ORLANDO, Fla. — Joel Greenberg, a former Florida tax official, and U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., on at least one occasion several years ago were recorded together entering the Seminole County Tax Collector’s Office when it was closed on a weekend night, according to a person familiar with office operations who saw the videotape.
The person said the footage showed Greenberg and Gaetz walking into the tax collector’s Lake Mary office on Primera Drive. Greenberg was seen going through baskets where driver’s licenses, turned in by residents for disposal, were stored and later went into a back room, the person said.
CNN reported Thursday night the visit was revealed to federal authorities investigating Greenberg in January 2020. Gaetz has since become a target of investigators, who are probing whether an alleged relationship with a 17-year-old girl violated sex trafficking laws, according to reports.
Information about the weekend office visit was shared with the Orlando Sentinel before news broke this week about the Gaetz investigation.
A spokesman for the tax collector’s office, Alan Byrd, told the Sentinel on Thursday that an employee also recalls seeing Greenberg and another man on security camera footage in the office after hours at least once several years ago. But he said the employee did not know who the second man was.
Byrd said the employee did not want to be directly interviewed.
The Sentinel sought the video through public record requests but was told by the tax collector’s office that security video is only stored for 60 days. It’s unclear if federal authorities have obtained the footage.
The person who described the video to the Sentinel requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. The person told the Sentinel the late-night visit came to the attention of Greenberg’s staff after it was discovered the following Monday morning that a security alarm had been turned off.
Text messages that were viewed by the Sentinel showed an employee had later asked Greenberg if he’d visited the office that weekend, to which Greenberg replied via text that he had been, and was “showing congressman Gaetz what our operation looked like.”
“Did I leave something on?” Greenberg added in the texts. When told that the alarm was off, Greenberg apologized and said he’d “be more careful.”
CNN reported portions of the same messages Thursday night.
The CNN report indicated the nighttime office visit occurred in 2019, but time stamps on the text messages seen by the Sentinel indicated it was in April 2018.
Gaetz, a Panhandle Republican who has not been charged with a crime, did not respond to a text message this week asking him about the late-night visit.
The office visit — and the description of Greenberg visiting the baskets of discarded licenses — is important because the basket of discarded IDs, which other agencies typically store securely until they’re destroyed, figure into some of the nearly three-dozen charges Greenberg faces.
An indictment states that Greenberg used his access as an elected official to look up information about a girl between the ages of 14 and 17 in a state database, in order “to produce a false identification document and to facilitate his efforts to engage in commercial sex acts.”
Federal prosecutors have said that customers visiting tax collector branches that issued driver’s licenses and Florida ID cards would sometimes surrender their old IDs to Greenberg’s staff to be destroyed. But Greenberg, prosecutors allege, “used his access to the Seminole County tax collector’s office to take surrendered driver licenses before they were shredded.”
He then “used the surrendered driver licenses that he had taken to cause fake driver licenses to be produced that had his photograph but the personal information of the victims whose driver licenses he had taken.”
Authorities have said Greenberg had several stolen IDs in his work vehicle the day he was first arrested, on charges that he’d stalked a political rival, as well as a pair of fakes in his wallet and materials for making more in his office.
Inside his work vehicle, agents said they found a backpack, which held three licenses from Canada, Virginia and Florida, belonging to Seminole County residents who had recently obtained new Florida licenses.
Employees of the tax collector’s office also told agents they had seen Greenberg taking surrendered licenses from the “shred basket” prior to their destruction. When asked what he was doing, Greenberg gave fishy explanations — which federal authorities say were lies.
Greenberg has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against him, which also include allegations that he embezzled funds from his public office and sought fraudulent loans from a COVID-19 relief program.
