Florida Republicans brace for more indictments in Greenberg probe: "The entire party is on edge."
Two sources say prosecutors are focused on Florida elections, as others raise questions about the current lack of charges for many involved in shady electoral schemes.
It would be absurd to say that anything about the federal investigation into Joel Greenberg has gone as expected. Since Greenberg’s arrest for harassing and stalking a political opponent last June, the scope of the investigation into the former Seminole County tax collector ensnared a slew of Republican heavyweights across the Sunshine State. Even Greenberg’s case has unfolded with surprises: after two superseding indictments and a bail revocation, he has now pled guilty to six of 33 charges. Now, once again, several sources close to the investigation are predicting seismic events in the weeks to come, as a broader sense of panic has reportedly set in on the state’s Republican Party.
One source told this writer that he has heard multiple local G.O.P. officials say they expect dozens of indictments to arrive before Memorial Day, in just one example of the wild speculation underway in central Florida. “The entire party is on edge,” the source said. “Everybody is guessing who has exposure based on reporting, and also the things they are hearing behind the scenes. Someone said they think there will be between 24-36 indictments.”
This same source says some of the speculation arises from threads prosecutors have so far left unexplained, including the roles of others in furthering Greenberg’s harassment of a political opponent, which resulted in federal felony charges for Greenberg. Jacob Engels, a Roger Stone associate who runs a right-wing blog called “Central Florida Post”, used his website to both promote Greenberg as a politician and target a Greenberg opponent with smears that strongly resembled fabricated claims Greenberg has now pled guilty to spreading against the same man. Prosecutors even mentioned an un-indicted conspirator in a June 2020 search warrant for Greenberg’s home relating to the harassment, but it is unclear if that co-conspirator is Engels. Engels could not be reached for comment.
Engels’ connections to another political scandal that rocked Florida just months before the Greenberg case went public may also pique the interest of federal investigators. Engels was partially responsible for the release of an illicit photo of former Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Andrew Gillum, just days after reports emerged regarding an incident at a Miami hotel last March. Two witnesses close to the investigation say prosecutors have recently asked questions about campaigns and elections in Florida with a particular focus on the election of Governor Ron DeSantis in 2018—the same race Gillum narrowly lost. Sources say investigators want to know whether witnesses are aware of any misconduct that Joel Greenberg may have committed with respect to that campaign. Whether investigators are looking into Engels’ conduct relating to the 2018 campaign remains unclear.
Despite the speculation, it is unknown whether prosecutors will obtain enough evidence to charge individuals other than Greenberg in a wide variety of alleged schemes that have been covered by media outlets in recent weeks. While Greenberg has now pled guilty and agreed to cooperate fully with authorities, the New York Times reported in mid-April that Greenberg had already attempted to cooperate with federal law enforcement last year. Yet a new indictment of Greenberg arrived in March for nearly a dozen additional financial crimes, and Greenberg’s detention after a bail violation in February indicates that previous attempt at cooperation may not have been helpful to prosecutors. And, in a twist now typical to the Greenberg case, the Daily Beast dropped a recent bombshell report that Greenberg wrote several letters and encrypted text messages to Roger Stone in late 2020 and early 2021 in an attempt to secure a pardon for himself from then-President Donald Trump. Those letters suggest that any plan Greenberg had to cooperate with authorities last year may have been dubious from the outset.
Greenberg allegedly wrote in the letters that he and Rep. Matt Gaetz indeed paid women for sex and had relations with an underage woman; in his plea this morning, he acknowledged he and “another man” paid an underage person for sex. It’s unclear why Stone would have wanted letters from Greenberg admitting crimes and implicating Gaetz in wrongdoing, but Stone did acknowledge he discussed the pardons with Greenberg. However, he insists the messages are incomplete. For his part, Gaetz continues to deny any and all allegations of wrongdoing. How Daily Beast obtained the letters and text messages between Stone and Greenberg is unclear—but it is hard to imagine many outside Greenberg’s camp had access to such sensitive communications.
