Griego facing 22 new charges
Latest criminal counts center around campaign finance between 2012-16
A Santa Fe County grand jury has charged embattled former state Sen. Phil Griego with 22 new criminal counts — including multiple counts of perjury and embezzlement — on top of the nine corruption charges already pending against him.
Charges listed in a June 16 indictment include 13 felony perjury counts; five felony counts of embezzlement; a felony fraud count; two misdemeanor counts of filing false campaign reports; and a misdemeanor count of illegally paying a Santa Fe auto repair shop with campaign funds. This expense took place several months after Griego resigned from the Senate in March 2015.
The latest charges center around campaign finance reports Griego filed between 2012 and 2016. Mark Pinto, an investigator for the state Attorney General’s Office, stated in several affidavits last year that an examination of Griego’s campaign bank account and finance reports from the period after the Democrat from San Jose resigned from office showed probable cause for embezzlement, perjury and other charges.
In an affidavit released last year, Pinto said Griego wrote more than 40 checks from his campaign fund since 2012 that never were reported to the secretary of state as required by law.
The former senator’s previous pending charges — including fraud, bribery and other counts — center around his role in the 2014 sale of a state-owned historic building just south of the Capitol. Griego resigned from the Senate a week before the end of the 2015 Legislature in the wake of a Senate ethics investigation into his participation in the deal. Griego collected a commission of more than $50,000 in that property sale.
A trial on the original charges is set for Oct. 30. Deputy Attorney General Sharon Pino has requested that the two cases be combined.
Griego’s lawyer, Tom Clark, couldn’t be reached for comment Monday evening. Griego pleaded not guilty to the previous charges.
Griego, a former Santa Fe city councilor, was in the Senate from 1997 through his resignation. At the time he stepped down he was chairman of the Senate Corporations and Transportation Committee.
Griego, 68, already was facing up to 28 years in prison if convicted of all nine of the original charges.
Conviction on the latest charges could add an additional 15 years to his sentence.