In an interview with TPMDC this afternoon, billionaire investor Jeff Greene suggested that Rep. Kendrick Meek is a worse ethical offender than the notorious Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY). Greene and Meek are locked in a nasty fight for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Florida, and Greene tried to take things up a notch by associating Meek with Rangel’s high profile ethics investigation underway in Congress.
The interview followed a hastily announced conference call with reporters in which Greene called on Rangel to resign — and urged Meek to do the same. (As the Palm Beach Post reports, Meek said last week he “favors letting the House Ethics Committee process play out” before passing judgment on what Rangel should do next.)
The talk of Rangel was simply pretext to the attacks on Meek, however, who Greene said deserved his own ethics investigation over his family’s ties to a Florida developer who Meek obtained an earmark for six years ago. The charge has been a part of Greene’s campaign for quite a while now, and Meek has denied wrongdoing on many occasions.
Greene seems to think Rangel’s ethics problems give him a new window to open up the old line of attack on Meek.
“I think Meek’s issues are much more severe than Rangel’s,” Greene told me. He called on Meek to voluntarily submit to a full Congressional ethics investigation in advance of the August 24 primary. “People deserve to know if they’ve got a guy who was so intimately involved in this pay-for-play bribery culture of corruption running for U.S. Senate.”
Meek’s campaign told the Post that Greene’s conference call — which his campaign team breathlessly billed as a “major announcement” — was little more than “trying to divert attention from unfavorable press Greene has received over the past week.”
That press has included stories about Greene abusing the people he paid to care for his yacht and today’s story in the St. Petersburg Times about Greene’s role in a scammy condo deal that the paper reports “put him uncomfortably close to a man now under federal indictment.”
Polling for the race has been scant, but a Mason-Dixon poll last week showed Meek leading Greene 33-29.
Evan McMorris-Santoro
Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.
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