The messages suggest Greenberg offered to pay Stone $250,000 in Bitcoin in exchange for lobbying for the pardon, and at one point Stone suggested that Greenberg should be ready to wire that amount over to him. Stone denies accepting any form of payment from Greenberg, and ultimately Greenberg was not pardoned by Trump. It is not unlawful to pay a person to lobby for a pardon, but lobbying can be a complicated area of law. Recently, a similar situation resulted in a federal investigation into a possible bribery-for-pardon scheme at the White House.
But prosecutors have so far laid off Greenberg’s ties to Stone, and Engels, and dozens of other operatives reportedly being targeted by investigators. The experiences related by individuals who have spoken with prosecutors and familiar with a sense of panic setting in for the Florida G.O.P. demonstrate the expansiveness of a probe that has mushroomed since Greenberg’s arrest last June, and underscore the difficulties prosecutors face as they attempt to address a litany of allegations about possibly illegal conduct by Republicans across the nation’s biggest swing state.
It was June 2020 when prosecutors went public with federal felony charges that Greenberg was committing crimes to sabotage his political opponent, local Republican teacher Brian Beute. Greenberg wrote fake letters assuming the identities of students and teachers in Beute’s school and falsely acccused Beute of sexually assaulting a young student. Initially, when Greenberg was first indicted, the general public focused on photo connections between him, Stone, and Gaetz. But details about Stone’s close associate, Jacob Engels, raised other questions about this entanglement of strange (or, perhaps, not-so-strange) bedfellows. That’s because Greenberg and Engels have ties of their own.
Engels, who characterizes himself as a blogger and journalist, promoted smears against Beute on Facebook that resembled Greenberg’s own fabricated allegations of sexual abuse against the teacher. Engels posted multiple videos calling Beute “Creepy Brian Beute” more than a dozen times, repeatedly accusing Beute of “trom-boning” students at the private prep school where he taught music. It is curious how Engels knew to make such claims before Greenberg’s faked allegations against Beute were public knowledge, but whether Engels knew in advance about Greenberg’s alleged plot to fabricate child abuse claims about Beute remains unclear.
Engels has not been charged with participating in Greenberg’s scheme, or any other wrongdoing. But another clue suggests Engels might have been in on the plan for Greenberg’s sabotage: Greenberg sent the first fake letter accusing Beute of abuse to school officials in mid-October 2019, and on October 29, Engels sent a separate letter to the same school administrators asking for any and all records of misconduct relating to Beute. The school chose not to comply with the request.
Months later, Engels published those two videos attacking Beute and mentioning vague allegations of impropriety at his school, just days before Greenberg was indicted for the alleged smear scheme. “I will make such an embarrassing example of you,” Engels said in one video. “We’re going to teach Creepy Brian Beute a lesson,” he said in another. “Creepy Brian Beute, who was involved in some trom-boning incident over at Trinity Prep as a teacher—we don’t know what he was trom-boning, but we heard there was a trom-boning incident. We just don’t know what that was.”
Engels did not mention that he had contacted the school for records of Beute’s misconduct just days after Greenberg sent fabricated letters, or that the school had declined to release any information to Engels.
Engels then invited Beute to sue him for defamation. “You can sue me,” he said. “I’d love to go to deposition, I’d love to go into discovery on you and all of your associates.” The “discovery” process allows parties to a lawsuit to compel disclosure of some information necessary to make their case. Presumably, if Beute sued Engels for defamation, Engels could have tried to compel Beute’s school to disclose the fake letters about Beute’s misconduct to show that Engels believed them to be true and thus hadn’t defamed Beute. “You were a music teacher, you were trom-boning, and we just don’t know what that was. But it was creepy.” Then Engels got angry: “So try it Brian—sue me, sue me, sue me. Try it and see what happens.”
