As part of his flood of pardons, President Joe Biden commuted the sentence of Illinois official Rita Crundwell, who was found guilty in 2013 of the worst embezzling of government funds in U.S. history.
Biden indulged the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history when on Thursday he issued 39 presidential pardons and commuted the sentences of an incredible 1,500 convicted felons, Crundwell among them, CBS News reported.
Crundwell was the comptroller for the town of Dixon, Illinois, famed as the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan. But investigators eventually discovered that for more than 20 years she had been funneling millions of dollars a year of city funding into her personal accounts to fund her luxurious lifestyle and businesses.
Crundwell was sentenced to 19 years in prison after Democrat town Mayor Jim Burke finally began to suspect something was amiss in the struggling town’s finances. Burke, who passed away in 2016, gave up his office in 2015 after Crundwell’s conviction. In addition, the entire city government was swept out of office and was reformed from a commission style of leadership to a managerial form.
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Investigators discovered Crundwell had been funneling city cash into several accounts, one called the Capital Development Fund and another she named the Reserve Sewer Capital Development Account (RSCDA), a name she invented to sound like an official city account. She would create false work invoices, then write checks to pay those invoices that would be deposited into the RSCDA account.
Crundwell was discovered when she went on vacation and her temporary fill-in discovered the RSCDA account that she felt was suspicious. She and Mayor Burke then went to the FBI to report the fraud. Crundwell was arrested in 2012 and on February 14, 2013, was sentenced to 19 years and seven months in federal prison for embezzling more than $53 million in city funds. She pleaded guilty in November 2012 in the fraud that started in 1990.
The former city official, now 71, would have served her sentence until October of 2029, but thanks to Biden’s commutation, she ended up only serving about eleven of her nineteen years.
Crundwell admitted she used the stolen city funds to pay for personal expenses and to fund her extensive horse breeding business. She had also bought several homes in Illinois and Florida. Still, in 2020, she had filed a request for a compassionate release with the warden of the Federal Prison Camp in Waseca, Minnesota. A year later, she was granted that release and ordered to home confinement at her brother’s home in Illinois.
Dixon City officials who opposed the early release have also expressed outrage for Joe Biden’s commutation of Crundwell’s sentence allowing her to freely leave her brother’s home.
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Dixon Manager Danny Langlossa released a statement expressing the town’s outrage:
The City of Dixon is shocked and outraged with the announcement that President Biden has given Rita Crundwell clemency for the largest municipal embezzlement in the history of our country. This is a complete travesty of justice and a slap in the face for our entire community.
“While today’s news in unimaginable, the City of Dixon is in an incredible place today. We will continue to focus on the future and work to capitalize on the momentum we have created.
Former U.S. Marshal Jason Wojdylo, who worked on the investigation of Crundwell’s crimes, was also disgusted by the president’s act on Crundwell’s behalf.
“Now, today I anticipate she’s dancing in the streets of Dixon with her commutation, because she just also conned the President of the United States,” Wojdylo said. “This official act undid decades of work.”
“It’s shock. It’s outrage. I have spoken as recent as today with people even close to Rita Cromwell,” Wojdylo added. “She is not remorseful. She never has been. Her only regret has only ever been that she was caught.”
Li Arellano, a Republican who took the mayor’s office after the Crundwell conviction and who ran for office to clean up the mess she left, insisted that Biden just showed that “crime pays.”
“Supposedly, these are labeled as nonviolent criminals,” he added. “If you rob a town of $54 million, and then you think there’s less violence that it doesn’t impact public safety, you’re wrong. There absolutely is more crime when you steal 10 to 20% of a city’s budget, absolutely.”
Arellano also noted that the city still hasn’t fully recovered from Crundwell’s crimes.
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