Why are state investigators MIA on Senate race probes?
Maxwell: Local officials pass the buck on who needs to be contacted for complaints in cases like Seminole County state Senate race.
Last Wednesday, I wrote about the arrest of a former state senator accused of paying a buddy nearly $45,000 in undisclosed cash and credit-card payments to run as a stooge candidate in a South Florida legislative race.
My main question: Why aren’t Central Florida investigators looking into similarly shady behavior in a Seminole County state Senate race won by Jason Brodeur?
After all, there are many connections, including the same dark-money group funding ads for mysterious third-party candidates in both races.
The Miami-Dade state attorney looked at the shady activity and declared: “In my community, election crimes will not be tolerated … they will be prosecuted.”
But in Seminole County, state attorney Phil Archer said he doesn’t consider investigating crimes to be his job. Only prosecuting.
That struck me as … inconsistent.
Apparently I wasn’t alone. On Thursday, Florida’s entire Democratic congressional delegation asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate. Then on Friday, state Senate Democrats did as well.
Good. I hope U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland dives in and gets answers. The public deserves to know who’s meddling in its elections and hiding information.
But I still must ask: Why is no one locally looking into all this?
Well, Archer said he never received a formal complaint the way his South Florida counterpart did, but also stressed he believes state elections officials and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement are better suited to investigate such things than his office.
So I tried to follow that logic. First, I reached out to FDLE Commissioner Rick Swearington to ask why he wasn’t investigating.
As spokeswoman responded that FDLE usually waits for someone else to ask them to investigate — someone like … wait for it … a local state attorney.
So, Archer said the FDLE should do it. And the FDLE said it usually waits to hear from someone like Archer. It’s like a “Who’s On First?” sketch.
Then I went to Florida’s top election official, Secretary of State Laurel Lee. A spokesman for Lee said investigating possible election improprieties wasn’t her job either.
If buck-passing was an Olympic sport, Florida would dominate the podium.
Listen, I get the value of formal complaints. But if I wrote a column saying I heard someone was planning an attack on FDLE headquarters, I doubt FDLE staffers wait until someone filed a formal complaint to ask questions.
Plus, we’ve seen FDLE respond to news coverage before.
I once wrote that someone needed to investigate troubling accusations made by two former staffers of then-property appraiser Rick Singh. The FDLE responded the next day, saying it would do so.
Yes, the next day. Singh is a Democrat.
But in this case — which involves races won by Republicans, and where a former GOP senator has already been charged with a crime — FDLE says it needs a formal complaint.
“We would certainly review any criminal complaints we receive,” said FDLE spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger. “If you or any of your readers has potential evidence of a crime, please contact FDLE.”
I guess eight months of statewide news coverage — followed by an arrest of a former legislator — isn’t enough.
To recap that coverage: Former GOP Sen. Frank Artiles is accused of paying unreported money to what’s
known as a “ghost candidate” — a candidate who didn’t actually campaign for office. Brodeur’s race also featured a mysterious, non-party-affiliated ghost candidate.
Both ghost candidates were promoted by political committees that reported receiving their funding on the same day from the same dark-money group — first disclosed as an Atlanta-based organization called Proclivity and then later changed to claim the money came from a Denver-based group called Grow United.
That dark money paid for mailers (purchased on the same day from the same Lake County print shop) that promoted the two NPA candidates in virtually identical ways — as liberals, in an attempt to siphon votes from the Democrats in the races.
Artiles was also with Brodeur in Central Florida on election night, bragging about his successful scheming in the South Florida race, according to the Miami Herald.
Also, there’s another, entirely different dark-money operation — one that blanketed Brodeur’s district with mailers — that no one seems to have probed yet.
Even though state law requires groups to disclose their funding source, the laughably named “Floridians for Equality and Justice” simply declared its $249,925.54 as a “starting balance” … as if it came out of nowhere.
A leading election law attorney said he couldn’t see any way
such a thing was legal.
So way back in August, I asked Lee if she’d asked anyone to look into the propriety of that money. She had not.
That inaction prompted that election law attorney, Mark Herron, to file a lawsuit on behalf of Florida Democrats that tried to do what state officials would not — find out where this money came from.
But Herron has been unable to do so. Why? Because Herron said he can’t find any evidence that the man listed as running the committee, Stephen Jones, “actually exists.”
So a group being run by a man who may or may not exist refused to provide any meaningful information about its money, as state law suggests it should … and no state official seems to care.
I don’t yet know whether anyone did anything wrong in this race. What we do know is that South Florida investigators looked around and found big problems — while Central Florida and state authorities couldn’t seem to care less.
If junkyards had watchdogs like these, there’d be burglaries every night.
Hopefully the feds will answer the call to action and get to the bottom of all this. Yet how sad that Central Floridians have to look to Washington to get answers about what’s happening in their own backyard.