Sandy MaloneBaltimore, MD – Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday on two counts of perjury and making false mortgage applications.
The indictment alleged that Marilyn Mosby lied about experiencing financial hardship from the pandemic on an application to withdraw $40,000 from her Baltimore City retirement account, The Washington Post reported.
The Baltimore state’s attorney filed the application under a Cares Act clause that enabled people impacted by the pandemic to access retirement money to fill the gap.
The indictment said that Marilyn Mosby claimed two times, under penalty of perjury, that she had experienced “adverse financial consequences” related to work hardships, according to The Washington Post.
Federal prosecutors said that wasn’t true.
The indictment said Marilyn Mosby got the retirement money under the Cares Act and used it to help buy two pieces of property in Florida, The Washington Post reported.
And then she lied on both of those mortgage applications, according to prosecutors.
The indictment said that Marilyn Mosby failed to reveal she had unpaid federal taxes, as was required by law, when she applied for the mortgages, The Washington Post reported.
Prosecutors said she also failed to disclose that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had placed a $45,000 lien against all properties owned by Marilyn and Nick Mosby in March of 2020.
Federal prosecutors began investigating the notorious anti-cop state’s attorney and her husband, Nick Mosby, who is president of the Baltimore City Council, after the Baltimore inspector general released a report in February of 2021 that brought into question the state’s attorney’s travel, personal businesses, and gifts, The Washington Post reported.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) subpoenaed all of the couple’s financial records including their tax returns, bank statements, credit card statements, loan documents, and canceled checks, The Baltimore Sun reported.
They also issued a subpoena to Marilyn Mosby’s campaign treasurer and requested records going back to 2014.
Additionally, federal investigators wanted to see records related to the two private travel and consulting businesses owned by the couple that Marilyn Mosby has said existed in name only, The Washington Post reported.
A. Scott Bolden, an attorney for the Mosbys, issued a statement that calling the investigation “a political witch hunt in its purest form.”
“My clients are progressive change agents, making them unfair targets of unnecessary scrutiny by federal investigators. Nevertheless, I can assure you and the people of Baltimore, they have done nothing illegal, inappropriate or unlawful,” Bolden said in the statement, according to The Washington Post.
But the Mosbys have been under investigation for multiple things over the last two years in addition to the IRS problems.
Marilyn Mosby has been accused of spending more time traveling than working in her office, prompting the investigation by the city’s inspector general that ultimately tipped off the feds.
Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming investigated the allegations and determined that the state’s attorney had spent at least 144 days away from her office in 2018 and 2019, which means she missed about one day a week for two years.
Marilyn Mosby’s has disputed the inspector general’s report, The Washington Post reported.
Cumming also said Marilyn Mosby should have gotten approval for more than a dozen trips including to Kenya, Portugal, and Scotland that were paid for by non-profit groups.
She was also criticized for using $3,250 in campaign funds to pay for her private attorney, The Washington Post reported.
An attorney for Marilyn Mosby said the money has been refunded to the campaign.
It was the inspector general’s investigation that revealed Marilyn and Nick Mosby had purchased a new home on Longboat Key in Florida just days before her campaign announced it was working on setting up a legal defense fund to offset her expenses, The Baltimore Sun reported.
Four days after the couple bought the $476,000 condo in February of 2020, the campaign issued a statement that said it was going to “establish an appropriate mechanism to set up a legal defense fund for the tens of thousands of dollars in additional costs” that were a result of the investigations.
Maryland law prohibits using campaign money for personal legal expenses.
In September of 2020, Marilyn and Nick Mosby bought a second “second home” in Florida, The Baltimore Sun reported.
The latest purchase was a 4,000 square foot, $545,000 home in Kissimmee, Florida near Walt Disney World.
Those were the same two home purchases that federal prosecutors said led to Marilyn Mosby’s indictment, The Washington Post reported.
Marilyn Mosby has been a lightning rod for criticism of violent crime in Baltimore since her failed prosecution of the officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray when he was being arrested by the Baltimore police.
She was accused of prosecutorial overreach for charging the officers, The Washington Post reported.
In June of 2020, Marilyn Mosby dismissed more than 600 pending criminal cases and announced that her office would no longer be prosecuting many misdemeanors.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan recently called the Baltimore state’s attorney a “big part of the problem” with skyrocketing violent crime in that city, The Washington Post reported.
“We have a prosecutor in Baltimore City who refuses to prosecute violent criminals and that’s at the root of the problem,” Hogan said.
In September of 2021, the Mosbys’ personal attorney said the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Criminal Tax Division was pursuing a perjury charge against the state’s attorney over a signature on a document but that prosecutors refused to tell him anything more, WBFF reported.
“You can’t prosecute me for perjury, or that I lied about a document, without telling me what the document is,” Bolden complained to reporters. “Without telling me what the lie is. That’s denial of due process. Every one of them, there were eight in the room, refused to tell us what the lie was, what the document they saw.”
No date has been set for Marilyn Mosby’s first court appearance on the federal charges, The Washington Post reported.
Holly Matkin
