The Democrat who nearly beat Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2018 pocketed illegal campaign contributions because he was having a hard time paying for his lifestyle after quitting his job to run for governor, a prosecutor said Tuesday as a corruption trial began.
Andrew Gillum, who was Tallahassee’s mayor, had a large mortgage, was making payments on two expensive cars and was paying private school tuition for his children when he quit his $120,000-a-year job at People for the American Way to run for the Democratic nomination for governor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Milligan said in opening statements.
One of the men Gillum’s team reached out for campaign donations was an undercover FBI agent posing as a developer exploring projects in Florida’s capital, Milligan said, adding that Gillum used his brother Marcus as a go-between to arrange illegal contributions. Marcus Gillum acted on his own in soliciting donations for Gillum’s campaign for governor because he wanted to impress his older brother, Moss said.
The agent who paid for the New York entertainment testified that Gillum wasn’t the original target of the investigation. Rather, the agency was investigating developer J.T. Burnette and starting looking at Gillum as they began to unpeel corruption that involved Burnette and then-City Commissioner Scott Maddox, another former Tallahassee mayor who ran for governor more than a decade earlier.
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