Let’s hope that a Tallahassee judge’s ruling puts an end to the brief but voluble political career of left-wing serial liar Rebekah Jones.
Jones, the former Florida Department of Health data-cruncher who asserted she was fired for resisting instructions to fudge the state’s COVID-19 reports, was booted from the Aug. 23 ballot in the Democratic primary for the 1st Congressional District.
That Panhandle territory is now represented by Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz.
State Circuit Court Judge John Cooper on Friday ordered Jones removed from the ballot because she had not complied with a new state law that mandated her to be a registered Democrat for at least a year before she could qualify as a congressional candidate, Florida Politics reported.
Peggy Schiller, Jones’ primary opponent, had challenged her status as a candidate based on the law.
“I don’t think I can come to any conclusion other than this,” Cooper said. “Jones was not a registered member of the Democratic Party almost two months during this period.”
Since she was the only other candidate in the race, Schiller is now the winner of the Democratic primary.
Oddly, Jones was residing and registered to vote in Maryland when she announced she wanted to run against Gaetz.
Schiller’s lawyer pointed out that Jones’ timeline did not match up, because she said she wanted to run as an independent and for a time in Maryland was registered as such.
Early in 2021 she was a Democrat, then became an independent in June and remained such until mid-August. But under Florida’s law, she was required to be registered as a Democrat before mid-June 2022.
Florida Politics noted that during the hearing Jones asserted that “outside individuals” undermined her candidacy by changing her party status when she was living in Maryland.
Like many things she’s claimed since bursting onto the public scene to be a liberal crusader against DeSantis, her story did not add up. Judge Cooper said he rejected her story and that she was the subject of hackers.
The biggest hit against Jones’ credibility came in May when the Health Department’s inspector general released a report saying there was no evidence to support her claim that she had been directed to alter data in 2020 to make COVID appear less severe than it was.
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In December 2020, when state law enforcement agents executed a search warrant in an investigation of whether she unlawfully pilfered state data, Jones claimed she was terrorized during a “raid” by gun-wielding officers. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement subsequently released body-cam footage that showed no such thing happened.
In May 2021, as Jones was still milking the affection and attention of the liberal media as the “data scientist-turned-whistleblower” against DeSantis, as USA Today once described her, Charles Cooke of National Review picked her story apart.
Cooke pointed out that Jones could not have edited raw COVID data, as she claimed, because she did not have the authority or access to do that.
When Jones tried to publicly assail Cooke’s reporting, he produced a tweet wherein she asserted exactly what he said she did.
In his column, Cooke wrote, “Jones confirmed this week that she has been lying about the role she played in the department. And, once she’d done that, there was nothing that she could do except to back off her main claim. No direct access to the database means no ability to delete data from the database. No ability to delete data from the database means no claim that she was asked to delete data from the database. No claim that she was asked to delete data from the database means no scandal.”
“Game over.” Let’s hope we can say the same for her political career.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Free Press.
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