Beute never took the bait, but he barely had time to: prosecutors unsealed their first Greenberg indictment just days after Engels posted the videos. Engels suddenly stopped talking about Beute. According to one source, he retained a criminal defense attorney. A forensic report prepared by a social media company Graphika found that the videos Engels posted in June 2020 were shared by a fake account network reportedly controlled by none other than Roger Stone. The network was taken down by Facebook the following month, and Engels was permanently booted off the social media platform around the same time. Engels has not publicly mentioned Beute since.
Obvious questions linger amongst locals about why Engels, a far-right blogger close to Roger Stone with ties to the Proud Boys, was so focused on a local Republican schoolteacher running for Seminole County tax collector. In a motion after Greenberg’s indictment, prosecutors acknowledged there were un-indicted conspirators in the harassment and stalking case against Greenberg, and said that portions of a search warrant affidavit for Greenberg’s residence obtained on June 19—one day before Engels’ second video was posted—identified a co-conspirator by name. Those documents have not yet been released.
But Prosecutors said the warrant “reflects the fact that probable cause has been found that the defendant conspired with that un-indicted conspirator.” Most importantly, prosecutors said they had no plan to call the un-indicted conspirator as a witness, lending support to the idea there is no cooperation happening between this un-indicted conspirator—whomever it is—and federal prosecutors. That means such a conspirator remains in play for future charges if Greenberg were to give him or her up and other evidence justified such a prosecution.
Engels denies any wrongdoing. Whether he has a part to play in any incoming developments on this saga remains to be seen. But questions about his possible work for other Florida Republicans loom forebodingly over Florida’s G.O.P., especially as federal investigators dig into other schemes by Republicans to sabotage Democratic candidates around the state.
One trail that could shed light on Engels’ possible work on other smear campaigns across Florida begins with a salacious news item from March 2020, just a few months before Greenberg was charged for harassing Brian Beute. Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was a rising star in Florida and national politics. Despite a narrow loss to Ron DeSantis in 2018 (he came short by about 0.4%, triggering a machine recount), Gillum was continuing onward and upward in public life: he landed a high-profile job at CNN, continued to do public work in Florida politics, and was speculated as a potential Vice-Presidential candidate for the ultimate 2020 Democratic nominee. Gillum said he was not ruling out another run for statewide office, either.
Yet his world suddenly imploded when he encountered a career-threatening scandal just as Covid descended over the globe. Police, responding to emergency calls from the front desk of a Miami hotel in early March, found Gillum in a hotel room with a gay pornographic actor and sex worker, Travis Dyson, who was overdosing on a bed. Gillum was reportedly getting sick on the bathroom floor. No arrests were made, and Gillum was permitted to leave on his own accord.
Conservative bloggers were “tipped off” about the incident. Conservative social media figure Candace Owens published a post on Facebook about the incident just a few hours after it occurred, replete with screenshots of police reports about the events of the evening. Under Florida law, these records would probably be required to be made public upon a records request. However, it remains unclear how they were obtained by Owens in near real-time. Additionally, the images were screenshots of a computer screen with the police reports displayed, not scanned images of the actual reports.
“BREAKING NEWS!!! Democrat Andrew Gillum was involved in a crystal meth overdose incident last night in a Miami hotel,” Owens wrote. “Orgy suspected, but unconfirmed. Read the report for yourself. I am the first to have it!” The conservative Twitter-sphere quickly made Owens’ post go viral. Gillum denied doing any drugs, and quietly went to rehab for alcohol abuse. He temporarily withdrew from public life and later came out as bisexual.
Then, just as the story was about to fade, it was electrified by a second shockwave: a photo of Gillum lying nude and unconscious on the floor of the hotel room was leaked to the press. Initially batched by media outlets with police pictures of the hotel room, it was not entirely clear who took the photo, obviously taken without Gillum’s consent. The origin of how the photo came to exist on the internet was initially murky.
