in over two years; and in this Court, the Solicitor General did not respond to the petition in No. 25-6128. An adversary does not decline, across four proceedings and two levels of the federal judiciary, to contest specific documented allegations of judicial and prosecutorial conflict — unless those allegations cannot safely be contested.
And the Third Circuit refused to follow its own binding precedent. In SEC v. Antar, 71 F.3d 97 (3d Cir. 1995), and United States v. Antar, 53 F.3d 568 (3d Cir. 1995), that court disqualified a district judge who presided over parallel SEC civil and criminal proceedings and revealed an objective of returning money to victims. Here the facts are worse in every dimension: no crime occurred, the judge declared his own financial interest from the bench, and the only person ever to identify a “victim” was the judge himself — naming administrators the appellate panel then confirmed were not victims at all. A court that will not follow its own controlling law when the conflict implicates the court itself is not providing review.
Every filing is posted here as it is submitted. Read the petition and judge the record for yourself.
Supreme Court Filings Read the Certiorari Petition (PDF)The government has had four years. They have not rebutted one violation. Not one. Because you cannot defend the indefensible.
The conduct at issue — assigning securities class action settlement claims to business entities — was established as entirely lawful by the United States Supreme Court in Sprint Communications Co. v. APCC Services, 554 U.S. 269 (2008), decided unanimously, thirteen years before the first charge was filed. Sprint was not discovered after conviction. It was the defense raised at trial, presented to the jury, briefed on appeal, and submitted to the Supreme Court. Not one court has ever explained why Sprint does not make this conduct legal. Not once in four years.
The SEC filed its complaint the same day as the arrest. On November 9, 2021 — at a hearing held without notice while Mr. Cammarata sat in custody in Miami, 1,200 miles away and unable to attend — that same judge declared "I consider this a crime against the courts" before seeing a single piece of evidence. He had already a 900-page ex parte order freezing over $78 million without the irreparable harm finding that Rule 65(b) requires as a mandatory prerequisite. No jurisdiction. Simultaneous hearings 1,200 miles apart while the defendant sat in custody. A forged service document. A summary judgment granted without satisfying a single required legal element. Every step designed to freeze the money, strip any ability to fight back, and protect the cover-up.
The lead SEC prosecutor, John V. Donnelly III, is married to an active attorney in the Executive Office of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals — the exact court where every appeal ended up. This was never disclosed. Four appeals have now sat at that court for up to two years with no government response and no rulings. When judicial misconduct complaints were filed to that court, they were denied with no explanation and no review of a single documented violation. Perhaps that is why.
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5(f) requires courts to issue specific discovery directives ensuring Brady compliance. Brady v. Maryland requires the government to produce exculpatory evidence — including controlling Supreme Court precedent that proves the conduct was legal. Had either been followed, Sprint would have been produced, and there would never have been a case. Perhaps that is why neither was followed.
When the controlling Supreme Court precedent was raised and proved the crime was impossible, the government should have dismissed the case. But six agencies had committed years of resources, millions in taxpayer dollars, and 5.5 million pages of documents. They had already illegally seized over $150 million and imprisoned an innocent man. Admitting they were wrong meant admitting everything. So they didn't stop. They covered it up — fabricating evidence, committing perjury, suppressing witnesses, altering transcripts — all the way from the district court to the Third Circuit to the United States Supreme Court.
When the fraud case started unraveling, the same prosecutors brought a tax case — same pattern of misconduct, same Brady violations, same disregard for the defendant's constitutional rights, and the same refusal by the same conflicted appellate court to address any of it. Appeal No. 24-1983 has sat at the Third Circuit since 2024. Scheduled for decision December 2, 2025. Nothing issued.
Those are six. There are 87 more — every one documented, every one on the public record, every one unanswered.
View All 93 Violations Congressional BriefingIn Sprint Communications Co. v. APCC Services, Inc., 554 U.S. 269 (2008), the Supreme Court held that assignees of legal claims have Article III standing to pursue those claims in their own name. Pennsylvania's Assignment of Claims Act of 1939 confirms this right under state law.
Joseph Cammarata assigned securities settlement claims to beneficial owners who then filed class-action claims — exactly as the law permits. The government indicted him anyway. No court has explained why Sprint doesn't control. None has even tried. The reason is simple: it does control, and the charged conduct was never a crime.
Sprint v. APCC Services, 554 U.S. 269 (2008)A coordinated prosecution between DOJ and SEC designed to guarantee conviction by eliminating any possibility of a funded defense.
Judge Chad Kenney was assigned to both the criminal case (21-cr-427) and the SEC civil case (21-cv-4845). He scheduled the SEC asset-freeze hearing at the exact same time as the criminal bail hearing — in two different cities — making it physically impossible for the defendant to attend both. No notice was given for the Philadelphia hearing. This was not a coincidence.
Multiple conflicts that should have resulted in recusal — none were disclosed.
Four related appeals have stalled in this court for years. Requests to transfer to a conflict-free circuit have been ignored.
Judge Kenney presided over both the criminal prosecution AND the SEC civil case. He controlled the asset freeze that eliminated the defense while simultaneously overseeing the criminal trial. Despite multiple recusal motions, he refused to step aside. The SEC hearing was scheduled without notice at the exact time as the Miami bail hearing — ensuring the defendant could never appear.
Every claim on this site is documented with court filings, docket entries, and official records. Verify everything yourself.
Organized by category with citations to specific court filings and controlling law for each violation.
View All ViolationsEvery significant event from 2019 investigation through present Supreme Court proceedings, with links to filings.
View TimelineProfiles of judges, prosecutors, and officials involved — their actions, conflicts, and documented misconduct.
View Players40+ PDFs of indictments, motions, orders, transcripts, and appellate briefs. Searchable by case and date.
Browse FilingsExecutive summary and full documentation package prepared for oversight committees and congressional staff.
View Brief12 documented actions across courts, oversight bodies, Congress, and FOIA. 7 stonewalled. The government's silence is tracked in real time.
View Full TrackerThis isn't just about Joseph Cammarata. It's about what happens when institutional safeguards fail at every level.
The Due Process Protections Act of 2020 was enacted specifically to prevent Brady violations. Neither district court ever issued the required certification. Rule 65 limits TROs to 14 days. This one has been enforced for 4+ years. Sprint v. APCC is binding Supreme Court precedent. No court has explained why it doesn't apply.
When the government's only defense is silence, and the courts' only response is delay, transparency becomes the last check on power.