God Answers Democratic Prayers In Miami-Dade-- David Rivera Is Back!

NRCC and Marco Rubio are not embracing their old pal Rivera this time around

Florida New Dem Joe Garcia has turned out to be a pretty big disappointment. A guy who certainly knows better, he quickly adopted the DCCC strategy of amassing a Republican-lite voting record in Congress. According to ProgressivePunch his abysmal 42.76 crucial vote score is, by far, the worst of any Florida Democrat (including Patrick Murphy), and one of the dozen worst among all House Democrats. Garcia votes against progressives even more frequently than reactionary Blue Dogs Jim Costa (CA), Dan Lipinksi (IL) and Jim Cooper (TN) and is exactly tied with West Virginia's Nick Rahall. And, remember, Garcia's district has a PVI of R+1 where Obama won both times; Rahall's district's PVI is R+14 and Obama barely scored a third of the votes against Romney and also lost big to McCain. Even Murphy has a "better" excuse for voting with the GOP so much-- a PVI of R+3. Garcia is just one big inauthentic mess who compromised away so much promise!

Yesterday, though, he may have had a lucky break-- a last minute entry into the Republican primary: the crook he defeated last time, David Rivera. Rivera's nemesis at the Miami Herald, Marc Caputo, reported that Rivera announced Thursday night that he would run for his old seat. In 2012, Garcia beat him 135,551 (54%) to 108,737 (43%), outperfoming Obama by 4%. But that was before Garcia had run up such a disappointing, defensive, Big Business-oriented voting record.

Rivera's thesis is that he didn't do anything wrong and all his troubles were manufactured out of thin air by the media, especially the Miami Herald. No one believed it in 2012 and there's been a lot more to prove it wrong since then.

“I will not answer to the lies of the Miami Herald,” Rivera said on the political talk show Ahora con Oscar Haza.

“I will not deviate from the issues and [will] defeat Joe Garcia. “Rivera said he’s running due to a “leadership crisis,” calling Garcia “incompetent.”

...Rivera’s announcement stunned Florida’s tough-to-surprise political world.

One of his fellow Republicans running against Garcia, Miami-Dade School Board Member Carlos Curbelo, issued a statement that blasted Rivera as well as Garcia, whose former campaign manager was recently jailed in an unrelated absentee ballot-request fraud scheme exposed by The Herald.

“Now more than ever our campaign is about putting an end to the scandals and the corruption that have plagued our community for far too long,” Curbelo said in a statement.

“The unethical conduct of public officials in both parties-- including incumbent Joe Garcia-- has landed people in jail and embarrassed the residents of Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties,” Curbelo said. “We will run a clean campaign focused on reestablishing the public trust and putting an end to this sad chapter in our community’s history.”

Curbelo is the Republican establishment favorite in the race and earned the endorsement of former Gov. Jeb Bush, an early Republican presidential frontrunner.

Rivera is a friend of another potential Republican candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio, though the two haven’t been as close as in past years amid Rivera’s mounting political and legal troubles.

The two still jointly own a Tallahassee rental home, but associates of the two say Rubio would like to sell it and that he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for him to run for Congress against Curbelo.

Rivera, who said he’d officially file for the office on Friday, didn’t address Curbelo. The two had a tense race against each other for Miami-Dade Republican chairman in 2008 when Rivera, then a state representative, won the post by just a single vote.



Rivera, then a state representative, went on to win his congressional seat in 2010 when he defeated Garcia and a phony tea party candidate who had links to Garcia’s former campaign manager, Jeffrey Garcia.

The FBI began investigating that incident last year after the Miami Herald uncovered new evidence in the case.

By then, the FBI and U.S. Attorneys Office were farther along in the investigation of Rivera and his friend, Ana Alliegro, who helped manage the campaign of a little-known Democratic candidate named Justin Lamar Sternad.

Sternad admitted to the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office that his Democratic primary campaign was funded with about $82,000 in illegal campaign contributions, which were used, in part, to bash Garcia to the benefit of Rivera.

Sternad identified Alliegro as a source of the money. A March indictment against her says she was aided by at least one unnamed “co-conspirator.”

Alliegro is in a federal lockup awaiting trial on charges of breaking campaign-finance laws and lying about it.

Sternad, who is cooperating against her, has yet to be sentenced after pleading guilty last year to charges of breaking federal campaign-finance laws and lying about it.

Alliegro was arrested in March in Nicaragua, to which she twice fled to avoid investigators and prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas J. Mulvihill argued last month in court as part of a successful effort to keep her locked up.

Mulvihill said that, after she surrendered her passport last fall, Alliegro and “another individual” left Miami by flying to Texas, boarding a Greyhound bus to Mexico-- where a U.S. passport isn’t needed for entry-- and then flying to her hideout in Nicaragua.

While in Nicaragua, Alliegro was frequently visited by Rivera, neighbors told the Miami Herald.

When the Sternad case broke in theHerald/El Nuevo Herald, Mulvihill had already been leading an unrelated federal tax investigation into Rivera stemming from a secretive $500,000 payment from a dog track.

Rivera also narrowly escaped a state indictment on 52 counts of theft, money laundering and racketeering revolving around his use of campaign money. State prosecutors said the alleged crimes were too old or too tough to prosecute.

Rivera has long denied wrongdoing in those cases and on Thursday night he downplayed close ties to Alliegro. “I know her family; everyone knows her family,” he said.

He also dismissed the Sternad case.

“Nobody cares about a fake campaign from two years ago.”

Rivera said “no” when asked if federal investigators have come knocking on his door.

“It’s ridiculous,” he said of the allegations.

The DCCC has relvamped and updated their old House of Scandal website-- still no mention of Joe Crowley-- but I bet they can hardly wait to tackle Rivera again. It remains to be seen if they can ever get anything as good as John Steward's Grimm Shady piece though!