Rep. Carol Ammons Indicted for Arranging Illegal Payments from State Grants, Receiving Kickbacks
Rep. Carol Ammons (D-Urbana)
A progressive State Representative is facing federal indictment after she allegedly used state grants to receive cash kickbacks and illegally used campaign dollars for personal use.
Rep. Carol Ammons (D-Urbana), was indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court in Urbana Tuesday. She was indicted alongside her husband, Champaign County Clerk Aaron Ammons.
Ammons is charged with a total of 10 counts, including eight counts of wire fraud, one count of making false statements, and one count of conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice. Aaron Ammons faces an additional charge of obstruction of justice.
The indictment alleges Ammons paid her daughter, former Champaign County Board member Titianna Ammons, for work she didn’t actually perform, totaling around $16,000. Titianna Ammons is also facing a separate federal indictment on unrelated charges.
Ammons is also accused of directing checks issued by her campaign to overpay the billed amount and receiving a cash kickback from the overpaid money. Many of those checks paid out by her campaign, totaled around $25,000, were never reported to the State Board of Elections, which tracks financial disclosures.
Another $15,000 was paid to a consultant between 2021-2022, in which Ammons allegedly received a kickback.
In 2019, Ammons arranged for a state grant from an Urbana organization called Urbana Neighborhood Connections Center to be moved to a non profit called “Hood Vote,” which focused on re-entry and corrections reform. Ammons’ daughter, Titianna, worked for Hood Vote and was improperly paid out of the state grant.
When the state grant payments to Titianna Ammons were stopped because of the conflict of interest, Carol Ammons allegedly secured a $600,000 state grant for the Bridgewater-Sullivan Community Life Center, based out of a Champaign church, that employed and paid Titianna Ammons illegally out of the state grant. Carol Ammons also allegedly received a kickback from the program in return for the grant.
Ammons also allegedly arranged for her daughter to be paid from a state grant to the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, an activist group the Ammons’ have been tied to for decades.
Rep. Ammons is accused of arranging for around $100,000 in illegal salary payments to her daughter. She is accused of pocketing around $1,700 cash.
Ammons and her husband, Aaron Ammons, who has served as Champaign County Clerk since 2018, are accused of lying to the FBI and attempting to convince a potential witness to “muddy the waters” with investigators. Aaron Ammons allegedly told a potential witness there was “nothing illegal” about giving friends money, when discussing the kickbacks taken by Carol Ammons.
Carol Ammons was first elected in 2014 (Disclosure: I worked for the candidate she defeated in that election) and represents a district that encompasses most of Champaign-Urbana and the University of Illinois campus. She has not responded to a request for comment. The U.S. Attorney’s office declined further comment.
