The Daily Beast Podcast - COVID Whistleblower Rebekah Jones: I Knew DeSantis Would Go After Me

Episode Date: December 13, 2020

COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones always thought that having a gun pointed in her face would be terrifying. That’s what the movies and TV shows have us all believe anyway. But she says when the Florida state police raided her home and held a gun inches from her face after she told them her two children were present, she felt “nothing.” She even let them enter peacefully, she says. “I was prepared to be arrested,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast on this special members-only episode of The New Abnormal. She was actually prepared to be arrested months ago by the Gov. DeSantis administration, when the virus numbers got bad last spring and she created her infamous COVID tracker contradicting the state’s numbers in addition to filing a whistleblower complaint “against the state for manipulating data and breaking the law.” So why are they going after her now? “I think they're purging everybody who's disloyal,” she says. Also, DeSantis doesn’t like her, or anyone who is making him look bad. Could other states be doing the same? Maybe, she says. (“Nobody wants to look like it's, they've lost control.”) As far as Florida is concerned, though, Jones isn’t shutting up. She restated her assertion that her state is absolutely underreporting hospitalizations and deaths and the DOH has even changed people’s cause of death. (“They've deleted people, [from the tracker], including children. When I drew attention to the fact that a two-year-old died in Escambia County, in Florida, less than two weeks after he was diagnosed and hospitalized for it, they reported him as a death. And as soon as I tweeted about it, and there was a big press reaction, they deleted it. They actually changed his dead status from yes to no.”) She doesn’t know what will happen next, but she wants people to keep paying attention to what’s happening with the virus. (“DeSantis would love to just distract people from what's going on with hospitalizations right now.”) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the new abnormal special bonus episode. We're so excited to have you today. We have a very special guest with Rebecca Jones, who is an American data scientist and geographer, as well as a whistleblower who's known for going ahead to head with Governor DeSantis in Florida over her COVID tracking project. And today she's going to talk to us about that, among other things. Okay, Rebecca, what the hell is going on? That's a good question.

Tell me. So I talked to you guys a while. go, right? And we kind of got into like the nitty gritty of the science and and all of that. And so I've spent really the last six months or so just trying to provide public information about what's going on in the state and then later what's going on in schools across the country. And I've been really kind of plugging away at that day in and day out. And I kind of thought back in May or June when I first launched the new dashboard that DeSantis, send people to come get me.

Why? Because I, I mean, I filed a whistleblower complaint against the state for manipulating data and breaking the law. Right. And for asking me to break the law. Because of his giant rant in front of the vice president before I ever said anything to anybody, he kind of created this fracture where I had spent months working in his administration to build the state's dashboard and all their data systems and create a reputation around it that it could be

trusted. Right. And when he publicly attacked me and defamed me, he created doubt with a lot of people that that information could be trusted anymore. And to me, that was awful because I had been asking the state since January to provide information about the virus and what was going on in our state. And I did that and I pushed so hard for it because I knew that people had a right to know what was going on and that a lot of people would be afraid if they did not have information or they had information that they didn't think was trustworthy. And so when all of that happened in May, there was a large share of the population in Florida that had nowhere to go for information. Right. And that's when you started the dashboard. Yeah. So I basically, you know, he went out and said I wasn't the architect of it. So I

completely rebuild it from scratch and added in all of the things that I wanted to always include and was told no. So stuff about hospital occupancy, Department of Corrections data, data from the Department of Emergency Management and a testing application where you could just, you know, hit the locate button and find all of the testing sites that are within five or ten miles and what their hours are and make it really easy for people to get help or get testing. Yeah, no, it's an awesome site and everyone should go to it. So tell us exactly, they broke into your house. Like, what happened there?

Well, they didn't break in. I opened the door. I let them in. Right. They did have a sledgehammer sitting on the table next to, like, I have a little, like, it used to be a night. They had guns, right? Yeah, yeah. I had a little, like, nightstand next to my front door.

That's an old table, you know, if I'm coming in from the grocery store and I have to put stuff down to open my door. and they had a sledgehammer there, so I'm assuming they would have just knocked down the door. I also think the guns are pretty scary. I always thought that having a gun pointed at my face from six inches away would be terrifying. I mean, let's be honest, I thought I would piss myself.

Who wouldn't? Right. Like, you see the stuff in movies or you see videos from, you know, people being, I'm like, oh, my God, I would be so scared. I felt nothing. Oh, interesting. And I was prepared to be arrested. So they were outside for about five minutes.

