Custer Battles, one of the crookeder of the Republican-linked crony-capitalist war-profiteering firms that have done so well out of the Iraq adventure, (and which has also been implicated in abuses directed at Iraqi civilians) was hoping that its fraudulent conduct would escape legal scrutiny on the claim that the Coalition Provisional Authority wasn’t an agency of the United States government, and that therefore fraud on the CPA wasn’t fraud on the government for the purposes of the False Claims Act. Apparently the Justice Department thought that defense had enough legal merit that DOJ backed off from “adopting” the whistleblower suit against the company under the qui tam procedures.
So far, the courts aren’t buying it.
The district court decision, if upheld, is good news both in general and because a trial on the merits might be extremely informative.
(It’s also old news, but I just learned about it from a helpful reader.)