President Biden is under growing pressure from civil rights groups and some Democratic lawmakers to pardon Marilyn Mosby, the former Baltimore state’s attorney who was convicted in February of mortgage fraud.
U.S. authorities in Maryland alleged that Mosby lied to mortgage lenders while purchasing two Florida vacation homes in 2020 and 2021. In February, a jury acquitted Mosby of fraud related to the first property but convicted her of making a false statement to a mortgage lender to acquire the second one.
Mosby, 44, is scheduled to be sentenced May 23 and faces up to 40 years in federal prison, though prosecutors in the case are seeking a sentence of 20 months.
In a May 7 letter to Biden, more than a dozen civil rights groups, led by the NAACP, called on the administration to intervene in Mosby’s case, describing her conviction as a “miscarriage of justice.”
On Thursday, the Congressional Black Caucus sent a letter to Biden calling for the same, while stating that Mosby had formally applied for a presidential pardon.
“We expect more from this DOJ and would hope that a Trump-era witch hunt would have no place in the Biden Administration,” the lawmakers wrote. “Mrs. Mosby’s case is not the only one — it is, however, the latest and one of the most egregious cases.”
Biden has been vocal about using his clemency powers to rectify what he has said are unjustified racial disparities, mostly in drug sentencing.
In December, he granted clemency to 11 people who were serving “disproportionately long sentences” for nonviolent drug offenses, all of whom would have been eligible to receive significantly lower sentences if charged with the same offense today. In October 2022, he pardoned people convicted of marijuana possession under a federal law that affected thousands.
Biden, who is likely to face off against Donald Trump in a tight presidential race in November, has also been ramping up his outreach to Black voters, a key constituency that helped deliver his 2020 win. The president is scheduled this weekend to deliver this year’s commencement address at Morehouse College, a historically Black college in Atlanta.
After speaking at Morehouse, Biden on Sunday will travel to Detroit, where he plans to talk to local business owners. On Sunday night, the president is scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Detroit.
The letter from the civil rights groups laid out Mosby’s clashes with the Trump administration in 2020, before and after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police that May.
In a major speech that February, former U.S. attorney general William P. Barr lambasted district attorneys whom he called “self-styled ‘social justice’ reformers.” After Floyd’s death sparked global protests against racial inequity, Mosby made frequent media appearances as an authority on police misconduct and police prosecutions, including writing an op-ed for the New York Times that June that called on state prosecutors to “come down hard” on police brutality.
In a July 2020 op-ed for The Washington Post, Mosby confronted Trump, who had threatened to deploy federal agents to Baltimore to tamp down unrest after the murder of Floyd. In the piece, Mosby vowed to prosecute any federal agents who engaged in unlawful actions against Baltimore citizens.
In their letter to Biden, the civil rights groups suggested that Mosby’s public challenges to the Trump administration prompted the Justice Department to open an investigation into her.
“Two months later [after The Washington Post op-ed], Attorney Mosby learned she was under federal investigation, a move widely perceived as retaliation for her courageous stance in protecting her constituents’ constitutional rights,” the letter stated.
In November, Mosby was convicted of perjury in a separate trial over her moves to withdraw $90,000 from retirement funds, which she used as down payments for the Florida homes. In that case, also initiated under the Trump administration, prosecutors argued that Mosby falsely claimed she was experiencing financial hardships during the coronavirus pandemic to access the money through a Cares Act program. She is appealing the perjury convictions.
On mortgage documents in 2020 and 2021, federal prosecutors said, Mosby did not disclose that she had unpaid federal taxes and that the IRS had placed a $45,000 lien against all properties owned by her and her then-husband, Nick Mosby (D), president of the Baltimore City Council.
Marilyn Mosby testified that she was aware of the unpaid taxes when she submitted the first loan application in July 2020 but thought her husband was making timely payments on an installment plan with the IRS. Mosby’s public defenders argued that she was a home-buying “novice” who was misled by her husband and mortgage broker. On the witness stand, Nick Mosby told the jury that he spent years hiding the couple’s tax debts from Marilyn Mosby, who had threatened to leave him unless he sorted out his finances. The Mosbys divorced last year.
The civil rights groups argued that Marilyn Mosby was wrongfully convicted of perjury in November, noting that 739 individuals withdrew funds from their retirement accounts without being charged for improper withdrawals. Mosby, they said, was the only person charged “despite having met an objective standard to qualify for the withdrawal.”
Mosby’s advocates also argue that she was wrongfully convicted of mortgage fraud for misrepresenting a $5,000 “gift” on one of her mortgage applications, in part because expert testimony had confirmed Mosby had been improperly advised.
“These convictions, with financial implications, fall far below the Department of Justice’s usual million dollar threshold,” the letter from the civil rights groups stated.
In a statement, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said the only thing Mosby was guilty of was the desire to provide her family with a better life.
“The sad reality is, as Black women take their rightful places in positions of power, dark forces seek to tear down both their progress, and that of our community,” Johnson said. “The NAACP refuses to stand idly by as injustice takes the wheel, driving us down a path of further disparity. We are proud to stand alongside our partners in calling on President Biden and the Department of Justice to reemphasize their commitment to racial equity by pardoning Attorney Mosby.”
Asked this week about the possibility of Biden granting clemency to Mosby, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said she could not comment about individual pardon cases.
Salvador Rizzo contributed to this report.