I emailed my lawyer. I said, they're here. What do I do? And they told me to just go downstairs, let them take you, just because we knew that, again, DeSantis would eventually come after me for something and lock me away. And so I was rummaging around my bedroom looking for clothes. I think I ended up actually putting on my husband's sweatpants, which did nothing for my ass in that video.

I'm going to be honest. You know, I got my husband to bring our daughter upstairs and have my son in the bedroom because I didn't want them to see me be arrested. Yeah. As soon as the officer called me and asked me if anybody was home, you know, they were banging on the door and I'm pretty sure my son looked out the window, so they knew we were here. I just put the phone down and I started going down there. And when I opened the door, I put my hands up. I was, like I said, fully expecting to be arrested. Luckily, I had that camera there. But then they came into the house with their guns. And drawn. And they asked me immediately who else was in the house. And I said my children and my husband. And then one of the guards pulled out his gun after I said that. After. They had me. I didn't

understand why in the world they were asking me to get my family down there. So I was, when they said, you know, get them down here. I was like, you want the children down here? Like, why would you bring my children out to see this? And that didn't seem right to me. I was obviously confused and I was expecting to be handcuffed and taken away, but instead they stormed the house. And some of them had guns that I didn't even know cops could carry. Like, not an AR-15. I've seen what those look like. And those are little compared to what some of these guys had strapped around their neck.

And it was a search warrant for my computer. That's all it was. You know, my husband's standing at the top of the stairs. He's got my two-year-old daughter in his arm. None of us are understanding why they're telling them to come down. And my 11-year-old son's behind him. And so they come down. They take us outside and it's freezing cold.

and tell me that there's been some kind of high cyber crime that they're investigating and they just take all my stuff. So Rebecca, when I watched the footage that you posted of them coming in the house and pointing the gun up at your children, one of the thoughts I had was like, you know, we have this vaccine. It seems like this would be coming to a close. Like, why now? It just feels so petty and weird. That was my question, the why now?

Because I thought for sure six months ago it would happen. But it's been so long, and he seemed to make it a point not to mention me directly, even when he's asked about me in my work, that I thought he was just ignoring me. You know, I was just like a minor nuisance he's occasionally asked about. I thought the governor would just grow up and move on. And apparently my lawyer told me that the state is about to issue their findings on the whistleblower investigation sometime soon, which I'm sure they'll, it's a state investigating the state kind of thing. so I'm sure they'll find in favor of DOH. So I don't think it's that. But I do know that the week that that message was supposedly sent, and I found out, which I didn't even know having worked there,

that the username and password for that account is apparently on the internet, public, and seven different PDFs through DOH's website, that somebody went through and screenshoted it, and they have not just that account, a bunch of different accounts with the usernames and passwords. words available. Supposedly this message was sent, I think, November 10th, and it said something along the lines like, you know, speak out or whatever before, you know, a lot of more people are killed. This was the same week that there was a purge at DOH. The governor's office fired the director of communications, Alberto Moscosso. He had been there through the whole pandemic. They fired him. Then lied and said that he resigned for better opportunities. He says he was fired. And I'm sorry, I'm going to go with him on that. Not the state. Just to go back into the weeds here, when DeSantis was confronted about this search, he said he knew nothing about it, right? Yeah, that's what he said. So that is sort of a pretty

jarring. Well, the Florida state police reports delictory to the governor in his office. Right. I am a somewhat known person in the state, certainly a person that somebody would have notified DeSantis that this was going to go down because there would be potential fallout and as press people would want to know that. I'm betting that they didn't think I had a camera pointed out the door when they brought their guns in. Thank God I did that or nobody would believe me. I'd be telling this sensational story about how they pointed a gun at my face and they pointed guns at my kids and they stormed my house with 12 cops. Nobody would believe me. The judge that signed off on the warrant was the most recent judge appointed by DeSantis had been sworn in less than a month before he signed the warrant.

And according to multiple news reports, this was the first thing he signed, the first warrant he's ever signed in his life. That's fun. So I'm just still like a little baffled, though. Do you have a hypothesis of why this happened and why they chose and why they chose to do this? I don't think I was the main target. I think it was a two birds, one stone situation. where they knew people were talking to me.

They fired, as I mentioned, a lot of head people at DOH within like two weeks. And there were people at other agencies who were speaking to me for months, giving me information that will most certainly hurt DeSantis. And I think they're purging everybody who's disloyal. I thought it was odd that they took my cell phone for a hack that was supposedly done over like an internet browser, which I don't need to connect to my house internet to do, right? So that makes no sense. But I think that they're looking for who has talked to me and what they've said so that they can just fire everybody.

