by Kevin Wheatley, @KWheatley_cn2 –
Dozens of friends and family members have implored U.S. District Judge Karen Caldwell for leniency in letters of support for former Personnel Cabinet Secretary Tim Longmeyer ahead of his sentencing on federal bribery charges Thursday.
The letters were unsealed Wednesday and include his wife, Lyn Longmeyer; parents, John and Janice Longmeyer; siblings and extended family; fellow parishioners at St. Agnes Church in Louisville; and friends, mostly in and around Louisville.
On Wednesday, the court also released a victim impact statement from the Personnel Cabinet, which urged law enforcement to look into other matters at the agency under Longmeyer’s direction.
Specifically, the cabinet says it’s exploring issues related to the Workers’ Compensation Program, selection of outside counsel and coercion of political contributions from state employees.
Longmeyer, an aide to Gov. Steve Beshear who was also named Attorney General Andy Beshear’s top deputy when he took office in January, is scheduled to be sentenced on federal bribery charges 2 p.m. Thursday for his part in a kickback scheme with Lexington-based MC Squared Consulting that involved the state employees’ health plan and 2015 Democratic political campaigns.
He faces $203,000 in restitution under the plea deal and up to 87 months in prison under the plea agreement reached in April, in which he admitted to accepting $197,500 in cash and $6,000 in conduit campaign contributions from MC Squared in exchange for helping secure work for the firm through Kentucky Employees’ Health Plan contracts held by Humana and Anthem between Oct. 1, 2014, and Sept. 30.
Prosecutors have said third-party administrators of the Kentucky Employees’ Health Plan, former Attorney General Jack Conway and Beshear were unaware of the kickback plot.
A co-conspirator, Democratic political consultant Larry O’Bryan, pleaded guilty to bribery charges in U.S. District Court and waived indictment by a grand jury on Wednesday. O’Bryan admitted to receiving more than $642,000 between October 2011 and March 2014, according to prosecutors.
In letters to the court, Longmeyer’s family and friends pleaded for leniency from Caldwell and said the scheme he helped concoct doesn’t reflect the man they’ve known for years, decades and, in some cases, his entire life.
Lyn Longmeyer said she was blindsided when her husband told her of the looming federal charges in March.
She said when prosecutors announced Tim Longmeyer’s indictment on Good Friday, her “world truly collapsed and the nightmare became a reality.” Her husband, she wrote, “can best pay for his mistake, not with a lengthy prison sentence, but through increased Community Service, making restitution and showing the world that man I know him to be.”
“Everything he worked for, that he accomplished, that we sacrificed for, was gone,” she wrote.
“Tim relives this constantly. He has heard one daughter tell him she will never be happy again. Or the oldest say she won’t get married because she doesn’t want to be this hurt again. Our youngest told us that she had kind of lost both parents because I had to work all day and Daddy was going to jail.”
Longmeyer’s mother, Janice Longmeyer, also begged Caldwell to keep her son out of prison.
“In a country where there are so many households without a male head of the family, it would be a shame to take this wonderful father and husband away from his home and family, possibly destroying his young children,” she wrote. “There must be many ways in which Tim could use his talents to work with fatherless children and broken families.”
But the Personnel Cabinet, in its victim impact statement, said employees at the agency “feel personally betrayed by Mr. Longmeyer” and deserve an apology from the former cabinet head.
“Mr. Longmeyer used this Cabinet for his own personal and political purposes,” the cabinet wrote.
“The full scope of his wrongdoing should be made public, and Mr. Longmeyer should issue an apology to the Personnel Cabinet and every single member of the health plan.”
