Robert D. Luskin (born January 21, 1950) is an attorney and partner in the Washington office of the international law firm of Paul Hastings, LLP. He specializes in White-collar crime and federal and state government investigations. Luskin is also an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches a course in Global Anti-Corruption. Formerly, Luskin taught Advanced Criminal Law and Labor Racketeering at the University of Virginia School of Law.
Luskin is a graduate of Harvard University (B.A. degree, magna cum laude) and Harvard Law School (J.D. degree, magna cum laude), and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Before attending Harvard Law School, Luskin worked as the Deputy Chief of the Washington Bureau for the Providence Journal. Luskin took a leave of absence in 1984 to work as Senior Speechwriter for the campaign of Geraldine Ferraro. He worked in the US Department of Justice, specializing in Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) enforcement, and helped supervise the ABSCAM investigation of the early 1980s. Since entering private practice, he has represented both witnesses and investigative targets in independent counsel, criminal, and congressional investigations, foreign corporations under FCPA investigation. In the course of his career, Luskin has argued not only in federal District Courts and numerous Courts of Appeal, but has also appeared before the United States Supreme Court. Luskin is admitted to the bars of the U.S. Supreme Court, the United States Court of Appeals for the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 11th Circuits, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Practice
Robert Luskin currently specializes in complex criminal and civil litigation at both the trial and appellate levels. Over the course of his career, he has represented foreign corporations, financial institutions, White House officials, cabinet secretaries, federal judges and members of Congress.
In 1995, Luskin successfully represented a sitting federal judge in a criminal appeal to the Supreme Court, resulting in a landmark case narrowing the construction of the general perjury statute.
In 2004, Luskin successfully represented the Assessor for Orange County, California in a Constitutional tax case involving $5–8 billion.
In 2003–09, Luskin represented White House senior advisor and chief political strategist Karl Rove, representing Rove in the special investigations into the outing of covert operative Valerie Plame's position within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) specialist.
Luskin was lead counsel for Lance Armstrong after the June 2012 allegations of blood doping by the US Anti-Doping Agency, a quasi-official American sports governing entity.
In 2019, Luskin represented Gordon Sondland, U.S. Ambassador to the EU, in the first impeachment proceedings involving Donald Trump. Luskin was the subject of a front-page profile in the New York Times following Sondland's appearance in public testimony.
Since 2012, Luskin has focused on civil and criminal investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and has represented foreign corporations in several of the largest FCPA investigations ever resolved by the DOJ and SEC:, including multi-jurisdictional resolutions on behalf of Airbus, Goldman Sachs, Total, Alstom, SBM Offshore and Technip.
Luskin has won significant recognition for his efforts, and has been hailed as a “dean of the FCPA bar” by Chambers USA. In 2021, Luskin was recognized as “White Collar Lawyer of the Year” by Chambers USA and was named a “White Collar MVP” by Law360 in addition to having spent the better part of the last decade atop the Chambers USA rankings in his areas of practice. The Global Investigations Review has identified Bob as one of 20 elite practitioners worldwide in the area of anti-corruption and recently also recognized Luskin as a “Global Thought Leader.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James B. Stewart singled out Luskin as a lawyer who, unlike most criminal lawyers, was prepared to be candid with prosecutors, not permit his client to lie, and come forward with information. Stewart wrote further: "These cases also illustrate that criminal defense lawyers have much to answer for. To his credit, Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin promptly revealed a damaging e-mail and had Rove amend his earlier testimiony that he didn't speak to Time's Matt Cooper. But other defense lawyers allowed their clients to lie in circumstances where they knew or should have known they were doing so."