The 13-year-old son of <a href="https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2022-05-28/ig-report-finds-rebekah-jones-claims-of-covid-19-manipulation-to-be-unsubstantiated-and-unfounded" target="_blank" rel="noopener">discredited</a> conspiracy theorist Rebekah Jones, a twice-failed Democrat congressional candidate, was arrested in Florida this week for allegedly threatening to shoot up a school.
&#8220;My son has been taken on the gov&#8217;s orders,&#8221; Jones declared on Twitter, &#8220;and I&#8217;ve had to send my husband and daughter out of state for their safety. THIS is the reality of living in DeSantis&#8217; Florida.&#8221;
&#8220;They took him away for sharing memes because he has a target on his back because I bested that short basturd who wants to be president,&#8221; she <a href="https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1644099602487074816" target="_blank" rel="noopener">claimed</a>. &#8220;They kidnapped him, because that&#8217;s what they do in Florida. Steal your children as political punishment.&#8221;
Police arrested and charged Jones&#8217; son with &#8220;written or electronic threat to conduct a mass shooting or an act of terrorism, a second-degree felony,&#8221; NBC News <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/son-controversial-florida-data-scientist-charged-making-alleged-school-rcna78653" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>.
&#8220;Basically one of the kids in school was on Snapchat, got a Snapchat from this individual that basically said something along the lines &#8216;I&#8217;m feeling silly today I think I may shoot up a bunch of people in a building&#8217; and then she showed that to a resource officer who then got in touch with a resource officer at Holley-Navarre Middle School where this gentleman used to attend, and then we took it through the process,&#8221; Santa Rosa County Sheriff Bob Johnson told local media.
A search warrant of the suspect&#8217;s Snapchat account was conducted, which led to the recovery of several messages from back in February that stated:
<ul>
<li>&#8220;I want to shoot up the school&#8221;</li>
<li>&#8220;If I get a gun I&#8217;m gonna shoot up hnms lol&#8221;</li>
<li>&#8220;I always keep a knife on me so maybe I&#8217;ll just stab ppl idk&#8221;</li>
<li>&#8220;Nah if I do kill people I&#8217;ll just kill myself&#8221;</li>
<li>“I’m getting a wrath and natural selection shirt so maybe but I don’t think many ppl know what the columbine shooters look like.”</li>
<li>“Okay so it’s been like 3-4 weeks since I got on my new antidepressants and they aren’t working but they’re suppose to by now so I have no hope in getting better so why not kill the losers at school.”</li>
</ul>
Despite Jones&#8217; claim that DeSantis &#8220;kidnapped&#8221; her son, video actually shows her taking him into the police station.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
VIDEO: Rebekah Jones turns in her son at the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office for threatening to shoot up a middle school <a href="https://t.co/7L9zAlwmPZ">pic.twitter.com/7L9zAlwmPZ</a>
&mdash; Max (@MaxNordau) <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxNordau/status/1644073498812227588?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 6, 2023</a></blockquote>
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&nbsp;

Rebekah Jones

Police Arrest Rebekah Jones’ Son For Alleged School Shooting Threat; She Claims DeSantis ‘Kidnapped’ Him

Police Arrest Rebekah Jones' Son For Alleged School Shooting Threat; She Claims DeSantis 'Kidnapped' Him

Florida

General

Ron DeSantis

U.S.

