Despite what Trump says, Israel still sheriff

Fox News falsely reported that he had been removed

Greetings, America, from Broward County, Florida, where as of this writing, Scott Israel is still very much the county sheriff.

Although Florida politics is rife with speculation that new Gov. Ron DeSantis will remove Israel, potentially triggering a legal battle like the one that has surrounded recently removed Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes, it hasn’t happened yet.

However, if you read Fox News’ website Tuesday night, you’d be forgiven for thinking differently. The conservative media operation reported Tuesday that Israel had been removed from office, after local media, including the South Florida Sun Sentinel, had reported throughout the day that Israel himself believed his departure was imminent.

Fox quickly corrected its error — according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine site, the headline of the story had been changed to “DeSantis’ office denies suspending Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel” by 7:30 p.m. Tuesday night. But in these days of rapid-fire social media, the change came far too late.

At 6:01 p.m. Tuesday night, Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing college campus organization Turning Point USA, tweeted:

You can’t really blame Kirk here — at the time of his tweet, he was just writing what he thought to be accurate given the erroneous reporting of Fox News — though it probably wouldn’t hurt to delete the tweet. Because as of Thursday morning, that tweet had been retweeted more than 14,000 times and, unfortunately for folks who care about preventing the spread of false information, one of the most recent retweets — on Thursday morning, well after the initial Fox News report was revealed to be mistaken — was that of President Donald Trump.

The entry for Israel on Wikipedia — the online encyclopedia that is open to public edits — now refers to him as “former sheriff.”

All of which is not to say that Israel won’t soon be suspended from office. DeSantis said he would have removed Israel after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had he been governor at the time. And further hints that he could remove Israel came in mid-December, when the then-governorelect announced a transition team that was to advise him on public safety issues statewide but that was stacked with Broward-based critics of Israel.

Many of the commenters on Kirk’s tweet praised DeSantis’ fictional removal of the sheriff, with quite a few wondering why the sheriff had not been removed immediately after the shooting. The Broward County sheriff is an elected position, and the governor has to leap a very high bar to remove someone put into office by the voters.

Should DeSantis remove Israel, it would mean only a suspension from office. The suspension could then be evaluated by the Florida Senate, which could then launch an investigation and decide whether to remove or reinstate the sheriff.