{"id":141694,"date":"2026-03-18T13:08:18","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T13:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/141694\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T13:08:18","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T13:08:18","slug":"pittsburgh-area-defense-contractor-found-guilty-of-defrauding-the-pentagon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/141694\/","title":{"rendered":"Pittsburgh area defense contractor found guilty of defrauding the Pentagon"},"content":{"rendered":"

A federal jury has found a Pittsburgh area defense contractor guilty on 13 counts of violating federal fraud and tax laws.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania, 75-year-old Donald Smith was found guilty of eight charges of wire fraud and five counts of failing to file a corporate tax return.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From 2019 through 2023, evidence showed that Smith underwent a process that defrauded the Defense Logistics Agency, the department that provides material to every branch of the U.S. military.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Smith presented products to the agency and charged payments of more than $1 million dollars, but the products were not what he promised or described.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On top of the scheme, Smith also failed to file corporate tax returns reporting any of the payments his company received during that time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The jury deliberated for approximately two hours before returning the guilty verdict. For the wire fraud counts, Smith is facing a maximum sentence of up to 20 years of imprisonment or a fine of up to $250,000. As for the tax violations, he is facing up to a year in prison on each count or a fine of no more than $100,000 or twice the gain from the offense.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He will be sentenced at a later date.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal jury has found a Pittsburgh area defense contractor guilty on 13 counts of violating federal fraud…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21745,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[10716,54617,73,75,74],"class_list":["post-141694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-fraud","tag-pentagon","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}