Howey
Gold Member
- Mar 4, 2013
- 5,481
- 761
- 200
Send him back to Mars or wherever he came from?
In unrelated news...I didn't know we had two gay candidates for Governor!
A police union official filed a complaint Thursday with the Florida Elections Commission, accusing Gov. Rick Scott of illegally coercing on-duty police officers to attend a campaign event in Tampa on Monday.
The complaint was filed by Jeff Marano of the Florida Police Benevolent Association, a union supporting Scott's leading Democratic challenger, Charlie Crist. Marano is president of the PBA's Broward County chapter.
Under Florida law, it's a first-degree misdemeanor for a public official to "directly or indirectly coerce" any employee to engage in political activity, and employees are prohibited from doing so while working.
Scott's campaign said it made its intentions clear but a high-ranking member of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office insisted that he believed he was going to a state event to meet the governor and discuss ways to reduce crime, which is why he asked several deputies to come along.
"We obviously didn't know we were going to a campaign event," said Hillsborough Col. Jim Previtera. "Had we known it was a campaign event, we wouldn't have been there."
Previtera said he was working on Friday, the Fourth of July, when Cody Vildostegui, a Scott campaign aide, asked him to attend a press conference Monday about reducing crime. Previtera's boss, Sheriff David Gee, who supports Scott, was unable to attend.
Also in attendance was another Scott supporter, Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who said the same campaign staffer made it clear to him that it was an event promoting Scott's re-election bid.
"It was unequivocally clear to me that this was purely a political event," Gualtieri said. "I knew what I was going into Where the communication broke down, I don't know, but it didn't break down with me."
Gualtieri said Scott's campaign even asked him for his private email address to avoid using a government email account for political purposes.
In unrelated news...I didn't know we had two gay candidates for Governor!