On Monday, nearly a year after his boss plead guilty to accepting more than $55,000 dollars in bribes during a disastrous run for the D.C. Council, former Councilman Michael A. Brown’s campaign treasurer was sentenced to 16 months in prison Monday for embezzling the campaign’s money.
After pleading guilty in October to tax evasion and violating campaign finance laws, The Washington Post reports that Hakim J. Sutton was sentenced to prison and hit with an order to pay the Internal Revenue Service over $18,000 in back taxes and interest on the stolen money.
Sutton was acting as the treasurer of Brown’s failed 2012 bid for the D.C. Council when prosecutors say he wrote himself dozens of checks from the campaign account over almost a year. All said, Sutton took home around $115,000 in campaign cash.
When tax time came around, Sutton forgot to mention the influx of cash to his personal bank account and he never reported the checks to himself in campaign finance reports, as required by law.
After Brown noticed the missing money from his campaign fund, he replaced Sutton as the treasurer before eventually losing the race for the at-large seat to David Grosso.
In an effort to avoid further jail time, Brown himself plead guilty to accepting $55,000 in cash from representatives of a business to help that business get contracts from the government.
The only problem was those business representatives were actually undercover FBI agents, and though Brown described the situation as a “loan arrangement,” he was still convicted of bribery.
During his trial, Brown admitted to accepting bribes and illegal contributions throughout his political career, including $20,000 during his 2007 campaign and $125,000 during his 2008 campaign, but as part of his plea deal was not charged with these crimes.
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