Oren Miller (left) and Gary Search, in mugshot mode
By Chris Satullo
A snarky take hot off the news can taste delicious at first, but sometimes it sours in your mouth as more facts roll in.
Thus, it was in January of last year when news broke that two Republican commissioners in Sumter County, Fla., had been charged with perjury, because, allegedly, they had lied to investigators about Sunshine Law violations they’d committed.
For many liberals, the headline fit neatly into well-established narratives about the GOP penchant for corruption, in forms big and small. Making the news tidbit all the more scrumptious was that the two men – Oren Miller and Gary Search – were residents of The Villages, the uber-MAGA mega-retirement community that dominates Sumter County, while sprawling into two others in central Florida. This minor scandal connected delightfully with another news item that had hit shortly before: Several residents of the Villages had been convicted of vote fraud in the 2020 election for trying in various ways to cast an extra vote for…wait for it… Donald J. Trump.
In fact, The Villages – larger in area than Manhattan, home to about 80,000 graying souls with nest eggs, most of whom vote Republican – arguably and ironically ranks as one the nation’s largest proven hot spots of 2020 voter fraud.
So, when liberal Twitter heard that official corruption might be added to the mix, it gleefully erupted with a meme-fest of schadenfreude.
So did I.
Now, a year later, here comes The Intercept, an investigative website founded by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, to spoil the fun with an exhaustive report that turns our initial take on its head.
It turns out that Search ,who pled guilty, and Miller, who was convicted at trial and did jail time, are actually the good guys in this story.
The latter, in fact, could reasonably be viewed, as his wife described him to The Intercept, as a “political prisoner” who was incarcerated for months on trumped-up charges. The whole case was a legal travesty and a shocking governmental abuse, even for Florida, where politicians kowtowing to rich developers is as common as the sun rising over the Atlantic. One such politician is Ron DeSantis.
Here’s a link to Ryan Grim’s account of this mess in The Intercept. It’s a very lonnnng read, but worth your time. (Unless, of course, you have high blood pressure; if so, this tale is so outrageous it might be hazardous to your health.)
But here’s the Cliff Notes version (and, even acknowledging that Grim is clearly on Team Miller-Search, it’s still a convincing picture of unfolding injustice):
Miller and Search got elected to the five-member county commission in 2020 as part of a three-person ticket of angry Villages homeowners. Their issue: rolling back a big county property tax increase which they saw as a sop to the Morse family, which built and controls The Villages – not to mention much of what goes on in Sumter County.
The family wanted to keep developing other parts of the county, but it didn’t want to pay impact fees to cover most the cost of the infrastructure the new developments would require (except for helping out with some road construction, if the county asked nicely). The developers, in short, wanted to do what corporations all over our land love to do: “externalize” the costs of their business operations to the taxpayer.
When the insurgents got into office, in 2021, they passed new impact fees. But the owners of The Villages weren’t having it. They put the area’s state representative on their payroll (in one year paying him about 30 times his $29,175 state salary). This tribune of the people dutifully introduced and got passed a bill that banned such impact fees – and retroactively rolled back the one the Sumter board had passed.
Enter Gov. Ron DeSantis. Of course.
He visits The Villages regularly for photo ops and scarfs up beaucoup political donations from its developers – and boatloads of votes from its residents. To benefit the Morse family, he promptly signed the rollback into law.
But that wasn’t enough for the Morses. Next, they rolled out a bogus investigation of supposed Sunshine Law violations by Miller and Search.
Now, I’m a journalist; I believe in the vital importance of rules for transparency in government. But, if I understand correctly the rule in Florida’s Sunshine Law that was exploited to trip up Miller and Search, it goes too far, veering into impracticality. The rule says that elected officials can confer about policy matters only in open, public meetings. It also says they can’t use a third party as a “conduit” to conduct private policy talks. The two newbie commissioners have freely admitted that in their early days in office they did chat about policy – because why wouldn’t you? – until they got ethics training.
At a public meeting, the county administrator – no friend to the insurgents – sucker-punched them by castigating them for possible Sunshine Law violations and inviting citizens to file complaints. Which several, predictably, did – not to the state ethics commission, which would usually handle such a piddling issue, but to the State Attorney…a friend of DeSantis.
This tale ultimately comes back to DeSantis.
Unable to prove the Sunshine Law violation, the State Attorney charged them in late 2021 with felony (felony!?) perjury for supposedly lying about the exact date when the two stopped talking to each other on the phone in order to avoid ethics violations. (It’s not clear whether any of the calls in question involved discussions of anything weightier than who was bringing doughnuts to the next meeting.)
Once the charges were filed, DeSantis promptly suspended Miller and Search, then removed them from office. (“Innocent until proven guilty” is a very conditional principle among politicians). There went the insurgent majority so distasteful to the Morse family.
Folks, I’m sorry to tell you that the State Attorney’s office still pressed these cases like Inspector Javert pursuing Jean Valjean. And the local paper, a megaphone for the developers’ interests, covered it all like it was the trial of a 9-11 terrorist – or maybe the Lindbergh baby kidnapper – replete with evil-looking front page mugshots of “the suspects,” who are more accurately described as two idealistic and somewhat naive senior citizens with heart conditions. Because of his health concerns, Search did a plea bargain, but Miller went to trial and then, again unbelievably, to prison for 70-plus days when the judge denied him bail pending sentencing.
Last month, a gaunt-looking Miller was brought in from prison for that hearing. Even after a parade of neighbors trooped to the courtroom microphone to testify to Miller’s many good works of neighborliness and charity, the judge couldn’t bring himself to let the man go with credit for time served. He tacked on hours of “community service,” but refusing to just let this ailing, gray-haired Good Samaritan continue the good deeds he routinely does, he ordered Miller to do his service at…the county landfill.
During this Lenten time and after reading this Intercept piece, I’m going to do some penance for the assumptions I made and the blue-vs.-red gloating I did when I first saw the news reports about the charges against Miller and Search. And I’ll try to remember this, my umpteenth life lesson about not jumping to conclusions, the next time I’m tempted by a CNN headline to lapse into partisan schadenfreude.
These are good men wronged, Miller and Search.
Perhaps the biggest lesson for all of us going forward is that the looming presence behind this mind-boggling carnival of vindictive, self-serving injustice was Ron DeSantis, a man who wants to be your next president.
We’ve already seen how it goes when a corrupt and vengeful developer gets into the Oval Office. Why take a second chance with a developers’ pal who’s actually more adept than DJT at yanking the levers of power to achieve dark ends?
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia