Daughter of Obama's Former Pastor Gets Jail Sentence for $1.2 M State-Grant Fraud
The daughter of President Barack Obama's controversial former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has been sentenced to two years in prison for her role in a fraud scheme involving $1.25 million state grant.
Pastor Wright's 47-year-old daughter Jeri L. Wright was accused of participating in a fraud scheme led by a former suburban police chief and the chief's husband, according to the Attorney's office for the Central District of Illinois in Springfield, Reuter reported.
Wright, of the Chicago suburb of Hazel Crest, was convicted in March 2014 of money laundering and lying to federal investigators and a grand jury, and has been in jail since March, according to Chicago Sun-Times.
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She was charged with two counts of money laundering, two counts of making false statements to federal officers, and seven counts of giving false testimony to a grand jury.
The state grant was meant for a not-for-profit work and education program called We Are Our Brother's Keeper, owned by Regina Evans, former police chief of Country Club Hills, and her husband, Ronald W. Evans, Jr.
Regina Evans was sentenced to five years in prison after she pleaded guilty, and was identified as the mastermind of the scheme to siphon more than $900,000 from a $1.25 million state grant. Her husband was sentenced to one year.
"Regina Evans was the engineer, but Jeri Wright chose to get on for the ride, and she rode it to the very end," Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Bass was quoted as saying.
Wright has also been ordered to serve three years on supervised release after her prison sentence is over and to serve the first six months of probation in home confinement. She was also ordered to make $31,821 in restitution to the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Rev. Wright was Obama's pastor for 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. He married Obama and his wife, Michelle, and also baptized their two daughters.
He's also known for making controversial statements in the past.
"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
In a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001, the Sunday after the 9/11 terror attacks, Rev. Wright said, "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye... We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
