It's not Brown's first rodeo.
During her 1992 congressional run, Brown sparked controversy when she paid $5,000 in campaign funds to a St. Petersburg company bearing the same address as the church headed by her longtime political ally, National Baptist Convention USA president Henry Lyons. Brown claimed that the payment was for the purchase of a computer from Lyons’s company, but in fact that entity had been dissolved six years earlier. Lyons, who had a long track record of financial malfeasance, had knowingly pledged fake credit-union-share certificates as collateral to obtain an $85,000 bank loan in 1988.
In 1993 Brown used taxpayer dollars to pay Florida minister Fred Demps, a close business partner of Henry Lyons, to do “community outreach” for her. Demps had previously helpedLyons defraud several corporations.
Also in 1993, Brown's congressional office reserved several airline tickets for Lyons at a special discounted rate that was supposed to be reserved exclusively for government employees traveling on official business.
That same year, Brown paid a $5,000 fine to the Florida Ethics Commission, which found that she had inappropriately used legislative staff members as employees in a travel agency she owned.
During her 1996 reelection campaign, which was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America's Political Action Committee, Brown accepted a $10,000 contribution—far more than the $1,000 individual donation limit—from a secret Wisconsin bank account that Henry Lyons, who was eventually convicted of racketeering and grand theft, allegedly used for money laundering. Brown did not report the money on either her financial disclosure statements or her campaign contribution reports. Nor could her office produce any bank records or receipts showing how the money had been spent.
The Federal Election Commission has admonished Brown several times for her inaccurate campaign-spending reports. Her own campaign treasurer quit his post in the mid-Nineties after learning that his name had been forged on some of those reports. Yet the staffer responsible for the forgery went on to become Brown's chief of staff.
On June 9, 1998, the Congressional Accountability Project voted to conduct a formal inquiry regarding Brown. The Project called for the U.S. House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to determine if Brown had violated House Rule 10. One of the complaints was that Brown's adult daughter, Shantrel Brown, had received a luxury automobile as a gift from an agent of a Gambian millionaire named Foutanga Sissoko. Sissoko, a friend of Congresswoman Brown, had been imprisoned in Miami after pleading guilty to charges of bribing a customs officer. Brown had worked to secure his release, pressuring U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to deport Sissoko back to his homeland as an alternative to continued incarceration. The Project held this violated the House gift rule, but Brown denied she had acted improperly.
In 2006, Brown's campaign committee paid her daughter's husband, Tyree Fields, $5,500 for political consulting work. Rep. Brown has earmarked millions of dollars in federal funding for her daughter's client Edward Waters College.
In June 2007, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released a report listing Brown's daughter Shantrel Brown-Fields as a congressional lobbyist; the organization maintains that Congressional relatives working as lobbyists for special interests are a conflict of interest for lawmakers. Brown-Fields is employed by Alcalde & Fayte, with clients including ITERA, Miami-Dade County Commission, and Edward Waters College.
In 2010, she again received criticism for requesting earmarks for an organization her daughter lobbies for.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/262289/democratic-congresswoman-accused-fraud-blames-daniel-greenfield
