Amesty: Criminal charges are “clear religious prosecution and a further personal political attack”

Following U.S. Attorney Roger B. Handberg’s Jan. 16 criminal complaint filing accusing former District 45 Florida state Rep. Carolina Amesty of two counts of theft of government property related to COVID relief fraud, Amesty is calling the complaint “clear religious prosecution and a further personal political attack against me.”

In a post on X, Amesty published a letter authored by her attorney, Bradley J. Bondi, of Paul Hastings, and sent to Sen. Josh Hawley, Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee. 

“We write to bring to your attention an 11th-hour prosecution by the Biden administration brought on Jan. 16, 2025 — just four days before the change of administration — that we believe is emblematic of the weaponization of the Department of Justice by the last administration,” Bondi wrote. “We represent former Florida state Rep. Carolina Amesty, a Christian youth pastor and Republican, who was criminally charged by United States Attorney Roger Handberg just days before President Trump took office. Ms. Amesty — who is innocent of these charges — is a leader in the Orlando-area Hispanic Christian community as an ordained youth pastor and a former Florida state representative. While in office, she advanced high-profile Christian positions on a variety of issues. Ms. Amesty now faces unwarranted persecution from the carry­over, Biden-nominated U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida, who has taken the rare step of personally leading the prosecution against Ms. Amesty. 

“At the time of the false allegations against her, Ms. Amesty was a highly devoted youth pastor in her 20s who laudably dedicated her time and limited finances to the betterment of Central Christian University and the network of Christian non-profit organizations, which her father, Pastor Juan Carlos Amesty, founded,” he wrote. “Her efforts included contributing $35,000 of her own money to Central Christian University in 2017, when she was just 23 years old — and three years before the government alleges she acted improperly by taking out Small Business Administration Economic Injury Disaster Loans on behalf of her father's religious organizations and other businesses he ran, most of which, in turn, serviced those various Christian non-profits. 

“In addition to the U.S. attorney's personal involvement in the case, the timing and legal mechanism by which the charges were brought underscore the potentially political nature of this prosecution,” Bondi wrote. “On Jan. 13, 2025, we wrote to U.S. Attorney Handberg, requesting a meeting to present exculpatory evidence on our first available date between Jan. 23 and 28. In that letter, we also provided notice of our intention to have Ms. Amesty testify before the grand jury in her own defense if U.S. Attorney Handberg sought to proceed forward with charges. 

“Not only did U.S. Attorney Handberg refuse to wait until after an attorney presentation to charge Ms. Amesty, but he also was unwilling to wait for a grand jury to evaluate potential charges against Ms. Amesty before charging her,” he wrote. “This decision is striking because it is uncommon for felony cases to be prosecuted in the Middle District of Florida on the basis of a complaint rather than an indictment. Moreover, there are no statute of limitations issues at play here. Accordingly, there was no legitimate need to rush to charge Ms. Amesty via Complaint on Jan. 16, 2025, rather than awaiting the completion of a full grand jury investigation. 

“The approach here raises the specter of a troubling political motive: to lock in charges against Ms. Amesty before the new administration would take over just four days later,” Bondi wrote. “The government's allegations in that criminal complaint are troubling both for what they do say, and for what they do not. Absent from the government's allegations are any of the sorts of extravagant personal expenditures, which have routinely characterized both high- and low-profile COVID loan prosecutions. Instead, the government lists 15 organizations founded or sponsored by Ms. Amesty's family for which the Amestys took out EIDL applications — 11 of which are Christian non-profit organizations, and the other four of which are private businesses. All of the for-profit businesses at issue here already have paid back their loans, despite having been entitled to repay those loans over a period of 30 years. 

“The remaining entities (that) received SBA EIDL funding are all Christian non-profit organizations, each of which had been operating and serving the Orlando-area Hispanic Christian community before the COVID pandemic: Central Christian University, a Christian college founded twenty years ago; Central Christian Academy, a Christian primary and high school; Central Christian University Holding Corp; Concilio Iglesia de Dios Misionera, an association of Hispanic evangelical Christian churches; Iglesia de Dios Misionera Okeechobee, an evangelical Christian church; Venezolanos en Orlando, a group dedicated to celebrating Venezuelan culture and its Christian religious heritage; and the Hispanic Christian Church Association, another association of Hispanic Christian churches,” he wrote.

