The private sector has not been attracting someone in political office since the age of 23. But Mr. Gillum needed the money and the exposure, so he made commitments to paid prayers and the CNN concert. The deeper he went into the presidential primary, the more he appeared in debate rooms and studios in New York and Washington.
“As a black man in politics, we don’t have the luxury of staying on the sidelines,” said Bakari Sellers, a CNN commentator and former South Carolina state lawmaker. “Because a lot of people depend on you. Not only personally, but when you lose that race, you feel like you disappoint the people who stood in front of you. ”
Mr. Gillum’s organization, Forward Florida, promised to register or reactivate 1 million voters by 2020. It started with almost $ 3 million in the bank that Mr. Gillum’s campaign had not spent before Election Day, in part because the radio waves were saturated.
But the unspent money upset John Morgan, an Orlando attorney and an influential Democratic donor whose firm had contributed $ 250,000. Morgan texted Mr. Gillum last year urging him to use the remaining funds to pay the criminals’ fines so that thousands of them may be eligible to vote. Mr. Morgan then chased Mr. Gillum on Twitter: “Give it to charity, not yourself.”
Soon after, The Tampa Bay Times revealed that Forward Florida, along with the Gillum campaign, one of its former employers, a wealthy Gillum donor, and others, had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in March 2019 to obtain a large amount of records dating back to 2015. Mr. Gillum was not subpoenaed, and no charges were filed.
It was not the first time that Mr. Gillum had been under the gaze of federal investigators. As the mayor of Tallahassee in 2016, he took a boat trip to the Statue of Liberty with a lobbyist who paid for the trip and with two developers who were actually undercover FBI agents investigating possible City corruption. The incident clouded his 2018 campaign, and Gillum, who was never criminally charged, paid a $ 5,000 state ethics fine last year for accepting the lobbyist’s gift.
By July 2019, Forward Florida had transferred its work to a newly created sister organization, Forward Florida Action. Unlike the political committee, the new organization’s nonprofit status allowed it to keep financial records secret. Mr. Morgan called it a “bribery fund.”
