Chasing reporters will just put them on high alert | Editorial

Nate Monroe, a political columnist at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, has a few things in common with the Orlando Sentinel’s Scott Maxwell.

First, he knows his stuff — many North Florida skeletons have been rooted up by Monroe’s sniffing around. Second, when he unleashes his scorn on self-dealing local and state politicians and business leaders, they know they’ve been stung. Last, any attempt to bully or intimidate him only fuels his determination to get at the truth.

MAXWELL: Attack the messenger – Consultants spy on newspaper columnist.

And yet, last week, Monroe found out he’d been the target of secret surveillance ordered up by employees of Matrix LLC, a political consulting firm with former ties to Florida’s biggest electric utility, Florida Power & Light. The dossier Matrix assembled on Monroe (which has been verified by Matrix founder Joe Perkins, reveals information that is clearly not in the public domain, including photos of Monroe and his wife-to-be walking their dog and deep-dive personal and financial data. On the list: His Social Security number, and names of relatives the journalist says he “hasn’t seen since I was a toddler.”

We doubt Matrix was looking to surprise him with a festive family reunion.

There is one three-text exchange from late 2019, however, that does illuminate a potential motive. The first, from an as-yet-unidentified Matrix number, shows a screenshot of Monroe’s Twitter feed with his post reading “Time to get drunk.” Within a minute came a response: “Awesome,” swiftly followed by the Matrix employee reporting that Monroe took an Uber, with a crying-face emoji.

It looks as if someone wanted to play gotcha. And while the Matrix employee hasn’t been identified, the Times-Union and the Sentinel have both reported that the person who replied “Awesome” was FPL’s vice president of state legislative affairs, Daniel Martell.

Why would an FPL executive say “awesome” about a journalist’s potential DUI? For years, Monroe has written about FPL’s attempt to take over JEA, the troubled, city-owned utility. The story is intricate and spans years, but here’s one example of a story Monroe helped uncover: In 2019, a Matrix-backed political committee called Grow United was involved in a job offer to a Jacksonville City Council member who was opposed to letting FPL buy the utility.

If the Grow United name sounds familiar, it’s because the same committee was implicated in the so-called “ghost candidate” scandal of 2020, which positioned candidates in three close state Senate races in an apparent attempt to confuse voters. All along, FPL has denied any involvement with attempted influence peddling — despite evidence of big-dollar payments from the utility.

Reporters from the Sentinel, the Times-Union and other Florida newspapers have been swarming over various elements of this simmering scandal for years. We wonder how many dossiers are out there detailing intimate details of their lives — and what the compilers hoped to gain with their ill-gotten data. Will we wake up to an email blast decrying the Sentinel’s Annie Martin, who’s posted pictures on social media in which she blatantly poses with at least one known terrier?

The reality, of course, is that journalists tend to be the kind of people who don’t back down when targeted for exposure or ridicule. The Sunshine State has a long, spicy tradition of reporters cast in this mold. They don’t make excuses for people who should know better. If they see pressure building to warp the course of Florida politics, they’ll try to find out where it’s coming from. And if they catch someone’s fingers in the taxpayers’ cookie jar, they will work tirelessly to catalog and label every crumb.

Anyone in a position of leadership in Florida should have figured this out by now. But there will always be people who believe power, wealth and influence can bargain away truth. They’re wrong about that —- and now they’ve given Florida’s press a little more reason to dig.

Editor’s note: Joe Perkins, founder of Alabama-based consulting firm Matrix LLC, says former employees were acting without his knowledge or approval when they orchestrated a campaign to promote “ghost” candidates intended to disrupt state Senate races in 2020 ? and that other activities, including the monitoring of Florida Times-Union columnist Nate Monroe, took place at the behest of former CEO Jeff Pitts and were not authorized by him. Matrix is currently in litigation with Pitts over his activities in Florida.

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Krys Fluker, Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick and El Sentinel Editor Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio. Contact us at insight@orlandosentinel.com