Wednesday delivered a political earthquake with the Department of Justice‘s indictment of Andrew Gillum on a raft of federal charges relating to political corruption.
If you recognize that name, you should. Until recently, the 42-year-old Gillum was described by many in the media as one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars. The African American politician served as mayor of Tallahassee, Florida’s capital, from 2014 to 2018, then narrowly lost the governor’s race to Ron DeSantis. It was close: Gillum lost by less than Stacey Abrams did in neighboring Georgia in 2018, and his political star kept rising despite his defeat. Talk of Gillum’s bright future leading to the White House was commonly discussed in elite liberal circles, at least until photos emerged in March 2020 of the former mayor, a married father, passed out naked after a drug binge with other men, including a gay escort.
Regardless, the 26-page DOJ indictment is a devastating blow to Gillum’s career, no matter how his trial goes.
Gillum was indicted along with Sharon Lettman-Hicks, the CEO of the National Black Justice Coalition in Tallahassee. Together, according to the DOJ, they conspired in a brazen act of political corruption between 2016 and 2019 to solicit payments from multiple individuals, some of them undercover FBI agents, in exchange for political favors. Gillum and Lettman-Hicks left an impressive electronic trail of their crimes, which makes it difficult to see how they can beat these charges. Altogether, they face 21 federal counts, among them wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and lying to the FBI. The man who almost became Florida’s chief executive now faces up to 45 years in prison.
Gillum will likely get a far shorter sentence, if convicted, but his political career is finished. His dramatic downfall can be fairly termed “epic.” How it happened needs to be asked. That Gillum was under FBI investigation for corruption was reported by the media in 2018, before the election. Florida media reported on the rising scandal beginning in January of that year.
His rival in that election, DeSantis, cited the FBI’s investigation in their final debate, a matter that Gillum and his defenders predictably brushed off as proof of Republican racism. Of course, it appears that Gillum was soliciting bribes during that gubernatorial campaign, as the DOJ alleges. It’s obvious that Florida dodged a major political bullet by electing DeSantis since the only way this scandal could look worse for Democrats is if Gillum were the Sunshine State’s governor right now.
On cue, Gillum is protesting his innocence while his supporters attempt to pass off his downfall as being about politics — as if President Joe Biden’s Justice Department would take down a rising star of their own party just because.
Credit is due to the FBI. Their multifaceted investigation that took down Gillum commenced in 2015 as Operation Capital Currency, the bureau’s effort to untangle systemic political corruption surrounding the Democratic machine in Tallahassee. That investigation, which has been extensively reported for years by the Tallahassee Democrat, resulted in federal bribery convictions against former Tallahassee Mayor and City Commissioner (and former Chairman of the Florida Democratic Party) Scott Maddox plus two of his co-conspirators and eventually took aim at Gillum at the center of the operation.
The bureau did its job meticulously here, as elaborated by the DOJ indictment. Knowing the political sensitivity surrounding this operation — their target wasn’t merely a prominent politician but an African American who was cordial with personages as august as former President Barack Obama — FBI agents employed multiple informants and sorted through mountains of evidence over years to make a solid case against Gillum, knowing it had to stick the first time. Speaking as a former federal investigator, these G-men and women definitely got their ducks in a row on this one.
For several years, it’s been fashionable on the Right to denigrate the FBI habitually, by no means always unfairly, as an element of the “Deep State” so detested by followers of former President Donald Trump. Some of the bureau’s work in the national security arena undeniably has been flawed. Like every big bureaucracy, the FBI has its share of incompetents, hacks, and even crooks. Indeed, there’s a valid case to be made that the FBI ought to have its highly secretive counterintelligence and counterterrorism missions taken away (few Americans realize that we are among just a handful of Western democracies whose domestic intelligence service is also a law enforcement agency) on civil liberties grounds.
That said, the FBI remains the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency. When it gets in the right gear, it has no equal to bringing bad guys and girls to justice — and doing so impartially. The Gillum case serves as a reminder of why we have the FBI, and we should be glad that we do.
Somewhere, J. Edgar Hoover, the man who created the bureau and ran it for a half-century in his nanomanagerial fashion, is smiling.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
