Fresh off tax fraud plea deal, ex-Rep. Brown runs for Congress

Corrine Brown, who recently pleaded guilty to tax fraud, unexpectedly announced Thursday she’s a candidate again for Congress, joining a hotly contested race to succeed U.S. Rep. Val Demings as she runs for U.S. Senate.

Brown, 75, a once-powerful Florida Democrat, is vying for the Orlando-area District 10 seat just a month after she resolved federal criminal charges that accused her of siphoning money from a charity for personal use.

“We’ve got to turn this country around, move forward instead of backward,” she said in her campaign announcement. “That’s what this campaign is all about.”

Other leading Democrats in the race include former U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, state Sen. Randolph Bracy and Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a 25-year-old gun control advocate.

Before being mired in the federal fraud case, Brown represented the Jacksonville area in U.S. Congress from 1993 until 2017, becoming one of the first three Black people to be elected to Congress in Florida since Reconstruction. At times, her district also included predominantly Black neighborhoods in the Orlando area.

Brown was convicted in

2017 on 18 felony charges, including mail and wire fraud, conspiracy and filing false tax returns. Prosecutors accused Brown of using donations to the One Door for Education Foundation to pay for lavish parties, trips and shopping excursions.

The charity purported to give scholarships to poor students, but it only gave out one scholarship for

$1,200, prosecutors alleged. Brown served two years of five-year prison sentence before being released in April 2020 because of the pandemic.

A federal appeals court tossed Brown’s original conviction, writing that a federal judge improperly removed a juror who had said the Holy Spirit told him that Brown was innocent. In May, Brown pleaded guilty to a single tax fraud charge before the start of a second trial, resolving her legal troubles.

As part of the agreement, Brown avoided additional prison time.

A felony conviction does not disqualify a person from running for and serving in Congress, according to a 2002 report by the Congressional Research Service.

In her campaign announcement, Brown cited guns, abortion, voting rights and inequalities in the justice system as key issues.

“There are far too many innocent people wrongly imprisoned,” Brown said. “Too many people whose lives have been ruined because of a racially biased and broken judicial system.”

Before her first trial, Brown referred to the charges against her as a “witch hunt” and vowed to clear her name.

“On my tombstone it will not say felon,” she said in one 2017 interview.

BOB SELF/AP U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown’s pleaded guilty to tax fraud and was convicted in 2017 on 18 felony charges. The conviction does not disqualify her from Congress.