If Gov. Ron DeSantis’ minions had meant to dramatize how badly he has failed the people of Florida in the face of COVID-19, they couldn’t have done it more effectively than by their Tuesday morning raid on the home of whistleblower Rebekah Jones in Tallahassee.
They flashed their sidearms at her, her husband and two small children.
A holstered weapon can’t harm anyone. The risk soars when it is drawn. That was a disgrace to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, where someone apparently deserves to be fired.
FDLE Commissioner Rick Swearingen’s explanation asserted that Jones refused for 20 minutes to answer the door and hung up on agents when they called.
No matter. The guns are what matter. The crime at issue, if there was one, was a nonviolent unauthorized posting on a state messaging computer.
Nitpicking at the facts, Swearingen says guns weren’t pointed at anybody. But they were out of their holsters and, in one scene captured on Jones’ home video system, a weapon was pointed up the staircase while an agent ordered her husband and children to come down.
As Ron Filipkowski, a Sarasota attorney and former prosecutor, aptly denounced it, “That’s Gestapo. That’s authoritarian tactics. That’s not America.”
Considering the source, it’s criticism the governor would be foolish to ignore. Filipkowski is a lifelong Republican and former state and federal prosecutor whom DeSantis reappointed to the Judicial Nominating Commission for the 12th Circuit last year. On hearing of the armed raid, he resigned the post, writing to the governor’s general counsel that he had been “increasingly alarmed” by DeSantis’ passive response to COVID-19, and “no longer wish to serve the current government of Florida in any capacity.”
The alleged third-degree felony for which agents had a warrant to seize Jones’ computer was a hack into a Department of Health messaging website.
She was a data scientist at the department before being fired this summer for what DeSantis claimed was insubordination. Jones said it was because she refused to manipulate COVID-19 data in order to minimize the danger. She then set up her own dashboard to give the public contrasting, if unofficial, data on the epidemic.
Officially, Florida has reported nearly 20,000 deaths. Jones says that seriously undercounts fatalities probably caused by COVID-19 but not confirmed.
By seizing her computer, smartphone and flash drives, the raid put her dashboard out of action and potentially exposed the identity of every state employee who ever contacted her.
What was the “crime” to justify that?
According to the FDLE’s search warrant affidavit, a hack into the Health Department’s messaging system last month posted this message: “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.”
Jones denies she posted that. The governor’s spokesman denies that DeSantis knew in advance about the warrant or the raid. The courts will have to sort out all the denials.
But the raid could hardly have done more to spotlight the DeSantis administration’s mishandling of the epidemic, or to validate the investigative report that the Sun Sentinel published just five days earlier under the headline “Secrecy and Spin.”
Reporters Mario Ariza, David Fleshler and Cindy Krischer Goodman disclosed that DeSantis’ Department of Health ordered county-level spokespersons to stop issuing public statements about COVID-19 until after the election. The administration withheld details about Florida’s first cases and then denied the reality of community spread. It took the threat of legal action to disgorge data about cases in schools, prisons, hospitals and nursing homes.
To this day, DeSantis refuses to let Broward County and other local governments levy fines against people who violate their local face-masking mandates.
The governor’s minimalist approach to the deadliest health threat in a hundred years mirrors that of President Donald Trump, whose endorsement transformed a little-known congressman into the governor of the nation’s third-largest state.
Among the many details in “Secrecy and Spin,” perhaps the most disconcerting is how the DeSantis administration manipulated and muzzled Florida’s decentralized health system. The state employees working as county-level spokespersons were told to issue no news releases or social media posts about COVID-19. The order was attributed to Alberto Moscoso, who was the department’s communications director before resigning on Nov. 6. He won’t talk about it.
Another conspicuous failure was the governor’s indifference to the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, which the Legislature established 14 years ago precisely for such contingencies as COVID-19.
One of the unwritten rules of politics is to not make a whistleblower the issue. Another is to deal candidly with health emergencies. The DeSantis administration has ignored both.
Even if Jones did hack the website, Filipkowski wrote to the governor’s office, “I would still call her a hero.”
In a newspaper interview, he accused the administration of “using police to silence a truth teller.”
Whether DeSantis knew of the raid is irrelevant to the fact that he is ultimately responsible for it, not to mention the entire issue of his having acted like Trump’s puppet in playing down the coronavirus. U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., reacted Wednesday with a statement saying she is “exploring various federal-level investigative options.” A congressional hearing ought to be one of them.
By coincidence, FDLE Commissioner Swearingen is on the agenda this Tuesday, Dec. 15, for a routine report to the governor and Cabinet, who comprise his governing board. DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody and Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis will probably not want to talk about the raid. Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, the only Democrat, mustn’t let them ignore it.
— South Florida Sun Sentinel