Bradley Lane Croft v. United States

Whether the Fifth Circuit abused its discretion in refusing to recall or clarify a post-GVR mandate after the panel resolved in the first instance, and attributed to “the trial court’s findings,” the disputed premise that use of the four instructors’ identities was itself the crux of the predicate fraud, where the Government’s witness, Rufus Cobum, the former director of TVC’s Veterans Education Program, described a composite representation concerning the instructors’ names, qualifications, employment, and proposed teaching roles and testified that names alone would not obtain approval; the panel relied on that same testimony; the trial court s only identified description characterized the identity use as facilitation; no specific crux finding exists; and Judge Ho identified qualifications rather than names as a reasonable competing crux.

Whether the Fifth Circuit abused its discretion in refusing to correct a mandate that treated use of the four instructors’ identities in an antecedent composite TVC approval package as the crux of eight later payment-wire predicates under 18 U.S.C. § 1028A, where the charged payments arose from a separate composite VA enrollment-and-payment package that did not require or use those identities, and the connection between the two packages rested only on approval-chain causation and facilitation.