Police promised a local investigation into who leaked the police reports to Owens, as well as separate police photos of the hotel room scene. But no results have emerged more than a year after that probe began. And curious minds inquired about the photo of Gillum, too: Had police or someone else taken it? And how did it get published on the internet? Police have so far stayed mum.
Months later, Dyson, the porn actor, admitted he took the photo of Gillum, ostensibly to “show Andrew what happened” while he was unconscious. Dyson says he then accidentally overdosed himself, requiring medical assistance. He was treated and discharged the same night, and was never prosecuted for possession of illegal drugs.
Dyson then admitted he also sent the photo of Gillum to multiple “friends.” It’s unclear why he did so, or why—if Gillum was unwell on the floor—Dyson did not seek to get him medical attention instead of taking his picture. (*One item of interest recently noticed by this writer: Dyson follows @GOP on Instagram).
It’s where the photos went next that might catch the attention of prosecutors. In an extensive and well-written review of the Gillum-Dyson imbroglio, GQ Magazine reported that Roger Stone’s associate Enrique Tarrio received the photo Dyson took of Gillum. Tarrio insists the photo was not sent by Dyson “directly or indirectly,” but provided no explanation for where the photo did come from.
Tarrio says he immediately sent the nude photo of Gillum to another Stone associate: Jacob Engels.
Engels then published the photo on his blog, the same blog where he promoted the fake smears about Beute. He wrote that the photo “clearly appeared” to be a “methed out” Gillum. Engels acknowledged he obtained the photo with Tarrio’s help. The post was shared across social media, including by Trump fan and conservative actor James Woods to 2.2 million Twitter followers. The picture was then taken by tabloids splashed across internet stories, dealing a devastating blow to Gillum’s political career and presumably causing him significant mental anguish. This writer is refraining from linking directly Engels’ blog post, but it includes a photo of Gillum without clothes that was clearly taken while he was unconscious and without his consent.
For his part, Gillum now says he thinks it was all a set-up. He believes Dyson drugged him, possibly when he handed Gillum something to drink upon his arrival at the hotel. Gillum and his wife remain married, and Gillum attributed his behavior that night largely to a depression which he says began after the grueling 2018 campaign and razor-thin loss to DeSantis. He said the incident ultimately helped him publicly accept his bisexuality, something he and his wife had chosen to keep private until the story broke.
Dyson, on the other hand, alleges the two men did drugs together on multiple occasions. He says they met on Grindr two weeks before the encounter. However, Dyson has not provided evidence to support that claim. He has spoken little about the affair and has returned to porn. Gillum refused to continue speaking to GQ after he found out the magazine had reached out to Dyson for his side of the story.
Curiously, the entire event may have never gone public had a Miami-based doctor in his fifties named Aldo Mejias, Jr. not “found” Gillum and Dyson in the hotel room. Mejias told police he had an appointment booked to see Dyson when he simply stumbled across the situation, and that it was he who dialed the front desk asking them call police to help Dyson. It’s not entirely clear how Mejias was let inside if both men were unresponsive or overdosing, or why police did not question Mejias over his “appointment” with Dyson. Despite the presence of drugs, overdoses, appointments with a sex worker, photos taken of a nude Gillum, and a hospitalization, all three men oddly left the situation without facing any law enforcement scrutiny.
Engels’ entanglement in the Gillum affair raises more questions than answers for those close to the Greenberg case. One source familiar with the investigation said other witnesses have openly wondered how Engels ended up with the photo of Gillum, and why Dyson took it in the first place. Could this be another smear campaign by MAGA operatives in the Sunshine State? Another source wonders why local law enforcement did not announce any charges or even offer an explanation about the leaking of police reports to conservative commentators.
Regardless, last spring was clearly a busy stretch for Engels: Greenberg allegedly fabricated charges against Beute, and Engels swooped in with his videotaped version of similar smears; Gillum encountered a devastating scandal in a hotel room, and Engels had exclusive access to the illicit and possibly unlawful photo which could end Gillum’s political career.
