When former U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm, R-Staten Island/South Brooklyn, announced he was running for his old congressional seat, news reports across the country emphasized his status as a convicted felon. The incumbent, Dan Donovan, whom Grimm is challenging in a June 26 Republican primary, has repeatedly underscored his opponent's federal conviction for tax evasion and his accompanying admissions to several other crimes in relation to it. Grimm counters that he was the victim of a political prosecution engineered by then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
The facts do, indeed, support Grimm's claim that partisan politics drove his criminal prosecution. However, various other assertions that he's been making about the matter are plainly false.
From the outset of Grimm's tenure in Congress, he was under attack by Democrats for alleged illegalities in campaign financing. Following a grand jury proceeding marked by a continual flow of malicious, illegal leaks, an indictment was returned against Grimm on April 28, 2014. It had nothing to do with campaign finances, however, but rather his operation of Healthalicious, a small Manhattan restaurant, prior to his election to Congress. That supported a reasonable inference that prosecutors, unable to come up with anything else, were nonetheless determined to come up with something.
The timing of the indictment pointed directly toward a politically motivated prosecution. Although the investigation spanned more than two years, the charges weren't filed until just after the last day for Grimm to decline the Republican nomination for re-election. Moreover, upon announcing the indictment, Lynch stated that charges of campaign-finance wrongdoing might yet be filed against Grimm. If that truly remained a possibility, only politics could explain the filing of the indictment in the middle of a congressional campaign instead of after the grand jury had completed its work.
Equally suspicious was the substance of the indictment, which primarily accused Grimm of hiring unauthorized immigrants and paying them off the books. Although indefensible, hundreds of thousands of similar businesses do the same thing, a reality of such common knowledge that it requires no citation. Yet, all but a tiny fraction of such violations are handled civilly, with offenders required to pay back taxes and penalties. With Grimm's misconduct costing the government less than $150,000 in taxes, his case clearly should have been handled the same way.
Grimm, however, miscasts the criminal case against him as simply a matter of "paying delivery boys off the books," adding that all the charges emanated from conduct prior to his service in Congress. Both of those statements are false. He was also indicted for, and subsequently admitted to, having lied under oath in a Jan. 13, 2013, deposition. When the Appellate Division suspended his law license for four years in May 2017, it noted that "he gave false deposition testimony, while serving as a member of Congress."
Following his indictment, Grimm forged ahead with his re-election campaign, repeatedly assuring voters that he was innocent and would be exonerated. A mere six weeks after he was re-elected, however, he pleaded guilty to tax evasion, resigned from Congress and left the district without representation until the following May, when Donovan won a special election to fill the seat.
Despite all this, Grimm told NY1's Anthony Pascal this February that he "absolutely did not lie" to voters. His explanation, however, was nonsensical. He began by asserting that he really wasn't guilty of criminal conduct, which, of course, is belied by his guilty plea to precisely that. Next, claiming that he was guilty only of a "civil wrong," Grimm stated that "nobody has ever been criminally charged" for what he did.
That statement is false, although, as noted above, all but a tiny fraction of similar cases are, indeed, handled civilly. Thus, Grimm continued, he truly believed that the court would dismiss the indictment on his claim that he was being selectively prosecuted.
In reality, however, the legal definition of a selective prosecution is far more stringent than what the term might suggest to laypeople. The case against Grimm fell far short of that legal standard, and the court properly so held. Moreover, even if the court had dismissed the indictment on that ground, it would not have been a declaration of actual innocence but, rather, a legal bar to the government's proving guilt.
Finally, Grimm told Pascal that he couldn't go to trial because he didn't have the $500,000 his lawyers wanted to represent him. It was an astonishing claim because it implies a belief on Grimm's part that he would have won at trial. That flies in the face of his unqualified admissions of guilt in court. Reiterating those admissions, the Appellate Division noted that he "stipulated that he had committed numerous acts of criminal conduct from 2007 through 2010." This, in addition, to admitting that he lied during the deposition.
Grimm can properly cast himself as the victim of a political prosecution. But he comes across as shifty and deceitful when he embellishes it with pure nonsense.
Email Daniel Leddy at column@danielleddylaw.com. Follow him on Twitter @LegalHotShots.
Michael Grimm faces incumbent Congressman Dan Donovan in next month's Republican primary election.
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