"You are dealing with people . . . who are highly educated, who go to work each day saying that I am going to do the right thing, and occasionally, like all of us, may make mistakes and then come under government scrutiny," said Schwartz, a Yale Law School graduate. "All of a sudden, you are out there in a world where you would never think that what you did on a day-to-day basis would be thought to be criminal."
How odd, then, that Schwartz now finds himself defending a government official - in the face of a government investigation.
It turns out that one of his white-collar clients - and a pro bono one at that - is a member of a prosecution team that blew up its own case by failing to disclose exculpatory evidence to a defense team.
She and other members of the team now are enmeshed in two government investigations aimed at determining whether both Justice Department procedure and criminal laws were breached.
The story is a cautionary tale about how a procedurally flawed investigation can destroy what seemed to be an otherwise solid criminal case, while wreaking havoc in the lives of the prosecution-team members who brought it.
It shows, too, how government officials themselves can feel the lash of a relentless prosecution - itself an injustice sometimes.
But first, a little background.
Schwartz's client is FBI agent Mary Beth Kepner, who after her graduation from the FBI training academy in Quantico, Va., was stationed in the bureau's Philadelphia office in the mid-1990s before transferring to Alaska - first to the Juneau office, then to Anchorage.
