Maybe Seminole County is the place to plan your next political crime. Here, no one seems to care | Commentary
In the last week, the Orlando Sentinel has revealed more damning details about a shady state Senate race in Seminole County — one involving dark money, a mysterious NPA candidate and, now, sworn testimony about forged documents.
In a moment, I’m going to list some of the new potentially criminal acts we’ve highlighted.
But before I do, I wanted to share a fear: I’m not sure any of it matters.
Why? Because Seminole County may be the perfect place to commit a political crime. There, the watchdogs rarely bark or even seem to care.
Maybe we already knew this. Seminole, after all, is the same county where Joel Greenberg and his band of bro-horts wreaked havoc until the feds finally swooped in. Yes, the feds.
Greenberg was a local official now accused of abusing his local office and local tax dollars. But most local officials didn’t want to be bothered. So the feds stepped in.
In this latest case, we have all sorts of red flags — including a mysterious candidate who left for Sweden after we started asking questions. State and local officials couldn’t seem to care less.
When investigators down in South Florida saw similar shady behavior in a Senate race — involving some of the same dark-money groups — they not only launched a probe, they made arrests. But not here.
Seminole calls itself Florida’s “natural choice.” Maybe they mean for scheming.
I don’t know whether anyone involved with this Senate race committed a crime. Maybe everyone from the dark-money funders to the candidate who now calls Sweden home are as pure as the driven snow. Or maybe they just skirted the lines.
But that’s the point: None of us know. Because, unlike in South Florida, where the state attorney aggressively probed, officials here have taken a pass.
Seminole-Brevard State Attorney Phil Archer has said he doesn’t run his office like they do down south and that he doesn’t consider it his job to investigate — that maybe the Florida Department of Law Enforcement or Florida elections division should do so. Yet both of those agencies said they weren’t doing so either.
So everyone — and no one — is in charge. How convenient.
Still, new revelations keep piling up. Last week, Sentinel reporters revealed that a then-25-year-old college student said she was paid $4,000 to sign documents claiming she led a political committee for which she did no actual work. So I decided to circle back to all three agencies.
Finally, someone said they might do something.
FDLE spokeswoman Jessica Cary wrote: “FDLE is currently in discussion with the 18th Judicial Circuit, Office of State Attorney Phil Archer, concerning a request for a formal review of the allegations.”
Now, that sentence was filled with more couching than a Rooms to Go showroom. (A discussion about a request that might lead to a review.) But it was something.
As a reminder: This case involves the Senate District 9 race in Seminole and southern Volusia counties won by Republican Jason Brodeur.
Brodeur was facing stiff competition from Democratic labor-law attorney Patricia Sigman when a mysterious NPA candidate named Jestine Iannotti popped up with dark-money groups promoting Iannotti as an attractive candidate for left-leaning voters. The idea seemed to be: Help Brodeur by tricking left-leaning voters into supporting an NPA instead of the Democrat.
Something similar happened in a Senate race in South Florida. There, South Florida prosecutors say former GOP legislator Frank Artiles secretly and illegally paid a buddy nearly $45,000 to run as a supposedly left-leaning NPA candidate as well. The same dark-money group that promoted Iannotti’s NPA campaign in Seminole promoted the NPA candidate now charged with crimes in South Florida.
And the Miami Herald reported Artiles was with Brodeur in Seminole County on election night, bragging about his antics.
But nobody has probed this race, even though Iannotti’s candidacy was strange by any measure. She never really campaigned for office. And records showed she was $154,000 in debt when she ponied up the $1,187 fee to run for office ... before later moving Sweden.
Which leads us to some of the facts we’ve learned:
One of the donors Iannotti listed as helping her pay that filing fee told the Sentinel he never donated to her campaign and didn’t know who she was. (One of our reporters found that by knocking on the donor’s door while local investigators did nothing.)
Yet another group that plowed money into this race, trying to siphon votes away from Sigman, reported $250,000 worth of income without ever explaining where it came from as state law normally requires.
The “chairperson” of a Seminole County-based committee helping promote Iannotti’s campaign said she was paid $4,000 to take the position — money we haven’t seen reported.
That same chairperson — who was 25 years old, pregnant and hard-up for cash when she said a GOP operative asked her to put her name on a committee she never ended up running — said in a sworn deposition that her signature was repeatedly forged.
You tell me one good reason why state, local and elections officials wouldn’t want to dive into all that. And those four points are just the tip of the iceberg.
We’ve seen a few instances of solid political investigations in Seminole before. For instance, the sheriff’s office did a five-star, CSI-inspired job revealing that Greenberg was behind an attempt to falsely accuse a political rival of unseemly crimes. That work helped the feds make a case on at least one of their 33 indictment counts.
Sheriff Dennis Lemma says that his office doesn’t investigate potential election crimes — that the FDLE or state elections division should.
So do it, FDLE.
I’ve seen the FDLE has do solid investigatory work before. Just not here.
The state’s entire Democratic congressional delegation has asked the U.S. Justice Department to step in and clean up Seminole County ... once again. Honestly, that’s probably what’s needed. It’s hard to have faith in state and local investigators who have ignored this case for so long.
But maybe the FDLE and state attorney will finally step up and do something more than a cursory review. The only thing that would suffice would be a thorough, dogged investigation that leaves no stone unturned, no questions unanswered and no lawbreakers unpunished.
Just like their peers in South Florida started doing months ago.
