We told you about Leland Yee back in March of 2014. The blog post was a transcript from Rush Limbaugh’s show in which he discussed the corruption of Yee. Excerpts from that blog post:
“I’m not quite through with telling you who Leland Yee is. He is big in California, and running for secretary of state. He’s a state senator. He was practically Piers Morgan’s go-to guy for attacking legal gun owners.
When he would leave an appearance on Piers Morgan, he’d go straight to Twitter. Here’s a typical tweet from Leland Yee back on December 14th: “A year after Sandy Hook, let us recommit ourselves to working towards a safer society for all of us.” I wonder how long Yee might have been allegedly helping to run guns? I wonder if he was involved in Fast and Furious, for example.”
SF Gate reports that Former state Sen. Leland Yee, a force in Bay Area politics for a quarter century, was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $20,000 by a federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday for taking bribes from undercover agents posing as campaign contributors.
After roughly an hour of haggling between Yee and his lawyers, who argued for leniency, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer dressed down Yee in front of the court. “I have the responsibility of sentencing the whole person,” the judge said. “You’ve done a number of very goods things but I don’t think I should be lenient.”
The judge said Yee’s crimes had undermined public faith in democratic institutions. “We must be accepted by the public as having done an honest job. You abused that trust,” Breyer said.
Yee stood stoically in a dark suit. Just before he was sentenced, and after his lawyers had asked for leniency on his behalf, Yee briefly addressed the judge. “Nothing will ever take away the pain I have caused to my friends, family, constituents and the institution I represented,” he said. “In the 67 years of my life, I’ve devoted most of it to the people here in San Francisco and in California.”
The judge took particular umbrage to Yee’s admitted participation in a gun-running conspiracy, considering his public position supporting gun control. The judge called Yee’s participation “inexplicable … unfathomable (and) hypocritical.” “You were willing to go against your stated position for money,” Breyer said. “That’s the most venal thing I’ve seen.”
One of Yee’s causes as a legislator was gun control. But in his guilty plea, Yee admitted agreeing in a March 2014 meeting with Jackson, an undercover agent and the now-deceased Wilson Lim, a Daly City dentist and Yee supporter, to illegally import weapons, including automatic firearms, from the Philippines. Yee said the agent paid him $6,800 in cash.
Read the whole story here.
Enjoy your time in prison, Yee.
DCG
