Campaign Disclosure Reporting Fraud

Perhaps the newest frontier on the DOJ catalog of Reed administration corruption investigations is the one involving campaign expenditure reporting fraud. The DOJ and the FBI have over the last several months pursued Reed’s former campaign legal adviser, Jeremy Berry, to appear at a grand jury to answer several specific questions regarding his prior work for the Reed Campaign involving the failure to report certain personal expenditures from campaign funds. Berry has resisted the effort finally being ordered to appear by a federal appellate court decision handed down on June 25, 2021.

More than anything else, coming out of the tight-lipped years long federal investigation of corruption at City Hall, this decision portends potential ominous consequences for Reed. The federal district court judge ordered Berry to answer specific questions regarding Reed’s campaign expenditures. From the questions Berry was ordered to answer in his testimony to the grand jury, and reading the tea leaves, it seems the feds are looking deeply into Reed’s campaign expenditures. So much so, as revealed by the court decision, they have already acquired statements from some of Reed’s campaign donors that they would not have donated to his campaign had they known the funds were supporting personal expenditures at resorts in the Caribbean and purchases of furniture delivered to Reed’s mother’s home.

For his part, Berry reportedly told the feds in interviews with the FBI that throughout his service to Reed’s campaign from 2011 through 2017 he repeatedly saw expenditures from the campaign bank accounts that appeared to him to be obviously personal in nature, as opposed to being legitimate campaign expenditures. He stated that this occurred throughout the time he was representing the campaign, and that these were not isolated incidents. Suffice it to say that “it ain’t over till it’s over”.