How Val Demings Helped a Campaign Donor Fund a Major Real Estate Purchase With Taxpayer Dollars

Democrats

Upon joining Congress, Florida Dem began renting a top donor’s newly purchased office suite

Rep. Val Demings / AP Collin Anderson • October 6, 2022 5:00 am

In December 2016, a political operative and loyal Val Demings campaign donor purchased a pair of office suites for $500,000. Within days, Demings began paying that donor taxpayer funds to rent the suites—payments that now total hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Longtime utility and telecom company political operative Julia Johnson gave thousands of dollars to Demings prior to the Democrat’s successful 2016 congressional campaign, according to campaign finance disclosures. Just weeks after Demings’s win, Johnson on December 29, 2016, purchased two units in an Orlando business complex for $500,000, local property records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show. Within days, Demings’s official office began paying Johnson’s LLC more than $5,300 a month to rent the two suites, which were combined into one office space. Demings’s lease with Johnson began on Jan. 3, 2017—the same day Demings was sworn into Congress—and the Democrat is still paying her campaign donor for the space as of January. In total, Demings’s office has paid Johnson nearly $320,000 since 2017, allowing the donor to pay for much of her real estate purchase with taxpayer dollars.

Nearly six years after Demings’s first payment to Johnson, the Democrat is running to unseat Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio, who Demings says “fights for his donors” over everyday Floridians. The race has seen Demings face an array of ethics issues—in April, for example, Demings opted to attend a House Judiciary Committee meeting remotely so she could simultaneously participate in a campaign call. “Of course I’ve been looking so forward to being with the Duval Caucus, and here I am stuck in a markup in Judiciary so I apologize for the background noise, but of course I am also listening to the hearing there, so I know when it is time for me to vote,” Demings said during the virtual campaign event. House rules require members to separate their official and campaign business.

Demings’s arrangement