In the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the Obama administration decided that someone had to be punished. But instead of taking on the powerful financial institutions that caused the scandal – which instead received financial bailouts – they did he went for it uncomplicated targets such as petite real estate agents. Tony Viola was one of them. Prosecutors sentenced him to prison for allegedly cheating banks into offering mortgage loans without a down payment. But in reality, banks knowingly offered these loans. The prosecutor’s office withheld this evidence from him. The crime was so egregious that after being released from prison and without a lawyer, Viola was able to prove her innocence during her second trial.
Now it turns out that prosecutors may have committed even greater abuses. Viola, who served eight and a half years in prison and was released in May 2020 amid up-to-date evidence, recently discovered that the married prosecutor in his case was allegedly have an affair with one of the government’s witnesses, who was also married. Assistant Ohio County Attorney Dan Kasaris presented Kathryn Clover as a fact witness when in fact she was an assistant prosecutor and was allegedly in a romantic relationship with him. They reportedly had the same lawyer, Jaye Schlachet, whom Kasaris hired in connection with his separation from his wife and Clover’s divorce.
Clover allegedly lied about Viola during the first trial. But then she felt so bad about it that she asked for Schlachet to go to court again. Prosecutors apparently refused because they needed her false testimony to convict Viola. She could only recant her testimony at the second hearing before the state court. She then adopted the Fifth Amendment, probably out of fear of being accused of perjury. But Viola believes prosecutors continued to utilize her in other grand jury and criminal cases — even though they knew she had committed perjury — because she would say everything they needed.
Wiola allegedly obtained thousands of emails exchanged between Kasaris and Clover from Kasaris’ Yahoo email account, on which Kasaris affixed his official signature as prosecutor. Several witnesses provided sworn statements confirming their knowledge of the couple’s affair. Kelly Patrick, Kasaris’ former sister-in-law, says has “over 100 pages of Facebook Messenger messages with his wife Susan about a sexual relationship that lasted for many years.”
Patrick he believes Kasaris had evil motives for pursuing Viola. She thinks he was jealous of him. Kasaris and his wife also bought and sold houses with no down payment or cash back, and Patrick believes Kasaris viewed Viola as competition. Kasaris is a Democrat. Patrick noted: “He was an atheist around me; “he didn’t like minorities, republicans and Catholicism.” Viola is Catholic and Republican.
Kasaris initially denied the existence of the Yahoo emails, but later he admitted used this account to send emails regarding criminal proceedings. He claimed to have solved the problem by deleting the emails. Apparently, since Hillary Clinton has avoided using her private email account for confidential government business and deleted her emails, Kasaris thinks he’s fine with it too.
Other misconduct by the prosecutor’s office in the Viola case continues to go unpunished. For a decade, the FBI maintained that it was unaware of nearly 10,000 pages of records in the Viola case that, under its own docket system, would have exonerated him. FBI Agent David M. Hardy twice gave false testimony, claiming that the prosecutor’s office had provided Viola with all documents and evidence. The FBI finally admitted lying about these records. The Justice Department withdrew Hardy’s statements, and in a letter to the judge, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Colville said he “regretted these inaccuracies and the inconvenience they caused.” He asked the judge to overturn previous rulings in their favor.
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Bennett falsely stated that there was no summary of the “FBI 302” interview with the banker who said the bank was offering the same no-down-payment mortgage loans that Viola allegedly deceived them into providing. Kasaris also provided false testimony under oath about the existence of the same voice recordings and the FBI 302.
Bennett later he admitted in writing that Clover had lied, but she hadn’t bothered to retract her statement. He also lied about the existence of voice recordings made by Director of Public Prosecutions Dawn Pasela, who recorded her conversations with Viola so that prosecutors could obtain confidential information about the defense trial strategy. Pasela later felt so terrible that she revealed the evidence hidden by the prosecutor’s office and gave it to Viola.
Viola filed a complaint demanding that prosecutors follow the law and report misconduct, but it has not yet been accepted. Bennett, despite knowingly using Clover’s perjured testimony to obtain a conviction received the award in 2015 for prosecuting Viola and others. Nothing happened to Kasaris. Indeed, it looks like he is collecting money run for office.
Viola filed a request to search Kasaris’ Yahoo email account, but oddly enough, Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost opposed the effort. That’s strange considering Yost he wrote in the introduction to the 2020 edition of the Ohio Sunshine Manual (which outlines how public records laws should be enforced): “I fully support government transparency and your right to know what’s going on behind the scenes.” Emails sent by government employees are considered public records, and although some confidential information about cases may be redacted, the emails must still be released. The State Department even ended up releasing many of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
There are many gross ethical violations in this case. If Donald Trump’s election lawyers were caught engaging in this type of behavior, they would be disbarred. However, because the deep state is involved and the legal system is dominated by the left, no one wants to turn against the corrupt people involved who used Viola as a scapegoat to advance their political agenda.
