Arizona official accused of smuggling mothers to US to give up babies for adoption
Maricopa County Assessor quits amid allegations he told pregnant women 'all you girls work for me, not the other way around'
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Your support makes all the difference.An elected official in one of the largest counties in the US resigned from his post after being charged in three states with allegedly smuggling pregnant women into the country and giving up their babies for adoption.
Maricopa County Assessor Paul Petersen of Arizona is accused of arranging for 28 women from the Marshall Islands to fly into the state, live in a house he owned, and have a doctor deliver their babies, paid for through the state's healthcare system, before the children were offered up for adoption.
He is charged with human smuggling in Arkansas and Utah and for filing $800,000 in fraudulent claims to Arizona's Medicaid system.
Mr Peterson is accused of participating in 70 illegal adoption cases, exploiting women who received little to no prenatal care upon their arrival, after which he stole their passports, according to authorities. The scheme was allegedly arranged through his private sector work as an adoption attorney.
He has pleaded not guilty in Arizona and Arkansas, but he has not yet entered a plea in Utah.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors suspended Mr Petersen in October following his arrest.
In a resignation letter delivered on Tuesday, Mr Peterson declared his innocence and accused the Board of Supervisors and media reports for presuming his guilt.
He insisted that he never neglected his duties while in office, and that his suspension was based on "anything but" his performance as assessor for the state's most populous county, which includes Phoenix and surrounding areas.
Mr Peterson said his "focus now turns to defending the allegations" against him.
He said: "Those allegations will ultimately be resolved in a courtroom, where rules and the Constitution still matter."
Mr Petersen had appealed his suspension, but an investigation that took place during the appeal revealed thousands of adoption-related documents on his county-owned laptop, including "shocking" messages between the assessor and birth mothers who were seeking to back out of the adoption process.
The report also found that the laptop was "wiped" twice before Mr Peterson turned it over to investigators, who were able to recover some data from cloud storage.
Among the messages recovered, Mr Peterson allegedly wrote "all you girls work for me, not the other way around" and made threats to one mother to remove his name from her apartment lease, forcing her eviction.
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