Video: Joe Carollo has investigated the recall petitions himself; lawyer denies it

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Miami City Commissioner Joe Carollo‘s lawyer has assured reporters that his client has not gone through the recall petitions filed against him at the city clerk’s office to find out who signed and who gathered them.

“The petitions were in the sole control and custody of the clerk,” Ben Kuehne told a Miami Herald reporter last week in the lobby of the courthouse after the city and Carollo lost their case and were told to turn over the petitions to the Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections (they have since appealed and the hearing is scheduled for April 7).

“We’ve not had any advantage to look at the petitions,” Kuehne is quoted as saying in the Miami Herald.

But that’s not what Carollo says — on video.

In a snarky, post hearing interview in the lobby of the county courthouse with Ana Cuervo from Telemundo 51 — captured by Ladra’s supertelefono — a puffy-chested Carollo last week goes on and on and on about the people who collected signatures, how they were paid against state statutes (more on that later), and who they are.

“One of the names I found is one of the reporters from you know where? From Raúl Gorrín, from Globovision! She was getting signatures against me! For the man that I showed had laundered hundreds of thousands of dollars in Miami,” Carollo says in his typical dramatic flair and self-promoting exaggeration. “A man that, in great part, the federal investigation against him was started with information I gave about him.

Read related: Miami city attorneys conspired, created ‘cheat sheet’ to stop Joe Carollo recall

“Now the U.S. is looking all over the world for him. He is one of the most wanted, because he was laundering money personally for Maduro.”

Gorrín is a Venezuelan attorney and president of Globovision and is currently a fugitive from U.S. sanctions involving corruption and bribery to Chávez-era government ministers, and in November he was added to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Most Wanted List. But there is no indication that Carollo had anything to do with it.

There is also no indication that any of the petition gatherers had ever worked as a journalist in Venezuela, where all media is pretty much government-run media so the person in question, if she exists, really had no choice. There are lots of Venezuelan journalists in Miami who are in exile precisely because they couldn’t practice free speech in their home country.

Others who collected signatures had been in the country for “only a few months in some cases,” Carollo said.

How does he know this? Has Crazy Joe investigated everybody associated with the recall petition already? Does he have access to immigration records?

Be afraid, people. Be very afraid.

Read related: Recall Joe Carollo attorneys win first round in court; city attorney appeals

Also, be skeptical.

Political consultant Emiliano Antuñez of Dark Horse Strategies, who was hired to help collect signatures, said his people are all legal and all have social security numbers and work permits where needed. He told Ladra he has no idea who Carollo is talking about. There is no former Venezuelan journalist on his canvassing team.

So, maybe a volunteer? None of the volunteers or attorneys associated with the recall have any idea who Crazy Joe is referring to.

Does this Globovision reporter even exist? Or is it just because it makes a good soundbite for Spanish-language TV.

Multiple calls to Carollo’s cellphone and texts asking for a name or more information were not returned. He knew Ladra wanted to write about this so if he had a name he would have exposed her. Could he have just made it up? Did he just throw these accusations out there with no real truth to them? Yeah, pretty much.

After all, that’s what he’s done from the beginning of the recall process — bringing up phantom socialists and communists with a plot to do business with the Cuba
n regime. Or Venezuela’s oppressive government. Or both. And the boogyman, too.

That’s what he’s done all his life.

“These people are the ones who commit conspiracy and fraud,” he said, and you can almost hear the Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

This is Carollo’s way of distracting and deflecting from the truth.

And collecting information and creating dossiers on his perceived enemies is exactly the kind of political retaliation that (a) got Carollo on a recall petition to begin with and (b) lead the organizers of the Take Back Our City recall to think anything could happen to the petitions in the city’s possession. What will Joe Carollo think up next?

Read related: Miami attorneys win and Joe Carollo recall petitions sit in judge’s chambers

Take Back attorney JC Planas even brought it up at the last court hearing, which was for his motion to vacate a stay that keeps the petitions in Judge Alan Fine‘s chambers until the matter is taken up by the Third District Court of Appeals. He said the delay gives Carollo an unfair advantage during which he can shake down petition signers and get them to rescind.

Assistant City Attorney Kerri McNulty called it “conjecture” and without any affidavit or evidence of that, the judge said, he could not consider it.

Ladra doesn’t think that Carollo is knocking on doors just yet. First, because he is in self isolation after having come into contact with a coronavirus carrying Mayor Francis Suarez and secondly, because nobody is going to open the door for the next 14 days. At least.

But also because he doesn’t have to. The very fact that Carollo has these petitions and is going over them and over them and over them collecting names and information — he’s got nothing better to do but conspire while he’s self quarantined — is enough to put a chill in the air.

Ladra calls it the Carollovirus.

  Ben Kuehne, Joe Carollo, Joe Carollo recall