Former Missouri House Speaker John Diehl, a Republican, was sentenced to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty last year to misusing federal COVID-19 relief loans for personal expenses. Diehl, a St. Louis-area attorney, “committed $379,900 in pandemic fraud,” the Justice Department stated. He has already repaid the loan money. Ex-Missouri House Speaker John Diehl sentenced to federal prison for fraud https://t.co/EHN5gVBigd — St. Louis-area politics (@stlpolitics) March 9, 2026 More from the Missouri Independent: His attorneys asked the court last month for a non-custodial sentence, arguing in part that he repaid the money. Prosecutors pushed back on that argument, saying repayment should not be treated as an “extraordinary” basis for leniency because Diehl is a “man of great and substantial means.” Prosecutors say he used the funds for personal expenses including payments on a Tesla, Audi and Jeep, mortgage payments, pool maintenance, additional country club charges and cash withdrawals. The filing also says he used about $200,000 of the loan money to fund a defined benefit plan for his law firm in which he was the sole participant. Diehl also allegedly used some of the funds to pay off “a civil settlement related to his time as Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives.” Prosecutors did not specify the nature of that settlement or whether it is connected to the scandal that forced him from office in 2015, which involved sending sexually inappropriate text messages to a 19-year-old House intern. Diehl will be allowed to report to prison at a later date. “Although he legitimately obtained pandemic relief loans for his law practice, Diehl diverted those funds for personal use rather than the purposes Congress intended,” said Special Agent in Charge Chris Crocker of the FBI St. Louis Division. “Relief programs like these were created to help small businesses survive the COVID-19 pandemic—not to line someone’s pockets,” Crocker added. USA TODAY shared further: “This defendant’s law practice didn’t suffer at all during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Hal Goldsmith said during court, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri. Goldsmith said Diehl did not use any of the loans for his law firm, adding that Diehl “saw a way to make some easy and cheap money.” According to prosecutors, Diehl applied for the federal loan in March 2020 and received $94,900. About two years later, he requested a loan modification and obtained $285,000 from the second loan. In those applications, prosecutors said Diehl signed an agreement form in which he falsely certified that his law firm “will use all the proceeds of this Loan solely as working capital to alleviate economic injury caused by disaster occurring in the month of January 31, 2020, and continuing thereafter.”