NORFOLK, Va. — The Justice Department on Thursday announced a federal grand jury indictment of Virginia Sen. Louise Lucas on felony charges related to alleged marijuana drug trafficking and money laundering.

Prosecutors charged Lucas and six others, including her two daughters, with an alleged racketeering conspiracy involving marijuana distribution, money laundering, honest services fraud through bribery, maintaining drug-involved premises, possession of firearms in furtherance of drug trafficking and wire fraud.

The announcement comes less than two weeks before the November midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. Lucas’ seat is not on the ballot, but the 82-year-old is a powerful Democrat who has served in the state senate for 30 years and chairs the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee.

The charges come five months after FBI agents raided the downtown Portsmouth office that houses her political headquarters and her business serving adults with intellectual disabilities, as well as her nearby CBD shop, The Cannabis Outlet. Agents recovered marijuana and firearms at both locations, according to the DOJ.

According to the indictment unsealed Thursday, Lucas and a close-knit group of associates including her family members orchestrated a criminal enterprise with Lucas’ cannabis business. Prosecutors said she approved and directed activities for the enterprise, including arranging for the acquisition and distribution of at least 100 kilograms of marijuana and supervising the laundering of marijuana proceeds.

“Today’s indictment reveals Louise Lucas allegedly abused her position of public trust as a Virginia State Senator to put her own financial interests ahead of the people she represents,” said FBI Director Kash Patel in a statement.

Patel and U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche traveled to Norfolk Thursday to announce the charges.

“Through her elected office, Senator Lucas has been a public servant,” Blanche said. “Her first duty should have been looking out for her constituents before herself. But the charges listed in the indictment reflect the alleged behavior of a public servant who put her own financial interests before the people she was elected to serve.”

“Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, an elected official, or an everyday citizen, nobody is above the law,” he said.

Patel said at the news conference that Lucas has accumulated “nearly $5 million in ill-gotten gains through her criminal enterprise” over the past five years. “Instead of serving the public as was her job,” Patel said, Lucas “created a criminal enterprise to illicitly enrich themselves” through the marijuana business.

The indictment also charges six others, including Lucas’ daughters Lisa Lucas-Burke and Theresa Lucas-Lamb, and grandson Ryan Eichelberger. It also charges Carlton Upton Jr., a former business partner of Lucas’, along with Prince Albert William Hudson III and Tameka Johnson.

Lucas has been in office since 1992. She’s made no secret of her status as a “grandma who legalized pot and now has her own cannabis store,” and she’s been known to sample her own supply.

Since the raid, Lucas has repeatedly said she didn’t know what was being investigated.

Neither Lucas nor Lucas-Burke could be immediately reached for comment Thursday morning.

But Lucas, who is known for a fiery and at times profane social media presence, did not hold back on social media. In a post made after the DOJ announcement, Lucas said she would not be intimidated or bullied and implied that the charges were retaliatory by President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice for Lucas’s role as a Democrat in Virginia politics.

“Today, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the full weight of the federal government have been wielded against an 82-year-old great-grandmother,” she wrote in a statement. “I grew up under Jim Crow. I’ve seen what happens when people in power try to silence those who stand up to them. I spent my life fighting back, and I’m not stopping now.”

Lucas has previously said the products at the Cannabis Outlet are CBD, which is legal in Virginia, rather than THC, which is currently illegal to buy and sell. Virginia is gearing up for a legal retail market set to take effect July of next year.

Federal prosecutors contend that in August 2022, Lucas paid $750,000 for a 100% stake in a shell company that a co-conspirator was expected to use for a Virginia recreational marijuana license when those begin. She allegedly failed to report this stake on her required Statement of Economic Interests form, required of all state lawmakers.

“Lucas allegedly met with the co-conspirator at her office at the capitol complex to receive a partial repayment and spoke with other officials, including legislators, about the co-conspirator’s qualification for a recreational marijuana license depending on her receipt of a bribery payment,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a news release.

Earlier this year, Lucas made headlines for leading the charge in Virginia to allow for mid-decade redistricting. The effort would have allowed the legislature to draw new congressional maps favoring Democrats in 10 out of Virginia’s 11 districts. But it was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court of Virginia and the Nov. 3 elections are taking place under the preexisting boundaries.

Lucas’ legal troubles surfaced in the public sphere in May when FBI agents raided her downtown Portsmouth business office and her CBD shop, The Cannabis Outlet, located next door. The building at 1214 County St. serves as the office for her business, Lucas Lodge LLC, and her political headquarters.

Lucas’s children – Lucas-Burke, Lucas-Lamb, as well as her grandson Eichelberger – are accused of acquiring marijuana and supervising its distribution at The Cannabis Outlet since the store opened in 2021.

Upton’s CBD Shoppe in downtown Norfolk was raided the same day. Upton, whose business records indicate him as the shop’s owner, is alleged to be Lucas’ business partner in the enterprise.

Upton was indicted on three counts of wire fraud in May, alleging he provided false statements to receive over $100,000 in pandemic era small business relief funds. VA Freedom Life – a parent company beginning in 2019 that both Upton and Lucas’ CBD businesses have operated under – is alleged to have received $11,800 in fraudulent loans in April 2020. The indictment alleges Upton also helped Lucas obtain a recreational marijuana license.

Lucas has maintained that the two severed professional ties in 2022.

“Two or three months in, I saw how messy he was,” Lucas told The Virginian-Pilot in an interview in August. “I said, ‘I’m not going to work with this boy.’ So I went to my lawyer and severed the relationship.”

In May, Upton declined to comment on any past or current relationship.

The FBI was monitoring Lucas’ phone communications in the months leading up to the raid. A U.S. District Court judge authorized the FBI to monitor Lucas’ phone communications between at least March 6 and May 14, according to sealed federal court records.

Virginia Democrats speculated the raid was political retaliation for Lucas’ redistricting campaign. At one point, Lucas sold shirts reading “Ten F****n’ One,” a reference to the proposed maps and a staunch rejection of other, less overtly partisan maps favored by others in her party. It wasn’t the first time Lucas put on her boxing gloves, a metaphor she favors. She previously stonewalled an effort by Youngkin to bring a sports arena — that Lucas dubbed “Glenn Dome” — to Northern Virginia. And she was an instrumental player in legalizing gambling and more recently, retail cannabis.

Though Democrats in Virginia have a trifecta of power, controlling both houses in the legislature and the governor’s mansion, Lucas has made no effort to project party unity. Earlier this year, state budget negotiations ground to a standstill as Lucas refused to budge on the question of whether data centers should be subject to the state’s sales and use tax. She publicly criticized fellow Democrats Gov. Abigail Spanberger and House Speaker Don Scott, who were skeptical of what they said would be going back on deals with businesses. The state teetered on the verge of a government shutdown before Lucas agreed to a down-to-the-wire deal that included a $1.2 billion data center consumption tax to be levied over two years.

Following the raid, supporters launched a legal defense fund. In July, Lucas transferred $300,000 in campaign funds to both the legal defense fund and to her law firm.

Her July 15 campaign finance report lists the $300,000 in expenses as paid June 30, the day before a new state law prohibiting personal use of campaign funds went into effect. 
Lucas supported the legislation, which made its way through the House and Senate unanimously.

In an interview with The Pilot in August, Lucas defended the transfer and said she had already paid her lawyers $100,000 out of her own pockets before then.

“So yes I’m going to use my political funds to help fight the legal part of it,” she said. “That money does not come to me. At the end of this whole process, any money that’s left that came back into the campaign fund does not go into my pocket.”

—Staff writers Peter Dujardin and Nori Leybengrub contributed to this report.

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