Text messages recently made public appear to contradict Andrew Gillum’s (Democrat Candidate for Florida Governor) story about how he came to see the Broadway show Hamilton in 2016.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, undercover FBI agents footed the bill for the trip to NYC along with tickets to the show.
As late as Tuesday, Gillum was insisting the tickets came from his brother and that he pays for his own trips.
From the Tampa Bay Times:
Gillum has repeatedly given vague answers to questions about who paid for what during the August 2016 trip to New York. And during Sunday’s debate, Gillum again avoided the question when DeSantis asked him about the tickets.”Did you pay for the Hamilton tickets?” DeSantis asked.”First of all, I am a grown man,” Gillum replied. “My wife and I take vacations and we pay for our own vacations … I don’t take free trips from anybody. I’m a hard-working person, I know that may not fit your description of what you think people like me do, but I’ve worked hard for everything that I’ve gotten in my life.”
More from the TBT here:
Undercover FBI agents paid for Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum’s hotel room and his ticket to the Broadway musical Hamilton during a 2016 trip to New York City, according to a bombshell trove of records that raise new questions just two weeks before next month’s election.The records include photos, a video and dozens of text messages between Gillum, former lobbyist Adam Corey and an undercover FBI agent, and they appear to refute what the mayor has said that trip and others.His campaign has maintained — and continued to maintain Tuesday — that Gillum’s brother, Marcus, who lives in Chicago, handed him the ticket the night of the show. The campaign has not said if Andrew Gillum has asked his brother how he came about the ticket.”These messages only confirm what we have said all along,” he said on Facebook Live. “We did go to see Hamilton. I did get my ticket to Hamilton from my brother. At the time, we believed that they were reserved by friends of Adam’s, Mike Miller.”And when I got there after work, got my ticket, we went in there and saw it, assumed my brother paid for it, and so far as I know, that was the deal.”But the messages show that Gillum was told the tickets came from “Mike Miller,” who was an FBI agent posing as a developer looking into city corruption.”Mike Miller and the crew have tickets for us for Hamilton tonight at 8 p.m.,” Corey texted Gillum on Aug. 10, 2016.”Awesome news about Hamilton,” Gillum replied, according to the records.Tuesday’s extraordinary release came from Chris Kise, an attorney representing Corey, who’s at the center of the FBI’s long-running probe into corruption in the state capital. No one has been charged, and Gillum has said that agents assured him he was neither a target nor a focus of the probe.Kise said he gave the records to the Florida Commission on Ethics, which is investigating a complaint about Gillum’s trips to New York City and Costa Rica with Corey, on Tuesday. Then he gave copies to the campaigns of Gillum and his opponent in the governor’s race, Republican Ron DeSantis.Gillum has repeatedly given vague answers to questions about who paid for what during the August 2016 trip to New York. And during Sunday’s debate, Gillum again avoided the question when DeSantis asked him about the tickets.”Did you pay for the Hamilton tickets?” DeSantis asked.”First of all, I am a grown man,” Gillum replied. “My wife and I take vacations and we pay for our own vacations … I don’t take free trips from anybody. I’m a hard-working person, I know that may not fit your description of what you think people like me do, but I’ve worked hard for everything that I’ve gotten in my life.”But the records go beyond Broadway tickets.They show that undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen were working for months to get an out-of-state meeting with Gillum, and that Gillum appeared willing to oblige them.
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