Star Tribune
Former Hennepin County Chief Public Defender Kassius Benson pleads guilty to federal tax evasion
The former Hennepin County chief public defender who resigned amid an investigation indicting him on 17 counts of federal tax evasion pleaded guilty Monday morning.
Kassius Benson appeared in U.S. District Court, admitting before Judge John R. Tunheim that he failed to pay taxes withheld for employees at his Minneapolis-based criminal defense firm, Kassius Benson Law, before taking his public job in January 2021.
As part of his plea deal, Benson must pay the Internal Revenue Service $213,591.81 in restitution. In exchange for pleading guilty to one count of failing to account for and pay over employment taxes, the remaining 16 charges will be dismissed at sentencing in April.
Tunheim said the maximum penalty for the felony offense is up to five years in prison, but he added that the court doesn’t typically impose the maximum. The judge asked Benson if he was aware that he will lose the right to hold public office with the felony conviction.
“I’m aware, Your Honor,” he said.
Benson’s comments in court were mostly brief, yes or no answers. He sat flanked by three attorneys — Daniel Adkins, Edward Ungvarsky and Andrew Wise. In a near empty courtroom gallery his partner, who didn’t wish to be named, sat in the front row.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Lin and Assistant Chief Matthew J. Kluge, who both work in the Justice Department’s Tax Division, prosecuted the case and negotiated the plea deal with Benson’s legal team.
Before going over facts of the plea, Benson provided some background on his life. He said he was 52, born in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Minot, N.D. He earned his law degree from the University of Minnesota and said he is currently employed.
Benson is still senior counsel and lead trial lawyer at his private firm that lists no other employees on its website. His law license is active and in good standing, according to state judicial branch records.
The state Board of Public Defense hired Benson to lead the Hennepin County Public Defenders Office just six months after the IRS lodged its probe into his firm in July 2020.
Minnesota State Public Defender Bill Ward didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment Monday. Ward previously said he was unaware of the IRS investigation before hiring Benson.
At his private firm, Benson employed at least five people in 2013 and again from 2015-2019, and failed to file proper quarterly forms and turn over $159,262 in taxes he withheld during that stretch, the affidavit said.
As the sole shareholder, he was responsible for the collection and payment of employment taxes and filing the appropriate quarterly IRS forms, according to the federal search warrant affidavit.
A revenue agent began an audit relating to forms that Benson was to have filed in 2017. The agent expanded the investigation to 2013 and 2015-2019 upon finding that Benson had failed to pay employment taxes, unemployment taxes and to file the forms.
The U.S. grand jury indictment charged him with 14 counts of failing to account for and pay the employment taxes due and owed to the IRS on behalf of his employees between 2016 and 2020, for a total nearing $125,000.
Benson was also charged with three counts of aiding and assisting in the preparation and presentation of false and fraudulent tax returns, statements and other documents. The false income tax withheld for those charges is nearly $50,000, according to the indictment.
In June 2022, Benson faced questions about whether he was improperly continuing to take private clients in his new chief public defender job. He said he wasn’t.
As chief public defender, he received a $145,288 salary and oversaw 200 employees. His resignation in October 2022 came just two days after Wayzata police cited him for drunken driving.
Benson’s legal team provided the following statement to the Star Tribune:
“Kassius Benson accepts responsibility for his actions, for which he is deeply remorseful and which will impact him both personally and professionally for years to come. We look forward to presenting the Court at sentencing with a full picture of the remarkable work he has done in this community and elsewhere over the past 25 years.”
Star Tribune staff writer Rochelle Olson contributed to this story.
Star Tribune
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, legislators celebrate passing of new law designed to kill 2040 Plan lawsuit
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, legislators and developers gathered Tuesday on the rooftop of Wakpada Apartments in south Minneapolis to celebrate a new state law exempting the comprehensive plans of metro-area cities from environmental legal challenges.
The law states that the broad plans cities create to guide growth cannot be considered conduct that could lead to pollution or environmental destruction, as plans for specific projects may be. That means a six-year lawsuit that had repeatedly interrupted Minneapolis’ pro-density 2040 Plan is “functionally” dead, said Rep. Mike Howard, chair of the House Housing Committee. The plan made Minneapolis the first city in the nation to end single-family zoning.
“Without legislative action, this lawsuit was holding up the status quo (of exclusionary zoning,)” said Howard, DFL-Richfield. “Nothing is more dangerous to addressing our housing crisis than the status quo, because it’s the status quo that has got us into this mess. We will not build the homes that we need to meet this moment without ingenuity at all levels of government.”
Wakpada Apartments, where the gathering was held, was completed in 2022 by Hall Sweeney Properties, and includes 8% of units affordable at 60% area median income; that would not have been possible without the 2040 Plan, developer Sean Sweeney said.
The liberated zoning restrictions for the property, located at Minnehaha and East 46th Street, allowed him to build six stories of 126 units instead of four stories of 60 units. That difference balanced the project financially to allow for the inclusion of affordable apartments, Sweeney said.
“Without a doubt that being a developer in Minneapolis, especially now with the 2040 Plan, is an absolute dream,” Sweeney said.
The Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis, the Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds and Smart Growth Minneapolis sued the city in 2018, arguing the 2040 Plan could pollute natural resources and usher gentrification and displacement, warranting a study to identify the environmental tradeoffs of densification. Nonstop injunctions, appeals and reversals since then injected chaos and uncertainty into development in Minneapolis.
