Waltz
A former Indiana State Senator and Johnson County council member is attempting to get his federal prison sentence overturned a year after he was sentenced for violating federal campaign finance laws and making false statements to federal investigators.
Greenwood resident Brent Waltz was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for felony counts of making and receiving conduit contributions and making false statements to the FBI last August. He was ordered to also serve 24 months of probation, and to pay $40,050 in restitution. Waltz finished his prison sentence in March and is now out on probation.
Nearly a year to the day since Waltz was sentenced, he is now claiming that he had an ineffective lawyer during negotiations with federal prosecutors in 2022. He now says he pled guilty to two felonies without knowing that the specifics of the agreement made it more likely he’d serve prison time, according to court filings made Thursday.
He also is continuing to plead his innocence.
When asked to comment about the filing and Waltz’s allegations, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Indianapolis said federal prosecutors would respond to the allegations in court.
The original case
Waltz and John S. Keeler, a 72-year-old New Centaur gaming executive and former Indiana State Representative, were indicted in September 2020 on charges of violating federal campaign finance laws, false statements and falsification of records, making illegal corporate contributions, and conduit contributions to Waltz’s unsuccessful 2016 congressional campaign. Waltz, a long-time Johnson County resident, served on the Johnson County Council from 2000 to 2004 and represented District 36 in the Indiana State Senate from 2004 to 2016. He left to run for U.S. Congress in the Ninth District but was defeated in the 2020 Republican primary by former Rep. Trey Hollingsworth.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office says the plan was to transfer thousands of dollars from the accounts of New Centaur to Kelley Rogers, a Maryland-based political consultant, who would then contribute that money to Waltz’s 2016 congressional campaign. The plan was hatched at a meeting between Rogers and an unnamed New Centaur executive in April 2015 at the Indianapolis International Airport.
Rogers allegedly created fake invoices and agreements to make it appear like he was providing services for New Centaur, and recruited straw donors to each contribute $2,700 to Waltz’s campaign, the federal maximum contribution limit at the time, the indictment says. Straw donors are people who contribute to a campaign in their name despite receiving advance payment or reimbursement of all or part of the contribution.
A total of 15 straw donors were involved, including three of Waltz’s relatives and one of his business associates. The straw donors were reimbursed by Rogers using money from New Centaur. He also transferred money from New Centaur to Waltz, who also allegedly recruited straw donors and either reimbursed them or paid them in advance, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
New Centaur transferred a total of $79,500 to entities controlled by Rogers for the scheme, according to the indictment, but Rogers allegedly kept $33,300 of that to pay for his consulting fees for his services to Waltz’s campaign. Waltz also donated $10,800 of his own money to the campaign through straw donors, according to the indictment.
The money
As part of the plea agreement, the federal government asked Waltz to accept guilt for illegally channeling $40,500 to his campaign. But in the filings made on Thursday, Waltz claimed he spent “thousands of hours” reviewing nearly 243,000 pages of evidence and couldn’t understand how the U.S. Attorney’s Office arrived at the specific dollar amount.
The filing then goes into detail about the day Waltz signed the agreement in April 2022 with his attorney, Russell Johnson of Franklin law firm Johnson Gray and Johnson. Waltz posed several questions to Johnson about the agreement, and specifically the monetary amount.
Still questioning where the number came from, Waltz continued to press his attorney about the number. But his attorney believed there was no significance to the amount, the filing claims.
Waltz also asked his attorney to have the false statement charge removed from the plea agreement, as Waltz said he did not lie to the FBI. However, this was unsuccessful, the filing says.
Though Waltz said he was not clear on the plea agreement, he did sign it. His attorney also did convince prosecutors to drop three other charges that were filed against him.
Sentencing guidelines
Later in the filing, Waltz said he did eventually find out the restitution amount of $40,500 was tied to the amount of conduit contributions that were allegedly given to his campaign.
However, he is still fuzzy on the math.
Sentencing guidelines indicate that if the allegation was less than $40,000 in illegal donations, there was less of a chance Waltz would face prison time. Over $40,000, there’s a “presumption of imprisonment,” the filing says.
Waltz and his new attorney, Abraham Murphy, say that no one who was present during the plea discussion at Johnson’s law firm was aware that, signing an agreement with that number would come with a “presumption of imprisonment.”
“I would never have accepted the plea agreement had I known that it accompanied a presumptive sentence of imprisonment,” Waltz wrote in an affidavit.
Wanted a trial
Waltz also said in the filing that he wanted to fight the charges at trial. He had only pled guilty because he didn’t want to risk a jury siding with prosecutors. He also thought a plea would keep him out of prison, according to the filing.
In the filing, Waltz says the case against him was “exceptionally weak.” He says the government’s “star witness,” Rogers, had implicated Keeler and gaming executive Rod Ratcliff in the conspiracy but not him. Ratcliff has not been criminally charged.
Rogers also has said he believes Waltz was unaware of the conspiracy.
“Yet, the government claimed I was somehow conspiring with him to achieve this conspiracy,” he wrote in an affidavit. “I welcomed the opportunity — and still do — for the government to explain this discrepancy at trial.”
Johnson responds
Johnson backed some of Waltz’s claims in his own affidavit. He said he wasn’t aware of any differences in punishments for dollar amounts at $40,000. However, he was familiar with a sentencing differential over $25,000 and under $95,000.
He also said he did not research the issue during the plea discussions in 2022.
“I advised Waltz on what I believed to be accurate information at the time,” Johnson wrote in his affidavit.
‘Collateral damage’
In an interview with the Daily Journal after his sentencing last year, Waltz alleged that the entire investigation that led to his indictment was politically motivated and that he was “collateral damage.”
Waltz alleged that his case stems from an alleged attempt by the FBI to investigate Ratcliff. Once the investigation did not turn up enough evidence to indict him, the pressure was then put on Keeler.
Keeler was investigated, and agents found a discrepancy in the taxes for New Centaur. He was then indicted as part of an effort Waltz claims was designed to put pressure on him to give information about Ratcliff. When Keeler didn’t do so, the government then focused efforts on Waltz, he alleges.
Keeler was ultimately sentenced to two months in federal prison on one count of causing the filing of a fake tax return and was ordered to pay a $55,000 fine.
Waltz believed the government ultimately indicted him because he could provide information that “they could not control,” and because of how common it is for cases to be resolved through plea deals, he said. He also believed Ratcliff’s ties to former President Donald Trump are the reason why the investigation was conducted.
Waltz also alleged that the FBI’s investigation into the straw donor scheme was consistent with other investigations federal law enforcement is conducting into Trump and people associated with him. Ratcliff has ties to Trump and was a major donor to his campaign.
