SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019 | MOTHER JONES 39ing to his financial disclosures. Most of that
was tied up in property he owned. He had
less than $90,000 in liquid assets.
Yet less than three weeks after Miller
announced his retirement, Gaetz dumped
$100,000 into his own campaign. Four
months later, he gave another $100,000.
His total contribution was more than half
his net worth and exceeded any of his oppo-
nents’ total fundraising. Where did he come
up with all that money? The obvious sus-
pect was his dad. It would have been illegal
for Don Gaetz to lend six figures to the cam-
paign, but he appears to have found another
way to funnel money to his son’s race.
Public records and financial disclosure
forms show that in the days following
Miller’s retirement announcement, Matt
Gaetz sold a house he owned for just under
$100,000. Three months later, he sold sev-
eral vacant lots he’d bought years earlier. All
of Gaetz’s real estate was purchased by the
same buyer: a company called Treveron,
which, it turns out, is owned by his dad.
Don Gaetz never completely left the
health care business after selling his hos-
pice company in 2004. He still owns a com-
pany called tlc Caregivers, which helps
elderly and disabled people with household
tasks. Matt, like his mother and sister, was
a longtime tlc Caregivers board member,
earning $10,000 a year. In his own financial
disclosure forms, Don described Treveron
as a property management company that
rents space and provides management ser-
vices to tlc Caregivers. Matt was listed as
an executive of both companies at the time
he sold his real estate to Treveron, and he
remained listed as a Treveron officer in
public records until April 2019. All other
officers of Treveron are also members of
the Gaetz family.
The transactions fall into a gray area of
campaign finance law. “This is a great ex-
ample of shady stuff that campaign finance
law probably doesn’t prohibit,” says Daniel
Weiner, senior counsel at the Brennan
Center for Justice. As long as Treveron paid
fair market value for the real estate—which
it appears to have done—he says, the cam-
paign contribution from Gaetz was likely
legal. But that could depend on what hap-
pened to the real estate, says Paul S. Ryan,
vice president of policy and litigation at
the watchdog group Common Cause. “If
on paper he seemed to have sold the prop-
erty but maintained control, that could be
a campaign finance violation,” he says.
Gaetz’s office confirmed that he donated
the proceeds from the real estate sales to his
campaign. But Gaetz said in an email that
he did not have control of the real estate
because “the other officers/shareholders
hold a majority interest to control all de-
cisions by the company.” The real estate
sales weren’t the only unusual features
of his congressional fundraising. While
in the Florida House, he had started and
chaired two leadership pacs, which raised
hundreds of thousands of dollars that he
used to influence races for county com-
missioner and other local offices. When
he ran for Congress, he resigned from the
pacs, which then shut down and donated
all their remaining money, about $380,000,
to a federal super-pac called North Florida
Neighbors, dedicated to supporting Matt
Gaetz for Congress. The super-pac and the
state pacs listed the same treasurer, and
the state pacs were chaired by the wife of
a former chief of staff to Don Gaetz.
Florida law prohibits contributions to
state races from being transferred to fed-
eral campaigns. A resident of Gaetz’s district
filed a complaint with the state elections
division, observing that “the transfer of
almost $400K from State pacs to a Federal
pac afforded Mr. Gaetz an edge that short-
changed voters, vis a vis their ability to ob-
jectively evaluate candidates.” The elections
division dismissed the complaint, saying
that the pacs had done nothing wrong be-
cause they dissolved before donating the
funds to the federal entity.
The super-pac, which spent more than
$500,000 on Gaetz’s behalf, received $10,000
from tlc Caregivers. But two donors
dwarfed all others, contributing $100,000
each. One was the Harness Oil and Gas
company in Houston, whose president is
the daughter of a longtime Gaetz family
friend. The other was Freeport Commun-
ications, owned by Odom, the former Gaetz
client who had served six months in prison
for campaign finance violations.
Odom shares one of Gaetz’s biggest policy
goals: legalizing medical marijuana. In 2015,
Odom was the primary financial backer of
a company that won one of Florida’s first
seven medical marijuana growing licenses,
authorized by a bill that Gaetz championed.
Two years later, Odom and his partners sold
the company and the license for around $40
million to a Canadian corporation. Gaetz’soffice said in a statement that Gaetz “had
nothing to do with Jay Odom getting a med-
ical marijuana license” from the state health
department.
The super-pac spending supplemented
the $900,000 that Gaetz raised for his
campaign. Even if Trump hadn’t cam-
paigned with him in Pensacola—twice—
during the election, Gaetz would have
routed his opponents simply by swamp-
ing the local media market with the more
than $320,000 he spent on campaign ads.
He won the primary and then crushed his
Democratic opponent, Air Force veteran
and attorney Steven Specht. “He’s a fun-
damentally bad person, but nothing ever
seems to stick to him,” Specht says. “He
can say and do the most despicable things,
and people just pull the lever.”when trump called Haiti a “shithole” coun-
try in January 2018, Gaetz took to the air-
waves to concur that Haiti was “deplorable,”
full of “sheet metal and garbage.” As the pres-
ident’s guest at the 2018 State of the Union
address, Gaetz brought a conspiracy theorist
who had questioned whether the Nazis actu-
ally used gas chambers. Gaetz hired a speech-
writer who had been forced out of the White
House because of his association with white
nationalists. During a gun control hearing,
Gaetz tried to get the parents of two Parkland
school shooting victims ejected.
His trolling knows few bounds—except
perhaps those created by witness intim-
idation laws. In February, on Twitter, he
threatened the release of damaging in-
formation about former Trump lawyer
Michael Cohen as payback for Cohen’s con-
gressional testimony against the president.
The threat landed Gaetz in hot water with
the Florida Bar, which launched an investi-
gation, eliciting a rare apology from Gaetz.
Virtually everything Gaetz has done in
Congress has been designed for maximum
publicity. The first bill he ever introduced
was a one-sentence measure disbanding the
Environmental Protection Agency. In July
2017, he hijacked a Democratic resolution
seeking more information about Trump’s
firing of former fbi Director James Comey
by attaching an amendment calling for an
investigation into Comey’s “refusal to in-
vestigate” Hillary Clinton for everything
from her private email server to her role in
the Uranium One pseudo-scandal. Wired
later discovered that (continued on page 65)