This post has been updated.
These days, Jim Greer is watching Florida politics from the sidelines.
The former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, and onetime political sidekick of the then-governor and onetime rising national GOP star, Charlie Crist, is currently awaiting trial for allegedly paying himself to raise money for the party – a fundraising contract he claims Crist and other party leaders approved. But Greer, who later broke with Crist and endorsed Marco Rubio for the U.S. Senate, only to find himself forced to step down as chairman and charged with money laundering and grand theft, is far from silent about what he claims is his party’s use of voter fraud fears as a pretext to sabotage minority voters.
“The voter fraud issue is just a nonexistent issue,” Greer told theGrio in a wide ranging interview. “It’s a marketing tool. When I was chairman, in three-and-a-half years, we never had one meeting that voter fraud issues were a major problem. The only time you ever had issue with [fraud] was absentee votes.”
Indeed, in Miami, allegations of absentee ballot fraud are roiling the recent election for Miami-Dade mayor. And a national scandal is unfolding involving a highly-paid Republican Party contractor, Nathan Sproul, whose company is alleged to have turned in dozens of fraudulent voter registration applications in Florida, and which is linked to applications that were discarded by a Sproul contract employee in Virginia.
“Most people say non-citizens shouldn’t be voting, but when you get past that you see there really is no issue here,” Greer said. “This is simply being done to provide a political advantage to this political party in this election, and do you think that’s right? Most people would say ‘hell no.’ The party hopes people just hear, ‘hey, non-citizens voting!’”
“There not about to let 2008 happen again,” Greer said of Florida Republicans, referring to the presidential election in which then-Senator Barack Obama won the state, and the presidency, many Republicans theorize, in part because then-Governor Charlie Crist allowed long lines at the polls to stay open.
Greer said that soon after the election, senior consultants met in his office to discuss how to prevent a repeat.
“We did have meetings where there were discussions about ending early vote or limiting it, because I was shown data that early voters were not Republican,” Greer said, referring to senior consultants who he said regularly met with him and other party leaders to discuss legislative strategy. Referring to his party’s ballot performance, Greer said, “we win on Election Day. We lose on early voting. My staff showed that to me on several occasions.”
Greer didn’t mince words in describing how his party feels about early voting, which in Florida was reduced to nine days from 14, under legislation signed by the current governor, Rick Scott. “If Republicans had their way, they’d do away with it. It’s all part of, unfortunately, the Republican Party’s effort from a strategic standpoint, to keep voters from getting to the polls, and that’s a real shame.”
Greer said the GOP’s attitude toward minority voters extends beyond Florida.
“Their strategy is, solve the problem today. And how are they trying to solve the problem today? Voter suppression,” he said. “Now the next question is, where do you go from here? We’re very successful in voter suppression in the last two elections, but unless you’re going to just pass legislation to take the vote away from some people, what is your long term strategy? They’re angry and they think anger and vengeance is going to carry the day. [But] if [Mitt] Romney doesn’t win this election, what will the grassroots of this party say to the grassroots?”
Greer said that as chairman, he sought to reach out to minority voters, who in Florida, as in most of the country, vote overwhelmingly Democratic, with the exception of Cuban-Americans, who lean toward the GOP. He said the party leadership had little interest, particularly in courting African-Americans.
“They opposed all minority outreach programs that I had as chairman, and they just for some reason have given up” on black voters, Greer said. “I had one of my leading consultants tell me that my ideas were going to bring blacks out from under every rock, and they were going to vote Democrat.”
Greer claims he pushed forward anyway, creating an African-American leadership advisory council, and meeting with black newspaper editors and clergy, to try and win support for the party’s small government, low tax message.
“That had never been done,” he said of his party’s black outreach. “And that’s when that discussion [about the futility of courting African-Americans] happened.”
Greer says he was told, “they never vote Republican, chairman.”
“I don’t know how they’re gonna vote, but if they never hear the message, they’re never going to have an opportunity to vote Republican,” Greer said he argued at the time. “Since I’ve left, they disbanded the African-American advisory council. They dismissed the director. They’ve gone back to what they were doing before.”
Echoes of Michael Steele
In voicing his frustrations about black outreach, Greer echoes the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who has often described similar frustrations in trying to convince the party, at a national level, to reach out to black voters.
Greer was an early Steele supporter, and was seen as one of Steele’s biggest boosters in the latter’s run for RNC chair.
“I was gonna run for national chairman,” Greer said of that period after the 2008 election, when the Republican Party was sorting out its next steps, following a painful loss for its standard bearer, Sen. John McCain. “At that point and time my stock was pretty high. I thought: I like Michael Steele. I thought it would be a great thing to have an African-American as our party chair.”
