Former Congressman Receives 10 Year Prison Sentence

Former U.S. Congressman Stephen E. Stockman, who was a two-term Republican member of the House of Representatives representing Texas’ 9th Congressional district from 1995 to 1997 and Texas’ 36th congressional district from 2013 to 2015, was sentenced this week to serve 120 months in prison for “orchestrating a four-year scheme to defraud charitable donors of hundreds of thousands of dollars and secretly to funnel the proceeds to pay for personal expenses and to illegally finance his campaigns for public office.”

Stockman has further been ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution and, upon release, will be subject to three years of supervised release.

“Former Representative Stockman stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from charities, then used the money to pay personal expenses and fund his political campaigns,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski, who runs the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division.  “As this case demonstrates, the Justice Department and our law enforcement partners will aggressively pursue corrupt public officials, including those who seek to corrupt our elections for personal gain.

Among the examples of Stockman’s wrongdoing were a 2010 instance in which Stockman and an accomplice “solicited an elderly donor in Baltimore, Maryland for $285,000 to be used for legitimate charitable and educational purposes.” The two men “used a sham charity named the Ross Center to funnel the money to be used for a variety of personal expenses” repeating the scheme in 2011 and 2012, when the men “received an additional $165,000 in charitable donations from the Baltimore donor, much of which Stockman used illegally to finance his 2012 congressional campaign.”

Stockman repeated this type of scheme numerous times, while also failing to pay taxes on the more than $1.2 million in funds he fraudulently acquired.