Tan Nguyen–the bizarre Little Saigon political figure who couldn't decide if he was a Republican or a Democrat–at least had one question resolved today: his future housing situation.
Federal Judge David O. Carter has sentenced Nguyen to spend 366 days in prison followed by six months in a halfway house for lying to investigators about his role in a scheme to intimidate Latino voters from voting in his 2006 race against incumbent Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez.
Despite the scheme, Sanchez trounced Nguyen by capturing more than 62 percent of the vote in the central Orange County congressional district composed of Santa Ana, Anaheim and Garden Grove.
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In 2004, Nguyen ran as a Democrat in hopes of toppling another OC congressperson, Dana Rohrabacher (R-Skipped Vietnam War Duty).
A native of South Vietnam and a man who has clearly struggled to
understand simple ethical concepts in the U.S., Nguyen has long claimed
he had no role in devising a pre-election letter that sought to
frighten 14,000 Latino citizens from voting. Multiple investigations
proved otherwise, yet Nguyen attempted to convert his status as a
convicted felon into a martyrdom. That effort pathetically failed, too.
“The Civil Rights Division is committed to protecting the voting rights
of all individuals,” Thomas E. Perez, an assistant attorney general at
the Department of Justice, said in a press statement. “We simply will not
tolerate those who attempt to interfere with efforts to enforce civil-rights laws in our nation.”
Carter gave Nguyen until March 28 to begin serving his sentence.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.