Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis was greeted with cheers on Wednesday during a press conference when he slammed the state’s Democrat Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, who announced this week that she is going to try to unseat DeSantis in next year’s gubernatorial election despite being a heavy underdog.
“With Nikki Fried now getting into the race to oppose you, do you expect a kind of escalation in the cultural wars?” a reporter asked DeSantis.
“Here’s what I’d say, you know, Nikki Fried has done nothing in office, she does nothing,” DeSantis said. “All she does is a emote on social media, virtue signal to small-dollar donors in California and New York.”
“She put her face, spent millions of dollars, to put her face on every gas pump across this state purely to boost her own image at your expense as a taxpayer,” DeSantis continued. “She’s a lockdown lobbyist. She would have had our kids locked out of school the whole year. She would have had this business shuttered for the whole year. They would be out of business, if Fried were governor.”
“So she’s opposed us at every turn. All the good stuff we’ve been able to accomplish for Florida, she opposes it,” DeSantis concluded. “And I’ve done more I think in my first week as governor than she has done in her entire time in government.”
WATCH:
.@NikkiFried is a #lockdownlobbyist who has opposed every commonsense measure that has kept Florida safe and free like open schools, businesses, and places of worship. @GovRonDeSantis has done more in one week than Fried in her time as Ag Commisioner. pic.twitter.com/yw3pQp6YL0
— Florida GOP (@FloridaGOP) June 2, 2021
Fried already raised eyebrows this week after she amended two financial disclosure forms right before she declared that she was running for governor that showed that she made hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed income.
The Tampa Bay Times reports:
The first change, a last-minute amendment to her 2018 financial disclosure forms first reported by blog Tallahassee Reports, shows that Fried, 43, changed the amount of annual income she made from her consulting firm Igniting Florida from $72,000 to $351,480 on Friday, May 28, days before she announced that she will seek the Democratic nomination to run for governor against incumbent Ron DeSantis. The form was first amended in January 2020 to reflect the $72,000 income for the first time.
Fried has faced increasing scrutiny over a variety of issues, ranging from how she obtained a certification for a medical marijuana card to domestic incidents where police became involved.
“Between 2018 and 2019, Fried’s net worth increased from $271,613 to $1,401,563 — almost entirely because her boyfriend, a marijuana investor and the former CEO of one of the largest marijuana companies in Florida, bought her a house,” National Review reported. “It took her more than a year to admit that, at the time she created a new Cannabis Office and Medical Marijuana Advisory Committee in the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs, she had a $200,000 ownership stake in publicly traded marijuana company Harvest Health and Recreation Inc. that she had not listed on the previous year’s disclosure forms.”