“The purported irregularities in Ms. Amesty's EIDL applications are readily explainable by shortcomings in the application process itself,” he wrote. “The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act was crafted to prioritize expediency, and to get aid to as many affected business and non-profits as quickly as possible. In an effort to achieve those aims, the SBA left EIDL applicants like Ms. Amesty to navigate an application process that, by the SBA's own later admission, was vague and 'confusing.'

"The SBA has since conceded that the COVID EIDL application did not clearly define 'employee' for applicants,” Bondi wrote. “Consequently, sole proprietors and independent contractors may have included independent contractors, seasonal workers or other individuals who do not meet the IRS definition of 'employee' in their COVID EIDL application.

“The same lack of guidance existed for the EIDL application's request for an organization's revenues,” he wrote. “The application requested applicants' revenues for the 12-month period preceding Jan. 31, 2020. Yet in contradictory fashion, the EIDL application process welcomed any business (that) existed as of Jan. 31, 2020 — thus allowing for applications based on less than a full year of business and inherently affirming the propriety of including revenue projections in the application. 

"Ms. Amesty acted diligently in completing her loan applications. Her phone records prove her conscientiousness, showing that she made at least 17 calls to the SBA seeking guidance on the SBA's admittedly vague application process. During one of those calls, an SBA administrator explicitly informed Ms. Amesty that she could appropriately put a projected revenue figure on the EIDL applications. A review of public sources confirms that the SBA routinely gave this same advice to others. 

"Although the EIDL application was undoubtedly vague and confusing even in the case of for-profit businesses, the applicable business concepts are inherently subject to even more varied interpretation in the case of non-profits, and religious organizations in particular,” he wrote, “Nonetheless, SBA regulations enacted by the first Trump Administration expressly clarified that "faith-based organizations are eligible to receive SBA Joans regardless of whether they provide secular social services." Moreover, those regulations provided explicit protection for religious organizations' good faith, and faith-based, determinations concerning their compliance with the EIDL application requirements. 

“Despite these protections, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida has seen fit to employ an FBI forensic accountant to subject the Amesty family and the various churches and Christian non-profit organizations they represent to a level of accounting rigor far beyond the scope of what Congress envisioned for even for-profit entities in passing the CARES Act,” Bondi wrote. “In the government's complaint, the government took issue with the way these Christian organizations used the EIDL applications to support each other — including taking Ms. Amesty to task for transferring EIDL proceeds to Central Christian University from the Carolina Amesty Foundation, a Christian non-profit fundraising organization she established for the very purpose of funding that university. 

“The criminal complaint ignores the SBA regulations that provide protection for religious organizations' good faith, and faith-based, determinations about which other religious organizations they count among their affiliates,” he wrote. “Those regulations directed that the ‘SBA will not assess and will not permit participating lenders to assess, the reasonableness of a faith-based organization's good-faith determination’ about whether a fellow religious organization constitutes an ‘affiliate.’

“Ms. Amesty is completely innocent of the false charges against her,” Bondi wrote. “The false charges against Ms. Amesty constitute a grave injustice which the U.S. attorney has taken in contravention of Ms. Amesty's Constitutional rights and the protections afforded by the SBA regulations in force in 2020. 

“We respectfully request that you take steps to investigate the nature of this problematic prosecution that was initiated four days prior to the change in administration,” he wrote. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida on Tuesday, Feb. 18, announced the departure of Roger B. Handberg as U.S. attorney. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara C. Sweeney will serve as the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida.

“During my more than three years as U.S. States, I made it a priority to engage with the community, to hear directly from the people that my office served to learn about their priorities and what is important to them, and to let them know about the great work that is being done by law enforcement,” Handberg said. “As part of those efforts, I made more than 100 speeches and presentations to local organizations, bar associations and chambers of commerce, and at other gatherings and press conferences. From my many conversations with members of the community and law enforcement leaders, I tried to focus the efforts of the U.S. Attorney’s Office on the matters of most pressing concern.”