HOUSTON (CN) – A federal jury convicted former Texas Congressman Steve Stockman on 23 out of 24 criminal counts in his corruption trial on Thursday, and he was immediately taken into custody amid fears he is a flight risk.
Stockman, 61, rested his head on his fist and sat stoically at the defense table as U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal read the verdict at the Houston federal courthouse Thursday afternoon.
The verdict came after a four-week trial in which prosecutors pulled from their trove of 142,000 pages of discovery, and painstakingly presented their case with numerous bank records, emails, text messages and check stubs.
They called to the stand two of Stockman’s congressional staffers, who corroborated the paper trail backing the government’s claims that Stockman defrauded two Republican businessmen of $1.2 million in charitable donations.
Federal agents arrested Stockman on March 15, 2017, while he was boarding a plane at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston on his way to the United Arab Emirates, the culmination of an FBI investigation that started in 2014 after news reports surfaced that Stockman’s 2012 campaign for Congress had received $15,000 in illegal donations.
Stockman was released on a $25,000 unsecured bond shortly after his arrest, and remained free until Thursday.
The Republican represented southeast Texas districts in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 1997 and 2013 to 2015.
A federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment in March 2017, charging Stockman with 24 counts, including mail and wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements to the Federal Election Commission.
After the jury convicted Stockman on each count except one wire fraud charge, federal prosecutor Robert Heberle requested that his bond be revoked.
“Stockman is facing a long sentence. That was not true before today,” Heberle said. “He has extensive foreign contacts in a number of places where it may be hard to find him. He has dealings in cyrptocurrency and we don’t know the state of his finances. And he sent [longtime staffer] Jason Posey to Egypt for two years to thwart the FBI’s investigation.”
Stockman’s defense attorney Sean Buckley lobbied for him to stay free on bond until his sentencing hearing.
“He’s been on bond since his arrest and made all his court appearances,” Buckley said.
But Judge Rosenthal disagreed.
“I don’t share your confidence, Mr. Buckley … The trial testimony made clear the deep nature of Stockman’s international contacts, including people who may assist him. I share the government’s concerns about the difficulty in detecting him in and extraditing him from these countries,” she said.
The government charged Stockman, an accountant, with using several shell bank accounts of bogus nonprofit charities formed in his name to launder $1.2 million donated by two prolific donors to Republican political causes: Richard Uihlein, a Chicago businessman, and Stanford Rothschild, a Baltimore investment manager who died last year at age 91.
They said Stockman got Uihlein to donate $350,000 in January 2013 with a slick pitch in which the lawmaker said the funds would go towards the purchase and renovation of Washington townhouse that would be used as a dorm and meeting place for young conservatives.
Stockman made a run for the seat of U.S. Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas, but placed second behind Cornyn in the March 2014 Republican primary.
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