Aaron Schock.

In 2015, Aaron Schock thought his resignation from Congress would bring an end to the scrutiny of his spending, reimbursements for travel and a U.S. House office remodeling that drew comparisons to the style of "Downton Abbey."

It was instead just a beginning. And, as subpoenas for testimony and records made that clear, Schock called McGuireWoods partner George Terwilliger III about taking up his defense.

Four years later, in March 2019, Schock emerged from the closely watched prosecution with the Justice Department dropping its case against him, agreeing to dismiss charges that the Illinois Republican leveraged his congressional office to fund a luxurious lifestyle. As part of the agreement, Schock agreed to pay $110,000 in restitution and taxes. His campaign committee pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in a case was marred by Schock's allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

Speaking with The National Law Journal about the case, Schock and Terwilliger blamed a media-created "narrative" about the former lawmaker, who attributed his legal troubles to poor back-office bookkeeping and maintains that his office decor had nothing to do with "Downton Abbey." They spoke of two courts for the highly publicized case: the federal court in Illinois and court of public opinion. And they spoke of a public message that conveyed comfort with the facts of the case.

"We knew and decided very early that the real story, the truth, was our friend in this case," said Terwilliger, a former deputy U.S. attorney general. Working with Mark Hubbard, a senior vice president in McGuireWoods' public affairs consulting arm, the defense team developed a "message that these are mistakes, but mistakes aren't crimes," Terwilliger said.

"That was the result of an exhaustive amount of work up to that point to understand what the facts were and know from that point forward, including through a trial if we had to do it, our story would be exactly the same and that story would be the truth," he said. The conversation that follows was edited for length and clarity.

Aaron, how did you connect with George Terwilliger and McGuireWoods?

Aaron Schock: When the subpoenas started flying, the press reported on that. And a former colleague of mine who is a former U.S. attorney suggested to me that, if you're going to have to deal with this as a criminal matter, then George Terwilliger is someone you should go talk to. This is someone who was a former U.S attorney himself, now serving in the Congress. In his estimation, there's no one better on white-collar law than George Terwilliger. This might show my age, but I didn't know who George was, probably because George H.W. Bush was president when I was in the fifth grade.

How times have changed on that front.

AS: Exactly, I think everybody knows Rod Rosenstein and Sally Yates, right? So honestly I looked him up and I called him, and I said, 'Look I want to come see you.' And he said, 'Well I'm out on my farm. And I said, 'I'm leaving town, so it's now or never.' And I went to his office, sat down with him and one of his associates. After two hours of meeting with him, I walked out of his office and I knew immediately that I needed to hire him. We were simpatico. He got it. I could tell he knew his stuff, I could tell I was going to like his demeanor. He asked tough questions. And I have said this: if resigning from office was one of the dumbest decisions of my life, hiring George Terwilliger was one of my best.

Why do you think your resignation worked against you in this case?

AS: I remember when we were sitting at the desk when I first met [Terwilliger], and we talked for a couple hours. You took off your glasses and you said, 'I have one question for you: Why the hell did you resign?' You basically said to me that your resignation is putting in the mind of this prosecutor that you did something wrong. And you didn't do anything wrong. But this prosecutor is going to be in search for a body.

George Terwilliger at McGuireWoods on November 27, 2018 in Washington, D.C.

George Terwilliger: On top of that, in my mind, behind that question is it is so much easier for a prosecutor to go after an ex-member than a sitting member. The whole sort of cloak and mantle of being an officeholder and the fact of undoing the results of the people's choice for a person to hold office is threatened to be undone by the prosecuting of a sitting member. So it has to be approached very differently by the Department of Justice. When somebody resigns, all of that goes away. It also takes away the option that the case might be further investigated and resolved in the ethics process of the House, to which the Justice Department as a matter of discretion might defer.

George, what was your initial defense strategy?

GT: There's nothing particularly magical about the initial strategy. What we were faced with was a very broad grand jury subpoena for both Aaron's personal appearance before a grand jury, which of course was a non-starter, as well as financial records from three different entities. So the first thing one does in a circumstance like that is try to talk to the prosecutor about limiting the subpoena to some subject matter period of time, some other limitations, and to talk about a rolling production.

What we ran into, talking to the original prosecutor in the case, was a brick wall on trying to deal with all of those issues and kind of a myopic insistence that [Schock] will be there. Right from the get-go, we had to face the prospect of engaging in litigation over the enforcement of the subpoena. And the prosecutor was saying things in the context of that early litigation that were a real public relations problem—that Aaron was being defiant in his resistance to lawful orders to produce documents and things like that. That meant we needed PR help early on in the case.

You criticized the initial prose-cutor's handling of the case, and the government transferred the prosecution to a new team in Chicago. What level of pressure did you exert?

GT: I never asked the Justice Depart-ment, never asked anybody, to transfer the case. What I kept telling the DOJ, including at the deputy's office level, was the more this case goes on, the greater the level of embarrassment that's going to inure to the department because of the way it was handled and being handled. And I kept that message up, not incessantly, but at points along the way, including when the prosecutor was found by the judge to have misled him on a key factual issue that had implications for Aaron's constitutional rights. I did that several times, both when Sally Yates was there and when Rod Rosenstein was the deputy.

What difference did it make having the federal prosecutors in Chicago handling the case? And how did you arrive at the deferred prosecution agreement?

GT: The difference in my opinion was between a prosecutor who had no objectivity about the case to prosecutors whose charter and commitment was to take an objective look at the merits of the case. It's simple as that. We had taken the position from the get-go in this case that there would be either a dismissal or a trial—that no plea was going to be forthcoming. I would not ask somebody who didn't commit a crime to plead guilty to something. But we had in the back of our minds as a team the possibility that, well, maybe the campaign could plead to something. So that idea got broached. And there was discussion back and forth between us and the assistant U.S. attorneys about Aaron making certain factual acknowledgements as part of that process. And that evolved into the deferred prosecution agreement and the plea from the campaign.

C. Ryan Barber, based in Washington, covers government affairs and regulatory compliance. Contact him at [email protected]. On Twitter: @cryanbarber