DOJ-OGR-00021087.pdf

Case 22-1426, Document 59, 02/28/2023, 3475902, Page40 of 113 other USAOs. See Annabi, 771 F.2d at 671; Alessi, 544 F.2d at 1154; Papa, 533 F.2d at 823-25. That is not the case here; Defendant produced ample evidence that the NPA was intended to bind other USAOs as to possible co-conspirators. Fourth, at most, Annabi embraces a tiebreaking rule: after the court conducts an evidentiary hearing and receives testimony from the attorneys involved in the plea agreement, if it still cannot decide the agreement's geographic scope, it may presume that it was limited to a single district. See Annabi, 771 F.2d at 671; Papa, 533 F.2d at 823. The court erred when it applied the Annabi canon without first granting Defendant's reasonable request for an evidentiary hearing. For all of these reasons or any of them, the court's ruling was error. 2. Annabi does not apply because the NPA was negotiated and entered into outside of the Second Circuit Remarkably, the court applied Annabi to the NPA without conducting a choice-of-law analysis and without addressing Defendant's contention that Eleventh Circuit law should apply. It did so even though the NPA was negotiated in Florida, with Southern District of Florida prosecutors, in exchange for Epstein's agreement to plead guilty in Florida state court. As shown below, applying the Second Circuit's minority Annabi rule in this context was improper and unfair: 25 DOJ-OGR-00021087