A former governor of Puerto Rico, Wanda Vázquez, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a misdemeanor campaign finance violation for accepting a promise of a political contribution from a Venezuelan banker in 2020.
The unusually lenient plea deal was backed by a top Trump Justice Department official and grudgingly accepted by a federal judge, who likened it to a slap on the wrist.
Ms. Vázquez, 65, pleaded guilty to accepting a promise of a donation greater than $2,000 but less than $25,000 from a foreign national in the Federal District Court in San Juan. That is a far less serious offense than the charges of felony conspiracy, federal programs bribery and honest services wire fraud brought against her in 2022, which carried up to 20 years in prison.
She will be sentenced on Oct. 15 to between six months and a year of probation, under an agreement between prosecutors and her defense lawyers.
Ms. Vázquez, a Republican who endorsed Mr. Trump and a member of Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood party, served as governor for less than two years, from 2019 to 2021, after a period of political tumult on the island.
She was arrested in 2022 after a grand jury indictment accused her of accepting bribes in exchange for replacing a top regulator on the island, who had been scrutinizing a bank owned by one of her campaign donors. The donor was Julio M. Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan whose international bank, Bancrédito, was mired in regulatory problems related to suspicious banking transactions.
According to the 2022 indictment, Mr. Herrera offered to pay $300,000 to political consultants working on Ms. Vázquez’s campaign in 2020 if she replaced the banking regulator. Mr. Herrera subsequently created a political action committee for Ms. Vázquez; she forced out the incumbent banking commissioner and installed Mr. Herrera’s choice for the job.
After leaving court on Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Vázquez told reporters that she was taking responsibility for her campaign’s failure to ask donors whether they were American citizens.
“There was no bribe here,” she said. “I did not take a single cent.”
Late last year, with the case still headed to trial, Mr. Herrera hired a new defense lawyer, Christopher M. Kise. Then, this spring, Ms. Vázquez’s legal team met with prosecutors to request that her charges be reduced to a misdemeanor, with the intention of sparing her the possibility of prison time.
The U.S. attorney in Puerto Rico, W. Stephen Muldrow, who brought the case, was generally open to plea negotiations. But he also made it clear that he wanted Ms. Vázquez to plead guilty to a felony and believed the case he had assembled against her was strong, according to two people familiar with the situation.
In May, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who has overseen the dismantling of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit, made it clear to prosecutors that he wanted to avoid dragging out the process any longer than necessary and ordered them to agree to Mr. Kise’s offer of a misdemeanor, those people said.
That interaction was first reported by Bloomberg News. Both Mr. Blanche and Mr. Kise have been members of President Trump’s legal defense team in the past.
Career prosecutors in Washington and San Juan expressed astonishment that their investigation came to so little, according to current and former Justice Department officials.
But the plea deal proceeded, surprising even the judge presiding over the case.
The judge, Silvia Carreño-Coll, who was nominated by Mr. Trump, wrote in an order last month that the penalty for a campaign finance violation “is a mere slap on the wrist” compared with what Ms. Vázquez would have faced if found guilty of the original charges in the case. The judge noted that the government had “zealously prosecuted” the case for three years.
“But alas, the government’s decision to shift gears at the 11th hour is allowed because ultimately the government decides how it will exercise its prosecutorial discretion,” Judge Carreño-Coll wrote, citing “directives presumably issued by Main Justice.”
A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In response to the judge’s comments, Ms. Vázquez’s defense lawyers said that the judge had turned an example of “justice working properly into an unwarranted tale of political favoritism.”
“The plea agreement resulted from the government’s professional evaluation of new compelling and exculpatory evidence uncovered through defense investigation and presented during good faith negotiations,” they wrote, “not from any directive.”
Ms. Vázquez was Puerto Rico’s top prosecutor in 2019 when mass protests forced Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló to resign. The secretary of state should have succeeded him, but that position was vacant, so Ms. Vázquez, the next in line, was unexpectedly catapulted into the governorship. She lost her bid for a full term when she was defeated in a primary in 2020.
Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
The post Former Puerto Rico Governor Pleads Guilty to Campaign Finance Violation appeared first on New York Times.
