Louisiana purchase: love of family inspired William Jefferson to do great things. it also explains that $90,000 in his freezer.

Summary

---

William Jefferson's bribery case - Biography

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Louisiana purchase: love of family inspired William Jefferson to do great things. it also explains that $90,000 in his freezer.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

On August 3, 2005, FBI agents raided the New Orleans home of nine-term U.S. Representative William J. Jefferson of the and District of Louisiana. What they found became instant fodder for talk-show hosts, late-night comedians, and pundits: $90,000 in cash, sheathed in tinfoil and stored in Jefferson's freezer. Despite Jefferson's insistence that he had "an honorable explanation" for his frozen cash, the Justice Department had a simpler account for the provenance of the money: bribery.

Last June, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, issued a sixteen-count, ninety-four-page indictment alleging, among other things, that Jefferson sought hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribe money in a deal to sell high-speed Internet service in Africa. Two men had already pleaded guilty to bribery and were in prison, prepared to testify against him. Jefferson vowed that he would prevail in court. "This is not who I am. This is not what I have done," he declared after a hearing that month, having posted a $100,000 bond. Standing in the sunlight with his wife, Andrea, he told reporters, "I am innocent of all the charges."

Confronted with 172,000 pages of evidence and two thousand hours of secretly recorded conversations, Jefferson and his lawyers have put the Justice Department through an expensive scrimmage. They have appealed the indictments on the grounds that the grand jury heard improper testimony. The defense also claims that the swirl of transactions involving Jefferson weren't bribes or a misuse of congressional power. Instead, they say, he was...

See the full content of this document

---