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The introduction email came last
What the rules allowed
NBA rules let a team hand over a player's contact information, and that is all. In October 2021, Gillian Zucker, the Clippers' president of business operations, raised endorsement deals with Aspiration founder Joe Sandberg and named Kawhi Leonard and another player as examples of players Aspiration could partner with. Zucker told investigators she had explained that NBA rules prevented her from helping. In that same conversation, she told Sandberg she would enlist a business agent, who was under a retention agreement with the Clippers, to help him structure the agreement.
The timeline
Zucker then conveyed financial terms for the deal to the agent and gave input on the term sheet. On November 5, 2021, she sent a formal introduction email to Dennis Robertson, Leonard's uncle and business manager, and to Sandberg. That email arrived nine days after she told Sandberg she would call the agent, eight days after she passed the financial terms to the agent, and one day after she weighed in on the term sheet.
The investigators' conclusion
Investigators weighed the timeline against what they found at Boingo, Daktronics, and Lockton, and concluded the email was drafted solely for record-making purposes. It was not a genuine message meant to start a deal-making process that was by then well under way. It is the same email that had been cited as exculpatory evidence for the past year.
How do investigators rebuild a timeline from emails?
Investigators collect emails, calendar entries, phone records, and payment records, and each one carries a timestamp set by a server rather than by the people involved. Putting them on a single line shows which step came first and which came after. Large investigations use document-review software to search millions of pages by date, sender, and keyword. A message sent after the events it describes stands out against the records around it.
Why do investigators get so many old emails?
Once a company expects an investigation, its lawyers typically issue a legal hold, which suspends the routine deletion of emails and files. Backups and servers often keep copies even after a person deletes a message. Federal law also makes destroying records to obstruct an investigation a crime, under a provision added by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
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