And harassing me and taking all my gear was just an added benefit to that. So I don't even think I was the primary target because the more information that comes out about this warrant and what was supposedly happened, it doesn't seem like anything that's actually legitimate. So who do you think the target was? I think I know who it was. I think I know a handful of people it was, but I'm not going to say. Oh, so they're trying to get to the people who are your sources. They want to know who's been talking to me and know what they've told me. We talked about this last time you came on it.

I've been obsessed with that, and I don't see a lot of reporting about it. How much underreporting are the states doing? So there's really two areas where I know they're actively underreporting, and that's hospitalizations and deaths. cases, if there's some kind of, you know, larger plan to reduce testing in areas where there's a high volume of cases so that there's not as much cases, I wouldn't know about that. They don't tell you where within a county they've been testing people. So cases is hard to do, but hospitalizations comes from an agency that's not covered by DOH is a different agency. And I have a source that I'm worried about now in that agency who's, you know, high.

high up in that agency who's told me on any given day there are hundreds of people now probably almost a thousand people who are hospitalized with COVID but aren't being counted that way in the data reporting because their primary diagnosis is something else. Now this was meant to remove people who, you know, trip and fall and are COVID positive, which makes sense. You know, you don't need people who got in a car wreck and them to be counted as COVID hospitalizations. But this also includes people who are diagnosed with pneumonia, which is one of the most common diagnoses that you get pending a test, especially. The second way is deaths, which has been interfered with at the state level at least four different occasions in how they report and record COVID deaths. They've deleted people, including children, when I drew attention to the fact that a two-year-old died in Ascambia County in Florida.

less than two weeks after he was diagnosed and hospitalized for it. They reported him as a death. And as soon as I tweeted about it and there was a big press reaction, they deleted it. They actually changed his dead status from yes to no. So is he alive? No, he's dead. That child died. But in DOH's data, it doesn't show that.

So if you do any kind of like death calculations, how many of those people do they go back and take out? Right. And they now wait for a death certificate that lists the primary cause of death is COVID. Which means that there's a lot of room for Fakhore. Yes. Again, pneumonia or any one of those other diagnosis, there's, you know, you can have cardiac arrests or a heart attack as a result of your COVID-19 infection. But if you did not die from the COVID, then you don't count. At least not right now.

They may review that later, but not right now, not anytime soon. And even with that, they're still reporting about 100 deaths a day. Yeah. But the thing that I think they don't draw any attention to, and this is intentional. And it's the reason I founded the COVID monitor with my two colleagues, is that there have been 26,214K through 12 cases in this state alone. So children. Just this fall.

It's students and staff. Across the country, we've confirmed through official sources more than 300,000 cases this fall and students and staff. just in the K through 12 setting. This does not include colleges. While the state was forced, partly through our efforts, to start reporting that, which I'm sure DeSantis loved, they don't draw any attention to it whatsoever. They put it in a PDF at the bottom of their website. They don't add it to the dashboard.

They don't draw any attention. They never talk about it. And that is something that has been an accelerant for case spread, but it's also been one of DeSantis's biggest sticking points was keeping schools open. A few weeks ago, he had said that, or his administration had said that they were going to force all students back to face to face in January. We went very public and we started talking about how this was a bad idea and eventually they caved and said, okay, no, we won't do that. But I actually published, I had a good week last week. This is why this is so shitty. Well, wait, I just want to go back for one second here because I think this is important.

So you're saying that Florida undercounts its deaths and its hospitalizations. Yes. Because the governor has control over the reporting. Yeah, and he's changed the policies. Ergo, other red states may in fact be doing the same thing. Well, other states red or blue could be doing the same thing. Nobody wants to look like they've lost control. Do you think that's happening?

I mean, is it fair to? make that jump that that's happening in other states too? I can't say specifically where, because I'm so dug into Florida, at least with, you know, deaths and stuff like that. I've heard about other states that are doing that, but without an actual knowledge. But you're definitely, I mean, you definitely, yeah, yeah, because it just seems to me, and I've heard that the real numbers of Americans who have COVID are significantly higher than what we're seeing. We're not doing a lot of randomized testing. or when Florida, we don't do any.

They do a lot in other states. I know California does a lot of randomized testing and so does other places, but we don't do that in Florida. We don't even encourage testing. Like, the dashboard that the state has doesn't even have testing resources listed on it. I mean, what is that? I fought

so hard to put that on there and lost every time. Right, but it does seem to me like a fair assessment that we are much sicker than our government is telling us. Yes, I think so. Go back to your good week.

