Ryan Ray
Marco Rubio doesn’t really project that Tallahassee Pol aura these days, but for years he was about as intimate with the levers of state governmental power as anyone in the game. Pema Levy in Mother Jones argues that while the former House Speaker was able to finesse several serious mistakes during his run for U.S. Senate, his excuses may not cut it amid the brutal maelstrom of a presidential campaign.
A talented orator, a Spanish speaker, and a legislator from a key swing state, Rubio could be a strong GOP contender. But his political career in the Florida State House from 2000 to 2009 dovetails with a golden age of corruption in Sunshine State politics. The FBI and the IRS descended on Florida in 2010 to investigate how Florida Republican officials and top pols, including Rubio, used their state party credit cards. He was not the worst offender. Others were criminally charged; Rubio was not. But by the time Rubio was running for the U.S. Senate in 2010, the St. Petersburg Times noted the “sheer number of public corruption investigations under way appears unprecedented in Florida.”
Levy goes on to recite a selection of the ethical issues Florida’s junior senator ran afoul of back in his old statehouse stamping grounds. Many of them will be familiar to SaintPetersBlog readers, like his propensity to play things a little fast and loose with reimbursements from the taxpayers — not to mention Republican Party of Florida credit cards:
From 2005 until when he left the state Legislature in 2009, Rubio had access to an American Express credit card paid for by the Republican Party of Florida. During his time as speaker, from 2007 to 2009, Rubio often used this card to pay for personal expenses — and some of those expenses ended up paid by the state GOP. In early 2010, when Florida newspapers began to dig into these credit card records, Rubio said he had done nothing wrong and had paid American Express around $16,000 between 2007 and 2008 to cover personal expenses that he had charged, such as $181.56 at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Rubio also put a $10,000 charge on a party card for a family vacation at a resort in Georgia before ultimately gathering money from family members and paying American Express directly, according to The New Republic.
In 2010, reporters at the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times (which has since become the Tampa Bay Times) identified thousands in personal expenses for Rubio that the Republican Party was never reimbursed for, including $68.33 for “beverages” and a “meal” from a liquor store near his West Miami home, $765 from Apple’s online store for “computer supplies,” and $1,024 in payments to a Tallahassee property manager for personal business. Since Rubio has not released his credit card records from 2005 to 2007, it’s unknown how he used the card during those years.
His close relationship with the ethically troubled David Rivera may also be an issue to, for instance, South Florida primary voters, who saw Rivera’s unwinding firsthand.
For the past several years, Rivera has been under investigation from state and federal officials for an exhaustive list of alleged misuses of political money. For example, investigators suspected that Rivera had accepted more than $500,000 in payments from the owner of a Miami dog track for Rivera’s help on a local initiative to allow slot machines at gambling sites. State investigators, though, let Rivera off the hook in 2012 after an 18-month investigation, citing the statute of limitations and Florida’s lax campaign finance laws.
But Rivera remains under federal investigation for an elaborate campaign finance scheme and cover-up that reads like an over-the-top Hollywood script. Running for re-election to Congress in 2012, Rivera was likely to face Democratic challenger Joe Garcia, whom he had beat two years before. Federal prosecutors are investigating whether Rivera propped up a Democratic candidate running against Garcia in the primary. Rivera allegedly used his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Ana Alliegro, as a go-between to funnel more than $80,000 in cash to the other Democratic candidate, Justin Lamar Sternad. Garcia beat Sternad in the primary, and then defeated Rivera in the general election in 2012. When the feds began to look into the campaign finance scheme, Rivera helped Alliegro to escape to Nicaragua to avoid federal investigators.
