SIOUX FALLS — Longtime South Dakota political operative Paul Erickson was sentenced to seven years in federal prison on Monday for wire fraud and money laundering.
Erickson, 58, of Sioux Falls, was ordered to seven years in federal custody and three years of supervised release, plus pay a $100 special assessment for each count to which he pleaded guilty, totaling $200.
Erickson pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering in November 2019. In a factual basis as part of the plea agreement, Erickson admitted to receiving a $100,000 wire transfer that was supposed to be an investment into his business to develop land in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota.
“I approached many of those individuals about investing in my business. However, I falsely represented to investors that I would use the money to purchase real estate and the construction of single-family homes in North Dakota, which I did not do,” Erickson said in the court filing.
Prior to Monday, Erickson had requested for a sentence of home confinement due to a heart condition and having open-heart surgery earlier this year and being at risk of contracting COVID-19 in prison. That request was not granted by U.S. District Court Judge Karen Schreier. The sentencing in the case had been delayed from earlier this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Erickson had been a longtime Republican political adviser in South Dakota and managed the 1992 presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan. He previously worked for Sen. Jim Abdnor.
He was originally indicted and charged in February 2019 for a range of alleged instances of wire fraud and money laundering by raising money from investors related to a company that said it would build senior residential care facilities and creating a wheelchair that allowed people to go to the bathroom without being lifted out of the chair. He ended up pleading guilty to the charges related to the oil field land investments.
Erickson’s fraud case was separate from his case that was lodged against his former girlfriend Maria Butina, who was a convicted Russian agent. She was charged in 2018 and pleaded guilty to conspiring with a senior Russian official to infiltrate American conservative political circles as an undeclared agent for the Kremlin.
According to her plea deal, Butina began acting on behalf of the Russian government in 2015 and continued her work after moving to the United States to attend graduate school at American University in 2016. Butina was deported in the fall of 2019.
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July 07, 2020 at 04:00AM
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