Richardson was Inslaw's attorney during their dispute with the Department of Justice over the Promis case management software for prosecutors. That case was arguably the only Promis scandal with any basis in fact. It became widely know after a series of articles in Barron's. They got their day in court and lost.
The later descriptions of Promis from Skolnick, Grabbe, et al gave it incredible powers to crack into any bank account anywhere and grab the money, detonate computer chips embedded with tiny thermite explosives, use a secret chip built into mainframe computers to upload data up to spy satellites, etc. A surprisingly large number of gullible people actually believed that stuff. It's fiction - taken from an novel written about the NSA before the existance of the agency was officially acknowledged.
You can't get much better than that. It'd make a great movie.
They (Inslaw) won at the bankruptcy court and district court levels. They lost on appeal in the D.C. Circuit. If you look at the opinion of the D.C. Circuit in reversing, you will see that the reversal had nothing to do with the merits of the case, but only with a technical issue having to do with the interpretation of a statutory provision as to whether the courts had jurisdiction over the issue. In fact, the D.C. Circuit's opinion contains language that can be interpreted as being critical of the government.
So, two courts found that the facts Inslaw alleged were correct. And the D.C. Circuit reversed for reasons having nothing to do with those facts.
And the way the bankruptcy judge who had ruled in favor of Inslaw was not reappointed for a new term as judge really smelled. I have clerked on the U.S. Tax Court, which has similar limited terms for its judges, and reappointment to a new term on that court, as on the bankruptcy courts, is routine.