So what has Republican David Rivera been up to, when he wasn't beating his girlfriend and hijacking trucks carrying his opponent's direct mail pieces?
Over the past seven years, Republican state Rep. David Rivera repeatedly said in sworn documents that his main source of income, outside of his salary from the Legislature, came from consulting work he did for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
But USAID has no record of ever hiring Rivera -- now a candidate for Congress -- or his company.
"We do not have Mr. Rivera nor the corporations you referred to in our records,'' USAID press officer Annette Aulton told The Miami Herald in an e-mail.
So now we have perjury -- lying under oath about his sources of income -- to add to Rivera's growing rap sheet. And we aren't done yet, because what exactly was he doing for a living? At the very least, he was funneling campaign contributions into his own pocket.
In 2000, Rivera's mother, Daisy Magarino, founded a company called Millennium Marketing Strategies, but it dissolved a year later, state records show. In 2006, a woman named Ileana Medina founded another company called Millennium Marketing Inc. Rivera's mother joined that company in 2008, records show. Medina also has notarized several of Rivera's financial disclosure forms filed with the state.
Magarino and Medina could not be reached for comment.
Rivera paid $30,000 in campaign funds to Millennium Marketing in 2006, records show. One $15,000 payment -- made two days after Millennium Marketing was created -- was for "campaign consulting," and another $15,000 was for a "thank you campaign," according to Rivera's campaign records. Rivera faced no opponent that year.
Now granted, in the pantheon of GOP excesses, this sure isn't dressing up as a Nazi, but perjury and money laundering (in addition to domestic abuse and highway pirating) give us a pretty good picture into Rivera's criminal character.
Good thing we have Joe Garcia running in this seat, one of the Democrats' few genuine pickup opportunities this cycle.
Now's a pretty good time to drop $5 or $10 into Garcia's campaign.