Ex-U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown pleads guilty to 1 charge in case that ended 24-year career in Congress

Former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown pleaded guilty Wednesday to a single charge of repeatedly lying to avoid paying taxes, ending a six-year legal fight about a charity scam that helped sink her 24-year career in Congress.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan sentenced the Jacksonville Democrat to time served in an earlier prison stint and payment of substantially less restitution than he ordered after her first trial five years ago.

The guilty verdict in that trial was overturned last year by an Atlanta appeals court, leaving charges from her 2016 indictment unsettled until a plea deal was reached this week.

Brown pleaded guilty to only one of the 18 counts she would have faced if prosecutors had persisted in plans for a second trial, which was scheduled for September.

The plea ignored the core of the indictment, a conspiracy to use Brown’s name and influence to raise money for a purported education charity whose funds ended up being used largely by people connected with the 75-year-old political icon.

One Door for Education President Carla Wiley and her ex-boyfriend, former Brown chief of staff Elias “Ronnie” Simmons, both pleaded guilty to conspiracy years ago and testified at Brown’s 2017 trial.

In that trial, Simmons testified about withdrawing cash from the education fund’s bank account and driving to Brown’s bank to deposit it in her checking account, as well as giving her blank One Door for Education checks after he had signed Wiley’s name on the signature line.

One Door for Education was only mentioned during Wednesday’s hear when Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Coolican detailed the government’s ability to prove Brown had lied on tax forms about donations to charity. Coolican read from a plea agreement that listed $24,500 in donations to the education fund that Brown’s tax returns falsely listed her making between 2013 and 2015.

The agreement, in which Brown admitted endeavoring to obstruct and impede administration of internal revenue laws, listed a string of donations she claimed that “were not all accurate” to organizations including Edward Waters University, Bethel Baptist Church, the Clara White Mission, Community Rehabilitation Center and New Destiny Church.

While in the 2017 trial an FBI accountant testified that over seven years about $159,000 in cash deposits entered Brown’s checking account from sources including One Door For Education and Friends of Corrine Brown, her campaign committee, the agreement said simply that Brown “omitted additional income from cash deposits” when her tax returns reported her income.

Deal allows ex-U.S. Rep Corrine Brown to collect her federal pension

The plea deal means that Brown will be able to continue to receive a pension she would have forfeited if she had been finally convicted of the dozen mail or wire fraud charges she faced in a second trial.

In the hearing Wednesday, Corrigan approved a pre-negotiated sentence that included an order to pay the Internal Revenue Service $62,650, a figure the judge said in the first trial represents the amount she was shown to owe.

But because there were no fraud convictions, she won’t be required to pay the $515,000 in restitution to fraud victims ordered after the first trial.

The government had already distributed about $31,000 of that sum it had seized from Brown. Corrigan said Brown had agreed to not seek reimbursement for that, so the effective total of her payments to the government will be about $93,000.

Previously sentenced to five years in prison, Brown served about 27 months in a minimum-security women’s prison before being released to home confinement in 2020 over concerns about her health and potential exposure to COVID-19.

After the hearing concluded a little past noon, Brown and her legal counsel walked to City Hall, less than a block away, where the veteran politician joined a prayer meeting in progress in the building's atrium.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Corrine Brown, former congresswoman from Jacksonville, pleads guilty