Baltimore prosecutor Mosby charged by feds

Marilyn Mosby is the Baltimore prosecutor who gained fame for prosecuting six police officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray in 2015. Gray died in police custody.

Mosby failed to obtain a single guilty verdict. However, she did help undermine police morale, which led to a shrinking of the force and a sharp increase in violent crime in Baltimore

More recently, Mosby has been under investigation by the Justice Department and the IRS. The IRS found that she and her husband failed to pay a significant amount of taxes. It placed a tax lien on the couple.

Now, a federal grand jury has indicted Marilyn Mosby for perjury and making false loan applications. Bill Otis puts this in even plainer language: Mosby is in the dock for “lying and cheating.”

Mosby allegedly lied and cheated to get her hands on money for a down payment on rental property in Florida. She wanted to get the money from her retirement fund. To accomplish this, which isn’t easy, she claimed to have experienced financial hardship due to the pandemic.

But Mosby had not been “quarantined, furloughed or laid off,” or suffered “reduced work hours,” or met any of the other requisites for claiming pandemic-related hardship for purposes of withdrawing money. In fact, her salary had increased by $10,000 to $248,000 a year.

The “hardship” claim wasn’t the end of Mosby’s alleged lying. She used the $36,000 from her retirement fund to place a down payment on rental property near Orlando, Florida. But according to prosecutors, in doing so she lied about her federal tax lien and falsely stated that the property was a second home, which lowered the interest rate.

Bill draws this lesson from Mosby’s apparent criminality:

For those of you still wondering about the true mindset of “prosecutors” who favor the interests of hoodlums over those of ordinary citizens, welcome to the window into the deeper-than-you-thought embrace of criminality that this case gives us. It shouldn’t come as a surprise.

We shouldn’t be surprised either that, even though it’s the Biden Justice Department pursuing this case, Mosby’s supporters are playing the race card. According to the Baltimore Sun, her supporters say Mosby is being targeted for her progressive policies and that Black leaders are often unfairly targeted for investigations. In October a group including civil rights attorney Ben Crump called for an end to the investigation of Mosby.

Bill heaps deserved ridicule on the notion that the likes of associate attorney general Vanita Gupta — the Asian-American former head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — and assistant attorney general Kenneth A. Polite — a black man who, during his time as U.S. Attorney for New Orleans, created the Crescent City Keepers Mentoring Program, aimed at using faith communities to mentor at-risk youth, and who created an anti-corruption unit to address claims of civil rights violations and public corruption — are persecuting Mosby because of her race.

Bill also gives credit to Merrick Garland for signing off (as he must have done) on the indictment of a black female Democratic prosecutor in a state that voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. Race, gender, and party affiliation should have nothing to do with prosecutorial decisions, and it’s encouraging that, in this case, they didn’t.

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