Rep. Marcy Kaptur former employee pleads guilty to stealing thousands from her
A former staffer for U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to stealing over $20,000 from Kaptur’s bank account to pay off her credit card debt.
Courtney Hruska, 40, admitted to committing felony wire fraud at a court hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, according to NBC News. Even though the maximum sentence for the crime is 20 years in prison, the news source reported that Hruska will probably spend less time behind bars when U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema sentences her in June.
The victim of the crime was not explicitly identified as Kaptur in the court filings, but records indicated that Hruska worked for Kaptur’s office in Washington, D.C., from 2015 to 2022 and served as Kaptur’s office scheduler and manager before getting a job as Kaptur’s administrative director.
After leaving Kaptur’s office in 2022, Hruska, “with the assistance of the victim,” began working for the United States Department of Agriculture, according to the filing.
A spokesperson for Kaptur didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News. As of Thursday, Kaptur hasn’t addressed the news in her recent news releases or on social media.
Court papers obtained by the news source said that Kaptur “provided and entrusted the defendant with the victim’s personal credit card and bank account information” and authorized her to “make specific purchases” as part of her official duties and responsibilities.
A “statement of facts” also revealed that, more than a year after 2022, Hruska admitted she began wiring money from Kaptur’s bank account to pay off her credit card debt, making 10 transfers from August 2023 to July 2024, which eventually resulted in Hruska stealing $23,000.
According to Hruska’s statement to prosecutors, she didn’t think she would be caught because she knew that the victim allegedly wasn’t “tech savvy” and “did not use electronic banking in any form,” so she wouldn’t get real-time alerts about the payments.
Despite Hruska’s claims, the victim learned of the transfers in late 2024 when a personal check she had written was returned for insufficient funds, according to the court filing.
According to the statement of facts, Hruska tried to say that she wasn’t responsible for the transfers and that the people who were actually responsible for the crime were “hackers from the dark web.”
“Throughout the investigation into the defendant’s conduct, the defendant repeatedly told investigators — both state and federal — as well as Victim and Victim’s representatives, that ‘hackers from the dark web’ must have been responsible for causing the wires to be sent from Victim’s bank account to pay the defendant’s personal credit card bills,” the filing said. “In truth, these repeated claims were false, and the defendant knew they were false.”
NBC News contacted Hruska’s attorney, but didn’t receive a response.
