I'm not saying it's a bad article. It's pretty good. It's just one caveat that billing statements often aren't privileged.
My credentials are Clarke v. American Commerce Nat. Bank, 974 F. 2d 127 (9th Cir. 1992) https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=4668677461185860899
In that case the feds asked for attorney billing statements from the bank's attorney. The bank raised the privilege, and the lower court said the crime-fraud exception applied. The 9th Circuit disagreed and said that the exception didn't need to apply, because the billing statements weren't even privileged in the first place.
Granted, it depends on what each line item says. Something like "Meet with FBI" is different from "Meet with FBI - I think they bought the story about DNS lookups, but it's probably not legal to x, y, z." Only the first part would get released. So an in camera review of the hours probably did happen. The judge may have redacted some of the entries... and Durham's report may just be based on what wasn't redacted.
Edit: However, I totally agree that 95% of the indictment didn't need to be in there... and it doesn't make sense to include all of that info if you haven't already secured some way of proving it / or it's misdirection / etc.
I'm not saying it's a bad article. It's pretty good. It's just one caveat that billing statements often aren't privileged.
My credentials are Clarke v. American Commerce Nat. Bank, 974 F. 2d 127 (9th Cir. 1992) https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=4668677461185860899
In that case the feds asked for attorney billing statements from the bank's attorney. The bank raised the privilege, and the lower court said the crime-fraud exception applied. The 9th Circuit disagreed and said that the exception didn't need to apply, because the billing statements weren't even privileged in the first place.
Granted, it depends on what each line item says. Something like "Meet with FBI" is different from "Meet with FBI - I think they bought the story about DNS lookups, but it's probably not legal to x, y, z." Only the first part would get released. So an in camera review of the hours probably did happen. The judge may have redacted some of the entries... and Durham's report may just be based on what wasn't redacted.
Edit: However, I totally agree that 95% of the indictment didn't need to be in there... and it doesn't make sense to include all of that info if you haven't already secured some way of proving it.