(CNN) — Florida police raided the home of a former coronavirus state data scientist on Monday, escalating a dispute between the state government and a data expert who accused officials of trying to cover up the scope of the pandemic.
The Florida Police Department executed a search warrant Monday morning at the home of data scientist Rebekah Jones, who was fired by the state Department of Health in May. The agency is investigating whether Jones accessed a state government messaging system without authorization to urge employees to speak out about the COVID-19 deaths, according to an affidavit from an agent working on the case.
Jones told CNN that she had not improperly accessed any state messaging system and that she lost access to her government computer accounts after she was removed from office.
Fight for covid-19 data
About 10 officers with weapons in hand showed up at his Tallahassee home around 8:30 a.m., Jones said. A video taken from a camera at his home, which he posted on social media, showed an agent pointing a gun down a staircase while Jones told him that his two sons were upstairs. Jones said the agent was pointing his gun at his 2-year-old daughter, 11-year-old son and her husband, who said they were on the stairs, although the video is unclear.
Rebekah Jones posted on Twitter a video of state agents raiding her home.
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The police officers also “pointed a gun 6 inches from my face” and took all his computers, his phone and several hard drives and USB sticks, Jones said.
What the police say
Gretl Plessinger, a police department spokeswoman, said officers knocked on Jones’ door and knocked on her “in an attempt to minimize the family disruption.” Jones refused to open the door for 20 minutes and hung up on officers, and Jones’ family was upstairs when officers entered the home, Plessinger said. He did not respond to questions about why the officers drew weapons.
“At no time were weapons pointed at anyone in the house,” Rick Swearingen, the department’s commissioner, added in another statement.
According to the affidavit of a department investigator, an unauthorized individual illegally accessed a state government emergency management system to send a group text message to government officials last month urging them to speak out about the COVID-19 crisis. 19.
“It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people die,” the message read, according to the affidavit. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak before it’s too late.
Officials traced the message, which was sent to about 1,750 recipients on the afternoon of Nov. 10, to an IP address connected to Jones’ home, the investigator wrote in the affidavit.
What Jones says
Jones told CNN’s Chris Cuomo Monday night that she did not send the message.
“I’m not a hacker,” Jones said. She added that the language in the message that authorities said was sent “was not my way of speaking” and contained mistakes that she would not make.
“The number of deaths the person used was not even correct,” Jones said. ‘Actually, they were down by about 430 deaths. I would never round 430 deaths.
Among the devices officers took away were USB sticks that Jones told CNN contained “evidence that (state officials) were lying in January about things like internal reports and notices from the CDC,” as well as “evidence of illegal activities by part of the state. She said she accessed those reports legally and some had been sent to her by other people after she left the state government.
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Jones said he believed the raid on his home was orchestrated by Governor Ron DeSantis, who is publicly accused of mishandling the pandemic.
“This is what happens when you challenge powerful and corrupt people,” Jones said. “If he thinks this is going to scare me into shut up, he’s wrong.”
The governor of Florida demarcates
DeSantis spokesman Fred Piccolo told CNN that “the governor’s office had no involvement or knowledge or anything of this investigation.” He added that police launched an investigation into the message before anyone knew about Jones’ alleged involvement. The health department sent a request for comment to the police.
Jones, who helped build the state’s online covid-19 data dashboard, was fired in May, in what she argued was retaliation for her refusal to manipulate the numbers and downplay the scale of the outbreak. She has publicly alleged that she was asked by a department superior to manipulate state data to make it appear Florida was closer to meeting its reopening goals than it actually was.
But state officials have defended his firing.
The health department said in May that Jones was removed because she had “exhibited a repeated course of insubordination,” making “unilateral decisions to modify the department’s covid-19 dashboard without the participation or approval of the epidemiological team or its supervisors.”
And DeSantis said at the time that Jones’ removal from office “was not a problem.”
Whistleblower complaint
Jones filed a whistleblower complaint against the health department in July, asking that she be reinstated to her job with back pay. It also launched its own online Florida Covid-19 dashboard, a website that ran on one of the computers that agents seized Monday, it said.
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Jones was previously charged with stalking last year after allegedly posting explicit photos of an ex-boyfriend online, a misdemeanor case that is still pending. She told CNN that the case involved a blog post she posted to an online group for women who had been in abusive relationships.
On Sunday, a defense attorney for Jones filed a motion to withdraw from the case because he learned that “a member of the immediate family is involved in an active investigation” of Jones, although he did not share any details about that investigation.
When DeSantis spoke about Jones’ firing in May, he referenced the alleged harassment case and said she “should have been fired much earlier.”
CNN’s Jamiel Lynch contributed reporting.
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