Federal prosecutors on Wednesday charged a second senior member of D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s 2010 campaign with trying to cover up a plot intended to heighten Gray’s chances of toppling a sitting mayor.

Howard Brooks, a consultant to the Gray campaign, was charged with making a false statement to the FBI because prosecutors say he lied when he told investigators he never delivered payments to a fringe mayoral candidate Sulaimon Brown or Brown’s campaign.Those payments, which Brown publicly disclosed in March 2011 when he also alleged the Gray campaign had promised him a job in the Gray administration, prompted an expansive grand jury probe into Gray’s campaign.In a charging document known as a criminal information — a type of filing that signals a guilty plea is imminent — prosecutors said Brooks “knowingly and willfully [made] a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement or representation.”