{"id":40061,"date":"2014-02-26T16:27:43","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T22:27:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/?p=40061"},"modified":"2014-02-26T16:27:43","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T22:27:43","slug":"johnson-brothers-plead-not-guilty-charges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/?p=40061","title":{"rendered":"Johnson Brothers Plead Not Guilty, Charges"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0FARGO, N.D. (AP) &#8211; Two brothers who operated a North Dakota farm have pleaded not guilty to charges they intentionally spoiled potatoes after the 2006 harvest in order to collect disaster payments.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fifty-year-old Aaron Johnson and 47-year-old Derek Johnson, along with their company, Johnson Potato, are charged in federal court with conspiracy and making false statements. They were arraigned in Fargo on Wednesday.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Authorities say the defendants applied chemicals and added spoiled and frozen potatoes to their harvested potatoes, and also turned up the heat in their warehouse <strong>near Cooperstown.\u00a0 <\/strong><br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The brothers allegedly received more than $800,000 in disaster payments.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Both men were released on a promise to appear. Prosecutors argued that Derek Johnson, who lives in British Columbia, should have been forced to stay in the U.S. until the matter is resolved<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0FARGO, N.D. (AP) &#8211; Two brothers who operated a North Dakota farm have pleaded not guilty to charges they intentionally spoiled potatoes after the 2006 harvest in order to collect disaster payments. \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fifty-year-old Aaron Johnson and 47-year-old Derek Johnson, along with their company, Johnson Potato, are charged in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4340,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-state","category-valley-city"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40062,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40061\/revisions\/40062"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}