DeSantis Elections Commission partially clears DeSantis-endorsed Polk school board member without doing any investigating

The FEC asked Rick Nolte if he did anything wrong. Nolte said no. And the FEC said: "Ok then." And they made public fools of Sheriff Grady Judd and State Attorney Brain Haas in the process.

Because Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and State Attorney Brian Haas refused to do any investigative work into Rick Nolte’s campaign finance absurdities, Ron DeSantis’ Florida Elections Commission has been able to dismiss one of my complaints against Rick Nolte as “legally insufficient.”

That’s because the FEC didn’t do any investigative work either. It just took Nolte’s answers to easy questions at face value without checking to see if the answers were true. Read for yourself in just a second.

This particular complaint is not about Nolte’s self-declared $5,200 felony cash contribution; it’s about 1) the $2,700 he reported spending on “shirts” with a Missouri company that doesn’t sell shirts 2) the odd collection of vague expenditures that just happened to add up to $7,500, which just happened to be the amount charged by Texas criminal GOP campaign consultant James Dunn to Nolte’s fellow CCDF candidates Terry Clark and Jill Sessions, who Nolte denies using despite Terry Clark saying in writing that he did. Full detailed rundown on all that here.

Interestingly, I filed this complaint some days after I filed the $5,200 cash contribution/loan complaint.

Receiving this dismissal first suggests to me that Nolte, his very high-powered election crime lawyer, and the FEC are having a harder time figuring out how to make that self-declared cash felony complaint go away.

Speculation and hearsay

This complaint was easier for them to make disappear, as you’ll see, because I do not have a badge or subpoena power over Rick Nolte or his campaign vendors.

I could only point out to the sheriff, state attorney, and DeSantis investigators the extreme oddities in the public record Nolte created — some of which indicated crime on their face and some that were merely suggestive of crime requiring some factual and documentary investigation to verify. Nolte has since amended his official campaign documents an obscenely hilarious 11 times.

Illegitimate DeSantis School Board member amends *11* campaign reports, somehow makes it all much dumber

I was just an attentive citizen reporting what looked like a crime scene to the appropriate authorities — as all good citizens should. FEC Executive Director Tim Vaccaro dismissed that as “speculation” and “hearsay,” without attempting to verify the fact record. I am not a prosecutor. I am a witness to the public record who “saw something and said something.”

Come get a chuckle at what Vaccaro and FEC sent back to me. And remember what Polk Sheriff’s spokesman Scott Wilder told The Ledger’s Gary White:

Since submitting the complaints about Nolte, Townsend has publicly questioned why the Polk County Sheriff’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office for the 10th Judicial Circuit have not taken action. Scott Wilder, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office, said that PCSO is not investigating Nolte and that state agencies enforce campaign-finance laws.

As you’ll see, the FEC will only “enforce” campaign laws if someone else investigates — like say a sheriff or state’s attorney — and takes them out of the realm of “hearsay” and speculation into fact-finding. Other than that, they’ll just ask if you committed a crime; and all you have to do is say “no” to be cleared.

Scott Wilder was clearly wrong about who “enforces” what. And DeSantis and “T.I.T.S.” Nolte have humiliated him, the sheriff and state attorney yet again.

I can’t wait to see what FEC comes up with to get Nolte out of the $5,200 self-reported felony.

Richard Coates is an awfully high-powered campaign crime lawyer for an innocent man to hire to help fix “de minimis” typos. LOL

We did get one important piece of fact-finding from the FEC; but it did not emerge from investigating. In its official correspondence, the FEC identified Rick Nolte’s very high-powered lawyer — Richard Coates. Check out his bio. See screen shot below.

Key excerpt:

Richard has advised some of Florida’s highest elected officials, including Governors, members of the Florida Cabinet, House Speakers and Senate Presidents…

… and served as the general counsel to the Republican Party of Florida from 2011 to 2014.

I’m sure “T.I.T.S.” Nolte will rocket right to the top of the Coates resume now.

