Government

GOP Rep. Fortenberry May Have Made One Or Thirty Thousand Campaign Finance Oopsies

Yet he kept talking about it.

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Yesterday morning Nebraska Congressman Jeff Fortenberry put out a strange message on his website. “You deserve to hear it from us firsthand,” began the post, which was styled as a letter from his wife Celeste to Fortenberry’s constituents.

It included a video of the congressman and the missus, parked in a cornfield inside their “1963 Ford F100 pickup truck,” adorable puppy in tow. Because Jeff Fortenberry is a Real American™.

Subtle.

In the Fortenberrys’ telling, poor saintly Jeff is being targeted by the mean “Biden FBI” for loving God, America, and apple pie too much … or something. In 2016, our hero attended a fundraiser in Los Angeles, “an event during which Jeff was inducted into the Order of St. Gregory, a knighthood bestowed by the Pope, for his service to persecuted Christians in the Middle East,” where he also picked up $37,000 in campaign contributions.

Turns out, $30,000 of that money came from a Nigerian billionaire — ooopsie. But, Celeste assures us, her husband knew nothing about any of it. He’s the real victim here! Which is why he kept talking and talking and OMG he’s still talking when federal agents from California knocked on the door in 2019 to ask about it.

“The agents said they needed his help. Jeff assumed he was one federal official helping other federal officials in the cause of justice,” Celeste wrote. “His instinct, as yours would be, was to help. So, he talked to them.”

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Apparently Celeste thinks that we are also A COMPLETE IDIOT like her husband. Duly noted.

For his part, Fortenberry claimed to feel “so personally betrayed, I thought we were trying to help.”

He really, really should have been less helpful. Because the promised indictment did drop yesterday, and this genius appears to have talked himself into three false statements charges under 18 U.S.C. § 1001.

According to the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Fortenberry became aware after the 2016 fundraiser that the real source of the $30,000 he received that evening, via multiple separate, smaller donations, was Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury. Chagoury paid $1.8 million in March of this year to settle charges that he’d illegally funneled $180,000 of campaign contributions to four Republican politicians, whom Politico identifies as Sen. Mitt Romney, Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry, California Rep. Darrell Issa, and Fortenberry.

The host of the fundraiser, labeled “Individual H” in the indictment, began cooperating with the FBI in September of 2016. It’s not clear from the indictment whether the FBI has a recording of the phone call from the spring of 2018 in which Fortenberry requested that “Individual H” host another fundraiser. But prosecutors seem pretty definite that the informant told the congressman multiple times that Chagoury had been the source of the original funds, violating both the law barring foreign campaign contributions and the ban on straw man donors.

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In fact, they’re so sure about the sequence of events on that phone call that they’ve charged Fortenberry with lying to the FBI about when he hung up the phone.

From the DOJ press release:

During this second interview, Fortenberry also misleadingly stated he ended the June 2018 call with Individual H after that person made a “concerning comment,” when in fact Fortenberry continued to ask Individual H to host another fundraiser for his campaign, the indictment states.

So, it’s not looking great for Rep. Chatterbox, all things considered. He had the right to remain silent, but not the good sense to use it.

US v. Fortenberry [Docket via Court Listener]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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