DOJ Alleges Puerto Rico Ex-Governor’s Lawyers Fabricated Quotes

The Justice Department accused the legal team for Puerto Rico’s former governor of giving a judge a “completely fabricated” account of how prosecutors determined to settle her bribery case.

Federal prosecutors were responding to the defense’s court filing Tuesday that sought to “clarify the record” by countering Bloomberg Law reporting that political pressure led DOJ leaders to dismiss the politician’s felony charges just ahead of trial.

In a Wednesday filing, prosecutors didn’t dispute that political intervention prompted DOJ’s about-face to provide a more lenient plea deal. Instead, they contended counsel for former Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced had falsified dialogue from their May meeting at department headquarters, including by fabricating a quote from DOJ leadership purporting to concede “the indictment has collapsed.”

Prosecutors told the court Wednesday they stand by their case and are prepared to go to trial if necessary on the original felony allegations that Vázquez Garced, who endorsed President Donald Trump in 2020, took bribes from a billionaire bank owner who’s been represented since 2024 by Trump’s former defense lawyer.

DOJ reached a plea deal in June with the defendants on a misdemeanor count of unlawful campaign contributions, which may allow them to avoid prison time. But rather than citing the settlement’s legal merits, prosecutors said in the Wednesday filing that the negotiated resolution was “consistent with the enforcement priorities of the Justice Department” and “served to conserve prosecutorial and judicial resources.”

That contradicts the account presented a day earlier by Vázquez Garced’s legal team. Her lawyers argued that US District Judge Silvia L. Carreño-Coll “generated damaging media coverage” in Bloomberg Law “that distorts reality” by declaring in a July 8 order that the case settled through “directives presumably issued by Main Justice.”

Rather than DOJ political leadership ordering prosecutors to settle, the former governor’s attorneys said the department was persuaded by the defense’s presentation of new evidence disclosing weaknesses in the government’s case.

“When confronted with the overwhelming evidence that contradicted their conspiracy theory,” the defense lawyers said in their filing, “prosecutors could not provide reasonable explanations for proceeding with the indictment.”

When Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, who was leading the May meeting, asked prosecutors why they proceeded with the indictment, “their response was simply: ‘We took our chances,’” Vázquez Garced’s lawyers added.

The US “emphatically denies” that prosecutors made this comment or said anything similar, DOJ told the court in a motion signed by the US attorney for Puerto Rico.

Unaddressed by the former governor’s lawyers in their motion was that it was Christopher Kise, her co-defendant’s lawyer, who’d been pressing the Trump DOJ to dismiss charges on the grounds of government weaponization. Kise previously served as co-counsel to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in Trump’s classified documents case.

The case is USA v. Vazquez-Garced, D.P.R., No. 3:22-cr-00342, response filed 8/13/25.