Rep. Matt Gaetz is going through one of the ugliest falls into political disgrace in decades. But on a smaller, less public scale, Gaetz’s downfall largely reflects one of his closest allies – the man who may have started his downfall: Joel Greenberg.
Gaetz, the Florida Republican and Greenberg are friends. Until recently, both were wealthy players in the new Trumpist wave that swept the Florida Republican Party. Both were children of successful parents who made their names known across the state. Both frequented the same circles, defended the same libertarian causes, and clung to the same icons of the Florida Republican Party as Governor Ron DeSantis and political agent Roger Stone.
And now, both have been caught in a federal investigation to investigate allegations that they recruited young women and paid them for sex, according to The New York Times.
As The Daily Beast reported on Friday, it was text messages about Gaetz and Greenberg’s trips to a government office that alerted investigators to the congressman’s involvement in alleged crimes – and eventually led them to what they determined to be a criminal sex gang.
But before Joel Greenberg was indicted for sex trafficking and for drawing attention to Gaetz, Greenberg was an eccentric tax collector with a political future and all the right connections.
Like Gaetz, Greenberg is the son of a wealthy local businessman. Dr. Andrew Greenberg was a co-founder of a dental company with 92 offices across the state. Joel, who owns a stake in that company, started to open his own advertising agency, DG3. For a while, he also performed “The Joel Greenberg Show”, a sports-themed radio program on WRSO 810 AM. He sold the advertising company in 2015 and ran the following year for the Seminole County tax collector, defeating the 78-year-old man who has held the position since 1988.
Once in office, Greenberg immediately took strange steps towards what should have been a low and tedious job. He took the agency out of its government offices without rent. He hired his friends. He distributed questionable contracts to longtime associates. He used his “tax collector’s badge” to impersonate a police officer and stop a speeder. He even tried to get some tax officials to carry guns.
But it was another type of alleged abuse of power that would eventually involve his friend, Matt Gaetz.
Greenberg, whose government agency was tasked with destroying expired driver’s licenses, was illegally creating false identities, according to investigators. And Gaetz was with him when the pair were caught in surveillance footage visiting the tax collector’s office in Lake Mary, Florida, over a weekend in April 2018, according to several people with knowledge of the incident.
When asked by an employee if he had visited the office over the weekend, Greenberg responded by text message: “Yes, I was showing Mr Gaetz what our operation was like. Did I leave something on? “
Images of text messages obtained by The Daily Beast show that Greenberg involved the congressman even more with a personal favor in September of that year. That was when he left the official protocol and instructed an employee – on a Sunday afternoon – to present Gaetz with a duplicate of identity.
“Amy- is there a way to help one of our congressmen get an emergency replacement ID or DL by Tuesday at 2pm? His was lost yesterday and he has a flight on Tuesday. You currently have no other form of identification with him. Sorry to bother you on Sunday, ”wrote Greenberg.
The favor went to his friend: “Matthew Louis Gaetz II”, born on May 7, 1982.
These text messages arrived in early 2020 at the U.S. Secret Service, the Florida Police Department and, more recently, another federal agency, according to a source with knowledge of the agents’ requests.
In the years before these incidents, Gaetz and Greenberg had publicly demonstrated a bond that referred to their similar thinking, interests and friendship. Gaetz, the son of a former Florida State Senate president, rose to the top echelon of Florida state policy at a young age.
But he earned an unpleasant reputation, even among his Republican colleagues, for allegedly creating what a lawmaker called a sex game in which “FL House members earned ‘points’ for sleeping with aides, interns, lobbyists and married lawmakers.” Sources in Tallahassee told reporters that Gaetz frequented a restaurant popular with local university students, part of his attempts to get undergraduate students.
Greenberg’s personal history during this period is much more obscure. It is not clear when their friendship with Gaetz began, but on July 8, 2017, the two each shared a photo of your dinner with Roger Stone.
Gaetz repeatedly called Greenberg his friendif it was to support the tax collector’s idea of accepting Bitcoin, share your op-eds, or make internal jokes about his mutual lobbyist friend, Chris Dorworth.
In 2018, Greenberg was saying BuzzFeed News that Gaetz was his political mentor, an article that Gaetz published in full on his official Congress website. Both visited Israel’s Public Relations Committee that year, where they photographed a selfie with a 21-year-old woman who worked on Ron DeSantis’s Florida governor campaign.
In 2019, they shared photos of themselves in the White House with Dorworth, whom Gaetz considers his own “legislative mentor”.
Both pressed for legalization of marijuana as well. In January 2019, Gaetz shared a video on Twitter with Greenberg and John Morgan, an Orlando lawyer who refers to himself as “Pot Daddy”. Greenberg was an avid marijuana user who often carried a marijuana vaporizer with him, said three people who saw him use it at the finance office, at work parties or with friends. And he became Gaetz’s favorite person for marijuana vapors, according to one of those sources.
