Former Florida GOP chair slams party: Voter ID a 'marketing tool' to suppress minority votes
theGRIO REPORT - The former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida is currently awaiting trial for allegedly paying himself to raise money for the party...
‘You and Charlie got what you deserved.”
Greer said his relationship with the party fell apart soon after Crist was jettisoned, because “at that time the tea party was taking over the executive committee” of the Florida GOP.
He said the party reneged on a promised $125,000 severance agreement, in part out of fear that if they paid him, tea party members would “come after” any Republican who aided Greer.
“What happened to me was there were leaders in the party [who] said at the beginning, we need to pay a severance agreement. He’s given us the keys to the castle, which we wanted, so let’s just move on,” Greer said. “But at that time the tea party was taking over the executive committee of the party and they were looking to hang people. If they could have put Charlie Crist in jail for 15 years they would have. They looked and tried to find something on [Crist] — spending, appointments …”
“My biggest fallacy was I didn’t see how bad it was,” Greer said. “When they came to me and said, ‘we no longer support Governor Crist — you’re his handpicked chairman, but the party’s going in a different direction.’”
“So they gave me a severance agreement,” he said of his initial departure as chairman. “What I know happened was they lied about it for three months that they never gave me one.” Greer claims that the RPOF board had become significantly more right wing, and that “29 out of 36 became tea party people.”
“I believe they told the leadership if you pay him one dime, we’re coming after you,” Greer said. “First they said there were no agreements, then they said the signatures were faxed, and therefore not legal, then they said they wanted me to void out the other agreement, and I said there’s a hold harmless agreement in there, because you’re not going to blame [former House speaker and then-U.S. Senate candidate] Marco Rubio and the House leadership’s spending on me. The only way to get out of it when four months down the road when the payment became due, was, oh, I committed a crime — I had a fundraising agreement nobody knew about even though it was mentioned in the first paragraph of the severance agreement.”
Greer said the party leadership decided, “it was, you discredit the guy before he discredits us.”
“They pretty much ruined my life,” he said. “People come up to me privately and say, ‘we can’t say it publicly but what they did to you is terrible.’”
But he says not everyone is as sympathetic.
“A friend of mine said, ‘you and Charlie got what you deserved because you can’t say we didn’t warn you.’”
Greer’s trial has been postponed several times and he is now expected to go to trial in February. He is also suing the party for $5 million. He says the party has refused to turn over documents to him, that lawyers for the RPOF sent his attorney a bill for $104,000 for photocopying costs.
But it is his critique of the political process, and what he claims is his party’s part in corrupting it, that is most biting, including his claim that the conservative Republican legislature is seeking to “radically change government to give more power to the governor and legislature,” including to remove state supreme court justices whose rulings they don’t like. He says citizens need to be much more engaged, and pay attention to what’s happening behind the scenes.
