Aspiration co-founder Joe Sanberg has voluntarily participated in the NBA’s investigation into possible cap circumvention by the LA Clippers, the top lawyer for the firm looking into the claims told a federal judge.

In a previous filing related to a federal fraud case in which Sanberg has pleaded guilty, his attorney said he “substantially assisted” the NBA in its investigation. Sanberg is the man in the middle of the NBA’s investigation. He co-founded and ran Aspiration, the firm that signed Clippers star Kawhi Leonard to a four-year, $28 million marketing contract for which he performed no work.

The NBA is investigating the contract and allegations that the Clippers may have used it to pay Leonard more money than he could have received under the league salary cap. It hired Wachtell Lipton, an oft-used New York law firm, to investigate the matter.

David Anders, the lawyer leading Wachtell’s investigation for the NBA, said in a letter to the court that Sanberg sat for two in-person interviews with his team and provided documentation and information for the investigation and cooperated after they sought to speak with him. He said that Sanberg’s lawyers asked him to inform the judge of Sanberg’s cooperation.

“In all our dealings with Mr. Sanberg, both directly and through his counsel, he provided information that was consistent with our review of contemporaneous documents and other evidence,” Anders wrote. “Mr. Sanberg’s cooperation substantially assisted our investigation, including our ability to develop a more complete understanding of key events.”

A lawyer for Clippers owner Steve Ballmer also filed a letter to the judge on behalf of Ballmer, as first reported by ESPN.

Sanberg is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to federal charges that he inflated Aspiration’s financials to obtain loans from investors. Federal prosecutors have asked judge Stephen V. Wilson to give him more than 17 years in jail, followed by three years of supervised release. Sanberg’s lawyers are asking the judge to give him a lighter sentence. Sanberg is scheduled to be sentenced April 27 in Los Angeles.

It is just one of many legal issues for Sanberg, though the most severe. He has faced civil lawsuits alleging fraud in courts in New York and in Los Angeles, along with a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission that claims he fabricated revenue to deceive investors.

A lawsuit filed by Aspiration investors in Los Angeles Superior Court last year claimed that Sanberg had defrauded them into putting money into the company. The suit had originally been filed in July 2025 but was then re-filed in November, after reporting by the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast uncovered Leonard’s contract and led to an NBA investigation. The new complaint listed Ballmer as a defendant and claimed he conspired with Sanberg to funnel money into Aspiration to prop it up, and that the company would then help pay Leonard more than he could be paid under NBA rules.

While Ballmer has publicly denied the cap circumvention claims, he went into more detail in a January court filing that asked the judge overseeing the case to dismiss it. A lawyer for Ballmer wrote that he had been named a defendant in the Los Angeles-based lawsuit “based on sensational—and patently false—assertions made in a sports podcast” and said that Ballmer and other investors were all “defrauded” by Sanberg.

The Clippers were first introduced to Aspiration, according to the filing written by Ballmer’s lawyers, in 2021 because it wanted to bid on naming rights for the new arena the team was building (later named the Intuit Dome). Aspiration became a key sponsor of the Clippers and had been their jersey patch partner, agreeing to pay the franchise more than $300 million in long-term deal in a deal announced in September 2021. The Clippers also hired the firm to supply it with carbon credits. Ballmer invested $50 million in Aspiration in the fall of 2021 and then another $10 million in March 2023, when the company was already in disarray and losing money.

Ballmer, the filing said, invested in Aspiration “because of its purported commitment to environmental sustainability, a passion Ballmer shared.” He said that he lost the entirety of his $60 million investment and that the Clippers ended their agreement with the company. According to the filing, Ballmer was also treated as a victim of Sanberg’s fraud by the SEC and that he received a victim identification letter from the Department of Justice in relation to Sanberg.

“Plaintiffs’ inflammatory allegations of salary cap circumvention and a ‘sham’ endorsement deal are flat-out false,” the filing by Ballmer said.