In light of all this context, remember that Greenberg offered through fall 2020 to pay Roger Stone to obtain him a presidential pardon, and all but confessed to Stone that he and Gaetz had sex with a minor in the process. Why Greenberg felt a federal pardon would eliminate his problems, when much of his indicted conduct could also be prosecuted as a state crime in Florida, raises separate questions about whether he knew Florida law enforcement would not prosecute him. A separate source, who tried several times to speak with Florida law enforcement about Greenberg’s misconduct while he was in office, told this writer that prosecutors have recently asked him about his interactions with State Attorney’s offices in Florida and whether anyone in state law enforcement threatened him for pursuing complaints regarding Greenberg’s conduct. The lack of state law enforcement action in the Gillum incident raises similar questions about whether local Florida law enforcement deliberately backed off investigations involving Florida Republicans or operatives connected to them.
Sources close to the case hope prosecutors make things clearer in the coming weeks. But what is apparent from the text messages published by Daily Beast is that Greenberg and Stone were closer than originally understood, that Engels is a strong—albeit mysterious—link between them, and that prosecutors may not be done addressing smear campaigns by Florida Republicans just yet.
Since June of last summer, when this saga began to unfold, federal investigators reportedly have opened inquiries into a number of Florida Republicans: Congressman Gaetz, a Republican lobbyist named Chris Dorworth, a Republican donor, Jason Pirozollo, and others in Greenberg’s circle. Public reports suggests they are investigating the use of third party candidates to siphon votes from Democrats across Florida, as well as sex and drug trafficking, and possible pay-to-play schemes involving medical marijuana business in the state. Sources tell this writer that the probe is even wider still, and that prosecutors are examining whether election officials tampered with election results or directed others to do so. But these same sources stress that aspect of the investigation is in early stages and has not yet been fully examined.
It’s the quagmire of political sabotage that has many in Florida wondering who might next find themselves in prosecutors’ crosshairs. Greenberg spent a significant amount of taxpayer money on inexplicable contracts to “consultants” and “vendors.” Any cooperation agreement with prosecutors will likely require some information about the taxpayer money that flowed so freely from Greenberg’s office to individuals and companies that didn’t appear to provide any value for the taxpayer, including one this writer profiled previously (actually called MAGA Advisory Group, LLC).
One source, who says that prosecutors have interviewed him multiple times over the last year, tells this writer that their recent conversations have centered on whether Greenberg ever discussed improper activity relating to the election of Governor DeSantis in 2018. This source says that he responded to prosecutors’ questions by telling them that Greenberg told staffers that DeSantis “owed him” because Greenberg helped him win the governor’s mansion. How Greenberg helped DeSantis remains unclear.
According to the source, Greenberg went on to say that if any employees were interested in sitting on DeSantis’s transition team, then Greenberg could secure their appointment easily. The source told prosecutors that Greenberg told one employee Seminole County elections would be more favorable now that DeSantis was in office and would appoint the “right people” to run them. Many of these statements were allegedly made in text messages; the source said he recently turned over his phone to investigators.
DeSantis ultimately appointed a former Greenberg employee, Chris Anderson, to supervise elections in Seminole County. Anderson was a deputy sheriff in the Seminole County Police Department who was running for a local State House seat when he got to know Joel Greenberg, then a newly-elected tax collector. According to the Orlando Sentinel, the two reportedly took a trip to Miami together—on the taxpayer’s dime—which Greenberg said involved a meeting with Rep. Matt Gaetz. That same weekend, Greenberg posted a photo with Gaetz and Roger Stone. Three days after the Miami trip, Greenberg “emailed an employment contract to Anderson for a job with an $82,500 annual salary,” the Sentinel reports. Shortly after that, Anderson’s fundraising for his State House race run dried up, and he eventually dropped out of the campaign. He joined Greenberg’s office in this paid contractor position little more than a month after the Miami trip.
