Reuters: U.S.: Jury to weigh fraud charges against NYC mayoral hopeful's aides

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Jury to weigh fraud charges against NYC mayoral hopeful's aides May 2nd 2013, 04:12 New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate John Liu speaks in support of a demonstration against the New York Police Department's ''stop and frisk'' crime-fighting tactic outside of Manhattan Federal Court in New York, March 18, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson By Jonathan Allen NEW YORK | Thu May 2, 2013 12:12am EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal jury was set to weigh fraud charges on Thursday against two former fundraising associates of John Liu, a Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City. The U.S. Attorney's Office said Jia Hou, the Liu campaign's former treasurer, and Xing Wu Pan, a fundraiser for Liu, were part of a coordinated conspiracy by the campaign to fraudulently get money from the city's donation-matching program, thwarted only by a federal investigation. Defense lawyers for Hou and Pan in closing arguments on Wednesday said the two were "collateral damage" in the government's "obsessive" probe of Liu's campaign. The jury, in U.S. district court in Manhattan, is due to begin deliberating the case on Thursday. Liu, now the city's comptroller, has not been charged with any crimes and denies knowing of any wrongdoing in his campaign to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor this year. Liu ranked third in the large Democratic mayoral field, according to an NBC New York-Marist poll conducted earlier this month. Hou and Pan were barely acquainted, their defense lawyers told the jury. Hou, who goes by the name Jenny, was described by her lawyer on Wednesday as an overworked, under-experienced 24-year-old "ingénue" when she was hired, who tried her best to follow complicated fundraising rules and to deal with donations from businessmen who admitted in earlier testimony they sometimes misled her to mask irregularities. Pan's lawyer said his client agreed to recruit more than a dozen so-called straw donors only at the persistent urging of a wealthy Texan businessman he considered to be a friend and a possible future business associate. Pan learned later that the man was an undercover FBI agent investigating Liu's campaign. Straw donors are illegally reimbursed as a way of circumventing limits on individual donations. "Mr. Pan is collateral damage in the government's obsessive pursuit in making a criminal case against John Liu," Pan's lawyer Irwin Rochman told the jury in his closing argument. "I don't represent John Liu. I don't give a damn about John Liu, but that's how we got here, and they are now struggling to make this a federal case. This case doesn't belong in this courtroom." Rochman told the jury that Pan admitted recruiting straw donors for the undercover agent, and in doing so almost certainly broke New York state laws, although he argued Pan did this only as a result of government entrapment he described as a months-long "courtship" by the undercover agent involving lunches, fancy dinners and many telephone conversations. Judge Richard Sullivan instructed jurors on Wednesday that they can convict Pan or Hou of the federal crime of attempted wire fraud only if they find that the defendants' actions were part of a deliberate attempt to defraud the city's donation-matching program. Pan never thought that far ahead, Rochman argued. He barely understood the program, Rochman said, pointing to FBI transcripts in which Pan repeatedly garbles the way the program works. His only goal was to please someone he "naively" thought had become his friend by getting the undercover agent, wired with a hidden camera, a private meeting with Liu at a fundraising event, Rochman said. Half the straw donors Pan found to secure the meeting were from outside New York City, Rochman said, and therefore ineligible for matching funds. And once the agent got his meeting with Liu, Pan paid scant attention to the fate of the donations he had arranged. Federal prosecutors have cited only one instance of Hou apparently soliciting a straw donor herself: an online chat with an ex-boyfriend the night before a fundraising deadline in which Hou told him she would reimburse him if she processed his donation. Hou's lawyers said her offer was a polite gesture and that both knew he would never accept reimbursement from her. Both sides agreed that the ex-boyfriend was a New Jersey resident and not eligible for the matching-funds program, and that his donation was never processed because the campaign's $1 million goal was reached the next day. But in their closing argument on Tuesday, prosecutors said Hou's apparent willingness to find a straw donor and Pan's recruitment of several of them could not be a coincidence, and were evidence of a "playbook" used by the Liu campaign in a "corrupt scheme to undermine an election." They told the jury that Liu must have known that straw donors were being used in his campaign, a charge he denies. Pan, of Hudson County in New Jersey, and Hou, of Queens County in New York, each face one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of attempting to commit wire fraud. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Hou also has been charged with obstruction of justice and making false statements. (Editing by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Steve Orlofsky) Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

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