Josh Wander Asked for Nothing. The Government Calls It Witness Tampering.

THIRTY YEARS FOR A BABY PICTURE

This is the fourth story in a series on United States v. Wander.

The first installment laid out the six counts in the Wander superseding indictment and asked whether the government's case would survive examination.

The second traced how 777 Partners collapsed within ninety days of a leaked report of a federal investigation.

The third argued that the Justice Department's leak created the victims in United States v. Wander.

A report of a criminal investigation appeared in November 2023 before, according to the government's own records, the investigation officially existed.

The ensuing run on a $10 billion company then supplied precisely what a fraud prosecution requires: losses, victims and, eventually, a cooperator.

This installment concerns the sixth charge, added while Wander was already awaiting trial.

On September 1, his lawyers asked the judge to dismiss it.

The new charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. Because the government says Wander committed it while on bail, another statute can add 10 more.

And so there it is.

Thirty years of a man's life.

THE GOVERNMENT'S WORDS

Here is the conduct the government calls the crime. From paragraph 33 of the superseding indictment:

"During a call in or around May 2026, JOSHUA WANDER, the defendant, asked to have dinner with Analyst-2 in New York.

"When Analyst-2 declined the invitation, WANDER stated, in sum and substance, that Analyst-2 would likely have to testify at WANDER's upcoming trial and that WANDER's 'livelihood' was 'in [Analyst-2's] hands.'

"Moments later, WANDER sent Analyst-2 a photograph of WANDER and his minor child looking directly into the camera.

"After sending the photograph, WANDER continued to contact Analyst-2 via the encrypted messaging application. Analyst-2 did not accept WANDER's calls."

Analyst-2 had a name, though the indictment does not give it. He also had a history with Wander. They were old friends. He had worked at 777 and gone somewhere else to work.

Wander called his old friend and asked him to dinner in New York.

The friend declined.

People ask one another to dinner every day. People say no every day too.

Then Wander said what a man awaiting trial might say to somebody who may be called to testify: “You may have to testify. My livelihood is in your hands.”

Those were the words, "in sum and substance," as the government has it.

And then the father sent his friend a picture of himself with his baby boy.

And from those small human things — a dinner, some words, a baby picture — the government made Count Six.

Witness tampering.

His lawyers found a shorter way to tell the story:

"Count Six charges Joshua Wander with a thirty-year felony for asking an old friend to dinner."

Notice what is absent. The government does not allege that Wander asked the man to lie. It does not allege that he asked him to refuse to testify. It does not allege that he asked him to invoke a privilege, develop amnesia, or alter a single word of his testimony.

He did not, according to the indictment, ask his friend to say anything at all.

It does not allege a threat, a bribe, a job offer, or a promised consequence.

Nothing offered and nothing promised.

Strip away the statutory vocabulary and what remains is a dinner that never happened, a frightened man's remark about what was at stake, and a picture of a child.

The friend then stopped answering Wander's calls.

According to the indictment, that was the end of it.

FOUR WORDS

And now comes the transformation.

Paragraph 47, the charging paragraph, takes the same conduct and supplies it with the vocabulary of felony prosecution.

Same dinner.

Same words.

Same photograph.

Wander, it says, "knowingly used intimidation, threatened, and corruptly persuaded another person, and attempted to do so, and engaged in misleading conduct toward another person, with intent to influence, delay, and prevent the testimony of a person in an official proceeding."

Intimidation.

Threatened.

Corrupt persuasion.

Misleading conduct.

Four accusations laid across two ordinary things.

Would you like to have dinner?

Here is a picture of my baby.

Keep the four terms in mind.

The defense motion examines each one against the conduct the government actually alleges.

THE FRIEND ALREADY KNEW

On September 1, Wander's lawyers at Gibson Dunn moved to dismiss Count Six. For purposes of the motion, they assumed the government's factual account was entirely true.

Read the government's own account, they told Judge J. Paul Oetken, and it is still not a crime.

"In its bail filings the government set out its own account of what was said on the calls and submitted the messages themselves, and it has identified nothing else to support the charge," the motion says.

