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About a month after Election Day, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan started taking a closer look into the criminal case against one of his former GOP colleagues, former Nebraska Rep. Jeff Fortenberry. For the Ohio Republican, it was a predictable move: Jordan has made a habit of investigating investigations.
As it turns out, however, Jordan can stand down: As Politico reported, the charges against Fortenberry are apparently poised to disappear.
The Justice Department has moved to drop its criminal prosecution of former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, a Nebraska Republican who resigned last year after a conviction on charges that he lied to the FBI. Fortenberry’s conviction by a federal jury in Los Angeles in 2022 was subsequently overturned by an appeals court that ruled he should have been tried in Kansas or Washington, D.C.
Federal prosecutors refiled the case last May and were prepared to go to trial — before Donald Trump won a second term. Now, conditions have changed in federal law enforcement.
NBC News reported, “The move to dismiss the case against Fortenberry was made by acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin.” (Martin is a conservative activist who served on the board of a group supporting Jan. 6 criminal defendants and is considered a prominent member of the “Stop the Steal” movement. This week, he launched a “Project 1512” to review the prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters.)
As for how we arrived at this point, the case against Fortenberry stems from an FBI investigation into illegal campaign contributions from Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian billionaire of Lebanese descent. His donations were reportedly funneled through a group of Californians from 2012 through 2016 and went to several politicians, including the Nebraska Republican.
Members of Congress cannot, of course, accept foreign funds for their campaigns, but in this case, that was not the principal problem: Fortenberry and his team also said they didn’t realize the $30,200 in contributions he received at a Los Angeles fundraiser in 2016 came from a Nigerian billionaire. The congressman later donated the money to local charities.
According to federal prosecutors, Fortenberry “repeatedly lied to and misled authorities” as part of the investigation into Chagoury’s scheme. The GOP lawmaker’s defense team tried to blame this on a misunderstanding caused by “a bad cell phone connection,” though jurors evidently didn’t find this persuasive.
But before the former Republican congressman could be retried, the “Stop the Steal” activist leading the U.S. attorney’s office in the nation’s capital decided to abandon the charges altogether.
The president expressed delight by way of his social media platform. “It is great to see that the Department of Justice has dropped the Witch Hunt against former Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, a longtime proud and highly respected American public servant,” Trump wrote. “Jeff and his family were forced to suffer greatly due to the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats. ... That Scam is now over.”
There was, of course, quite a bit wrong with the president’s rant, including the fact that federal prosecutors started making a case against Fortenberry during ... wait for it ... the Trump administration. When he referenced the “illegal Weaponization of our Justice System,” Trump was apparently referring to his own team.
Stepping back, it’s also worth appreciating Trump’s seemingly limitless support for members of Congress who’ve been convicted of corruption. In his first term, for example, the Republican president pardoned former Reps. Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter Jr. of California, for example. It’s against this backdrop that Trump is now singing Fortenberry’s praises.
Is it any wonder why former Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez seemed eager to publicly praise the Republican president after being sentenced to 11 years in prison following a corruption conviction?
This post updates our related earlier coverage.