The funny thing is, is I remember Saturday night, I was on my treadmill and, you know, doing a run and feeling like everything was good. I had that weird, serene feeling that, you know, like my life is okay right now, which I have learned so many times in my life to know that if I feel that, something is coming. I'm not allowed to enjoy that for very long. The next night, actually, I learned that something might be happening to me, so it didn't last a whole day. But I had an op-ed with my two co-founders of the COVID monitor come out early last week, kind of relaying some of our information on our data and why we believe that schools should be shut down through January. Then the day after that, I published the first large-scale study of COVID-19 cases in school that's been done in America about American schools. to date. Nobody else has done this. And that was a big deal because as the first, like, article saying, this is an in-depth look and analysis of what's going on in schools based on the largest data set that we

have available. And it was damning for Florida because I used Florida as a case study. And then the day after that, this huge Sun Sentinel article came out, of which there were 50 or so sources, I was one of them, detailing how the DeSantis administration ordered all Department of Health officials not to even talk about COVID in the weeks leading up to the election. Like, they were not allowed to talk about it. They were supposed to push influenza and all these, like, carbon monoxide poisoning and all this other stuff, but to not talk about COVID. They were told to shut up in the weeks leading up to the election. And a whole bunch of other stuff that really makes DeSantis look like a murderer, at least,

if nothing more than by neglect or a lack of concern or attention. And so I had a great week. The Santa's had a shitty week. And then that Monday they store my house. So you think they're trying to figure out who your sources are. You can continue. You haven't been charged with anything. They just took your laptop, right?

When do you get it back? Like what happens now? I'll probably never get it back. I asked them, I said, well, because they took a couple laptops, my phone, some, external hard drives that had evidence on it of what I've been saying. My tower, my massive beast tower, who I miss. I feel like I've lost an appendage by losing that. Why are they allowed to do that? Because they had a DeSantis appointee who's been sworn in for less than a month and sign off on a warrant to take it. And that tower was expensive. You know, it's weird when you're

a person who does, you know, computer work all the time. you lose your computer. Setting up a new one just feels inferior. And I miss it so much, but they said it could be eight months before I get it back, if I ever get it back. Do they have a legal leg to stand on here? Well, I mean, they have a warrant that says that they can take whatever they want and do whatever they want with it, pretty much. My lawyers right now are trying to make sure that they don't review any, you know, privileged information, like communications with my lawyers. Right. That seems likely that they will, right? Legally, I don't think they're allowed to, but...

Right. Who says that they won't? And discussions about evidence that we have and where it came from for my lawsuit, they're not supposed to look at, but... Can you sue the governor for this? It's been suggested, but honest to God, right now, I'm just... I'm trying to get, like, to the next hour. Right. I'm trying to get to the next day.

I want to get back to work. Right. Because it's never been more important. than it is right now that people understand what's going on. You are a civilian who's been targeted by your government for the information you're providing. Yes, which is for the Florida site, just a collection of information that's made public by the state through various different agencies all put into one place. Yeah. Now, my school site does use some anonymous reporting resources for people who want to come forward about cases that are not being reported.

in the school district. So there is that aspect of it. So the school's project is separate. And I'm doing my best to shield it in all possible ways because I feel like that operation, I'm operating in a journalistic capacity. But fundamentally, a Rubicon is being crossed here, right? Because the governor is saying,

if you report stuff we don't like, we will come. We'll just take it. He really doesn't like me. Well, fuck him. I mean, who cares if he doesn't like. Like, he still can't arrest you. Oh, come on, Molly, now. Well, I'm just saying that fundamentally there's a real, it seems like there's a real.

Innocent people go to jail in this country every single day. Yes. People have their houses raided with armed guards in front of their children every single day. The weirdest part of that is that the video looks awful, but it's the experience of so many Americans, especially minority communities, every single day. And seeing it as a reality, is that. scary and the police have defended themselves saying, oh, this is what we normally do. And that's the problem. That is the problem that that is what they normally do. They're saying all policies

were followed. That means the policy is to come in with guns raised at anybody who's inside the house, including children. You know, that's the problem here. And if I really don't like talking about what happened that morning, because I don't want it to overshadow all of the great work that's being done at the COVID monitor and what's going on in Florida with cases, because DeSantis would love to just distract people from what's going on with hospitalizations right now. More people are hospitalized with COVID-19 or because of COVID-19 right now in the state of Florida than have been at any point yet in this virus. But this was amazing.

We appreciate you so much for coming on. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and don't want you to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly JongFest and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens?

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