Virginia senator indicted on her own quote: 'I've gotten too old to not be greedy'

…(cont) All together now — eight counts: racketeering, money laundering conspiracy, drug trafficking, fraud, and firearms charges, stacked across forty-five pages. The government alleges a marijuana distribution enterprise moving at least 100 kilograms, with proceeds laundered back through a cannabis business Lucas co-owns. Attorney General Todd Blanche's statement calls it "the behavior of a public servant who put her own financial interests before the people she was elected to serve." That line, too, sits in the indictment's press release, not in anyone's imagination.

Here is the clause that answers the one before it. Back on September 4, Representative Suhas Subramanyam told the Washington Examiner that the FBI and DOJ had notified him his phone calls with Lucas were being monitored — a wiretap, confirmed, on the record, weeks before anyone outside the case file knew a case existed. Forty-eight days passed between that confirmation and Thursday's unsealing. For forty-eight days, the wiretap was real and the public was not told it was running.

The indictment says Lucas used her Senate seat to pursue cannabis licenses in the same industry prosecutors say she was running illegally. She spent three decades writing the rules for a business the government now says she was also operating outside them. That is the whole shape of the document: a wiretap confirmed in September, an indictment unsealed in October, and a defendant's own words, selected by the people charging her, doing the work no prosecutor's adjective could.