Aide Pleads Guilty, says Philadelphia Congressman Brady's Campaign Paid Primary Challenger To Quit

Jeremy Roebuck and Chris Brennan at the Philadelphia Inquirer offer a piece on Philadelphia Congressman Bob Brady (seen in the above photo).

Federal prosecutors said Tuesday that U.S. Rep. Bob Brady’s campaign secretly paid a 2012 primary rival $90,000 to abandon his race and that the city’s longtime Democratic power broker later tried to derail an FBI investigation into the payoff by coaching a witness.

Those accusations, in court filings made public for the first time, emerged with the disclosure that an aide to Brady’s challenger, senior Municipal Court Judge Jimmie Moore, had admitted her role in the payoff scheme and pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal it.

Neither Brady nor Moore has been charged with a crime. Nor were they identified by name in the court documents that outlined the plea by Moore’s former political aide, Carolyn Cavaness. But a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia about her guilty plea made clear the crime was related to the 2012 primary campaign for Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District, which Brady has represented for nearly two decades.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/ex-aide-to-brady-rival-admits-scheme-to-pay-off-challenger-20170725.html 

You can also read an earlier post on Carolyn Cavaness via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/07/philadelphia-woman-pleads-guilty-to.html 

Philadelphia Woman Pleads Guilty To Charges Of Causing False Statements To the Federal Election Commission

A The U.S. Justice Department released the below information:

A Philadelphia woman pleaded guilty to a criminal information unsealed today charging her with causing false statements to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in connection with a 2012 congressional primary election. Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and Acting U.S. Attorney Louis D. Lappen for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania made the announcement.

According to the plea memorandum filed today, Carolyn Cavaness, 34, engaged in a falsification scheme involving payments to a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. According to the plea memorandum, those payments came from the campaign committee of the candidate’s political opponent for the purpose of removing the candidate from the 2012 Democratic race for Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District. Cavaness was a member of the candidate’s campaign staff.

As set forth in the criminal information and the government’s plea memorandum, Cavaness admitted that in or about February 2012, her candidate withdrew from the primary election pursuant to an agreement with his opponent, who promised to pay the candidate $90,000 from his campaign funds to be used to repay the candidate’s campaign debts.  Cavaness admitted that she was aware that under the applicable law, a contribution from one authorized campaign to another could not exceed $2,000 for the primary election, and that the FEC required campaigns to file periodic reports itemizing the campaign’s contributions and expenditures during the reporting period. However, in order to conceal the fact that his opponent’s campaign committee paid his campaign debts, according to the  plea memorandum, the candidate instructed Cavaness to create a company whose sole purpose would be to receive the funds from his opponent’s political campaign and repay the candidate’s campaign debts. As described in the plea memorandum, Cavaness admitted that she did so, and that the payments were then routed through two political consultants, who created false invoices to generate a paper trail intended to justify the payments from the candidate’s opponent’s campaign committee.

According to the plea memorandum, Cavaness used the money from the opponent’s campaign committee to repay the candidate’s campaign debts and for personal expenses, but failed to disclose this information to the FEC. Instead, according to the plea memorandum, Cavaness knowingly and intentionally caused the candidate’s campaign committee to file false reports with the FEC which did not disclose or reference the funds received from his opponent’s campaign committee, did not mention the companies of the political consultants through which the payments were routed and  falsely listed the same debts owed by the candidate’s campaign that had been disclosed on earlier reports, despite the fact that those debts had been repaid using funds paid to the candidate by his opponent’s campaign committee.

The case is being investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Gibson and Trial Attorney Jonathan Kravis of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section.