But Greer said his idea to back Steele met with a cold reception among other members of his party.
“I’d say to a room of 600 people that if the country can celebrate its first African-American president, why can’t the Republican Party have its first black chair? And I’d get like, four applause.”
“I chaired Steele’s communications committee,” Greer said. But he said that after Steele won, following several contentious votes, the RNC chair would face a fate that Greer found familiar.
“The same thing they did to me, they used the same gamebook on him,” Greer said of Steele. “I used to open up the paper and it would say, ‘Chairman Greer spends $50,000 at Yankee game’ — limousines, booze and women … and I was at home with my wife. And I’d find out it was the legislators who were in New York over the weekend and they’d put the expenses through the party. Then one day I open up the paper and it’s almost the same story about Michael Steele, and I said to my wife, ‘they’re going after him. Look what’s coming.’”
But Greer’s allegations about the desire of some within the party to “get rid” of Steele, include darker allegations about attitudes regarding the former national chair.
“There’s a state committeeman who will remain nameless who in a back room called Michael Steele a ni–er,” Greer said. “He said, ‘he’ll never be chairman of this party.’ But it’s the same idiot who told me John McCain would never be the nominee of our party, so he lost in both instances.”
Greer would not name the person who made the alleged remark.
But it is in the area of outreach that Greer said the party’s lack of interest in reaching out to black voters was most apparent.
“They used to ask me to come to the quarterly RNC meetings to make a presentation to all the chairs about what we were doing in Florida for minority outreach,” Greer said. “They’d put it on the agenda and I’d have six show up out of 50. And the six who were there were very interested.”
Greer said the GOP’s strategy for dealing with minority voters is to put outreach aside, in favor of a more immediate strategy – using the legislative process to stymie non-Republican voters at the polls. He calls voter fraud a “marketing tool” in this process, whose goal is “to provide a way to swallow the pill as to why you’re changing the election process.”
Greer claims that the near halving of the early voting period in Florida in 2010 actually had its origins in the aftermath of the 2008 election, and that such legislative ideas are strictly business for the party and its top consultants.
“The whole elections package that they passed in 2010, they presented to me and Crist in 2009 and we wouldn’t go along with it, and that’s why it wasn’t done in 2009,” Greer said. “Each year, the consultants put together a package of election law changes that they believe are beneficial to the party in the upcoming elections.”
Among the consultants, Greer names former Crist deputy chief of staff and political consultant Jim Rimes, who he calls “the technocrat who comes up with a lot of this stuff” – meaning legislation – (and who later became a consultant to the Rick Perry presidential campaign), and consultants Andy Palmer, lobbyist Richard Heffley, who runs a firm based in Tallahassee, and Matt Williams, who was a strategist for former Florida attorney general Bill McCollum.
“These are the paid people,” Greer said of the consultants. “It really needs to be exposed [because] there is millions of dollars involved now in winning elections — in pollsters and political advisers.”
“They get bonuses,” said Greer, referring to the practice of paying “success bonuses” to consultants who run winning campaigns. “We’ve had people who get $50,000, $100,000 … one gentlemen got $200,000.”
“I don’t really fault them,” Greer said of the consultants. “It leaves a bad taste in my mouth as a citizen, but they are only doing what they are hired to do. And each year, around January or February they would pile into my office and say, ‘we have an elections bill that we want to run, and we have these legislators who are going to sponsor it.’”
Greer said those ideas included moving the Florida primary to January from March, which Greer said he supported because it gave Florida more influence in the process, and another bill that “eliminated the prohibition of statewide officeholders having to resign if you ran for federal office, because there were several legislators seeking to run for higher office and they wanted that law change.”
Greer said that after 2008, the consultants recommended restricting the governor’s ability to extend voting hours “because they were pissed at [Charlie] Crist.”
“We had two special elections in districts that leaned Democrat but that we thought we were gonna win,” Greer said. “One was in Palm Beach County in ‘08, and what happened was the polls were supposed to close at 7 p.m., and before that somebody called in a bomb threat. So what happened was we thought we were winning that race. Exit polls showed that. When the bomb threat got called in, the consultants got on the phone to me and begged me to get on the phone with the governor and tell him not to extend the voting hours because they thought it would give Democrats time to go and get more voters or let people in line vote. I told them I wouldn’t do it.”
In the revised legislation, according to Greer, a future governor could only extend voting hours if he got a request from a supervisor of elections.
Greer said that in 2009, Republican legislators and consultants “came with this whole package because they were obsessed with what happened in 2008, because remember, I was [also] chair of the rules committee for the national RNC. There was an obsession that we can’t ever let that happen again.”
