United States v. Imad Eddin Wadi
NEW UPDATE: After Mr.Wadi’s appeal was denied by the Fifth Circuit on September 26, 2025, the team filed a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States. The petition focused on one primary issue:
Case Description:
Mr. Wadi is an elderly 68-year-old naturalized United States Citizen who is originally from Syria and the father of six children. He has no prior criminal history. On February 29, 2024, Mr. Wadi was convicted of four federal offenses following a five-year FBI sting operation and is currently serving a 13-year-sentence. The government alleged that Mr. Wadi had agreed to start a halal meat slaughterhouse business that would send a partial amount of its profits to Syria, what the government labeled as conspiring to provide material support to terrorism. In reality, Mr. Wadi had been entrapped and physiologically influenced by a trained undercover FBI agent who worked over the period of five years to gradually lure Wadi into agreeing to the FBI’s trap. The agent took advantage of Wadi’s precarious financial situation and desperation to secure the funds to start his business in order to get him to agree to the problematic profit conditions.
The trial was riddled with many significant issues, the most alarming that the main FBI agent destroyed the original iPhone that he had used to communicate with Wadifor the entirety of the operation, despite the district court prohibiting him from doing so via multiple court orders. The government also failed to make a forensic copy of the original iPhone at any point in violation of FBI policies. Ultimately, the defense was left with no way to verify if the agent’s new phone had all the original data from the original phone in its accurate form. The defense’s forensic expert concluded that it was likely the data on the new phone had been manipulated and tampered with.
Based on the destruction of evidence, the defense moved to dismiss the indictment and requested the district judge to issue a spoliation or adverse-inference instruction. The district court denied all relief. The jury was never even informed that the agent had destructed his original phone.
The SCOTUS cert petition is based on the agent’s destruction of the phone and the court’s refusal to provide any remedy.
IMPACT
The precedent of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Mr. Wadi’s case has grave consequences. The government can effectively use agents for the period of an investigation, fire them, and then escape accountability for any evidence destructed at the hands of the informant. The ubiquity of digital evidence in criminal investigations reflects a world in which smartphones are indispensable to both the prosecution and the defense. Its destruction is therefore not a mere technicality but a substantive loss that can deprive a defendant—and the fact-finder—of the actual truth.
Although the success rate of SCOTUS’s grant for cert petitions is low, the filing of the cert petition on its own represents a formidable avenue to document Wadi’s storyand raise awareness around the harmful precedent the ruling in his case creates.
Mr. Wadi’s case is a clear and egregious example of the shattering impact that FBI undercover influence can have on vulnerable people in our communities. Wadi has never committed any violence nor was he convicted of any violent crimes; his conviction was solely based on an agreement to eventually send money to his friend’s family members in Syria. Beyond such statements that were likely made in order to secure his business’s initial investment funds, Wadi took no affirmative action to actually send these funds. In fact, he repeatedly emphasized the need to send donations for humanitarian efforts in Syria in response to the FBI informant’s suggestions to send the money for weapon purchases in Syria.
It is of essential importance to speak out against the use of entrapment as a prosecution mechanism because it is a debunked and manipulative form of identifying at-risk individuals.
