Two Democratic candidates for the post of Florida state Attorney General are calling for a legal investigation into alleged abuses of credit cards issued by the Republican Party to its members. Senators Dave Aronberg and Dan Gelber are demanding that currently Sunshine State AG Bill McCollum make a formal investigation into the question of whether Republicans evaded a 2005 ban on gifts made to lawmakers by giving these people credit cards to court favor. This week, Aronberg and Gelber sent a joint letter to McCollum. They cited the current media flurry over so-called “lavish spending and secret fundraising deals” perpetuated by the GOP’s former and current leadership, and called for McCollum to undertake a “criminal investigation” of how the party spends its money.
McCollum has been made a scapegoat of in the past days, stuck in the midst of his own attempt to handle his party’s internal scandals as an Attorney General and as many people consider to be the current frontrunner for the party’s gubernatorial candidate. That puts him in the position to be considered Florida’s unofficial Republican leader. But McCollum wants any investigation to wait until the GOP elects a new state chairman on the 20th of this month. He says that he shares everyone’s outrage on the issue, and will make sure that guilty parties are turned over to law enforcement and punished if any actual evidence of criminal wrongdoing is found. In the meantime, however, he says that he’d rather not be the one to take that step.
Many former Florida GOP members have stepped forward to give details of lavish parties given and extravagant spending committed by some of the biggest hitters in Florida politics. The party currently refuses to divulge how many of its members were given credit cards.
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