A more characteristic courtroom triumph, however, was the bribery prosecution, in 1974, of the Brooklyn Democratic congressman Bertram Podell.
"It's unusual to see a bribery prosecution where the payment wasn't to the defendant," said David A. Sklansky, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
Karl Rove, the former senior political adviser to President Bush, denied Wednesday that he had anything to do with the Justice Department's bribery prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama, a Democrat.
With 22 defendants, it was also the biggest individual foreign bribery prosecution by the Justice Department — and the new charges against Mr. Bistrong, identified as a main figure in the F.B.I. sting, reveal that a much larger investigation is under way than was previously disclosed.
Over the course of nearly four hours, the former cabinet minister publicly confirmed for the first time that she had indeed been subjected to a "barrage" of political pressure from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to spare the powerful Quebec engineering firm SNC-Lavalin from fraud and bribery prosecution.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould's resignation came a week after a Canadian national newspaper reported, on anonymous sourcing, that either Mr. Trudeau or his staff had pressured her to back off the corruption and bribery prosecution of a prominent, Montreal-based engineering company, SNC-Lavalin.
The bribery prosecution stemmed from a lawsuit filed by John Griffin Jones, a lawyer in Jackson, Miss., against Mr. Scruggs and others, in which Mr. Jones contended he had been cheated out his share of a $26.5 million settlement in a case the two had filed against State Farm Insurance after Hurricane Katrina.
It is difficult (though not impossible) to imagine a tweet from a public official that qualifies as the kind of "decision or action on a question, matter, cause, suit, proceeding or controversy" McDonnell generally requires for a bribery prosecution.
