By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, June 23, 2022
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled a 21-count federal
indictment against Andrew Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee and the
former Democratic nominee for governor in 2018, alleging wire fraud, related
conspiracy charges, and making false statements.
It’s not the biggest story of the week, but it does have
an intriguing and revealing wrinkle. The DOJ contends that, “Between 2016 and
2019, defendants Gillum and Lettman-Hicks conspired to commit wire fraud, by
unlawfully soliciting and obtaining funds from various entities and individuals
through false and fraudulent promises and representations that the funds would
be used for a legitimate purpose.”
(Marc Caputo’s scoop over at NBC News includes the
paragraph, “The indictment marks a new low for Gillum, a married father
of three who withdrew from public life as a political leader and a paid CNN
commentator after a March 2020 sex scandal involving a suspected male overdose
victim in a hotel in the South Beach neighborhood of Miami Beach.” Are we sure this is
really a new low? Because that previous low was pretty darn low.)
On or about June 14, 2017, Gillum
voluntarily agreed to speak to FBI agents. During the investigation, Gillum
falsely represented that Southern Pines representatives never offered Gillum
anything or gave to Gillum anything, and that Gillum stopped having
communications with Southern Pines representatives about the campaign
contributions following their attempt to link the campaign contributions to
support for potential projects in Tallahassee.
As Peter Schorsch, the publisher of
FloridaPolitics.com, succinctly summarized, “Andrew Gillum KNEW in June of 2017
— more than a year before the Florida primary and general election — that he
was under federal investigation; Gillum knew he had lied to those
investigators. He still ran.”
Yesterday, many observers of Florida politics and
national politics marveled at how different the state would be if Gillum had
won the governorship by a narrow margin over Ron DeSantis, instead of the other
way around. Certainly, Florida’s policies during the pandemic would have been
dramatically different, DeSantis would not be a top-tier 2024 Republican
presidential contender, the Disney corporation would be happier, and, who
knows, maybe Joe Biden would have considered Gillum as a running-mate option.
But Gillum’s jaw-dropping decision to run for governor,
while knowing he was being investigated by the FBI and likely to be indicted
someday, reveals a difficult lesson that everyone interested in politics should
heed, and the Florida Democratic Party should have installed on a giant
flashing neon sign in its headquarters.
That lesson is, “Don’t fall in love with candidates
you’ve just met.”
Do your due diligence. Recognize that no candidate for
office walks on water. You’re hiring a contractor for a multi-year deal, not
welcoming a messiah.
Way back in June 2017, the U.S Department of Justice and
the FBI issued subpoenas to the city of Tallahassee and the Tallahassee
Community Redevelopment Agency, and one of the subpoenas was for all emails and
documents of Adam Corey the former campaign treasurer for Gillum. This was not
a secret; this was in the local news. The Tallahassee Democrat newspaper
and other regional news sources reported on a wide-ranging FBI investigation into corruption in city politics
throughout 2017 and 2018. Just how likely was it that a wide-ranging probe
into city-government corruption that targeted the mayor’s former campaign
treasurer was not going to ensnare the mayor in some way?
Gillum was close friends with, and had gone on vacations with, developers who
had business before the city council. The spin from the Gillum campaign was,
“no city business was discussed and the mayor paid for all of he and Mrs.
Gillum’s expenses, including food and drink, and his portion of the villa.”
Florida’s Democratic primary that year wasn’t held until
August 28. There were six other Democrats on the ballot, including former state
representative Gwen Graham, the daughter of the former governor and senator Bob
Graham.
Sunshine State Democrats had other options; they chose the guy with a giant cloud over his head because he
gave them the old Barack Obama excitement — young, black, and
progressive.
Then, as the FBI probe became an issue in the
gubernatorial race, the Gillum campaign’s spin was: “Mayor Gillum is not a
subject of the FBI investigation, and he’s committed to rooting out any
corruption or wrongdoing in Tallahassee,” said Geoff Burgan, Gillum’s
spokesman. “We’re not going to take ethics lectures from Congressman Ron
DeSantis, who is marching in lockstep with the most morally, ethically and
legally challenged President in American history.”
