Chris Rabb’s former campaign treasurer pleads guilty to defrauding him and others of $1 million
Yolanda Brown, a Florida-based campaign consultant, was accused of steering thousands of dollars worth of donations to Rabb into separate accounts that she controlled.
Philadelphia State Rep. Chris Rabb’s former campaign treasurer, whom he accused of draining his campaign account and disappearing in the middle of his run for Congress, pleaded guilty Wednesday to a federal fraud charge.
Yolanda Brown, a campaign operative formerly based in Florida who worked for Democratic political candidates and social justice causes across the country, appeared in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia Wednesday and pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud. She admitted to embezzling a total of about $1 million from 20 clients, including Rabb, between 2022 and 2026.
Brown, who now lives in Virginia, faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and will be required to pay restitution. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Jan. 26.
Rabb, a progressive, went on to win the Democratic nomination in May. He is expected to prevail in the November general election to represent Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District. There is no Republican candidate, though he faces a long-shot independent opponent.
Rabb did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
» READ MORE: From Florida to Philly, a political consultant kept working as fraud claims piled up against her
For years, fraud claims from several political campaigns piled up against Brown, who operated Brown Financial & Consulting Services Group and at times worked under her married name, Yolanda Rumph. She was accused of financial impropriety in several states, The Inquirer reported, including shaving money from accounts she controlled to embezzling from a nonprofit client.
But she continued working in politics, and in August 2025, signed on to work for Rabb, who was in the midst of a highly competitive Democratic primary run for an open seat in Congress representing about half of Philadelphia.
In January, Ken Welch, the mayor of St. Petersburg, Fla., said that he had reported Brown to law enforcement after she misappropriated $207,000 from his campaign committee.
The following month, Rabb said that Brown had made a series of unauthorized withdrawals from his campaign. The amount of money embezzled totaled more than $160,000, which constituted most of what was in his campaign’s account at the time, according to paperwork Rabb’s campaign filed with the Federal Elections Commission.
Khambrel Davis, Brown’s attorney, said in an interview with The Inquirer in March that Brown was innocent and merely the victim of a rogue employee who had stolen from her clients.
But on Wednesday in court, Brown acknowledged that she executed a scheme to defraud her clients of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
» READ MORE: Chris Rabb’s former campaign treasurer was charged with wire fraud for routing money into her own bank account
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Livermore told District Court Judge Chad F. Kenney that Brown “embezzled client funds in her control to pay for her own personal expenses without authorization from her clients.”
He added that she “often used client funds to repay other clients from whom she had previously stolen funds.”
In charging documents, prosecutors wrote that in one instance, Brown steered about $19,000 from the account belonging to Rabb’s campaign — identified in court filings as “Political Campaign #1″ — into a separate account that she controlled. She then transferred $6,000 of that money into her personal bank account.
That transfer was one of multiple unauthorized transfers that Rabb’s campaign detected. Prosecutors often formally charge a limited scope of wrongdoing if a defendant has agreed to plead guilty.
Prosecutors described the fraud perpetrated against Rabb’s campaign as part of an “overall scheme” in which Brown defrauded about 20 clients of a total of more than $1.4 million. They wrote that she had repaid clients more than $400,000, for a net loss of about $1 million.
