Ro Khanna’s buddy former U.S. Attorney Renato
Mariotti is representing his embattled former
campaign manager.

CONGRESS | 17TH DISTRICT | 
ELECTION 2016 |
Renato Mariotti is a former assistant U.S. attorney and a high-powered Chicago lawyer. He is also the attorney of record for Brian Parvizshahi, the former Ro Khanna campaign manager currently ensnared in a federal lawsuit claiming he accessed confidential computer files belonging to Rep, Mike Honda’s campaign.

There’s also another common thread: Mariotti is a long-time acquaintance of Khanna. The two were college classmates at the University of Chicago and Yale.

In a short essay Khanna penned in 2014, he described a two-year effort to organize a conference at the University of Chicago on the future of democracy “with one of my closest friends, Renato Mariotti.”

Mariotti gain some renown last year when he was able to successfully prosecute a crime known as “spoofing,” when a trader fraudulently posts a large order for stocks and other financial instruments and then abruptly pulls the buy, often times within a split second, in order to disrupt markets. Subsequently, Mariotti became a partner last June at the Chicago’s law firm Thompson Coburn.

But, his help in a far-flung case involving a 25-year-old former campaign manager seems incongruous with Mariotti’s recent successes. Marriotti was in federal court to defend Parvizshahi last week in San Jose.