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Ted Suhl Is Still A Felon (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

What’s the matter with me? President Trump commuted the sentence of a man who used religion and bribes for personal gain, and my outrage meter barely registered. The president has the constitutional authority to override the decisions of federal criminal juries and federal judges, and my only surprise last week was that he merely let Ted Suhl out of prison early rather than giving him a full pardon.

Suhl, whose “faith-based” behavioral treatment centers depended on Medicaid revenue, remains a felon, convicted by a jury of his peers of two counts of honest services fraud and one count each of federal funds bribery and interstate travel in aid of bribery. And he served two and a half years in federal prison, which is a huge break from the seven years he was sentenced to serve but equal to the sentence served by his bribee, former Department of Human Services Deputy Director Steven Jones.

As with so much that comes out of Trump and his administration, the official explanation for the mercy shown Suhl is factually inaccurate.

“Investigators alleged that Mr. Suhl participated in a bribery scheme to increase Medicaid payments to his company. Federal prosecutors in Arkansas declined to pursue the case, but prosecutors in Washington decided to move forward with the prosecution,” according to the statement from the White House.

In fact, prosecutors in the Eastern District of Arkansas did not decline to pursue the case. As is common in cases of official corruption, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Little Rock — then led by Chris Thyer — handed off the case to prosecutors from the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section. That section had already assisted in eliciting guilty pleas from Jones and a couple of middlemen.

The same DOJ division is currently involved in the cases against former state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, who is awaiting sentencing for crimes in three federal districts, and was also involved in the successful prosecution of former state Sen. Jon Woods, former state Rep. Micah Neal and the men who admitted bribing them.

The White House also stated that Suhl was “acquitted on half of the charges filed against him.” That’s mathematically incorrect. He was charged with six counts and convicted of four. While convicted of two counts of honest services fraud, he was acquitted of a third. And while convicted of bribery, he was acquitted of conspiracy.

I don’t know how President Trump came to misunderstand the local prosecutors’ decision and the jury’s findings, but I hope he wasn’t misled into an act of clemency that he wouldn’t have offered had he been better informed.

The White House statement described Suhl as “a pillar of his community before his prosecution,” which is only curious in that the federal criminal justice system tends to punish more harshly felons who abuse positions of trust. It’s not usually a mitigating factor, in federal law or life in general. (“For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” It’s there in red letters, Luke 12:48.)

I rather doubt Suhl would have been considered a pillar if his community been aware that he had, as prosecutors noted at the time, paid bribes to Jones “more than a dozen times over a four-year period, and he did so under the pretense of charitable giving and religious activism.”

Suhl had some heavy hitters on his side. His request for clemency was “strongly encouraged by leaders in Mr. Suhl’s home State of Arkansas,” the statement said, but the only names attached were former U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins and former Gov. Mike Huckabee. Are they leaders in Arkansas?

Cummins was pushed out as U.S. attorney by the Bush administration 12 years ago in order to install Tim Griffin, now our lieutenant governor. With the exception of a stint on the Trump transition team, his activities since have been in the private sector — defending accused criminals and absolutely everything President Trump says or does. (The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that Suhl’s family had hired Cummins “to review the case,” but Cummins said he wasn’t paid to seek clemency for Suhl.)

Huckabee was certainly a leader in Arkansas for many years, but he has been a resident of Florida for almost a decade. I’m surprised the White House — where his daughter worked until just a few weeks ago — didn’t know that.

Huckabee told the Democrat-Gazette that he had received only “the satisfaction of seeing a President have the courage to bring justice to several persons targeted for take-down by the government.” Questioning the work of federal prosecutors is always fashionable — I do that myself sometimes — but if Huckabee felt that Suhl had been wrongly targeted, I wonder why he feels that just a shorter sentence brought justice.


Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.
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