Virginia Senate President L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic leader behind the state’s redistricting effort, was arrested Thursday in connection with an alleged bribery and racketeering scheme.
In a 45-page indictment filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, Lucas and six co-defendants were charged with conspiring to distribute and possess marijuana, conspiring to launder money, laundering money, and committing bribery by distributing large quantities of illegal marijuana under the auspices of her legal medical cannabis business.
Lucas, an 82-year-old great-grandmother, has served in the Virginia Senate since 1992. She faces five of the eight charges included in the indictment. These charges arrive five months after the FBI raided Lucas’s office in Portsmouth, Virginia, and the neighboring cannabis dispensary she co-owns.
In a phone call in February 2026, Lucas discussed the language surrounding the state’s pending recreational marijuana legislation with an unindicted co-conspirator, according to the charging document. During the phone call, Lucas spoke about the possibility of the co-conspirator receiving a license and sharing the proceeds with her because “this is our last chance at generational wealth.”
“I’ve got too old to not be greedy,” Lucas said, according to the indictment.
In another phone call a month later, Lucas said she hoped that the cannabis legislation would pass in order to make what she’d done legal, because “when I did it, it was obviously illegal.”
Lucas has been a frequent critic of Republicans and President Donald Trump, and is an ally to Virginia’s Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger. The state senator was a central figure in mounting her party’s redistricting efforts earlier this year, which were ultimately blocked by the Virginia Supreme Court.
This story has been updated.