The Florida woman who claimed she was asked to falsify COVID-19 data made “unsubstantiated” and “unfounded” claims about why she was fired, the Florida Department of Health’s Office of Inspector General found.
Rebekah Jones claimed she was fired after she refused to falsify or manipulate COVID-19 data for the state of Florida. Her accusations were picked up by media outlets looking to demonize Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who bucked Blue State COVID lockdown trends during the pandemic.
The Inspector General <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22039765-oig-report?responsive=1&amp;title=1">report</a> makes clear that there is no evidence to support Jones’ claims and exonerates the officials she accused of wrongdoing.
“The independent report paints a portrait of an employee who did not understand public health policy or the significance of epidemiological data, did not have high-level access to crucial information and leveled claims that made professional health officials ‘skeptical,’&#8221; NBC News <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/florida-ig-report-insufficient-evidence-desantis-critics-claims-covid-rcna30647">reported</a>.
The Inspector General report did not, however, investigate Jones’ claim that Florida intentionally reported fewer deaths, a claim NBC called a “conspiracy theory.” The Daily Wire previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/rebekah-jones-florida-whistleblower-claims-she-never-said-she-was-asked-to-delete-covid-deaths-she-claimed-that-specifically">reported</a> that Jones on December 24, 2020, published a now-deleted tweet that read: “The woman who told me to delete cases and deaths is now blaming DOCTORS for the death backlog. She’s the most corrupt, lying, incompetent and ignorant person that could be [sic] ever be put in charge.” Her tweet came in response to a Sun Sentinel article claiming Florida had a delayed death reporting process.
But in May 2021, Jones claimed she never made such an accusation, tweeting, “Deleting deaths was never something I was asked to do. I’ve never claimed it was,” after Fox News host Tucker Carlson featured her fraudulent claims on this nightly program.
Media outlets hailed Jones as a “whistleblower” for her claims and because she was granted such status by the same Inspector General now saying there is no substantiation to her wrongful termination claims.
Jones’ attorney, Rick Johnson, said his client would take the matter to court, insisting Jones “was fired for refusing to manipulate Covid data.”
Jones’ claim to have been asked to manipulate data was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/media-wanted-to-believe-florida-was-fudging-covid-19-data-but-the-story-is-a-fraud">debunked</a> by National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, who <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-covid-whistleblower-who-wasnt/">reported</a> that Jones never handled raw data and was given only a copy of the data she was supposed to input in the system. Jones’ story also changed dramatically the more she told it, from her initial claims that she was fired for merely questioning the data to eventually claiming her superiors directed her to “delete cases and deaths” to make Florida look better.
Her claim that her superior told her to “go into the raw data and manually alter figures,” wasn’t possible because she never had access to that raw data.
In August 2021, Jones was called out for another false claim, one involving DeSanti’s press secretary Christina Pushaw. Jones <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/rebekah-jones-who-falsely-claimed-florida-altered-covid-death-totals-has-falsely-claimed-gov-desantis-press-secretary-faced-criminal-charges">claimed</a> Pushaw faced criminal charges after she allegedly violated a restraining order Jones took out against her. Pushaw never knew about the restraining order, and Jones claimed the order had been violated before it had even been reviewed by the courts. The request for the restraining order was dismissed, and so was the follow-up claim. Nevertheless, Jones claimed the state attorney was making a “deal” with Pushaw for “deferred prosecution,” a claim the state attorney denied.

In this photo illustration the Florida’s COVID-19 Data and

Florida Inspector General Report Finds ‘Insufficient Evidence’ Of Rebekah Jones’ Claims Against DeSantis Administration

Florida Inspector General Report Finds ‘Insufficient Evidence’ Of Rebekah Jones’ Claims Against Ron DeSantis Administration

COVID

The woman who falsely claimed Florida, under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, was altering its COVID-19 data has for months claimed that DeSantis’ press secretary faced serious criminal charges. That, too, has been found false.
Rebekah Jones, who became a liberal media darling after claiming she was ordered to change Florida’s COVID-19 data, tried to make news by insisting DeSantis’ press secretary, Christina Pushaw, had violated a restraining order and was facing criminal charges. As National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rebekah-jones-invents-a-new-insane-lie-about-ron-desantiss-press-secretary/">explained</a>, this was false. The situation is complicated, but Cooke explained “the gist”:
<blockquote>[A]ngered by Pushaw writing a piece about her lies, Jones took out an interim restraining order against Pushaw in Maryland, and, before that order had even been reviewed by the courts, filed a second claim alleging that it had been violated. Because the grounds for the original order were utterly ridiculous, the court dismissed it for lack of evidence, but, for long and boring bureaucratic reasons, it didn’t dismiss the secondary claim — even though that claim had been rendered moot by the dismissal of the order on which it was based (and was set to drop off the docket the moment it was addressed). Aware that most people wouldn’t understand the minute details of all this, Rebekah Jones then spent months pretending that there was an open criminal charge against Pushaw — which, of course, there was not.</blockquote>
On Friday, the District Court of Maryland dismissed the secondary case because Pushaw couldn’t violate a restraining order that was never in place. In addition, Cooke reported, Pushaw never even knew Jones had tried to take out the restraining order against her.
In an attempt to save the situation, Jones apparently told someone named Grant Stern via text that the hearing on Friday was going to consist of Pushaw entering into a deferred prosecution agreement.
“Tomorrow is just a status hearing for Pushaw. They are making a deal with her for deferred prosecution,” Jones reportedly told Stern. “This is something that the state attorney’s representative told me.”
Cooke called the director of public affairs for the Montgomery County State’s Attorneys Office, who confirmed that none of what Jones said about the situation is true. Pushaw had never been accused by the state of Maryland for “criminally violating a Maryland court order.” No criminal charges whatsoever had been filed against Pushaw and Pushaw had not agreed to any “plea deal” or “deferred prosecution” agreement.
This is simply the latest in Jones’ personal vendetta against DeSantis and his administration. Cooke previously <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-covid-whistleblower-who-wasnt/">debunked</a> Jones’ entire claim to have been ordered to alter Florida COVID-19 data by showing that she merely managed the dashboard. She was given information to input and was never provided raw data.
After this was revealed, Jones insisted she had never claimed she was asked to delete Florida COVID-19 death data, even though she has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/rebekah-jones-florida-whistleblower-claims-she-never-said-she-was-asked-to-delete-covid-deaths-she-claimed-that-specifically">claimed that specifically</a> in the past.

