Dem. Rep. resigns after alleged stealing from her own charity

Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell, 53, (D-PA) allegedly stole half a million dollars from her charity's bank account to pay off a Porsche, buy lavish fur coats and go on pricey vacations to Mexico. And she also is said to have used some of the charity donations to fund her two campaigns for a state House seat in Philadelphia.

Her charity, known as Motivations, Education & Consultation Associates (MECA) was slated to help the neediest in West Philly, housing and caring for folks struggling with substance abuse, mental illness and poverty, but instead, it allegedly put Johnson-Harrell in the driver's seat of a hot Porsche and helped fund her campaign.

In spite of her disputing some of the charges against her, she submitted her resignation Thursday and will step down from the Pennsylvania state house. Some officials said that she is planning to plead guilty to some of the charges against her, which include theft, perjury and related crimes, and she may go to prison.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said of the corpulent lawmaker: "Her theft knew no bounds. No one is above the law, no matter their position of power. And today is no different."

Johnson-Harrell is the 60th public official in Pennsylvania to have been arrested by Shapiro’s office since 2017, but the charges against her are significantly more egregious than the others.

Prosecutors say the hijabi clad lawmaker used her charity as a “cash account,” drawing in some cases from her clients’ government benefits, and covered it up by lying on financial records belonging to her nonprofit and campaign, as well as herself.

“I vigorously dispute many of these allegations, which generally pertain to before I took office,” she said in a statement to the Associated Press, “and I intend to accept responsibility for any actions that were inappropriate.”  Meaning that she is willing to go to the slammer and learn a new trade.

Johnson-Harrell was elected in March and said she was the first female Muslim member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. She has been outspoken against gun violence and her family has lost four members to fatal shootings: her father, brother, a cousin and her 18-year-old son.

She claimed that it was her brother's death that motivated her to start her "charity" twenty years ago. He went undiagnosed with PTSD and bipolar disorder and was killed in 1991.

As executive director, the organization “has advocated, cared for and fought to improve the quality of life for disenfranchised groups,” she wrote in a University of Pennsylvania biography.

In 2005 she bought 3 adjacent row houses with her own money in West Powelton, prosecutors said. She rented the houses out to MECA in 2013 for the exact amount of her mortgage payments. 

The residents living in the row houses were funding the residents with their own Medicaid and Social Security disability benefits. The houses were supposed to serve as a personal care home, but they were living in squalor. When state health officials threatened to shutter the houses due to the horrible conditions, MECA kicked out the residents.

But even though the space went unoccupied, MECA kept paying rent to its executive director, Movita Johnson-Harrell.

“While Johnson-Harrell was lining her pockets with MECA funds,” Shapiro said, “MECA’s residents were living in squalor.” 

At this time, Johnson-Harrell was ironically appointed to a position overseeing victim services and launched an unsuccessful campaign for her current seat in the state House.

While she was making direct transfers to her personal bank account, "Johnson repeatedly wrote checks for 'cash' on MECA's account, in varying amounts, whenever she needed extra money," prosecutors said in their criminal complaint.

MECA it appears, funded a long list of high-priced items: Matching fur coats for her and her husband. Clothing from Ralph Lauren and other luxury online retailers. Overdue payments on her Porsche Cayenne and private school tuition for her grandchildren. 

MECA was the gift that kept on giving.

The MECA-funded trips amounting to $16,000 in 2017, got prosecutors to look into the lawmaker's social media. "Johnson's Facebook posts from these vacation destinations, leave no doubt that these were pleasure trips," they wrote in the complaint.

Johnson-Harrell even inflated the salary of a relative who worked at MECA so that the family member could purchase a house in west Philadelphia that she moved into — and for which she paid the mortgage.

In January 2018, when that house was foreclosed on and she went into default on another property, prosecutors said, MECA gave its executive director a $70,000 “loan” ― which she later used to pay off her real estate financial woes. 

That same year, the sitting state representative for her district resigned over a bribery conviction, and this was impetus for Johnson-Harrell to go after that seat. She financed her campaign through MECA, transferring $12,500 directly from the charity's bank account to her campaign committee, which she told to record the money as a personal loan from her, proving that she isn't very smart and is terribly dishonest. She also allegedly funneled $30,000 to MECA through her personal bank account.

She won the seat by almost two-thirds of the vote but lasted a mere 10 months before she was bagged.

In a letter to Pennsylvania House Speaker Mike Turzai (R) on Thursday, Johnson-Harrell said she was "accepting responsibility for some missteps" she made before the election.

Missteps? That's how she funded her campaign, for starters.

“I am choosing to resign to protect my district, to allow for an orderly election for my successor, and to focus on my defense to these allegations,” she wrote. 

Yes, choosing to resign may be one of the last choices she is given if found guilty of the charges against her. Perhaps the Council on American-Islamic Relations can provide her with legal assistance.

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