But not for long. In January 2019, Anderson resigned when newly-inaugurated Governor Ron DeSantis appointed him to replace the local Seminole County Elections Supervisor. Through that office in 2020, Anderson approved a suspicious third-party candidate to run for Seminole County tax collector—the same race Joel Greenberg was running in. The candidate, Daniel L. Day, applied to use the name Dani Mora Day in the same year the Democratic candidate was Lynn Moira Dictor.
Day had also run in 2016—as Daniel L. Day—and in that race, his candidacy triggered a loophole in Florida law that caused the tax collector election to be a closed primary between Greenberg and his opponent, incumbent Ray Valdes. Greenberg narrowly won that election and marched to victory in the general election unopposed. With respect to Day’s candidacy in 2020, Dictor has said she believes Day wanted to use a different name to siphon votes from her so Greenberg would win.
Day filed his 2020 candidacy as a No Party Affiliation candidate on June 10, 2020, guaranteeing he would appear on the November ballot alongside Lynn Moira Dictor. Day made no expenditures and raised no money, same as 2016. But both Day and Greenberg withdrew from the campaign a little more than two weeks later, on June 26, about four days after Greenberg’s indictment.
Anderson and staffers have said it was their obligation to let Daniel L. Day run as Dani Mora Day because the candidate met registration requirements and they do not have the ability to challenge the validity of such applications in court.
Multiple complaints have been filed about Day’s candidacy, and the Seminole County Supervisor of Elections office has been unable to locate him since he failed to properly terminate his campaign. Whether Day’s candidacy was approved by a DeSantis appointee as part of some promise to help Greenberg stay in office remains unclear, but what does seem apparent is that prosecutors have been asking a lot of questions about Florida elections and schemes to hurt the chances of Democrats and more centrist Republicans in state races.
This writer surmises that federal investigators are trying to get their arms around a political corruption scenario as complex as it appears ubiquitous. Greenberg’s ties to Engels; Engels’ ties to smear campaigns; Greenberg’s discussions with Stone; expansive schemes to sabotage or siphon votes from Democratic candidates—and that list doesn’t even cover human trafficking and drug allegations, or reported bribery probes involving Rep. Gaetz and others, or Greenberg’s misspending of taxpayer money. The laundry list of problematic allegations against G.O.P. officials or operatives offers insight as to why prosecutors have moved slowly on this complicated matter since last year. The picture painted by sources shows a group of prosecutors methodically interviewing witnesses again and again—in a year where ability to meet in person has been severely limited—to fully understand the state of affairs in what appears to be a deep, mucky swamp.
Questions about the integrity of Florida elections are a potential minefield for federal prosecutors, who are well-known for bringing only airtight criminal cases. After months of false claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election, Republicans would likely erupt in outrage and denial if prosecutors allege that it was, in fact, Republican officials committing serious election crimes in the nation’s biggest swing state. The possibility of future indictments regarding election schemes likely depends on the amount of airtight evidence prosecutors can get their hands on.
While Greenberg may be able to explain things or offer insight into schemes, his misconduct and instability make him a less-than-perfect cooperating witness for prosecutors. Key would be the collection of corroborating evidence and new testimony that may be unfolding outside of view. There are individuals who could strike their own cooperation agreements with prosecutors, who might find these persons based in part on leads Greenberg provides. That kind of shift might hand prosecutors the kind of airtight evidence they need to bring charges on these complex but critically important corruption issues emerging in Florida.
Important to remember, however, is that this story is not yet finished; rest assured there are more tidbits to come in the days and weeks ahead. Possible vote tampering, allegations of bribery, a proposed “prostitution boat,” the rampant use of Bitcoin by far-right figures—just some of the topics that have been heard by this writer.
Stay tuned. Florida Republicans are really the grift that keeps on giving.