Rebekah Jones, Who Falsely Claimed Florida Altered COVID Death Totals, Has Falsely Claimed Gov. DeSantis’ Press Secretary Faced Criminal Charges

A <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/a-florida-graduate-student-wanted-to-correct-the-record-on-covid-deaths-rebekah-jones-tried-to-ruin-his-career-over-it/">blistering report</a> in National Review delineates how Rebekah Jones — the former COVID dashboard manager for the Florida state health department who <a href="https://dailywire.com/news/media-wanted-to-believe-florida-was-fudging-covid-19-data-but-the-story-is-a-fraud/">falsely claimed</a> that higher-ups in the DeSantis administration instructed her to input different COVID data than what they received — allegedly turned to spurious claims of sexual harassment to target a Ph.D. candidate at the Florida Atlantic University College of Business who challenged the way that news media was reporting COVID-death numbers.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Rebekah Jones is a monster, and the media lionized her because she plays for the right team. <a href="https://t.co/EjCDTao8e6">https://t.co/EjCDTao8e6</a>
&mdash; Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) <a href="https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1405843626282786822?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 18, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Jon Taylor, 37, a Ph.D. candidate at the Florida Atlantic University (FAU) College of Business, noted publicly that the media was “conflating the actual number of Floridians who had died of COVID on a given day with the number of COVID deaths that had been entered into the system on that day — a total that included deaths that had occurred days and sometimes weeks before the entry date,” as Jack Crowe wrote in National Review.
Taylor joined his academic adviser to <a href="https://business.fau.edu/covidtracker/">create their own COVID tracker</a>, which wound up showing that media reports on Florida COVID deaths were exaggerated. He issued a blog post in early August 2020 explaining how the way the state presented COVID numbers elicited an overstatement of the true data.
That triggered Jones to call Taylor a “quack” and a “fraud” on Twitter. After a quiet period, in October Taylor started to appear on local news shows and podcasts, and one of his tracker tweets went viral. Jones then accused Taylor and his adviser of sexual harassment, while tagging FAU, the president of FAU, and university police.
“Jones deleted the tweets, but Taylor preserved them as screenshots on the advice of a prominent academic who had previously been subjected to a characteristic Jones smear campaign,&#8221; Crowe reports. &#8220;Jones makes a habit of deleting past tweets before arguing that she had never sent them in the first place, the academic told Taylor. Reached for comment, Jones also denied defaming Taylor and his adviser.&#8221;
Jones also emailed the dean of the FAU College of Business accusing Taylor and his adviser of sexual harassment. “The dean of the business school, Daniel Gropper, then escalated the complaint to the vice president of the university and the chief of the FAU police department, who asked Jones to substantiate her claims. Jones never did,&#8221; Crowe reported.
In one email, Jones accused Taylor of making “jokes that he would put his penis in my mouth to shut me up.” Taylor told Crowe, “That crossed the line to me. I would never say that to somebody. . . . I know the consequence of saying that to somebody. And it’s not just the consequence. I’m just a good person. I would never do that anyway. I don’t talk like that; it’s ridiculous.”
With no evidence to support her accusations, Jones then claimed Taylor or his adviser issued the threats through burner accounts or urged their followers to threaten Jones for them.
Taylor denied the lurid claims, adding that he was frightened the student board that would consider the charges would take Jones at her word. He stated, “They don’t have to have proof. There’s no burden of proof; the mere suspicion that it could be true is enough to expel me from the university. If I get expelled, I’m never finishing my doctorate. That’s the true cost of what’s going on here. And that’s exactly what she tried to do.”
Meanwhile, still not producing any hard evidence, Jones urged her followers to contact the university about Taylor, prompting numerous followers to do just that.
Crowe related other cases in which Jones had attempted to harass people who questioned her claims about COVID numbers, noting that the academics Jones targeted wanted to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution.
But Peter Wood, who graduated from the Florida State University geography doctoral program in 2016, was not as reticent; he stated, “I know people who refuse to even be anonymously involved in conversations about her because they’re afraid she’ll harass them. I’m in a decent position. I’m not afraid of her; I don’t have much to lose.” He pointed out Jones had falsely represented herself as a Florida State geography Ph.D. on Twitter and that she had been expelled from the FSU program for having sex with an undergraduate and lying about her criminal record.
Crowe wrote, “Far from being ostracized for her role in making frank discussion of an immensely important topic near impossible, Jones has profited immensely. She’s raised more than $600,000 on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe; her conspiracy theories about Florida’s COVID cover-up have been endorsed by Florida congressman Charlie Crist, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, and the president of one of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions; and she’s now<a href="https://dailywire.com/news/rebekah-jones-florida-whistleblower-whose-story-has-been-seriously-questioned-plans-to-run-for-congress/"> teasing a run for Congress</a> herself.”
In January, Jones was arrested for allegedly getting unauthorized access into the state’s emergency messaging system. If she&#8217;s convicted, the felony charge carries a sentence of up to 5 years in prison.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Visits Hurricane Center Ahead Of Hurricane Dorian

