Government focuses on mortgage, bank records as Mosby trial continues

GREENBELT — It was a document-heavy day for federal jurors hearing the case against former Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby.

Mortgage applications, tax forms and letters made up much of the evidence prosecutors presented Tuesday, the second day of testimony in Mosby’s trial on mortgage fraud charges.

Marilyn Mosby trials: Complete coverage

Though it made for dry listening, the testimony from mortgage underwriters affirmed what the government first alleged in an indictment over two years ago: that Mosby did not disclose major tax debt when she applied for mortgages on two luxury Florida vacation properties.

Mosby’s defense team is expected to argue that Mosby did not know about the tax debt or believed that her ex-husband, Baltimore City Council President Nick Mosby, had settled the debt when she applied for the mortgages. An IRS officer testified Monday that the couple was mailed dozens of notices about their delinquent taxes and a $45,000 lien the IRS placed on their property in 2020.

But there are other inaccuracies that may be tougher for Marilyn Mosby to explain. Prosecutors say she executed a false gift letter, for example, to make it appear that her husband was providing her with $5,000 she needed to make a down payment on a condo in Long Boat Key, Florida.

In fact, according to evidence presented Tuesday, Mosby herself sent the money to her husband, who moved it between his checking and savings accounts before wiring it to an escrow agent. The gift letter allowed Mosby to lock in an interest rate that would have expired if she’d waited for her next paycheck to cover the down payment.

The government also alleges that Mosby lied when she submitted a “letter of explanation” to a mortgage company claiming she had lived in Florida for the past 70 days. Mosby was the Baltimore state’s attorney at the time and had only spent 37 of the last 70 days in Florida, according to testimony Tuesday.

Mosby is also accused of falsely claiming she would maintain control of a vacation house in Kissimmee, Florida, when she had actually signed over the authority to rent out the property to a vacation home management company.

It appears Mosby’s defense to those allegations will involve saying that other people were responsible.

Though Mosby signed mortgage documents herself, including ones that threatened criminal legal action for lying on mortgage applications, her lawyers seem to be focused on the other people involved in the process, such as Mosby’s mortgage broker.

In her opening statement Monday, Assistant Federal Public Defender Sedira Banan called Mosby a “rookie when it came to real estate,” and said she “relied on and trusted others, loved ones and licensed professionals, to help her get things right in an unfamiliar, complicated area, just as all of us do each day.”

In one email revealed in court Tuesday, Mosby’s mortgage broker told her that sending a letter saying she had spent 40 days at the house in Kissimmee might help her get preapproval for the purchase of the Long Boat Key condo. Mosby wrote up a letter, which is referenced in the indictment, and ultimately claimed she had been living in Florida for 70 days; she also ignored some suggested edits to the letter from her broker, according to the testimony.

It is not yet clear whether the defense will call the broker, or Mosby’s ex-husband, when the government rests its case. Prosecutors ended the day Tuesday with testimony from Jenna Bender, a forensic accountant with the FBI.

Bender testified about the Mosbys’ finances, including some difficulty they had paying their mortgage on their home in Baltimore in 2014 and 2015. Nick Mosby made payments on the mortgage directly from his bank account in 2014, according to Bender’s testimony, but by May 2015 the mortgage was 199 days delinquent with a total due of nearly $19,000.

In 2016, however, Marilyn Mosby took over the mortgage payments, Bender said. The testimony may be the government’s effort to show that Mosby was involved in the family’s finances or understood the mortgage process, which would counter the defense’s argument that she was a novice who relied on professionals when she bought the Florida properties.

The government may rest its case on Wednesday morning.

A different jury previously convicted Mosby of perjury in November. At that trial, which was based on the same indictment, prosecutors said Mosby lied when she claimed to have experienced an “adverse financial consequence” related to COVID-19 in order to withdraw money from her city retirement account under emergency pandemic rules.

Mosby argued that she did suffer a loss when a travel company she planned to launch in 2020 had to be scuttled because of the health crisis. But the government countered that the business never had any clients or made any money, and jurors agreed Mosby perjured herself when she withdrew her retirement money.

Mosby used the money she pulled from her retirement account to make down payments on the two Florida properties that are now central to her mortgage fraud trial.

Mosby, 44, was still Baltimore’s top prosecutor when she was indicted in January 2022. She left the job last year after losing in the city’s Democratic primary.