The Minnesota Supreme Court decided in 2022 that citizens were entitled to challenging municipal comprehensive plans under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act. But in May, the Court of Appeals threw out a prior ruling halting the 2040 Plan pending environmental review. The appeals court allowed Minneapolis to immediately resume approving stalled projects, but city officials feared it would not last without a law change.
Six days later, the Minnesota Legislature passed Rep. Sydney Jordan’s comprehensive plan bill in the chaotic final hour of the legislative session as part of a 1,400-page Omnibus Tax Bill.
“As a Minneapolis house delegation, all 11 of us were united and made this our no. 1 priority and stood strong to ensure that it was passed,” said Jordan, DFL-Minneapolis.
The lawsuit’s plaintiffs have petitioned the Supreme Court to reinstate the injunction against the 2040 Plan in part because of how it had been incorporated into the tax bill. A provision of the state constitution, adopted in 1857, states legislators may not roll bills on unrelated topics together in the interest of transparency.
The Attorney General’s Office has filed a motion to defend the constitutionality of the new law.
Frey said the city would continue to fight the lawsuit if needed.
“When we recognized that we had a long-term issue with exclusionary zoning that segregated both people and neighborhoods, we knew that we had a lot of work to do to be more inclusive,” he said. “We are seeing right now some of the lowest rent increases in the entire country. That’s in part due to the supply increase that we’ve seen … and of course that’s due to the 2040 Plan.”
Lori Tocholke waited nervously near baggage claim carousel 11 Tuesday afternoon at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, her heart “beating a thousand miles per hour.”
On March 12, Tocholke’s newest grandchild, Greyson Leo Phillips, was born, 2 pounds 2.6 ounces and 12 weeks ahead of schedule.
The premature birth was traumatic enough for Tocholke’s daughter, Cheri Phillips. Worse was the fact that Greyson was born while Phillips and her husband, Chris, were vacationing in Brazil.
Because of a technicality, Brazilian authorities refused to issue his birth certificate. Without a birth certificate, Greyson couldn’t get a U.S. passport. And without a U.S. passport, Greyson couldn’t go home to Minnesota.
The family’s travails caused a storm in Brazilian media, held up as an example of how the country’s bureaucracy can tie up daily life for no good reason.
At the airport Tuesday, a half-dozen news cameras encircled the entry to baggage claim.
All Tocholke wanted?
To hold her newest grandchild for the first time, 105 heart-wrenching days after he was born. Tocholke told the other waiting family members she had first dibs.
The plane landed at 1:48 p.m., seven minutes early. Tocholke bided her time as Chris, Cheri and Greyson gathered their things from the plane and made their way from gate G19 to baggage claim.
Suddenly, a stroller burst through the doors, then Cheri, then Chris: a happy, exhausted family, finally home. Applause erupted. Tocholke hugged her daughter, then she got down to the business at hand: That sweet baby boy.
Greyson’s silver-blue eyes peered up at his grandma as she scooped him out of the stroller and cooed. He cried a few times. “Oh, I know!” his grandma soothed. She snuggled him and jiggled him, and he quieted. She held him like a football, then passed him to another family member, who passed him to another, then another.
“Everybody’s here, everybody’s safe, my heart is full,” Tocholke said.
A few feet away, tears and sweat streamed down Chris Phillips’ face and chest, exhausted after three days of travel and months of uncertainty. The family had gone to Brazil to visit Chris’ 8-year-old daughter, who lives with her mom in the Brazilian coastal city of Florianópolis.
“It was an ordeal, and not something we ever expected,” he said. “We went down for 17 days, just to visit my daughter on her birthday. Along this entire process, it seems like every time we made one step forward, it was three steps back.”
During their sojourn in Brazil, the family did interviews with a slew of Brazilian media outlets, focusing on the gaps in Brazilian bureaucracy. Their story resonated. Three days after Minnesota media first published the family’s story, two representatives from the Brazilian cartorio, like a public notary, came to their AirBnb with Greyson’s birth certificate.
“We love Brazil; this wasn’t us hating Brazil,” Chris said. “I go there three times a year. My daughter is half Brazilian. Now my son’s been born in Brazil. I feel part Brazilian. It’s a wonderful place. But what do I hope changes? I hope Brazilian bureaucracy is behind us, but for hundreds of millions of Brazilians, it’s not.”
Before they left the airport for the hour drive to Cambridge — to the new home they closed on remotely from Brazil — Cheri pulled out a bottle and fed Greyson.
“He’s been alive for three and a half months and never been home,” Cheri said.
“We’re home, bud,” Chris said, patting his head. “We’re home.”
The Mississippi River lapped at the edges of the Minnesota Boat Club on Raspberry Island in St. Paul Tuesday afternoon, as waters in the capital city approached “major” flood stage.
The river, on the rise with recent heavy rains, has also overtaken some bike and pedestrian paths near its banks, and high water has led to the closure of flood-prone park areas and roads, including Shepard Road from Eagle Parkway to Highway 61 and Water Street.
As of 3 p.m. Tuesday, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) gauge on the Mississippi River at St. Paul put the stage of the flood at 16.83 feet — just below what’s considered “major” flood stage at the site, 17 feet, which it was expected to hit by 7 p.m.
The river is forecast to continue rising through the end of the week, cresting at 20.9 feet in the early hours of Saturday.
That’s well below the record crest for this site: Waters reached a flood stage of 26.01 feet in 1965. The river last surpassed 20 feet at the St. Paul gauge in 2019. Many low-lying areas in St. Paul are parks.
The St. Paul Parks and Recreation urged St. Paul park users to be cautious around high water, noting water levels can change quickly and without warning. Information on St. Paul Park closures can be found at https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/parks-and-recreation/special-notices-closures.