And Coates must be who Nolte was talking about when he told this to Lakeland Now’s Kim Moore:

He was then asked the status of the investigation into his campaign finances.

“I haven’t heard anything other than it’s being taken care of,” Nolte said. When asked who told him that and how it was being taken care of, Nolte smiled and said, “I don’t know.  I don’t ask these reporter types of questions.”

Richard, did you read Rick’s “T.I.T.S.” manifesto before you took him on as a client?

This dude will be prowling middle schools with your help. Congrats. Thanks for having it “taken care of.”

Rumor has it Nolte has spent big bucks on Coates. I hope that’s true. It makes me smile; and I guess you could think of it as an FEC fine of sorts — just paid to a fancy-shoed lawyer, not taxpayers. (As always, Nolte is welcome and encouraged to tell his full story to me so I can tell it here at PE1. I’m easy to reach.)

At the same time, it seems odd to drop so much cash and suffer so much trouble for a few innocent typos easily fixed with amendments. I assure you, if it had been me, I would have immediately and publicly corrected my typos and “de minimis” errors without spending C-notes on Florida’s election lawyer to the GOP stars and subjecting myself to endless public humiliation.

Will Grady and Brian claw back any dignity?

What remains most darkly amusing about law enforcement at multiple levels corrupting and humiliating itself to protect Rick “T.I.T.S.” Nolte is that it’s corrupting and humiliating itself to protect Rick “T.I.T.S.” Nolte.

That’s what happens when you forsake your professional public duty and integrity to become a meaningless cog in a tiny state dictator’s quest for the White House. You make yourself party to gross absurdity.

Grady and Brian and Brad Copley and Scott Wilder have sold a lot for very very cheap to Ron DeSantis — and maybe Steve Maxwell. I can’t stop that; but I can certainly mock it.

They all have one last chance to regain some dignity, though.

Now that FEC has shown that it will only respond to investigative fact-finding done by others, the Polk Sheriff’s Office or State Attorney could investigate and publicly clarify if Rick Nolte did, in fact, spend the suspicious $7,500 on what he said he did. Get the receipts; locate all those “signs”; quantify the “marketing.”

Remember that Nolte himself told Kim Moore he didn’t even know what his campaign, run by his charming son Ren, spent money on:

Nolte also claimed he didn’t know about the Summit Printing expenses.

“I don’t know – that’s my son. I don’t know anybody out of state that does that. One of my committees did that,” Nolte said. He has said his son, Ren Nolte, worked for his campaign, along with Nolte’s daughter.

So now it’s a simple typo? Ok. Sure.

You just have to laugh at this whole stupid situation

Politically and institutionally and publicly and morally, Rick Nolte is Dead “T.I.T.S.” Walking. He has no power on the School Board. Superintendent Fred Heid can ignore whatever he mutters incoherently. The crushing of the CCDF with the help of James Dunn left Nolte completely isolated and emasculated.

Nolte won’t be articulating any powerful dark vision of the future. He can barely put a sentence together. “T.I.T.S.” Nolte is the lowest quality, least formidable person ever elected mistakenly by the people of Polk County.

He’s a much bigger reputational and dignity problem for Grady Judd and Brian Haas than he is disruption problem for the Polk School system. And he’s not a problem for me at all. I’ve already weaponized his gross incompetence and self-declared criminality to cost him thousands of dollars.

I’m happy to let him to twist in my wind for four years as a public political object lesson. And I look forward to finding new ways to use his gross incompetence and self-declared criminality for my purposes at my leisure. If he does something gross or unethical to you, Polk school stakeholders, please call me.

It would be nice to live in a state that did not produce “T.IT.S.” Noltes in public life or at least dealt with them morally and legally when it did. But that’s not our state; and I don’t deal in delusion.

I would enjoy taunting Ron DeSantis as he removed his favorite T.I.T.S. manifesto-writing school board member.

But this isn’t that bad either; and maybe relentlessly rubbing faces in this petty corruption will have some future deterrent effect that the hilarious FEC tries hard to avoid providing.