The DOJ's Aspiration Prosecutor Joins PTFO

EPISODE 378: Our series continues.

We didn’t plan to drop Part X of our ongoing Clippers/Aspiration investigation the day after it won the Pulitzer Prize.

This particular episode, in fact, was in the works for months.

You may recall that in Part IX, taped live in March 2026, we obtained a crucial document from March 2023: the confidential complaint, submitted to the federal government, under penalty of perjury, by two Aspiration whistleblowers.

This complaint is what started the Department of Justice’s investigation. It provided the detailed roadmap for the successful convictions of Aspiration co-founder Joe Sanberg and Aspiration board member Ibrahim AlHusseini.

And crucially, for our purposes here, it also detailed Steve Ballmer’s Clippers using Aspiration to pay Kawhi Leonard and “circumvent the NBA’s salary cap”:

All of which reminded me that there was a lead DOJ prosecutor who’d already vetted this whistleblower complaint… and many of the same documents… and many of the same sources… that I started studying, years later, in 2025.

That prosecutor’s name, it turns out, is Lou Manzo.

And Lou — who has since left the federal government — has become a fan of the journalism PTFO has been doing. An “avid listener,” even.

So I asked him to help us decode what Steve Ballmer has been most recently claiming. And what might happen with the sentencing of Joe Sanberg: the guy that the richest man in American sports may fear the most.

YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Relentlessly,

Pablo

P.S. You can now watch us over on Apple Podcasts (!)