Florida Rep. Val Demings (D) has been consistent on social media urging voters to reconsider Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s (R) seat in the Senate. However, Rubio is now pushing back, calling to attention a recent development in an ethical investigation into Rep. Demings’ campaign.
In turn, Republicans across the state are criticizing the party, accusing them of “twisting rules… to cover up the violation of a member.”
The former Orlando Police Chief has faced controversy after she allegedly misused campaign funds, and a recent message from the Rubio campaign claims that she “was caught abusing mailing privileges as she runs in a high-profile statewide race.”
Last month, “the bipartisan House Communications Standard Commission… opened an investigation into Demings following a complaint that she sent a 12-page, campaign-style mailer to Floridians outside her district.” However, Democratic leadership in the House has now shut down the investigation.
In response, as reported by the Free Beacon, a senior congressional aide with information on the issue, argued that “this is just the latest example of Democrats twisting rules, process, and precedent to cover up the violation of a member.”
Moreover, Florida Rep. Kat Cammack (R), a member of the Commission, penned a letter, arguing that the investigation had not gathered enough information.
The letter, directed to Pennsylvania Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D), who is also the Chair of the Committee, expresses that “here, even though the Member is a candidate for statewide office, she appears to have engaged in little to no oversight of her vendor’s operations, explaining that she was so unaware of its operations that she neither reviewed nor approved final mailing lists to ensure compliance, did not know and did not inquire concerning the vendor’s mailing practices, and was overall so uninformed about the process that she did not know a violation had occurred.”
The letter references a response from Demings, which was “a three-page letter from attorneys at Elias law Group, obtained by the Free Beacon,” that “admitted that the mailings went outside her district” according to a message from the Rubio campaign to supporters.
The message adds that “Scanlon’s campaign also employed Elias for ‘legal services.’”
