An ex-U.S. State Department worker under former President Joe Biden (D) has pleaded guilty to embezzlement from the agency.
The accused in the case was identified as 64-year-old Levita Almuete Ferrer, who also goes by the name Levita Brezovic, of Montgomery Village, Maryland, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said in a press release Wednesday.
An image shows Ferrer:
Authorities said Ferrer “admitted that she abused her signature authority over a State Department checking account between March 2022 and April 2024 while working as a Senior Budget Analyst in the State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol.”
The attorney’s office continued:
She issued 60 checks payable to herself and three checks payable to another individual with whom she had a personal relationship. She printed and signed each check and then deposited all 63 checks, which totaled $657,347.50, into her personal checking and savings accounts.
Ferrer attempted to conceal her scheme by using a common Quickbooks account at the State Department. After entering her name as the payee on checks in Quickbooks and then printing them, she often changed the listed payee in Quickbooks from herself to an actual State Department vendor. As a result, anyone viewing those entries in the Quickbooks system did not see Ferrer’s name as the payee on the checks unless they accessed an audit trail.
Her sentencing is set for September 18 and as part of her plea agreement, the woman said she will pay $657,347.50 in restitution and be liable for a forfeiture money judgment in that amount.
In a similar case, a man in Corpus Christi, Texas, pleaded guilty recently to embezzling over $280,000 from a steelworkers labor union, Breitbart News reported Friday.
In 2023, a woman was found guilty of embezzling over half a million dollars from a Catholic parish in Indiana where she was a business manager.
It is also important to note that Biden in December commuted the sentence of an Illinois official who was found guilty in 2013 of the worst embezzling of government funds in the nation’s history, the news coming amid the former president’s numerous pardons, according to Breitbart News.
Rita Crundwell “was the comptroller for the town of Dixon, Illinois, famed as the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan. But investigators eventually discovered that for more than 20 years she had been funneling millions of dollars a year of city funding into her personal accounts to fund her luxurious lifestyle and businesses,” the outlet said.
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