"The Court can read precisely what the government alleged was said and look past the labels in the pleading's charging paragraph. Those allegations do not meet the elements of witness tampering, and do not establish that any such tampering occurred in this District."

The government says Wander tried to tell his friend that somebody else at 777 was responsible for altered bank statements.

For this, it has another phrase.

"Misleading conduct."

Unfortunately for the government's theory, the indictment has already introduced its own contradiction.

Again, assuming every word of the government's theory is true, Paragraph 29 alleges that this very witness personally altered one of the screenshots at Wander's direction, changing March 16 to March 17 before returning it.

The man the government says Wander tried to mislead was also the man it says performed the act.

It is difficult to deceive a man about an act the government says he personally performed.

The Second Circuit disposed of the problem forty years ago in United States v. King. If both men know the story is false, it is not misleading conduct.

If "misleading conduct" falls away, the government is left with another statutory phrase: "corruptly persuades."

But the Supreme Court held in Arthur Andersen that persuasion, standing alone, is "innocuous." The statute requires consciousness of wrongdoing.

Courts have held that even asking a witness, without coercion, to exercise a legal privilege does not necessarily amount to corrupt persuasion.

Wander is not alleged to have asked for even that.

As the motion says: "If asking a witness to exercise a right he holds is not corrupt persuasion, then asking a witness for nothing cannot be."

He did not ask him to do anything.

Sometimes nothing really does mean nothing.

"On the government's own proffer, then, the whole of the charged conduct is a dinner invitation, a remark about the stakes of testimony, and a family photograph," the motion continues. "Nothing in it indicates the consciousness of wrongdoing that Arthur Andersen requires."

WHERE WAS EVERYBODY?

The defense's second argument lacks the charm of the baby photograph. Constitutional venue usually does.

The old rule is simple enough.

The Constitution requires a criminal defendant to be tried where the alleged crime was committed.

Weeks before Wander's superseding indictment, the Supreme Court decided Abouammo v. United States.

In interpreting a closely related obstruction law, it held that venue lies where the prohibited conduct occurred, not merely where the affected proceeding is pending.

The timing here is unusually obliging. Find the place where the forbidden act happened, it said.

Wander lives in Florida.

The indictment does not say where he was when he made the calls or where his friend was when he received them.

On August 13, the defense asked the government to identify the locations.

Four days later, the government declined to provide the inconvenient geography and instead invoked a statutory provision permitting prosecution in the district where the proceeding is pending.

In this case, New York.

The defense responded that Congress may enact venue statutes, but it cannot amend the Sixth Amendment by statute.

The only court decision upholding this particular provision against a constitutional challenge is a 1998 district court ruling from Washington, issued before the Supreme Court's more recent venue cases.

No federal court of appeals has decided the issue.

The curious thing is that the two human beings in this alleged New York crime were apparently somewhere else.

HOW IT GOT TO A GRAND JURY

How does an unanswered telephone call and a baby photograph become a thirty-year federal charge?

The route is instructive.

Wander's bail conditions did not prohibit him from speaking with former employees or potential witnesses.

Nor was the baby photograph some unsolicited piece of psychological warfare.

According to the defense, the friend had known Wander for years.

When Wander's wife was pregnant, the friend asked about the baby. After the baby was born, he asked to see pictures.

That is one reason friends have photographs of one another's children.

Yes, Wander initiated a Signal call on October 24, 2025, roughly a week after his arrest.

Then something distinctly unlike intimidation occurred.

The government's own production shows the supposed target opening a chat thread and calling Wander back the next day. Over the following months, he sent Wander 27 Signal messages and placed 63 calls, many seeking Wander's advice about his own business deal.

This was the relationship before the government gave it another name.

On June 3, 2026, without first calling defense counsel, the government filed a letter with the court asking to modify Wander's bail.

The government asked the court to prohibit Wander from contacting any current or former 777 employee — a category numbering in the thousands — and to ban him from encrypted messaging applications.

The letter repeatedly referred to "the defendant's crimes," although Wander had not yet been tried.

For atmosphere, they invoked Sam Bankman-Fried.

