A former congressional staffer has been arrested after allegedly stealing hundreds of government cellphones from the U.S. House of Representatives. He is accused of using his position in IT to ship the phones to his house in Maryland before pawning them, U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro said in a news release Monday.
Christopher Southerland, 43, of Glen Burnie, was indicted on a charge of theft of government property, according to the indictment. The 240 new phones were valued at over $150,000, Pirro said.
“As alleged, stealing 240 government-issued phones worth over $150,000 is a direct betrayal of the public trust,” Pirro said in a statement. “That’s taxpayer money meant to serve Americans, not line someone’s pockets. Accountability matters — and no one is above the law.”
While working as a system administrator for the House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure from April 2020 through July 2023, Southerland was in charge of ordering cellphones for committee staff, officials said.
Southerland allegedly had the cellphones shipped to his home in Maryland from January 2023 to May 2023. Eighty staff members belonged to the committee at that time, yet Southerland ordered 240 phones, officials said. He allegedly sold more than 200 of them to a local pawn shop.
Officials accused Southerland of directing an employee at the pawn shop to sell the phones in pieces in what they say was an attempt to bypass the House’s software that allows for remote security and monitoring, according to the news release.
The scheme began to unravel, prosecutors say, after one of the phones ended up on eBay. The buyer saw a House of Representatives Technology Service Desk phone number appear on the screen and called the number, officials said.
“House employees soon discovered that several phones purchased by Southerland were unaccounted for,” the U.S. attorney’s office for D.C. said in the release.
A federal public defender listed in online court records for Southerland did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
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