Greer said the package “included reducing early voting days, it included restricting the governor, it included ID at the polling places, it included provisional ballot issues and it was just a complete briefing on, here’s what we need to do to make sure 2008 doesn’t happen again.”
“Well both the governor and I said we didn’t like it, so it didn’t happen,” Greer said. “They asked me was the governor going to veto this bill and I said he very well might.”
He said his and Crist’s relationship with the party never recovered, particularly after Crist also opposed an attempt by legislators, including the Florida House Speaker, Dean Cannon, to use taxpayer money and poison pill legislation to kill a popular amendment that turned redistricting over to a non-partisan commission.
“It’s just another example of this nuthouse where we are going to do whatever we want, when we want,” Greer said of his party. “Now with the voter rolls, they tried to expunge two to three thousand people, but the list turned out to be inaccurate,” said Greer, referring to an attempt by the Florida secretary of state to “scrub” the voter rolls of allegedly ineligible voters, which resulted in the state being given access to federal immigrations data, after several court challenges.
‘No message’ for Hispanics
As critical as Greer is about his party’s tactics with respect to black voters, he also said the party has “no message” for Hispanics.
“The party is so torn about the immigration issue, that they don’t have an answer for [immigration] that will be broadly accepted by the Hispanic community,” Greer said. “So until they get that answer, they’re going to give lip service to the Hispanic community.”
Greer said his Hispanic outreach committee met the same fate as his black outreach efforts after he was no longer chair. “There’s so much turmoil within the party,” he said. “The tea party wants to round them all up and put them on a bus regardless of how they came here and what ties they or their children have,” he adds, referring to Hispanic Americans and the GOP. “They don’t know what to tell them.”
But Greer alleges that the party does have a message for Cuban-American community leaders in the stronghold of Miami, where Republicans routinely win majorities of Hispanic votes.
“When I was chairman,” he said, party leaders “would periodically come to me and ask me to authorize cash disbursements, and one of the reasons they did that was because particularly down in Miami, I was informed that there were Hispanic leaders that needed to get cash payments to either support the party or oppose certain candidates, or get people to the polls. That is so weird because as I think about it now, onetime I did a cash disbursement to one of our Hispanic leaders of $10,000.”
“It was a brown bag thing,” said Greer. “I was told they would go on Hispanic radio and talk up the Republican candidate.”
‘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.
“Like selling a widget”
“People do not have any comprehension of what is at stake in an election,” Greer says. “It is not as much [about] who is going to hold the office. This is a business, just like selling a widget.”
“These people have so much at stake,” Greer says. “I mean the consultants, the extreme right of the Republican Party that’s in power in Florida… Citizens don’t know what’s going on behind the country. The Republican Party that’s in power today will tinker with the people’s ability to get to the polls and vote.”
Greer said he is still a Republican, but that his party has gone far astray.
“It’s hard to get people to understand what’s happening,” says Greer. “The Republican Party is very good at [saying] ‘look at this hand, don’t look at that hand.’”
The bad feelings between Greer and the Republican Party of Florida are mutual.
Reached for comment, RPOF spokesman Brian Burgess had this to say about Greer:
“Jim Greer was arrested by law enforcement authorities and is now facing a trial for multiple felony counts including charges for embezzlement and intent to defraud. He is not viewed as a credible source on any of these matters and everything he says should be considered in light of those facts.”
Greer denies any wrongdoing, but he admits to making many mistakes as chair, including going along with a harsh critique of President Obama’s speech to school children, which Greer publicly objected to. He now says he read a statement written for him by staff, and that his only real objection was to a lesson plan that went with the speech which he believed was partisan.
“What people don’t think about is that someday the Republican Party is not going to be in power,” Greer says. “They have this illusion that everything they’re doing — changing the voting laws, putting tanks on every corner, they’re going to stay in power. But when the Democrats come back into power, it’s always a tit for tat, and they will have consultants who will come into power and say, ‘remember what those guys did to us?’”
“It’s not unique to the Republican Party, the idea of a power grab,” Greer says. “Republicans have a fundamental opposition to minorities that Democrats do not have, but I will say some of the things that happen will be simply to win the election. If Democrats came back in to power, probably the first thing to happen is to extend early voting ten times what it is now, because their consultants have told them” that will help them win.
“But the Republican Party has such a disdain for minorities, and for laws that provide access to the ballot for minorities,” says Greer. “That is what is unique to the Republican Party.”
“They don’t want me, or Crist or [retiring Indiana Senator Richard] Lugar,” or other moderates in the party, he says of the new, tea party-led GOP. “It’s a mob mentality in the Republican Party. They’ve got pitchforks and torches and they’re looking for Frankenstein. And they think [Frankenstein is] Barack Obama.”
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport