Florida congresswoman accused of funding campaign with tax dollars

Andrew Kerr of the Washington Free Beacon highlights an emerging campaign finance scandal.

Before she assumed office in 2022, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D., Fla.) was a perennial candidate on the fringes, challenging incumbent Alcee Hastings (D., Fla.) in the 2018 and 2020 primaries. She raised less than $110,000 during those campaigns, both of which she lost in landslides.

And then Hastings died on April 6, 2021. Cherfilus-McCormick wound up taking his vacated seat after winning a December 2021 primary election by just five votes. This time, money wasn’t a concern—Cherfilus-McCormick put $2.6 million of her own money into her campaign, a major feat for someone who reported earning only $86,000 the year prior.

The same day Hastings died, the Florida Department of Emergency Management (FDEM) received an invoice from Trinity Health Care Services, whose CEO at the time was Cherfilus-McCormick. It was the first of 17 invoices that Trinity submitted to the state in spring 2021 that brought the firm $5.8 million in taxpayer funds “that it was not entitled to and had not earned,” the FDEM later alleged in a December 2024 lawsuit accusing the company of theft by “conversion.” Trinity didn’t return those mispaid funds in 2021. Instead, it paid $6.2 million in “profit sharing fees” to Cherfilus-McCormick, who then doled out more than $4.2 million in loans to her 2021 and 2022 campaigns—efforts that raised less than $280,000 from people not named Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick.

The House Ethics Committee is now investigating whether Cherfilus-McCormick used Trinity’s allegedly stolen taxpayer funds to bankroll her campaigns in 2021 and 2022, alongside a slew of other potential violations of federal laws concerning her covert dealings with a state political action committee and an unregistered nonprofit group that paid for her campaign ads.

Some aspects of the allegations against Cherfilus-McCormick have previously been reported by outlets including the Washington Post, which framed the matter as “ethical worries” for the Florida Democrat. But a Washington Free Beacon review found that several members of Cherfilus-McCormick’s family—her husband, brother, mother, father, and sister-in-law—played roles in the alleged schemes.

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