Any time a guy on your side tries to deflect from
accusations of corruption by pointing to the other side’s corruption, the
needle on your B.S. detector should move a little. Remember when Harvey
Weinstein’s response to the giant #MeToo exposé was how he was just a guy who “came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about
behavior and workplaces were different” and how, “I am going to need a
place to channel that anger so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my
full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party”? One of
the quickest and easiest defenses of a guilty guy trying to wiggle off the hook
is to say, “Stop looking at what looks like corruption around me and look at
the corruption over there!”
Despite my seeming cynicism, I do believe that good,
smart, honest, and capable Americans are out there, and every cycle, some of
them choose to run for office and some of them win. The problem is that every
cycle, a whole bunch of unhinged narcissistic maniacs run for public office,
too.
Candidates for higher office hate the media, large and
small, digging into their background. But there’s a reason we in the news
business do this, or why we’re supposed to do this: Lots of people who choose
to run for higher office are bad people! Or if they’re not bad, they have some
sort of past decisions or actions that would make voters a bit more wary of
them. Elected office is power, and it’s not just good and upstanding people who
want power.
Every political campaign is attempting to sell the public
an idealized and ultimately false image. The job of the media is to show voters
the reality, so they can make an informed decision at the ballot box. If you
want to elect a candidate with shady business associates, go ahead. If you want
to elect a candidate whose womanizing makes Wilt Chamberlain look like a chaste
monk, go ahead. Just know what you’re getting and accept the consequences.
We can rightfully complain that large swaths of the
national media aren’t that interested in digging into the backgrounds of
Democratic candidates. Every cycle or so, I write about Great Southern Democratic Hopes, the
longshot Democrats running for statewide office in red states, whom the
national media become convinced will pull off an amazing upset — Alison
Lundergan Grimes, Beto O’Rourke, Jaime Harrison. (Credit where it’s due, Jon
Ossoff did eventually win in Georgia, although in some pretty unusual
circumstances.) Andrew Gillum was a variation of that species — one where both
the state and national media had a difficult time seeing anything beyond what
they wanted to see: A young, black, progressive rising star who was going to
turn a long-time swing state blue.
On paper, these longstanding media reflexes are a
disadvantage for Republicans, but I wonder if tougher media scrutiny is an
advantage for the GOP over the long run. Corruption, bad behavior,
self-absorption, and sleaze are human flaws, not a partisan phenomenon.
If a Republican candidate for office has skeletons in his
closet, the media are going to sniff them out and run the story on the front
page. It may well be that this “expose the Republican scandals” reflex has run
amok; this is how we end up with a New York Times exposé on the speeding
tickets of Marco Rubio and his wife. And if members of the media wonder why
Donald Trump’s sordid past, shady business practices, and various other
scandals didn’t derail his 2016 bid, maybe that was because large swaths of the
electorate just tuned it out after a while.
But think about how often Democrats have belatedly
realized that one of their favorite elected officials or rising stars has
turned out to be a sleazy maniac, just in recent years: Andrew Cuomo, Michael
Avenatti, Al Franken, Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, Eric Schneiderman. Again,
the point there is not that Democrats alone have sleazy maniacs. It’s that, in
terms of media coverage, Democratic sleazy maniacs usually have the wind at
their back, while Republican sleazy maniacs are sailing into the wind.
Finally, it is worth noting that Gillum released a
statement yesterday: “I have spent the last 20 years of my life in public
service and continue to fight for the people. Every campaign I’ve run has been
done with integrity. Make no mistake that this case is not legal, it is political.
Throughout my career I have always stood up for the people of Florida and have
spoken truth to power.”
As Charlie Cooke observes, “The idea that the case against
him is ‘political’ seems silly on its face. Gillum, you will note, is not being
prosecuted by the State of Florida, but by the federal government. So where’s
the motive? Gillum mentions his ‘campaigns.’ But he’s a Democrat, like the
president, and his most recent opponent was Ron DeSantis, whom the president
loathes.”
Another hard lesson that everyone should heed: Guys who
are guilty as sin often like to claim that the accusations against them are just
a partisan witch hunt. You know, like the “vast
right-wing conspiracy” that made it look like Bill Clinton was having an
affair with an intern.
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