A former Republican political operative convicted in the first federal criminal case of illegal coordination between a campaign and a purportedly independent ally was sentenced Friday to two years in prison, a lighter punishment than prosecutors sought but one that still served as a sharp warning.
Under questioning from U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady, Tyler Harber said: “I’m guilty of this. I knew it was wrong when I did it.” But Harber said he was not motivated by greed or a lust for power, he simply wanted to win an election and believed that what he was doing was a common, if illegal, practice. “I got caught up in what politics has become,” said Harber, 34, a resident of Alexandria.
Harber, who managed the unsuccessful 2012 congressional campaign of Chris Perkins in Northern Virginia admitted in February that he helped create a super PAC and arranged for it to buy $325,000 in ads to help Perkins’s campaign, then lied to the FBI about his misdeeds. Federal prosecutors hailed Harber’s guilty plea and sentence as “an important step forward in the criminal enforcement of federal campaign finance laws,” and they indicated that they are ramping up scrutiny of the close ties between political campaigns and their ostensibly independent supporters.
The watershed prosecution comes as super PACs are playing increasingly prominent roles in national politics. Nearly all the 2016 White House contenders are being helped by outside groups run by friends or former strategists, in many cases operating in close proximity. But complaints about potentially illegal coordination have stalled before the Federal Election Commission, which is mired in partisan gridlock.
Top federal officials issued strong statements Friday warning that candidates and consultants should tread carefully as the 2016 race heats up.
Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell said that political operatives should “think twice about circumventing laws that promote transparency in federal elections” and encouraged party and campaign insiders to act as whistleblowers. In court, federal prosecutor Richard Pilger asked O’Grady to send Harber to prison for three years and 10 months, saying such a term would send a message to the campaign world that “how you win matters.”
Harber’s defense attorneys argued that a sentence of a year and eight months was more appropriate. They asserted that Harber, a married father of two, was already financially ruined and unlikely to ever again work in the field where he was once a rising star.
Although the sentence was closer to defense attorneys’ request than prosecutors’, leading election-law attorneys said the aggressive stance by the Department of Justice should put donors and political consultants alike on guard.
“I think the department is trying to deliver a very clear message that it affirmatively wants to bring criminal-coordination cases and it is simply looking for the right opportunities to do so,” said Robert Kelner, who heads the political law practice at Covington & Burling.
Kenneth Gross, a former associate general counsel at the FEC, called the department’s posture “a shot across the bow.” “This shows they are willing to venture into areas of criminal enforcement in the 2016 election, beyond what they had done previously,” Gross said.
Perkins ultimately lost by a sizeable margin to Democratic incumbent Gerald E. Connolly to represent Virginia’s 11th District.
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