Aide pleads guilty, says Brady campaign paid primary challenger to quit
Federal prosecutors said Tuesday that U.S. Rep. Bob Brady’s campaign secretly paid a 2012 primary rival $90,000 to abandon his race and that the city’s longtime Democratic power broker later tried to derail an FBI investigation into the payoff by coaching a witness.
Those accusations, in court filings made public for the first time, emerged with the disclosure that an aide to Brady’s challenger, senior Municipal Court Judge Jimmie Moore, had admitted her role in the payoff scheme and pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal it.
Neither Brady nor Moore has been charged with a crime. Nor were they identified by name in the court documents that outlined the plea by Moore’s former political aide, Carolyn Cavaness. But a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia about her guilty plea made clear the crime was related to the 2012 primary campaign for Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District, which Brady has represented for nearly two decades.
Under wraps for at least months, the case suggests that Brady — chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee since 1986 and the second-longest-serving U.S. representative in the state – may be the city’s latest major officeholder under FBI scrutiny, less than a year after a former House colleague, former Rep. Chaka Fattah, was sent to prison for corruption-related crimes.
Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania/philadelphia/ex-aide-to-brady-rival-admits-scheme-to-pay-off-challenger-20170725.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
