What makes David Rivera so thankful?
By Fred Grimm
From The Miami Herald
Some might wonder whether his gratitude was worth the $243,000 extracted from campaign accounts for very murky “thank you” campaigns. But that’s exactly why Rivera’s so damn thankful.
Despite discomfiting questions about his mysterious job history, personal finances, a secret $500,000 pro-gambling consulting contract and questionable thank-you campaigns, Rivera was still elected to the Legislature, then Congress.
State campaign laws allow candidates to divert money from campaign accounts into post-election “thank you” advertising. Herald reporters Patricia Mazzei and Scott Hiaasen reported that Rivera extracted more thank you money from his campaign accounts in 2004 and 2010 than any other state candidate.
Rivera obviously appreciated that his constituents indulged him despite erroneous, even mendacious financial disclosure affidavits that grew more confounding each time he dredged up a new explanation. Voters stuck by Rivera despite large chunks of campaign money going to corporate entities that seemed composed of his mother and godmother.
There was that troubling, belatedly disclosed $132,000 “loan” Rivera received from the marketing firm — run by mom and godmom — that landed a $500,000 consulting contract from Flagler Dog Track. Track officials insisted that they thought they were hiring Rivera to run a pro-slots campaign, not momma.
By the measure of what his constituents have had to overlook to vote for Rivera in recent years, $243,000 was chump change.
But like so much of the congressman’s finances, how Rivera actually spent the thank-you money remains mysterious. For example, last year Rivera’s campaign wrote checks totaling $75,000 to his thank-you consultant, who (in yet another familial coincidence) happens to be the daughter of a Rivera staffer.
The campaign told Hiaasen and Mazzei that the detailed records of the thank-you campaign could not be produced because the consultant’s invoices were “inaccessible or in storage.” Rivera must have consigned these secret invoices, also known as public records, in one of those mythical fortified vaults deep in the Rockies where the military stores space-alien photographs, Elvis Presley’s whereabouts and Glenn Beck’s Kenyan birth certificate.
Without the invoices, we’re left to guess where that money went. I’m no politician, but I know that if I had offered up a similar tangle of inscrutable, meandering, wild-eyed explanations in a personal relationship, my “thank you for not tossing me into the streets” campaign would have entailed jewelry, flowers, candlelight dinners and lots of credible documentation to back up my alibi.
Whatever other expressions of thank you the enigmatic Rivera offered his constituents, they’re still waiting for those credible documents. Something. . . anything. . . that might make him believable.
