I am sure if she could pull the wool of JP Morgan's eyes, she could convince Scientist-1 that it was legit. "I want to expense it under Marketing not R&D, which would let us pay you more. My CPA's eyes glaze over, can you uplevel it?" or something
You could imagine something like that happening, but from the email conversation quoted in the indictment, it doesn't seem like there was even a token attempt at justifying it.
