Miami Mayor’s notes tell a full story he didn’t say about firing the police chief (UPDATED)
Security for Mayor Francis Suarez battered a Univision reporter, his notes blamed her.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez gave a brief, carefully scripted press conference about the City Manager’s termination letter to Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo, whom he hired only six months ago to great fanfare. And he refused multiple text messages seeking comment for this story.
Fortunately, he left behind the entire script with extensive handwritten notes and pre-planned answers to questions, many of which he deployed to avoid giving substantive answers to the journalists assembled in a cramped hallway in front of City Hall’s second-floor entrance to the Mayor’s offices. At the bottom was the Bitcoin promoting mayor’s main message, left unsaid to the press:
“No winners or losers / turn the page.”
Notably, handwritten blue pen portions of Mayor Suarez’s script addressed an incident where his security team tried to smash Univision reporter Erika Carillo into a wall while she tried to get a comment from him.
Handwritten Spanish claims she “tropiezar en una espacio limitado” or ‘tripped in a cramped space.’
That tends to happen when a politician has three bodyguards smashing everyone in sight asking the Miami Mayor a question.
Suarez’s spokesperson gave a dystopian comment to the Miami Herald saying the mayor was refusing comment to “avoid creating more conflict.”
Another note simply reads, “— Humility.”
The press conference went mostly on-script. Mayor Suarez made a brief statement.
Opening the floor to limited questions, he ducked a question about corruption from podcaster and Miami-resident Thomas Kennedy.
Suarez followed that by ducking multiple questions about the 8-page memo from Acevedo that set off a political firestorm, by sticking to the above script.
Then, the mayor confirmed the federal criminal investigation into the City Commission, and into one of his political rivals on the November ballot who is a known associate of Commissioner Joe Carollo, the true power in the city of Miami today.
Lastly, Mayor Suarez explained his absence from the city over the weekend for a Caribbean vacation while the Commission and City Manager conspired to fire the police chief.
“As to my personal life, I had my birthday on Wednesday,” said Suarez, “and decided to spend some time with my wife and do some other personal things I had to do.”
Curiously, a former City of Miami employee turned real estate developer named Otto Boudet, with ties to former Mayor Manny A. Diaz, was copied in the email containing Mayor Suarez’s detailed notes.
Miami residents are left to wonder what personal things are more important to the part-time mayor than dealing with the firestorm that started when he hired a high-profile police chief to reform the department and abandoned him, and most of his powers as the mayor when the officer did his job.
To underscore how much the Mayor didn’t want these documents made public, his press secretary came out and collected the records, then illegally denied our requests to keep a paper copy of them.
H/T @ParkPossie on Twitter for pointing out the Miami real estate developer copied in the mayor’s emails that led me to publish an update.
