U.S. Attorney Byung J. "BJay" Pak of the Northern District of Georgia (left) and attorney Scott Grubman, of Atlanta's Chilivis Grubman Dalbey & Warner. (Courtesy photos)

Former city of Atlanta Chief Financial Officer Jim Beard is asking a federal judge to disqualify U.S. Attorney Byung J. "BJay" Pak from participating in any ongoing or future investigation of him, citing a multiyear "campaign of harassment and intimidation."

Beard counsel Scott Grubman, a partner at Atlanta's Chilivis, Grubman, Dalbey & Warner, filed the motion for an injunction that would bar Pak, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, and his entire office from investigating Beard, who served as the city's chief financial officer from 2011-2018.

The motion also asks that Pak's lawyers and federal agents currently investigating Beard be blocked from further review of thousands of seized personal emails they subpoenaed from Beard's personal AOL email account this month.

In a response filed Thursday, the U.S. attorney contended that Beard's claims that privileged communications contained in his personal emails are at risk are "entirely speculative." The response was also signed by assistant U.S. attorneys Jeffrey Davis and Trevor Wilmot.

Prosecutors also contended that the use of filter teams is "generally accepted across the country" and that a restraining order would slow the FBI's corruption investigation, which has been ongoing since 2017.

They said the government "provided rigorous and detailed procedures to ensure that the prosecution team would not see any privileged material," including "the highly unusual steps" of contacting Beard's lawyer for search terms that might help them to filter out privileged communications. The response did not address the harassment and intimidation claims. Pak couldn't be reached for comment.

Grubman said in court papers filed April 20 that, for at least two years, Beard has been "one of numerous apparent subjects" of the U.S. attorney's ongoing investigation of former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed's administration.

Neither Beard nor Reed have been indicted or charged with a crime.

Federal prosecutors have secured guilty pleas from the city's former chief procurement officer, Reed's deputy chief of staff, a former director of the city's contract compliance office, two city construction contractors and a convicted felon who tried to intimidate one of the contractors to keep him from talking to federal investigators.

Bribery charges are pending against another longtime city vendor and the city's former human services director.

Grubman said that in targeting Beard, the government has expanded its inquiry to include his children, friends, former colleagues and acquaintances whom they have plied with questions he said are irrelevant to Beard's City Hall tenure.

The motion includes a string of government actions the lawyer claims are intended to intimidate potential witnesses, including:

• Dispatching FBI agents to interview Beard's minor son at his mother's Florida home, where they questioned whether Beard's child support payments were current;
• Dispatching FBI agents to interview Beard's 22-year-old stepdaughter at work shortly after she was hired by an investment bank, then compelling her to appear before a grand jury in Atlanta, even though Grubman said she agreed to be interviewed;
• Securing a search warrant for Beard's wife's cellphone;
• Dispatching the FBI to contact Beard's friends with questions that Grubman said imply Beard "engaged in personal shenanigans."

Grubman said any one of those actions, taken individually, "might very well be within the DOJ's investigative prerogative."

"But taken together over the course of the last two years, it demonstrates a clear pattern of harassment and intimidation designed not simply to seek the truth, but to destroy a life," he said.

Grubman said he moved to disqualify Pak from investigating Beard after federal prosecutors notified him last week they had three years of Beard's personal emails and that a "filter team" that included a prosecutor and two FBI agents had already reviewed the emails for privileged material.

Grubman said the team, also known as a "taint team," intended to turn the bulk of the subpoenaed emails over to City Hall prosecutors on Friday.

Grubman argued that Pak's decision to use in-house prosecutors and local agents "increases the risk of privileged information making its way back to members of the prosecution team, whether intentionally or completely innocently."

"That tainted information could then easily form the basis for further investigative activity, or even make its way into a presentation to the grand jury, even if inadvertently, and nobody would be the wiser," he said. "It is well known that members of the U.S. Attorney's office not only work together, but oftentimes form personal relationships and friendships that continue outside of the confines of the federal building. …The likelihood that members of the government's filter team have already reviewed communications protected by the attorney-client privilege and the work-product doctrine is high, if not near certain."

Grubman's motion also more broadly challenged federal prosecutors' use of in-house taint teams as inherently unconstitutional, citing rulings from multiple federal circuits critical of the practice. "When it comes down to constitutional rights, we can't assume the prosecutor down the hallway and the agent down the hallway is going to do the right thing and not unintentionally let anything slip to the prosecutor in the case," he said.