The intercourse trafficking scandal surrounding Florida U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz is getting gnarlier by the day, each due to the circus sideshow of supporting characters it brings with it and the great questions it raises about why we, as a nation, insist on electing folks to our federal authorities who appear to be they may very well be plausibly concerned with intercourse trafficking.
But that’s neither right here nor there! If you’re not acquainted, on Tuesday, the New York Times revealed a bombshell report detailing an investigation into Gaetz’s alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old woman whom he had given cash for flights in order that she may journey throughout state strains with him. Those allegations reportedly surfaced through the course of a bigger investigation involving a man named Joel Greenberg — a former native official in Florida who’s presently being investigated by the Justice Department on “…an array of charges, including intercourse trafficking of a little one and financially supporting folks in change for intercourse, no less than considered one of whom was an underage woman,” the Times reports.
Apparently, Joel Greenberg has been a busy man in Florida, and the Orlando Sentinel just lately compiled a useful listing of headlines it’s revealed over time that collectively paint a image of each unfettered, brazen corruption and mind-blowing, ape-brained stupidity. Perhaps essentially the most unbelievable merchandise on Greenberg’s rap sheet — even wackier than the story about him impersonating a law enforcement officer — is the time he reportedly used $90,000 value of taxpayer cash to construct a large cryptocurrency mining rig in his personal workplace, which instantly overloaded {the electrical} breakers after which, when he moved it to a totally different workplace, brought about a energy surge that began a hearth.
During a 2020 audit of his spending throughout his time as Seminole County’s tax collector, investigators discovered that Greenberg had pay as you go $65,860 to an entity known as “Government Blockchain Systems LLC,” which his workplace was the only member of. When questioned about why such an LLC existed in the primary place, Greenberg instructed auditors that he had been creating a new technique for his workplace to just accept “cryptocurrency as funds.”
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“There doesn’t seem like a public goal to create a county-wide platform on condition that there are a number of non-government entities that already present the flexibility to gather cryptocurrency and convert the cost into U.S. {dollars},” the auditors wrote in their report.
According to that very same report — which, by the best way, additionally discovered that Greenberg had used public funds to purchase physique armor, weapons, ammunition and a drone — injury from the hearth that resulted after Greenberg moved his rig to Seminole County’s Lake Mary department was roughly $6,700, which “…was not lined by insurance coverage as a result of negligence of the Tax Collector.”
“It value an extra $1,200 to tear down the server room,” auditors wrote. “The bills incurred for the server room buildout, hearth injury, and server room tear down had been roughly $98,000.”
Florida prosecutors are apparently not shopping for these claims about a new cost system, and on Wednesday filed a second superseding indictment towards Greenberg for embezzling $400k to buy cryptocurrency for himself, wire fraud, and bribery. In addition to his first indictment — which included expenses of harassment and stalking of a political opponent — and his first superseding indictment — which included one cost of human trafficking, a number of expenses of aggravated id theft, and misuse of driver license data —Greenberg is now going through a mixed complete of 33 expenses.
Although Greenberg resigned his publish as tax collector in 2020 sooner or later after federal authorities charged him together with his first indictment, he had posted a selfie exterior the White House only one yr earlier in which he will be seen standing alongside Gaetz. While the precise nature of the connection between the 2 males remains to be murky, Gaetz did publicly congratulate Greenberg on his profitable election in 2018, predicting that he would sometime make a nice congressman.
Gaetz, for his half, has continued to disclaim the allegations of intercourse trafficking, insisting as a substitute that he’s being focused by an elaborate extortion scheme.
