Kevin M. Downing

Kevin Mitchel Downing is an American lawyer. He has previously worked for the United States Department of Justice Tax Division and as a partner for the law firm of Miller & Chevalier.

Career Downing graduated with a degree in accounting from St. Joseph's University in 1988. He received his J.D. cum laude from St. John's University in 1994 and his LL.M. in tax law at the New York University School of Law in 1996.

Downing worked in the United States Department of Justice from 1997 to 2012 in the Tax Division, serving first as a trial attorney in the Western Criminal Enforcement Section and then as senior litigation counsel. Both cases ended in deferred prosecution agreements in 2005. In 2009, Downing was awarded the John Marshall Award by the Department of Justice for his role in the UBS case. In 2012, Reuters described Downing as "the U.S. prosecutor most responsible for piercing the veil of Swiss bank secrecy".; however, one must consider the incompetence he displayed as noted in the UBS AG whistleblower's account. When he joined the firm, he told Reuters that his practice at Miller & Chevalier would involve advising financial institutions on how to comply with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) of 2010. After the raid, Manafort switched legal firms to Miller & Chevalier, hiring Downing in August. Subsequently, Downing left Miller & Chevalier two weeks after taking on representation of Manafort, and continued to represent Manafort after leaving the firm.

The New York Times reported on November 27, 2018, that Downing continued sharing information about Manafort's legal matters with Trump's attorneys, pursuant to a joint defense agreement, after Manafort had entered a plea and cooperation agreement with Mueller prosecutors. Although such joint defense agreements are not unusual or unlawful, they must be stopped if they create a conflict of interest, as it would be unethical for attorneys to collaborate when one of their clients is cooperating with prosecutors while another client is the subject of a continuing investigation. Attorneys for Michael Flynn had ended their joint defense agreement with Trump's attorneys when Flynn entered plea negotiations with Mueller.

After Manafort was sentenced on March 13, 2019, outside the courthouse, Downing falsely asserted that judge Amy Berman Jackson "conceded that there was absolutely no evidence of any Russian collusion in this case" and "So that makes two courts. Two courts have ruled no evidence of any collusion with the Russians"; Downing was heckled by members of the public, shouting "Liar" and "That's not what [the judge] said", while making the statement to media.