Woman Who Smeared DeSantis Administration Accused Researcher Who Challenged Her Of Sexual Harassment: Report

Sexual Misconduct

The data manager who claimed Florida’s Department of Health was fudging COVID-19 numbers to make the state look better now says she plans to run for congress to unseat Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz.
NBC News last week, in an article glorifying alleged “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones while pointing out Gaetz’s political vulnerabilities, reported that Jones was planning to run for congress. “Florida Covid whistle-blower Rebekah Jones hopes to unseat scandal-scarred Rep. Matt Gaetz,” read NBC’s headline.
Of course, NBC did not mention <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/media-wanted-to-believe-florida-was-fudging-covid-19-data-but-the-story-is-a-fraud">any of the issues</a> with Jones’ claims or her history of false statements and legal issues. Last month, National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-covid-whistleblower-who-wasnt/">reported</a> that Jones’ claims about being told to alter Florida’s COVID-19 data isn’t even plausible on its face, as she never handled raw data and was given a copy of the data she was supposed to input in the system.
Further, Jones’ story changed dramatically the more she told it, from her initial claims that she was fired for merely questioning the data. The Associated Press initially <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/ousted-florida-virus-data-curator-history-violations-70853281">reported</a> that “Jones has not alleged any tampering with data on deaths, hospital symptom surveillance, hospitalizations for COVID-19, numbers of new confirmed cases, or overall testing rates — core elements of any assessment of the outbreak and of federal criteria for reopening.” The outlet also noted that “Jones acknowledges Florida has been relatively transparent — for which she herself claims some credit — and relatively successful in controlling the pandemic.”
Since that initial story, however, Jones began saying that, actually, yeah, her superiors &#8212; particularly Dr. Shamarial Roberson &#8212; had directly instructed her to “delete cases and deaths” to make Florida look better. She now claims Roberson “asked me to go into the raw data and manually alter figures.”
Again, remember that Jones didn’t have access to the raw data. She merely ran the dashboard. To further illustrate this point, National Review pointed out that Jones now runs her own dashboard, using the same data as the state, she simply displays it differently:
<blockquote>Or, to put it more bluntly, she displays them badly. When you get past all of the nonsense, what Jones is ultimately saying is that the State of Florida—and, by extension, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has not processed its data in the same way that she would if she were in charge. But, frankly, why would it? Again, Jones isn’t an epidemiologist, and her objections, while compelling to the sort of low-information political obsessive she is so good at attracting, betray a considerable ignorance of the material issues. In order to increase the numbers in Florida’s case count, Jones counts positive antibody tests as cases. But that’s unsound, given that (a) those positives include people who have already had COVID-19 or who have had the vaccine, and (b) Jones is unable to avoid double-counting people who have taken both an antibody test and a COVID test that came back positive, because the state correctly refuses to publish the names of the people who have taken those tests. Likewise, Jones claims that Florida is hiding deaths because it does not in­clude nonresidents in its headline numbers. But Florida does report nonresident deaths; it just reports them separately, as every state does, and as the CDC’s guidelines demand. Jones’s most recent claim is that Florida’s “excess death” number is suspicious. But that, too, has been rigorously debunked by pretty much everyone who understands what “excess deaths” means in an epidemiological context—including by the CDC; by Daniel Weinberger, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health; by Lauren Rossen, a statistician at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics; and, most notably, by Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, who, having gone to the trouble of making a video explaining calmly why the talking point was false, was then bullied off Twitter by Jones and her followers.</blockquote>
Cooke followed up his initial reporting with <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rebekah-jones-admits-she-was-never-asked-to-delete-covid-deaths-in-florida/">another article</a> pointing out that Jones finally admitted she was never asked to delete COVID deaths in Florida, something she had previously claimed. Jones made the admission while claiming she had never suggested she had been asked to do such a thing, but Cooke <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/rebekah-jones-florida-whistleblower-claims-she-never-said-she-was-asked-to-delete-covid-deaths-she-claimed-that-specifically">had the receipts</a>.
Gaetz is not without his weaknesses, as he is currently under investigation by the Department of Justice, which claims he paid an underage girl for sex, a charge Gaetz vehemently denies. His spokesperson, Harlan Hill, told NBC that Gaetz “faces no criminal charges,” something Jones cannot say about herself, because she was charged in December with hacking into Florida’s computer system. She denies this.

