Ex-Clarkston resident Chris Clemens pleads guilty to federal fraud charges

Chris Clemens, a former member of the Lewiston-Nez Perce County Regional Airport Authority Board and short-term interim manager of the airport, has pleaded guilty to two federal fraud charges.

Vanessa Waldref, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, made the announcement Wednesday.

Clemens, 42, of Harrisburg, Pa., and formerly of Clarkston, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States for bribing a federal contracting official with the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs and fraudulently obtaining a contract with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in Moses Lake, Wash., according to a news release from the Department of Justice.

Sentencing is scheduled to take place at 11 a.m. on May 29 at the Thomas Foley Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Spokane.

According to a news release, the plea agreement stated that Calandra Charging Eagle was a contracting official at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Albuquerque, N.M., and Clemens’ company, Hamilton’s West, was a government contracting company seeking federal government contracts.

In June through October 2018, Clemens and Charging Eagle were involved in a bribery scheme in which he agreed to pay Charging Eagle’s $10,700 debt to the Sandia Resort and Casino in exchange for her using her position to give Bureau of Indian Affairs contracts to Clemens.

One of the projects was a more than $500,000 contract for improvements to the Navajo Nation’s Pine Hill School in New Mexico. Clemens was given access to confidential and internal information to give him an unfair advantage in obtaining those contracts.

In October 2020, a grand jury indicted Clemens with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and Charging Eagle with felony counts of paying and accepting a bribe. Charging Eagle pleaded guilty to accepting a bribe in December 2021 and was sentenced to two years of probation in March 2022, according to the news release

Before Charging Eagle pled guilty, Clemens entered into an agreement with the court and was ordered not to commit any more crimes and not engage in any federal contracting or subcontracting for five years, according to the news release.

But in January 2022, two months after the order, Clemens falsely certified that he was not prohibited from federal contracting through a new company. In August 2022, based on the false and fraudulent certification, Clemens obtained a contract with the FAA in Moses Lake, Wash.

Between August 2022 and October 2023, Clemens claimed to be the vice president of the new company and the FAA paid $479,818 for a design-build contract, which it wouldn’t have paid if the FAA knew Clemens wasn’t allowed to have the contract, according to the news release.

Clemens admitted in the plea agreement that he’d conspired with others to commit the fraud of the FAA as part of conspiring to defraud the U.S., including his previous bribe to Charging Eagle, according to the news release.

“Bribing a federal official is a serious violation that undermines the basic fairness that we all expect and deserve from our government,” said Waldref in the news release. “Similarly, ignoring a court order and continuing to fraudulently engage in federal contracting cannot and will not be tolerated.”

Waldref also thanked law enforcement partners and the Department of Interior and the Office of Inspector General Western Region who investigated the case. Assistant U.S. attorneys Tyler Tornabene and Dan Fruchter prosecuted the case for the U.S., according to the news release.

In Nez Perce County in 2019, Clemens pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for illegally registering to vote in Nez Perce County. He was sentenced to a withheld judgment to serve 100 hours of community service, unsupervised probation for one year and pay a $1,000 fine.

He was initially charged with a felony. According to the probable cause affidavit, Clemens fraudulently voted in the 2016 election by using his Lewiston business address as his residence instead of his home in Washington.