Jury begins deliberations in trial of Rep. Jeff Fortenberry

LOS ANGELES (Nebraska Examiner) — A federal prosecutor and a defense attorney for Rep. Jeff Fortenberry painted starkly different pictures Thursday about why the nine-term congressman was facing three felony charges in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom.

During the seven-day trial, jurors heard from Ayoub, the host of a 2016 fundraiser in Los Angeles. He testified that he was given a paper sack with $30,000 to be donated, through his friends and family, to Fortenberry’s reelection campaign.

The carrier of the cash, Toufic Baaklini, told jurors that he got the money from Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian-Lebanese billionaire living in Paris.

Donations from foreigners to U.S. political campaigns are illegal, as are donations funneled through conduits or “straw men.”

Four times, jurors heard an audio recording of a June 4, 2018, phone call between Ayoub and Fortenberry.

In that call, the congressman was told at least three times that the $30,000 wasn’t from a group of Lebanese-Americans, but from Baaklini, and that the funds “probably” originated from Chagoury.

All of those involved in the fundraiser were associated with In Defense of Christians, a group that fights to protect religious minorities in the Middle East and had enlisted Fortenberry to speak at several of its events.

Har used slides to dissect the prosecution’s case, detailing the evidence that she said proved that “the defendant understood, the defendant remembered, the defendant lied.”

“He understood exactly what Dr. Ayoub was telling him,” she said.

Har asked jurors to use their “common sense” and “life experiences” to discount the defense’s contention that Fortenberry might not have heard all the words in the phone call from Ayoub because of a bad cell connection at his Lincoln home.

When that happens, she said, doesn’t someone ask, “Can you repeat that?” or “I didn’t quite hear you.”

Meanwhile, Fortenberry’s defense focused on their claims that he didn’t hear, didn’t comprehend or was distracted during the 2018 phone call.

That’s why, his attorneys maintain, he didn’t recall the warnings when quizzed by FBI agents at his home in March 2019 and in Washington, D.C., in July 2019.

Littrell, in his close arguments, said federal prosecutors created a case against Fortenberry, describing how someone can fire an arrow against a barn and then draw a target around it. He called it the “sharpshooter fallacy.”

“They’ve created the impression that they hit right on the bull’s-eye,” Littrell said. “But they strung together a lot of facts … they’ve created a narrative, a misleading narrative.”

He also told jurors that there’s no proof that Fortenberry heard all the words spoken in the phone call from Ayoub, asking them to “consider it a reasonable possibility” that he didn’t.

He displayed a slide for jurors that showed that if just three words in that phone call were deleted, “it completely distorts the meaning.”

Memory, the defense attorney added, “does not work like a tape recorder.”

Fortenberry “should not be judged on not remembering every word in that call,” Littrell said.

Lead prosecutor Mack Jenkins, in his rebuttal of Littrell’s closing argument, asked jurors to ignore “the distractions” that he presented.

“They’re asking you not to look at the evidence, but to look away from the evidence,” Jenkins said.

“This isn’t a case about the defendant’s reputation or integrity,” he said. “It’s about how he lost his way and why.”

Jenkins maintained that Fortenberry was aware that he was in “a hole,” but instead of telling the FBI the truth, “he doubled down” to save his political career.

A year ago, deferred prosecution agreements were announced for Chagoury, Baaklini and another Chagoury associate.

They agreed to pay fines ranging from $90,000 to $1.8 million and to cooperate in the investigation. Ayoub also reached a deal to avoid prosecution if he testified truthfully.

Indictments against Fortenberry were announced in October, some weeks after it was revealed that he was raising money for legal expenses.

Celeste Fortenberry, during her testimony Thursday, provided several explanations about why her husband may not have heard or understand warnings in the call from Ayoub that his campaign had received illegal contributions.

She testified that she and her husband were exhausted on the day of the call after returning from a long flight home from Finland.

She choked up briefly as she said they were stressed out because one of their daughters was facing a serious surgery in a couple of days.

Fortenberry said the congressman “loathed” making fundraising calls, so he often did other chores — like cooking, cleaning, yardwork or walking the dog — to “help him through it” while he was making such calls “on autopilot.”

And, the wife said, the cellphone reception at their Lincoln home was “spotty” — perhaps only one or two “bars” of service in the house — and was so bad that her husband never took calls in his cluttered office in the basement.

“We live in Nebraska,” the wife told jurors. “The state has kind of lousy cellphone service.”