Florida COVID-19 Data

Rebekah Jones, Florida ‘Whistleblower’ Whose Story Has Been Seriously Questioned, Plans To Run For Congress

Matt Gaetz

Jared Moskowitz, who led Florida’s emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ripped former Florida health department worker Rebekah Jones for “running a disinformation campaign” about Florida’s pandemic response.
The former director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management blasted Jones after she shared screenshots of private messages between herself and Moskowitz with <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article251838913.html">The Miami Herald</a> in an attempt to embarrass the former Florida official. The messages are largely congenial, but Moskowitz claimed that he was keeping Jones close to limit the false and damaging information she was spreading to her sizable following.
“With a platform of 400,000 Twitter followers, her reputation for bullying people on social media and her running a disinformation campaign that the national media echoed, she was more dangerous as an enemy than a friend,” Moskowitz told <a href="https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2021/06/04/democrat-who-ran-floridas-pandemic-response-blasts-rebekah-jones-for-running-a-disinformation-campaign-1385039">Politico</a>. “Everything she did was disinformation.”
“She had a dedicated following — and whether it was fact or fiction — treated everything she said as if it were in the Old Testament,” he added. He likened his friendly messages with Jones to “keeping a fish on the hook.”
Moskowitz added that Jones’ attacks on Florida’s response and GOP Governor Ron DeSantis have backfired. Jones’ claims of misconduct and data tampering have consistently been found unsubstantiated or contradicted by official data.
“There was no doubt this was an effort to harm the governor,” Moskowitz said of Jones’ campaign. “But what they’ve done is the opposite: give him a national platform and attention that made him a political juggernaut in his party.”
Jones was fired from her job working for the Florida Department of Health as a COVID dashboard designer last year. She claimed that she was ordered to change data on the dashboard in an effort to cover up the impact of the pandemic on Florida. Florida officials denied Jones&#8217; assertions, saying she was fired for insubordination.
Jones had a different take on the Moskowitz messages, telling Politico that Moskowitz was an “excellent resource for combating the conspiracy theories being spread by Ron DeSantis and his administration, whom he characterized as &#8216;Conspiracy Frat Bro&#8217; and &#8216;relentless&#8217; in our conversations.” Moskowitz denied ever referring to DeSantis in those terms and pointed out that they did not appear in any of the messages Jones shared with the media.
Jones was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/rebekah-jones-fired-florida-data-scientist-charged-with-felony-over-unauthorized-emergency-message">indicted</a> in January for allegedly hacking into the Florida emergency message system in December and sending a message to Floridians that read: “Speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.” She has been charged with a felony that carries a penalty of up to five years in prison.
Jones is also <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/05/27/fired-florida-data-scientist-axed-by-fsu-years-ago-had-affair-with-student/">entangled</a> in misdemeanor charges related to her tenure as a professor at Florida State University for allegedly stalking a student she had an affair with. Garrett Sweeterman, who was 21 at the time, was granted a restraining order against Jones after she allegedly created a “revenge porn” website and published online a 342-page manifesto detailing their relationship.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/media-wanted-to-believe-florida-was-fudging-covid-19-data-but-the-story-is-a-fraud">Media Wanted To Believe Florida Was Fudging COVID-19 Data, But The Story Is A Fraud</a>