Former Republican Rep. Aaron Schock expects to be indicted by a federal grand jury for charges relating to the spending scandal that led him to resign last year, his legal team told the AP Thursday.
“This indictment will look bad, but underneath it is just made-up allegations of criminal activity arising from unintentional administrative errors,” said Schock’s attorney George Terwilliger in a statement. “These charges are the culmination of an effort to find something, anything, to take down Aaron Schock.
Schock, a 35-year-old one-time Republican rising star from Illinois, had been under investigation for at least 19 months after his allegedly extravagant spending of federal funds in Congress, including a lavish remodeling of his DC office in the style of the British television drama. Known for being a successful fundraiser, he resigned in March 2015 after increasing reports questioned his celebrity lifestyle on the dime of his supporters and taxpayers, including requests for government reimbursements for expenses like private flights, automobiles, legal expenses, and tickets to the Super Bowl.
His resignation meant that he avoided an imminent congressional ethics probe, but federal investigators opened a “preliminary investigation” the same month.
In October 2016, Schock agreed to pay a $10,000 penalty to the Federal Election Commission for asking former Rep Eric Cantor, R-Va., to pay for fellow Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s campaign ads.
The former lawmaker said in June that the allegations he is being investigated for were “honest mistakes.” In a Thursday statement, Schock repeated his earlier claim he did not intentionally commit illegal or unethical actions and looks forward to defending himself.
“As I have said before, we might have made errors among a few of the thousands and thousands of financial transactions we conducted, but they were honest mistakes — no one intended to break any law,” he said.
Shock criticized the Justice Department’s for the investigation included two grand juries that “poked, prodded, and probed every aspect of my professional, political, and personal life.”
“Like many Americans, I wanted to have faith in the integrity of our Justice Department,” he said. “But after this experience, I am forced to join millions of other Americans who have sadly concluded that our federal justice system is broken, corrupt, and too often driven by politics instead of facts.”
