A Republican lawyer resigned Tuesday from a Florida judicial panel to object to police raiding the home of a data scientist who has alleged the state health department ousted her for resisting unethical pandemic-related requests.
“It just seems like it’s not really about any kind of criminal investigation,” Filipkowski told The Washington Post. “It’s about intimidation of her and sending a message to people currently working in state government that, ‘This could be you.’ ”
The state’s public-facing portal of pandemic data has been under scrutiny since earlier this year, when Jones, a former data scientist at the Florida Department of Health, was fired and began trading public accusations with the agency. She alleged that she was asked to undercount infections and overcount the number of people tested, while state officials said she had been repeatedly insubordinate.
Jones launched her own data portal in June, advertising it as an independent alternative to the state dashboard. State police seized her computer, phone and other hardware during the raid Monday, in what she says is an attempt to silence her work.
An affidavit attached to the search warrant alleges that Jones used unchanged log-in credentials to gain unauthorized access last month to a health department communication platform and sent a message to about 1,750 people, urging them to speak out against the department’s pandemic response.
Jones has denied the accusation and has not been criminally charged. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the state attorney for the region encompassing Leon County did not respond to a question about whether she was likely to face charges.
Filipkowski submitted his resignation after reviewing the search warrant affidavit, ending a decade of service on the volunteer commission to which he was appointed by DeSantis (R) and then-Gov. Rick Scott (R). Filipkowski, a Marine veteran and former state and federal prosecutor, also has a private criminal law practice.
“The recent events regarding public access to truthful data on the pandemic, and the specific treatment of Rebekah Jones, has made the issue a legal one rather than just medical,” he wrote in the letter. ” … I no longer wish to serve the current government of Florida in any capacity.”
He added that he would regard Jones as a hero if the allegations were true and that he did not believe DeSantis spokesman Fred Piccolo’s contention that the governor was unaware of the raid in advance.
Filipkowski, who promoted the candidacy of now President-elect Joe Biden, said he received no response to his letter from the governor’s office. Representatives of DeSantis did not respond to questions Wednesday about whether they accepted Filipkowski’s resignation or had a response to his criticisms.
DeSantis’s handling of the coronavirus, which has infected more than 1 million people in Florida and killed nearly 20,000, had long concerned Filipkowski. The state’s pandemic rules, among the loosest in the country, include allowing bars and restaurants to operate at full capacity.
But the raid on Jones’s home was the last straw for Filipkowski, who said he thought it was an aggressive response to the alleged breach and that its broad sweep was a thinly veiled attempt to determine which state employees were in touch with Jones and intimidate them into silence.
He said he believed Jones’s situation would be covered by Florida’s legal “necessity” doctrine, which protects people who commit a crime to prevent a more serious danger.
“If that’s a crime, there’s something wrong,” Filipkowski said of Jones allegedly messaging state employees. “The computer hacking statute in Florida was meant to prevent people from stealing other people’s identity, crashing their servers — not for sending an email urging people to tell the truth.”
The search warrant was signed by Judge Joshua Hawkes, whom DeSantis appointed in September, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
Jones has continued to speak out on her own behalf since the raid, telling CNN on Wednesday that she was concerned officials would use the electronic devices they seized from her to identify state employees leaking information to her as whistleblowers.
“DeSantis needs to worry less about what I’m writing about and more about the people who are sick and dying in his state,” she said. “And doing this to me will not stop me from reporting the data, ever.”
Jones has encountered law enforcement before. She faces a pending misdemeanor charge of cyberstalking a former romantic partner in 2019, to which she has pleaded not guilty, court records show. Another cyberstalking charge and a sexual cyber-harassment charge stemming from the same incident were dropped. Previous charges against her of criminal mischief, trespassing, robbery and contempt of court for violating a domestic violence injunction were also dropped.