Arlington Man Gets 14 Months In Prison For Super PAC Donor Scheme

ARLINGTON, VA — An Arlington man was sentenced Friday to 14 months in prison for scheming to lie to the Federal Election Commission about the true identifies of donors to a super PAC for which he served as president and treasurer, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Joseph Fuentes-Fernandez, 62, served as president and treasurer of the super PAC Salvemos a Puerto Rico. On Friday, the super PAC was ordered to pay a $150,000 fine and to serve three years of probation. Fuentes faced a maximum of five years in prison.

In May, Fuentes pleaded guilty in federal court to scheming to lie to the FEC.

According to admissions made in connection with the plea agreement, Fuentes raised funds to support the 2020 election campaign of an unnamed public official, who was then a candidate for office in the executive branch of the government of Puerto Rico.

Soon after Salvemos a Puerto Rico was organized, Fuentes and others also formed two shell nonprofit social welfare organizations, according to the Justice Department. These two nonprofit groups were registered within seven minutes of each other, listed the same mailing address, and shared some of the same officers.

Fuentes also admitted that he and others solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations to the two shell nonprofit entities, which sent most of those funds to Salvemos a Puerto Rico, the Justice Department said. Fuentes and Salvemos a Puerto Rico then reported to the FEC that the nonprofit entities were the donors of those funds, rather than reporting the true source of the funds.

The purpose of routing the donor funds through the nonprofit entities was to conceal the true identities of the donors to Salvemos a Puerto Rico, according to prosecutors. For example, in October 2020, Fuentes sent a text message to a potential donor that read: “You can use a third party to not disclose the true donor.”

By ensuring that many of the true donors to Salvemos a Puerto Rico remained anonymous, Fuentes and Salvemos a Puerto Rico “deprived” the people of the Puerto Rico and the FEC of information about the true source of hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing into Puerto Rico’s political system, the Justice Department said.

The FBI’s San Juan Field Office helped to investigate the case.

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