In July 2021, the federal government paid a South Florida healthcare company $4.95 million on a COVID vaccination staffing contract. The company had requested $50,000. FEMA sent $5 million. It was a clerical error — the kind of thing that gets caught, flagged, and returned.
Instead of returning the money though, according to a 15-count federal indictment, the owner of that company kept the money, laundered it through multiple bank accounts, used it to fund a congressional campaign through illegal straw donors, and spent more than $100,000 of it on luxury items, including a 3-carat yellow diamond ring.
That company owner is now Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick — the sitting Democratic congresswoman from Florida’s 20th district. She is facing trial on April 20th. She has refused to resign. And starting today, the House Ethics Committee will hold what legal observers are calling one of the rarest proceedings in modern congressional history: a public adjudicatory hearing against a sitting member of Congress.
The charges against Cherfilus-McCormick are not a political allegation or an opposition research hit. They come from the U.S. Department of Justice, Southern District of Florida, supported by the IRS Criminal Investigation division. The indictment names four defendants: Cherfilus-McCormick, her brother Edwin Cherfilus, her campaign manager Nadege LeBlanc, and her accountant David Kofi Spencer.
According to the indictment, when FEMA’s $5 million overpayment hit the account of her company Trinity Healthcare Services, the defendants allegedly did not report it, did not return it, and did not hesitate. Within a short amount of time, the money was moving. It was laundered through multiple accounts to obscure its origin. Over $100,000 was allegedly spent on personal items — including the diamond ring. And LeBlanc allegedly arranged a straw donor scheme in which FEMA contract money was funneled to friends and relatives, who then donated to Cherfilus-McCormick’s congressional campaign as if contributing their own personal funds — a federal crime.
She faces 15 counts including conspiracy to commit theft of government funds, money laundering, making illegal campaign contributions, and conspiracy to file a fraudulent tax return. Maximum sentence if convicted on all counts: 53 years in federal prison.
She has pleaded not guilty. She was absent from her own arraignment.
On top of the criminal trial, Cherfilus-McCormick is facing an extremely rare Congressional proceeding — a public adjudicatory hearing before the House Ethics Committee’s investigative subcommittee.
The Ethics Committee does not hold public trials. The last time something approaching this level of public Ethics scrutiny occurred against a sitting member was the lead-up to George Santos’s expulsion. What makes Cherfilus-McCormick’s situation more unusual: Santos was expelled before a criminal conviction. Democrats have failed to hold their member accountable, unlike Republicans did with Santos. She is facing both a live federal criminal case and an Ethics adjudicatory hearing running simultaneously — a combination that virtually never happens.
When her lawyers tried to delay the Ethics hearing until after the criminal trial concluded, the subcommittee unanimously rejected the request. When they tried to have the hearing held in closed session, that request was also rejected. The hearing will be public. The record of evidence the Ethics Committee has compiled — a 58-page Statement of Alleged Violations — found “substantial evidence of conduct consistent with the allegations in the indictment, as well as more extensive misconduct.”
More extensive misconduct than what she’s already charged with.
The Sun Sentinel editorial board has called on her to resign. Former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner has called on her to resign. Rep. Greg Steube has filed a resolution to force a House vote to expel her. Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries stripped her of her subcommittee ranking member position — but has stopped well short of supporting expulsion. She is still casting votes on the floor of the United States Congress.
But Rep. Cherfilus-McCormick is hardly the only Democrat under fire for Covid-related fraud.
In June 2025, Andrew Hoang Do, a Democratic member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors in California, was sentenced to five years in federal prison for accepting more than $550,000 in bribes in exchange for steering more than $10 million in COVID relief contracts to specific vendors. In November 2025, Ibraheem Samirah — the Virginia Democratic state delegate best known for heckling President Trump during a speech — was sentenced for fraudulently obtaining $83,000 in PPP funds, falsely claiming payroll employees who did not exist. In January 2026, Georgia Democratic state Rep. Karen Bennett pleaded guilty to pandemic unemployment fraud. One month earlier, Georgia Democratic state Rep. Sharon Henderson was indicted on similar charges — two state legislators from the same party, in the same state, indicted for the same type of COVID fraud within weeks of each other.
And then there is Minnesota. The Feeding Our Future scandal — in which a nonprofit operating under a Democrat-controlled state government fraudulently claimed to feed schoolchildren during COVID while stealing more than $250 million in federal funds — remains the largest pandemic relief fraud in American history. Seventy-nine defendants have been indicted. Fifty-six have pleaded guilty. Seven have been convicted at trial so far. The House Oversight Committee is investigating whether Governor Tim Walz’s administration ignored red flags to avoid political embarrassment.
These are not isolated incidents. They are a pattern — of COVID relief money treated as a political slush fund, of Democratic officials who saw federal emergency dollars and made a calculation about what they could take and what they could conceal.
Cherfilus-McCormick’s federal criminal trial is set for April 20th in Miami. The evidence the DOJ has assembled — the bank records, the straw donor network, the diamond ring, the brother, the campaign manager, the accountant all charged alongside her — represents the kind of multi-defendant, paper-trail-heavy case that federal prosecutors bring when they are confident. Federal conviction rates in cases that go to trial run above 85 percent. The DOJ does not indict sitting members of Congress on a whim.
She has pleaded not guilty. She is entitled to her day in court. But the Ethics Committee’s own 58-page investigation found substantial evidence supporting the indictment’s core allegations — and then found more beyond it. Her co-defendants face decades in prison. She has burned through multiple lawyers, missed her own arraignment, and failed in back-to-back attempts to delay or close the Ethics proceedings against her.
The federal government says she took your COVID money, laundered it, bought a diamond ring with it, and used it to illegally fund her own political career. On April 20th, a jury will hear the evidence.
She is still in Congress until they do.