Five days later, the defense offered a simple solution: Wander would not contact the friend unless counsel was present.

Judge Oetken did not immediately rule on the bail request.

While it remained pending, prosecutors went to the grand jury.

On June 30, Count Six appeared in a superseding indictment.

"If Ms. Rothman had called me and said your client is reaching out to a witness, tell him to cut it out, I would have said, okay. I'll tell him to cut it out," defense attorney Jordan Estes told the judge on July 30. "It was a simple phone call. Instead, they ran to make this bail application, and then they ran to the grand jury on top of that."

WHAT THE JUDGE SAID

At the July 30 conference, prosecutor Alexandra Rothman improved upon her own indictment.

Wander, she told the court, "has attempted to persuade that individual to give false testimony at the upcoming trial."

One searches Count Six in vain for such an allegation. It says Wander asked the man for precisely nothing.

There is no request to testify falsely. There is no request at all.

Rothman also referred to Wander's "record of witness tampering."

Estes objected. Wander had an accusation of witness tampering, she said, not a record of it.

A man does not get a record merely because the government accuses him.

Judge Oetken questioned how a ban on Signal use could be enforced and called the proposal "pretty unusual."

He also observed that the new charge was "obviously not helpful to the defense."

He reserved decision.

The judge ultimately imposed a standard no-contact condition concerning potential witnesses, subject to exemptions, and did not impose the requested encryption ban.

WHY NOW

On May 6, Wander's civil lawyers deposed Damien Alfalla, the former CFO who pleaded guilty two days before Wander was charged, now the government's cooperating witness, in Florida litigation brought by ING Capital.

Alfalla largely took the Fifth.

A week later, the government attempted to halt the civil discovery process altogether, asking Judge Oetken to stop Wander from deposing witnesses in his own civil litigation.

On May 20, the judge refused. The civil case had been pending for most of a year, and prosecutors had never asked anyone to stay it.

The chronology itself requires no speculation.

The cooperator took the Fifth.

The government tried to stop the depositions and lost.

Two weeks passed.

Then came the government's bail letter.

Then came the grand jury.

And Count Six, carrying a potential 30 years.

And somewhere between the telephone call and the grand jury, something happened to a photograph.

It had been a picture of a father with his baby on his lap. Now it was evidence in a federal felony case.

WHERE IS THE CRIME?

Count Six has uses quite independent of whether it can withstand legal scrutiny. A charge can do work even before anyone decides whether it should have existed.

A dry fraud prosecution about receivables suddenly receives the vocabulary of physical menace.

"Intimidation."

"Threatened."

Those words change the room.

The words remain powerful even when the conduct beneath them is a telephone conversation.

They follow a man into the courtroom. They arrive before the evidence has established that the defendant deserves them.

An accusation has thus acquired some of the force of a verdict.

For that reason, the defense asks that if Count Six survives, the words "intimidation" and "threatened" be struck from the indictment because, it argues, the alleged facts do not support either word.

If the government alleges no threat, it should not use the word.

Courts rarely grant motions to dismiss criminal charges before trial.

Judges usually let charges go forward. 

But there is a big difference.

An acquittal means the government alleged conduct that constituted a crime but failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed it.

Dismissal on these grounds would mean something more embarrassing: Suppose the government has told the truth about every fact. Suppose everything happened exactly as it says.

And still, there is no crime.

And so the inconvenient question becomes unavoidable:

If Wander did every single thing the government says he did, where precisely is the crime?

Thirty years of a man's life.

The dinner never happened.

The friend stopped answering Wander's calls.

And the photograph.

Look at it without the indictment.

Look at it without "intimidation" and "threatened" and thirty years.

There is a father.

His little boy sits on his lap. And both of them are looking into the camera.

Previous Stories

$500M Fraud Rap — and a Baby Photo as 'Witness Tampering' (August 20, 2026)

FEDS OPEN FILE — TWO DAYS LATER NEWS REPORT KILLS $10B FIRM (August 22, 2026)

How the DOJ Made Its Own Victims in USA v. Wander (August 27, 2026)