Former congressman and former FBI agent Mike Grimm of New York, a Republican who until December had represented Staten Island and a slice of Brooklyn for two terms in the House, was
just sentenced to eight months in prison as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. Federal law enforcement officials had conducted
a lengthy investigation of Grimm over a series of alleged campaign finance transgressions, but they wound up
indicting him in April of last year on charges of tax evasion, fraud, and perjury regarding his hiring of illegal immigrants to work at a restaurant he owned before entering Congress in 2011.
Grimm ultimately pleaded guilty to a single count of tax fraud just before Christmas and resigned his office a couple of weeks later. That downfall came less than two months after he convincingly won re-election despite being under indictment, a feat he managed by claiming for years that he was the victim of political persecution, a stance that stoked the defiant resentments of his notoriously chip-on-the-shoulder constituents. Indeed, Grimm insisted he wouldn't resign even after his guilty plea, but if he was planning to simultaneously serve prison time and his district, we never got to find out, because John Boehner somehow convinced him to step down.
And yet Grimm's troubles didn't poison the well for Staten Island Republicans—not in the slightest. In a May special election to fill his seat, Dan Donovan, the prosecutor who failed to secure an indictment for the cops the who killed Eric Garner, handily crushed his Democratic opponent by 20-point margin.
But the ending isn't happy for Grimm, who will now enter prison as a former law enforcement agent. The judge who just sentenced Grimm told him: "Your moral compass ... needs some reorientation." He'll now get to spend the better part of a year contemplating just that.