When Florida Sends Goons to Intimidate Government Critics

By Bill Cotterell

Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia ought to take a break from barnstorming across the state and arrange a mandatory conference call to remind all his division directors and bureau chiefs that Americans still have a right to talk back to their government.

But first, he ought to dash off a letter to James and Cathy O’Gara, sincerely apologizing for the chilling little visit two enforcement agents from the Department of Financial Services made to the couple’s home in Largo recently. Ingoglia might want to phone them, too, and assure them — even though the department says he didn’t personally know of the intimidating intrusion — that his agency doesn’t use the power of government to bully its critics.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that James O’Gara sent a postcard to Ingoglia, saying simply, “You lack values.” The paper said the retirees have been active critics of conservative policies. Ingoglia, who was appointed CFO this summer by Gov. Ron DeSantis and is up for election next year, has waged a highly visible campaign of spotlighting alleged waste and mismanagement in local governments.

He calls it the “Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight,” or FAFO, which is internet slang for “fool around and find out.” (Yes, we cleaned that one up.)

Soon after the postcard, two guys in armored vests emblazoned “POLICE” showed up at the O’Gara home and asked if James O’Gara had mailed that little missive to Tallahassee. They didn’t identify themselves, but the O’Garas checked with Largo police and found out the men were from the Department of Financial Services’ investigations unit.

“They started right off with, ‘Did you send a postcard?’ They showed me a picture of it, asked if this was it,” James O’Gara told the Sentinel. “They didn’t give a reason why they were there. They just showed the picture of the postcard.”

At one point, O’Gara said an agent mentioned O’Gara’s military service in the Vietnam War era.

“I was literally scared at that point,” he said, as it indicated they’d done a little digging into his background.

Well, what’s going on here anyway? Are we gonna have people thinking they’re some kind of free citizens living in a state where you can tell public officials what you think? No need for handcuffs right now, but a stern warning by a couple of armed troops should let everybody know we’re watching this kind of stuff.

Department spokeswoman Sydney Booker told the Sentinel that Ingoglia knew nothing of the encounter. “In light of recent events and with political violence on the rise,” she said public agencies are vigilant in this “increasingly hostile political environment.”

There has been a horrifying rise in political violence across the country. Police have to run down threats, but part of the job is distinguishing between a nut with a gun and a grudge, or an unhappy voter with a pen and a postcard.

Of course, this is the same climate of fear and excess that brought the feds to the front door of former FBI director James Comey when he posted a photo on Facebook showing some pebbles on a beach spelling out “86 47.” That was long before Comey got indicted on controversial charges, but it’s a real stretch — an absurdity, in fact — to pretend to think he wanted to 86 our 47th president.

And there isn’t even the mildest hint of a personal threat in O’Gara’s postcard. He just expressed an opinion of how Ingoglia serves the state.

The couple has also sent messages informing DeSantis and Attorney General James Uthmeier of their displeasure with assorted MAGA policies. But neither the governor nor the attorney general was scared enough to sic the cops on them, at least not so far.

Coincidentally, the Sentinel’s Jeff Schweers, who wrote the O’Gara story, is the same reporter who got an unsigned “cease and desist” threat from the Department of Children and Families this year, demanding that he stop poking into the $10 million Hope Florida mess. Nothing came of the warning, but it underscores the DeSantis administration’s beat-the-press attitude to the public’s right to know.

Ingoglia is a sophisticated politician who chaired the Florida Republican Party for four years and served in the state Senate before DeSantis appointed him CFO. He wouldn’t send his financial investigators to hound dissident critics like this. Some hyper-sensitive midlevel factotum in the Department of Financial Services probably saw the postcard and thought it should be checked out, lest the writer turn out to be some dangerous lunatic.

Even assuming the best of intentions, the First Amendment matters. It gives the O’Garas and all of us the right to speak freely about — and to — our government leaders, without cops rousting us.

Bill Cotterell began his career as a copy clerk for the Miami Herald, then covered state government for United Press International in several states, returning to Florida as a state capitol reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat for 27 years. He has been a columnist since 2013, most recently for the News Service of Florida, his current syndicate. He can be reached at [email protected].