Ex-CIA Employee Pleads Guilty to Perjury, Tax Evasion

Case Began When She Was Dismissed as Murder Juror

Washington, DC – Michelle Suggs, a former Central Intelligence Agency employee, pled guilty today in DC Superior Court to two charges in connection with her ownership of rental property in the District, Attorney General Karl A. Racine and Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey S. DeWitt announced. Ms. Suggs, of Upper Marlboro, Md., was sentenced by Judge John McCabe to 24 months of unsupervised probation and ordered to pay $4,509.80 to the District in restitution.

Ms. Suggs was arrested last November. The case originated in 2009, after she was dismissed as a juror at the end of a murder trial. The defendants in the murder case appealed the conviction because Ms. Suggs had been dismissed as a juror, alleging that the District of Columbia’s juror-selection system was racially biased. A subsequent investigation found that Ms. Suggs was a Maryland resident, but was claiming the District’s Homestead Deduction tax benefit on her rental property in the District of Columbia. The Homestead Deduction is a benefit available only to District residents.

The DC Office of the Chief Financial Officer’s Office of Tax and Revenue (OTR) and the DC Office of the Attorney General (OAG) conducted the investigation. Ms Suggs eventually pleaded guilty to charges of perjury and felony tax evasion. The tax plea included her failure to declare rental income and falsely claiming a dependent on her DC individual income tax return.