Justice Department prosecutors have accused Grammy-winning rapper Pras Michel of betraying his country for money.
A U.S. district judge has sentenced Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, a member of the 1990s hip-hop group The Fugees, to 14 years in prison for illegally funneling millions of dollars in foreign contributions to former U.S. President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
Michel declined to address the court before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced him Thursday. The trial in Washington, DC included testimony from former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
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This week's sentencing came after a federal jury convicted Michel of 10 counts, including conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, in April 2023.
Michel obtained more than $120 million from fugitive Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho – also known as Jho Low – and routed some of that money through front donors to the Obama campaign.
Low is wanted for his prominent role in the 1MDB scandal, in which billions of dollars were stolen from Malaysia's state investment fund in one of the biggest financial frauds in history.
Several senior financial figures and members of the Malaysian government have been convicted for their role in the scandal, including disgraced former prime minister Najib Razak, who received a 12-year prison sentence in 2022, which was later halved.
Court documents, filed by Justice Department prosecutors on Thursday, say the 52-year-old Grammy-winning rapper “lied unapologetically and relentlessly to carry out his plans” while diverting illegal payments from Low to the Obama campaign.
In the United States, it is illegal for foreigners to donate to electoral campaigns, as well as to pay another person to make a contribution to the campaign.
“Prakazrel Michel betrayed his country for money. He funneled millions of dollars in prohibited foreign contributions into a U.S. presidential election and attempted to manipulate a sitting president to serve a foreign criminal and a foreign power,” prosecutors said.
Prosecutors also said Michel had attempted to end a Justice Department investigation into Low and the 1MDB scandal, in addition to “tampering with witnesses and then committing perjury at trial.”
Prosecutors informed Judge Kollar-Kotelly that federal sentencing guidelines recommended a life sentence for such crimes, urging her to take into account the “breadth and depth of your crimes, your indifference to the risks to your country, and the magnitude of your greed.”
Michel's lawyers downplayed the magnitude of his crimes and said Low's motivation for donating money was not “to achieve some political goal.”
“Instead, Low simply wanted to obtain a photograph of himself and then-President Obama,” Michel's attorneys wrote.
Low – who remains in hiding and claims to be innocent – courted America's rich and famous during a years-long spending spree, allegedly financed with funds stolen from 1MDB.
Most notably, he was one of the main financiers of the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street, starring DiCaprio.
Defense attorney Peter Zeidenberg said Michel will appeal.
He called his client's 14-year sentence “completely disproportionate to the crime” and “absurdly high,” given that those terms are typically reserved for deadly terrorists and drug cartel leaders.
Instead, Zeidenberg recommended a three-year prison sentence for Michel.
Michel, a Brooklyn native whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti, was a founding member of the Fugees along with his childhood friends Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean. The group won two Grammy Awards during their heyday in the 1990s and sold tens of millions of albums.
