real election crimes committed by his own party. republicans ran ghost candidates last year. consultants spent more than $1 million on these independent candidates steined to draw votes from democrats. two people including a former state senator now charged with campaign fraud over the scheme. new reporting from the ceptinal reveals dark money came from florida s biggest utility company. joining me now orlando ceptinal senior reporter jason garcia. jason, before we get to your newest reporting i want you to walk us through this. how did the ghost candidates change the outcome of the election? yeah, so what happened here is there were three really intense battleground races that were for the florida senate. the florida senate is 40 seats. these three races were seen as key to deciding which party would control them. and in those races three independent candidates qualified for the ballot who did no exam
would control them. and in those races three independent candidates qualified for the ballot who did no exam pain of their own, but they were promoted by more than half a million dollars in advertising that was designed to appeal to democratic voters. the wording seemed to designed to syphon off votes from the democratic candidates in the races. and the republican candidates won all three of those senate races including one race in miami by 32 votes in which the the independent ghost candidate got more than 6,000 votes. and all of this happening while there s all this crowing about voter fraud that doesn t exist. jason s paper reports, quote, neither desantis nor gop leaders have released any proposal to increase penalties or crack down on the use of ghost candidates. what does it tell you about governor desantis true obsession with election fraud? well, it tells me that florida as we ve discussed on this program before, this is the laboratory, the test market, if you will, for
president david farenhold uncovered the rampant for years the trump foundation was founded exclusively with other peoples money. the trump family didn t put a dime into it. and it turns out what trump was actually doing with this charity to which other people had donated money as if was an actual charity, he was actually buying himself fun presents, lots and lots of pictures of himself, for example. he was also paying off legal fines and making illegal political contributions that charities aren t allowed to make, and ultimately he used it to do a bunch of stuff to promote his presidential exam pain, which again is something a charity can t do. that reporting in the washington post landed david a pulitzer prize. it also landed the president and his three oldest children in a middle of a lawsuit filled by
virtually every year. we had come in very late at night and i had just left literally the american cemetery in paris and really probably assumed that was fine. i was extremely busy because of affairs of state. doing other things. i m struck by it seems like such an honest answer and it s rare that you hear the president admitting he did it wrong. innocent he said i had a lot of calls which does not help the messaging here. but in some ways it helps the messaging because that s part of the honesty in the message. i think he is working super harp. and he probably did 26 exam pain stops in 14 days in the mid-terms. the fact that he admitted it was a mistake and he will be there next year is great. i don t think there is daylight
no, it has not. at the time i left i did not have see any smoking gun evidence of collusion. is there any evidence of collusion that you have seen yet? is there? there is a lot of smoke. we had no smoking gun at this point. no smoking gun. sean: tonight, no smoking gun, your lying media will have you believe that paul manafort and his associate has everything to do with trump russian collusion. it has nothing to do about that. none of that is related to president trump, none of that, zero, is related to his exam pain and the campaign and the vast majority all happened before paul manafort ever worked for the trump campaign. the issue of robert mueller attempting to change the narrative to distract from the real russia collusion and massive cover ups, don t think this is a coincidence. last week on this program we had