They were close enough to mix with the family. A video posted on YouTube shows a photo of Gaetz cradling Greenberg’s newborn daughter. Greenberg’s wife, Abby, shared a photo on Facebook of another occasion when Gaetz held his son in front of the White House, flanked by a smiling president, Donald Trump.
This week, a Florida state lawmaker, Congresswoman Anna V. Eskamani, a Democrat, told The Daily Beast about her own strange interactions with Greenberg and Gaetz, who approached her in person – sometimes together.
“There was all this weird engagement and friendship with me,” she said. “Matt Gaetz too. I don’t have his number. I have no commitment to him. He tried to get involved with me on Twitter. I am very careful with any response to him. “
She said Greenberg used to send text messages with pictures of her reminiscing about her party past, and that in 2019 he and Gaetz joined in what she called a “strange” voice message, which the Daily Beast published on Friday.
“We were talking about you and talking about your lovely qualities,” Greenberg said in the message, followed by Gaetz’s comment: “We think you are the future of the Democratic Party in Florida!”
On May 4, 2018, Gaetz accessed Twitter for plug a new political innovation from Greenberg. “Pay your taxes in cryptocurrency? @MrJoelGreenberg say yes, ”wrote Gaetz, now a member of the House Blockchain Caucus. He set up a Greenberg parody account in the tweet, possibly by mistake.
An audit from Seminole County last year showed that Greenberg channeled about $ 66,000 in taxpayer funds to his own company, Government Blockchain Systems LLC. When auditors asked him about the company, Greenberg said he was developing a new way to accept “cryptocurrency as payment” of taxes.
That innovation resurfaced this week in the form of new federal charges. Prosecutors allege that Greenberg stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from Seminole county taxpayers and turned them into cryptocurrencies. A millionaire, Greenberg also used about $ 240,000 in Bitcoin to boost his doomed re-election bid for 2020.
Although Greenberg never financially supported Gaetz’s federal campaign efforts, Greenberg’s parents supported Gaetz, maximizing for him in the 2018 Republican Party primary elections. A year later, on June 9, 2020, Gaetz returned the favor, bursting Greenberg’s re-election.
Two weeks later, Greenberg was hit with his first charge, on charges of persecuting his Republican political opponent.
Prosecutors have broadly expanded these charges to a diverse list of crimes, ranging from electronic fraud to sex trafficking, claiming that Greenberg recruited at least one teenager between the ages of 14 and 17 to engage in a “commercial sex act” in 2017 at Central Florida and elsewhere.
That’s where Gaetz comes back.
The New York Times revealed on Tuesday that federal investigators were also investigating whether Gaetz violated sex trafficking laws in his dealings with an unidentified 17-year-old girl. The teenager is reportedly the same victim at the center of the charges against Greenberg.
Follow-up reports from various media claim that Gaetz shared nude photos of his sexual partners on the floor of the Chamber, induced minors to have sex with their friends and tapped ATMs, Apple Pay and Cash App to pay for sex, leaving a trail of receipts. Some of the men and women involved allegedly took ecstasy to the meetings.
Gaetz’s reputation in Congress did not help him to refute these allegations. It is well known that Gaetz used to go out with younger women, often in their 20s, and had a long-standing relationship with a Congress intern who was just over 21. CNN reported on Thursday that he shared nude photos of his sexual partners with other lawmakers on the House floor and we talked about having sex with them.
Lawmakers gossiped about his alcohol and drug use for years, complaining that his office often smelled like marijuana and speculating that his weight loss in Congress was due to cocaine. And his adverse relationship with his colleagues – particularly fellow Republicans whom he considered insufficiently favorable to Trump – has cost him in his search for allies willing to defend him and refute a constant stream of negative stories, just like Gaetz’s claims about a plan extortion has a real touch to them.
Gaetz’s initial response – that he was the victim of a “organized criminal extortion” scheme with geopolitical implications – added a bizarre new dimension to the whole story. The complicated production involved a former DOJ prosecutor, a serial fraudster, and his own father, who Gaetz said he used a telegram under FBI instructions to stop the crime.
Gaetz produced a document of his alleged extortionists, containing the absurd deception that the DOJ would give up its sexual crimes investigation if Gaetz lent them $ 25 million to help free a Jewish American held hostage in Iran. The hostage, Bob Levinson, was declared dead last year by the United States government.
The exposure of the pressure campaign did little to convince Republicans in Washington to come together in defense of Gaetz. His spokesman resigned on Friday. His political idol, Trump, was silent, as were the vast majority of his fellow Republican congressmen.
“The last time I had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old, I was 17,” Gaetz told The Daily Beast earlier in the week, one of his strangely specific denials of the charges against him. “As for Colina, I know that I have many enemies and few friends. My support is generally outside of Washington, DC, and I would not accept it any other way. “