Federal prosecutors asked a judge on Monday to drop the remaining corruption charges against Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for governor of Florida in 2018. During his trial earlier this month, the jury couldn’t reach a decision on all but one of the charges, and they were all deadlocked.
Prosecutors said they were going to retry Gillum after the trial finished on May 4, but they changed their minds in a one-paragraph motion that also asks Sharon Lettman-Hicks’s case to be thrown out.
Gillum was found not guilty of lying to the FBI, but the jury could not decide on more than a dozen fraud and plot charges that said he and Lettman-Hicks used tens of thousands of dollars from campaign donations for their own purposes.
Gillum’s defense team, led by Miami lawyer David O. Markus, said in an email that he can now “resume his life and public service.”
“Andrew Gillum had the guts to stand up and say, ‘I am innocent.'” And people are finally seeing that. “We want to thank the hardworking jury members who did their job and told the government why it should drop the case,” the statement said.
U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor, who was in charge of the trial, didn’t decide on the move right away on Monday, but judges usually give prosecutors a lot of freedom. The U.S. attorney’s office said nothing more than what was in the court document.
Gillum, who is 43 years old, used to be the mayor of Tallahassee. In 2018, he ran for governor of Florida to become the state’s first Black governor. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, beat him by less than 34,000 votes, which meant that the election had to be rechecked.
Prosecutors said Gillum committed fraud because he was having trouble making ends meet after leaving his $120,000-a-year job with the leftist group People for the American Way to run for governor.
Lettman-Hicks, a longtime political adviser of Gillum’s and a former leader with the group, was accused of working with Gillum to move the donations to his own accounts. On those counts, too, the jury could not agree.
Gillum was accused of lying about his contacts with undercover FBI agents who posed as developers and paid for a trip he and his brother took to New York in 2016 that included a ticket to the hit Broadway show “Hamilton.” The jury found Gillum not guilty of these charges. Gillum said that the ticket came from his brother.
Gillum’s lawyers said that the indictment was done for political reasons, but Winsor didn’t dismiss the case last year. He said that Gillum and Lettman-Hicks had to be tried together because their acts were so linked.
