Nevada Republican convicted of taking money meant for officer memorial

A Nevada politician was found guilty of taking money meant for a memorial honoring a police officer killed in the line of duty and spending it on plastic surgery, rent and her daughter’s wedding.

A federal jury on Thursday convicted Michele Fiore, a Republican justice of the peace and former Las Vegas City Council member, of six counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Fiore, 54, is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 6 and faces up to 140 years in prison — 20 for each count.

Fiore — a politician dubbed “Lady Trump” by outlets and pundits for her gun-toting, fiery brand of conservatism — pleaded not guilty when she was arraigned in July. During last week’s trial, prosecutors accused Fiore of bilking donors who thought they were contributing to a statue of Alyn Beck, a 41-year-old Las Vegas police officer who was shot with his partner in 2014.

“Michele Fiore used a tragedy to line her pockets,” federal prosecutor Dahoud Askar said in court Thursday.

Fiore’s lawyer, Michael Sanft, did not immediately respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment. On Thursday, he told reporters that Fiore would appeal the conviction.

According to an indictment, the fraud scheme unfolded over a seven-month period between July 2019 and January 2020, while Fiore served on the Las Vegas City Council.

In 2018, the city had broken ground on the Alyn Beck Memorial Park in a ceremony during which Fiore proposed that a statue of the officer be installed at the park’s entrance, court records state. And while a private real estate development company had already agreed to pay a sculptor to create and install the statue, Fiore began a fundraising campaign — soliciting more than $70,000 from Nevadans, including Gov. Joe Lombardo (R), who was the sheriff of Clark County at the time.

Lombardo, who testified against Fiore, said in court that he had authorized a $5,000 donation from his campaign fund in 2019 to go to Fiore’s political action committee to help pay for the statue — adding that he wouldn’t have made the payment if he had known the funds would be used for Fiore’s personal gain.

Though Fiore promised donors that “100% of the contributions” would go toward erecting the statue, no part of the raised funds were actually used in the memorial, the indictment states. Instead, Fiore laundered the money through front companies and relatives and used it to maintain her luxurious lifestyle, prosecutors said. Some of the donations, they claimed, were used by Fiore to write checks to her daughter, who then cashed them to pay for rent.

According to the indictment, Fiore also falsely told the sculptor creating the statue that she had been given discretionary funds by the City of Las Vegas for the project — which was unveiled to the public on Jan. 31, 2020.

“She is an elected official,” Askar said. “It is her job to safeguard the public trust. Instead, she abused it through her actions. She stole from charitable donors.”

Sanft, Fiore’s lawyer, argued in court that prosecutors had not done enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Fiore had intended to defraud donors — and accused the FBI, which carried out a search warrant of Fiore’s home in 2021, of “spinning” the evidence to mislead the jury.

“When you look for one thing only, you can miss everything else,” Sanft said, arguing that prosecutors had not shown the jury receipts that tracked where the donations had been spent.

However, after deliberating for less than two hours, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts for Fiore, who will remain free until her sentencing next year.

The conviction is the latest scandal to embroil Fiore, who rode the tea party wave in 2010 to become one of the nation’s most colorful and controversial political figures. After a failed bid for Congress that year, Fiore in 2012 won a seat in the state Assembly — where she was the only Republican to vote for legalizing marijuana and lifting the Nevada’s ban on same-sex marriage. She also sponsored an unsuccessful attempt to allow college students to carry concealed weapons on campus.

Fiore also received national attention in 2016 for helping negotiate a resolution to a standoff between the FBI and anti-government occupiers in Oregon.

But Fiore has also made headlines for her brash style of outrage politics. A staunch supporter of the right to bear arms, she has posed in racy wall calendars with an assortment of semiautomatic rifles. Her Christmas card in 2016 — which showed multiple generations of her family yielding weapons — soon became a lightning rod for controversy. Fiore has also publicly said she is “not okay with Syrian refugees” and has offered to “shoot ’em in the head myself,” before later backtracking.

From 2017 to 2022, she served in the Las Vegas City Council. In her last year in that position, she was sued by a fellow council member, who accused Fiore of breaking her finger in a physical fight at City Hall. The case is still ongoing in court.

In 2021, Fiore announced her bid for the governorship with a contentious campaign ad, but she dropped out of the race before the election. Shortly after, she ran for state treasurer. And though Fiore ultimately lost that 2022 race as well, she was unanimously appointed justice of the peace in Nye County, Nev., that same year — despite not having a law degree at the time.

Following her indictment in July, Fiore’s judgeship was suspended by the Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline.