Todd and Julie Chrisley plan to appeal convictions and prison sentences, attorney says
WASHINGTON — The attorney for a former top campaign aide accused of stealing millions of dollars from her client’s campaign was not willing to comment on Thursday on whether she intended to appeal her own client’s prison sentence or whether she plans to challenge the convictions of the four others she now considers a co-conspirator with her client.
But she said she was still evaluating whether to file a motion for a new trial because she had received a request for a new trial from former campaign treasurer and former Republican National Committee finance chair Karen Dunn, who was part of a group of conspirators who helped the defendant defraud her clients.
“I am looking at every legal avenue in the hope that the government will not retry these defendants or pursue other charges against them,” Julie Chrisley said in an email Thursday. “This case has become a tragedy for our country and we have to fight to get this case to a place where our clients may not have to spend the rest of their lives in prison.”
That was the message that Chrisley and her client, former presidential campaign aide John Perry Barlow, were leaving with fellow conspirators Dunn and two others, including former GOP official David Hale. Dunn, now the Republican deputy campaign chairman for Alabama Senate candidate Luther Strange, pleaded guilty last year to a single felony conviction that was part of a plea deal from a federal investigation that had focused on her role in helping the Barlow defraud his clients’ Republican presidential nominee’s campaign during the 2016 election.
Dunn’s plea agreement was part of a federal trial case brought by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. The case has become central to an investigation that federal prosecutors said last week was designed to root out any possible evidence of a criminal conspiracy to defraud Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The Barlow case appears to have been at the center of the prosecution’s interest. Dunn faces up to 15 years in prison and is also scheduled to be sentenced in November. Three of Barlow’s co-defendants were sentenced to far less time.
As part of the plea deal, Dunn admitted that she had been working on behalf of Trump’s campaign
