Former judge under investigation
“I truly welcome any investigation because I did nothing wrong. I got beat fair and square.”
Former Circuit Judge Thomas Lynch is under investigation on accusations that he violated state election law during his 2020 campaign to become Broward’s public defender.
The investigation was disclosed in an April 6 executive order posted on the governor’s website, assigning the case to Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle. Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor asked the governor to take his office off the case because of a potential conflict of interest — Lynch’s son, Michael Lynch, is a current judge overseeing criminal cases.
No details about the alleged election law violations have been disclosed. The governor’s executive order also names political consultant Michael Ahearn and his wife, Megan Donahue, as targets of the investigation. Donahue was the treasurer of Lynch’s campaign.
Though the executive order was dated April 6, Lynch said he did not become aware of the investigation until late Thursday morning, when a link to the order was posted as an anonymous comment on the courthouse news and gossip website JAABlog.
Former Broward Circuit Judge Thomas Lynch
“I truly welcome any investigation because I did nothing wrong,” Lynch said. “I got beat fair and square.”
Lynch came in last in a threeway race to replace Howard Finkelstein to run the Public
Defender’s Office, which
provides legal representation for criminal defendants who cannot hire their own lawyers. The winner of that race, Gordon Weekes, took office the first week of January.
Lynch became a county court judge in 1984 and a circuit court judge in 1996.
He retired from the bench in 2016, the same year his son was elected, and started his own practice focusing on mediation and expert testimony.
Ahearn said he, like Lynch, did not learn of the executive order until Thursday and declined to comment without knowing the specific allegations were being investigated.