LOS ANGELES (CN) — A Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday wrestled with the government's decision to try former U.S. Congressman Jeffrey Fortenberry of Nebraska in Southern California on charges of making false statements to investigators in his home state and in Washington.
"You had a Nebraska citizen, elected to represent the people of Nebraska in the House of Representatives, who made a misstatement of fact in Nebraska — how ever got that case tried in Los Angeles?" U.S. District Judge James Donato, a Barack Obama appointee who sat on the panel by designation, asked. How is that consistent "with our long tradition that you're tried in the community where you committed your crime? That is your entitlement under the Constitution."
Fortenberry, 62, was convicted last year of concealing a $30,000 illegal campaign contribution from a Parisian billionaire, with whom he shared a passion for the plight of Christian minorities in the Middle East, and lying to the FBI when they questioned him about donation. He was sentenced to two years probation as the judge found his crimes to be "out of character" for the veteran Republican politician and didn't require prison time.
His attorneys appealed his conviction, arguing that he never should have been charged and tried in LA because none of the crimes occurred there.
Although the illegal campaign contribution occurred at a 2016 fundraiser in LA, the charges only pertained to statements Fortenberry made some three years later, after the organizer of the fundraiser had started cooperating with the FBI investigation into Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian-born, Paris-based billionaire who illegally contributed to various campaigns.
The cooperator had alerted Fortenberry in a 2018 phone call recorded by the FBI that the money he raised in LA had in fact come from Chagoury, who as a foreign national couldn't contribute to federal campaigns, and was given to the congressman through "straw men" at the event. In two subsequent interviews with the FBI, in Nebraska and in Washington, Fortenberry said he didn't know the money had come from an illegal source.
"This is really an unprecedented prosecution," Fortenberry's attorney Kannon Shanmugam said at Tuesday's hearing. "A member of Congress is hauled across the country simply because the [assistant U.S. attorneys] and agents happen to be here."
Much of the argument before the Ninth Circuit panel circled around whether Fortenberry's false statements to the FBI were "material" in so far as they influenced the ongoing investigation of Chagoury that was run by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles.
"The crime, the false statement, was material to an investigation in the Central District of California," Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Robbins told the court. "And the reason that that investigation was in the Central District of California was that the defendant chose to have a fundraiser here in Los Angeles."
U.S. Circuit Judges Salvador Mendoza Jr. and Gabriel Sanchez, both Joe Biden appointees, rounded out the panel.
Fortenberry had represented Nebraska's 1st Congressional District from 2005 through March 2022, when he resigned from Congress because of his conviction. He had come to know Chagoury through their mutual involvement with In Defense of Christians, a nonprofit that lobbied Congress on behalf of Christian groups and other religious minorities in the Middle East that face persecution.
The former congressman got caught up in the FBI's investigation of possible Federal Election Campaign Act violations by Chagoury, who also had a house in Beverly Hills at the time and who investigators believed was secretly injecting foreign money into U.S. election campaigns. Chagoury in 2021 paid $1.8 million as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department over $180,000 in illegal contributions he made to four different campaigns.
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