It reads like they were pulling teeth.
A transcript of the sworn statement of Miami Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla by an attorney with the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust shows how well The Dean can channel a hard-headed high school sophomore.
In his signature sarcastic style, ADLP and his attorney Ben Kuehne practically drive Nolen Bunker, a staff attorney with the ethics panel, and Radio Turay, the new advocate, crazy with their dodges and slippery maneuvers. You can especially hear the desperation in her voice.
“I would just kindly ask that we just move forward,” Turay says after Kuehne — who also questioned the commission’s jurisdiction — gets ethics investigator Karl Ross kicked out of the meeting because he says Ross is an agent of the state attorney’s office. He kept insisting that the ethics board interview was some kind of SAO trick. Talk about paranoid.
Read related: Ethics board: Miami Commissioner ADLP abused his power with city car
“We’ve taken a long time to get to this point,” Turay says — probably because they had to subpoena The Dean to get him to talk. “Let’s just go ahead and get it done. It’s an ethics case. Let’s just move on.
“We’re here to interview your client, not the other way around,” she said.
At one point, ADLP hints at future defense of Nillo’s no-show job when he says that her duties — like everyone else’s — shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“All of a sudden, all of her responsibilities shifted to issues that were more important, were emergency issues — testing, masks, food distributions,” Diaz de la Portilla said. “Face it. The world was turned upside down and the commission office started working on things they were not projecting to work on a month before.”
Interestingly, Ladra makes a cameo appearance on the transcript when Bunker asked if ADLP communicated with me. This question obviously arises from the publishing on Political Cortadito of text messages between the Commissoner and this blogger that say he had Nillo hired at the CRA to spy for him after he “discovered some improprieties.”
Read related: Alex Diaz de la Portilla is investigated on ghost city employee at Omni CRA
“I may have exchanged some texts with her. She’s a blogger,” Diaz de la Portilla said, adding his patent “she was fired from the Herald,” smear that is not true. He knows that’s not true. If there’s an attorney reading this that wants to sue him for defamation for me, drop me a line. But we can’t take his house. The bank is already doing that.
Diaz de la Portilla also seems to be blaming his old chief of staff, Alex Barrera — who testified that he left the office because of all the shenanigans — for assigning the city vehicle to Nillo.
“I don’t know who authorized it. I don’t know when she started. I don’t know,” ADLP told investigators, offering Barrera as a possible explanation.
His hostility, however, backfires: His defensiveness makes him sound guilty. Read it for yourselves.
Sworn statement of Alex Diaz de la Portilla re: Jenny Nillo case by Political Cortadito on Scribd
Sworn statement from Alex Diaz de la Portilla to the Miami-Dade ethics board added by Ladra on
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