This Could Be an Interesting Lawsuit

Today's Miami Herald has a report that raises as many questions as it answers about a dirty trick gone bad, originally aimed at Joe Garcia, the likely Democratic candidate for the open House seat in FL-25.

As I haven’t blogged much about this race previously, forgive me for taking longer than usual to set the scene, but I think the background is relevant.

The primaries are not until the end of August, but the smart money is for Garcia, who ran a strong campaign against an incumbent two years ago, to win the Democratic primary and face the likely victor on the Republican side: increasingly beleaguered state Rep. David Rivera. If fundraising numbers are any guide, both candidates should coast to easy wins over their less-well-known and underfunded primary opponents.

That said, Rivera has had a really, really bad month or so. (Bear with me.)

So, to sum up, the Rivera campaign has some reason to be feeling a little worried.

Utterly coincidentally, someone cooked up the idea of sending voters in Collier County a campaign mailer that tries to suggest that because he served in the Obama Energy department – as head of the Office of Minority Economic Impact – Garcia is responsible for the Gulf Oil spill. It also tried to suggest that Garcia, the former director of the Cuban-American National Foundation – is somehow anti-Cuban. Yes, really: see the Miami Herald’s Student's bizarre attack ad targets Democrat Joe Garcia (7/23/10).

The mailer claimed to be paid for by a newly registered independent expenditure group, a so-called 527 organization, called “Progressives for Prosperity.” The head of this group was a 19-year-old college student at FSU named Matthew Slider who claimed to be a Democrat supporting one of Garcia’s primary rivals. You can see a picture of the mailer over at the Reid Report.

That story didn’t last real long. Today’s Miami Herald reveals that in fact the moving force behind “Progressives for Prosperity” is Evan J. Power, a Tallahassee lobbyist and political operative with a history of dirty tricks. And the student whose name is on the registration papers, well, he’s angry and says he was conned (7/28/10):

Slider said he met Power through a friend, fellow FSU student Chris Spencer. Spencer and Power told him they needed a registered Democrat to head the political group and showed him copies of a positive mailer they planned to send out that outlined Meurice's best qualities. That mailer was never sent.

But it gets better. Not only does Matthew Slider now say (under oath!) that Power tricked him, but he claims that there is no way his organization could have paid for the mailers since it only ever had $100 in its bank account. As reported in the Naples Daily News,

“Evan Power told me that despite the difference in their political parties, he was supporting Luis Meurice and cited polls, which I never saw, that supposedly claimed Mr. Meurice would be a strong general election candidate versus David Rivera,'' Slider said in his sworn statement.

Lobbyist Power says someone hijacked the group’s name the very week he was creating it, and the mailers were a complete surprise to him. The lobby group that employed Power seems to have taken a dimmer view of the situation, as it has fired him.

The timing is especially suspicious here. According to the Naples Daily News,

Slider said he was assured that he would get to see and approve any piece of mail sent out by the 527 group and that no mail had yet been distributed.

What struck him most about the mailer, he said, was that it was sent from Miami on Saturday July 17, but the group wasn’t formed until Monday.

“It all just clicked,” Slider said. “I realized I had been duped.”

According to the Herald, “Garcia's campaign said it is considering legal action, especially since the bank statement shows money was never withdrawn to fund the mailers.”

Usually campaigns don’t like to get involved in lawsuits since it drains time and money away from the main task of reaching voters. But this is one time where I wonder if the lawsuit might not be worth pursuing. Discovery could be very interesting, as witnesses will have to explain under oath just how independent of Rivera they were, and where the money came from.

(Of course if they deny everything under oath, then it all grinds to a halt unless someone can find the printer.)

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3 Responses to This Could Be an Interesting Lawsuit

  1. Brautigan says:

    Bienvenido a Miami!

  2. David Rivera and Marco Rubio have, as fully expected, reinforce the notion that they are just big political hacks who cheat the system. Republicans are typically willing to use dirty tactics. That arrogance and hypocrisy for the party of family values and the party of NO will come home to roost really soon.
    The Dog

  3. Just me says:

    Rivera has a real uphill battle on his hands. Joe Garcia appears to be one of the few “good guys” out there in politics. Even if his politics did not agree with me (and they do), I would be hard pressed to oppose him. This may make me more susceptible to being mislead politically, but I would rather have good-honest leaders with whom I disagree politically than leaders with whom I agree but that I can’t all together trust (I liked McCain in 2000 because I felt I could trust him to express his real positions, you know, the whole straight shooter thing. By 2008 I felt like he had embraced two faced politics too much – teaming up with Palin proved it). As far as I can tell, Joe Garcia has a very high “good guy” factor about him. The sorts of shenanigans described in the story only serve to create a bigger good guy v. bad guy gap in the Garcia v. Rivera general to follow in November.

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