Democratic congresswoman accused in hearing of siphoning COVID cash to her campaign

With President Trump putting a spotlight on fraud, Congress sought to make an example of one of its own members Thursday, holding a rare public hearing to accuse Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of siphoning millions of dollars of ill-gotten money into her campaigns.

The Florida Democrat’s business kept more than $5 million in pandemic money that her state overpaid. She found various ways to siphon most of that money to her 2022 campaign, helping her win her first election, investigators for the House Ethics Committee charged.

For her second campaign, she benefited from funds originating with the Haitian government, and she showed favoritism in doling out earmark spending, the investigators said, all in violation of House rules.

Even as the lawmaker accepted the money, she presented herself to voters as a wealthy self-funder independent of business interests. She filed bogus papers with the Federal Election Commission and the House of Representatives, committee investigators said.

“The committee has a truckload of evidence,” Brittney Pescatore, the committee’s director of investigations, told members of the bipartisan panel.

Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick sat at the witness table before a subcommittee of the ethics panel while her attorney, William Barzee, told them to pump the brakes on the whole process.

He said she also faces a criminal indictment that overlaps some of the ethics issues and that Congress is trampling on her rights to a fair trial by tainting her jury pool.

“How can she have a fair trial? Any action by the committee is going to violate those rights,” he said.

He acknowledged that Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick bungled her campaign finance reports and financial disclosures — “many, many, many mistakes were made” — but said she disputes all the other allegations. Mr. Barzee said she was entitled to some of the money and wasn’t involved in some of the other transactions at issue.

“She is not guilty of these allegations. She is absolutely innocent,” he said.

Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick first won her southern Florida seat in 2022, in a special election after the death of Rep. Alcee Hastings. She then ran in the regular elections in 2022 and 2024.

Ethics Committee proceedings are not criminal in nature. Committee investigators present the facts they have discovered, and the congresswoman can challenge or dispute them.

The meeting Thursday was a subcommittee hearing, the first such public hearing since 2010, and the panel’s members, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, were asked to make a “summary judgment” that the facts against Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick were so overwhelming that a full hearing with witnesses wasn’t necessary.

Mr. Barzee objected, saying the congresswoman has a strong defense and deserves a chance to present it.

Rep. Michael Guest, the Mississippi Republican who chaired the hearing, said the investigation has been underway for two years, and Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick has rebuffed every opportunity to speak or provide documents to challenge the case against her.

“For you to allege that all of this information is new, that we’ve not tried to gather this information for the last two years, I find that offensive,” Mr. Guest said.

Before winning the election in 2022, Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick headed a company owned by her family, Trinity Health Care Services LLC.

Investigators said it won pandemic-era contracts from Florida’s Division of Emergency Management to help register residents for vaccines.

The contracts should have paid out about $9 million, but the state mistakenly overpaid by nearly $5.8 million, including one payment in which it wrongly added two zeros — boosting a check from about $50,000 to $5 million.

The company rebuffed efforts to claw back the money and instead poured it into Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick’s political career, the probe concluded. Investigators said she is allowed to use personal money for her campaign, but Trinity was paying her well above her annual salary.

Nearly $200,000 was donated directly to her campaign, and Trinity money flowed to relatives and other firms owned by Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick, the probe found, making its way back to the campaign either through straw donors or by paying for salaries and expenses for campaign operations.

All told, investigators figured at least $3.6 million of the money Trinity bilked from taxpayers made its way into the campaign at some point. She used some of the money to repay her loans.

That money helped her win her seat in a 2022 special election.

The Ethics Committee said she then had to begin campaigning again for the general election that November and was at risk of trailing an opponent in the Democratic primary in the cash race. She responded by fabricating her financial reports and taking out a large personal loan to boost her bottom line, and then withdrawing that money days later.

In reality, investigators said, that second campaign was funded by friends, family and money from the Haitian government, siphoned through Petrogaz-Haiti, an oil firm.

The committee also said Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick used her office to reward financial backers by giving them special treatment in pursuing earmarks, the line items lawmakers slip into bills to direct federal taxpayers’ money back to special interests in their states and districts.

In one case, the congresswoman sought to have colleagues fund an earmark requested by Michael Joseph, treasurer of Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick’s political action committee, even though her own staffer had decided it was not eligible. Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick personally overruled the staffer and ordered them to apologize to Mr. Joseph.

Investigators also said Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick spent an exceptional amount of time promoting another earmark for a foundation.

Mr. Barzee said Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick wasn’t aware of the paperwork filing problems. He also said she had a profit-sharing agreement with Trinity that made that money legitimate.

“Every single penny she received from Trinity Health Care, she was entitled to,” he said. “If she wants to put money into her campaign as a loan, as far as I understand, she is allowed to do so.”