The former President notwithstanding, the government’s position in Fischer\xa0v.\xa0United States is unsettling. ![A photo of a group of people standing in front of the Supreme Court.]()
On Monday, October 15, 2001,an executive assistant arrived for work at the Houston office of Arthur Andersen, at the time one of the Big Five accounting firms, to find that the break room was a mess. “There was food everywhere,” she later said, “like they had been there the whole weekend.” Near the remnants of meals were bags stuffed with paper strips. This was the opening scene in what became—as Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind recount in “The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron”—a bacchanalia of document shredding. Arthur Andersen executives had learned that their client Enron was likely being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for what would prove to be egregious fraud. Subpoenas might arrive any day. They also knew, to varying degrees, that their own work on Enron’s books would not hold up to scrutiny. Soon, “files awaiting destruction spilled out into the hallways,” McLean and Elkind write. The pretense was that the paper obliteration was just a reflection of the accounting firm’s “document-retention policy,” and yet, in the space of about two weeks, the Houston office shredded more than it would in a year. At one point, Arthur Andersen, with its own machines at capacity, hired a mobile shredding truck from a company called Shred-It. Even the firm’s London office got in on the shredding. That sorry episode was revisited, repeatedly and somewhat incongruously, before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, in oral arguments for Joseph W. Fischer v. United States. Fischer was part of the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6, 2021. | 
