I wrote about this China Trip of County Brass once already and was very suspicious of what went on. I said something was fishy with this trip In a post I wrote April 2nd and apparently the Miami Herald agreed and reporter Douglas Hanks did some more digging. You might notice this is NOT a Miami Herald link because it is buried and I don't have time to find it on the Miami Herald Site. Why did they bury it on line but it was front page in the Newspaper?
Everyone knows that you must not destroy data but the County Information Department issued 13 phones and each one now says: "Wiped by User". What is even more bizarre, the Supervisor of the IT Department is Myriam Marquez. Sound familiar? Her name should, she was the former top dog at El Nuevo Herald and she formerly was the Editorial Page Editor of the Miami Herald. If anyone should know that this information should be preserved it is Myriam. So what happened?
The trip was fishy to begin with. There was a leg of it not on the itinerary that went to visit the Genting group...that owns the land where the former Miami Herald offices were on Biscayne Bay and they want to build a giant gambling complex there. Why did some of the members of the junket, including the Mayor and his favorite lobbyists, take this detour to Genting? What could have been on the phones to give us some answers?
Myriam Marquez speaking for the Mayor says it was a mistake to have erased the phones. This is no mistake lady. And, you know it. You are selling yourself out for your job.
In fact, the whole erasing scandal appears to have been intentional, the erasing done after the Miami Herald asked for the information and some of the phone users saying they gave it in with all the information on it:
On April 2, the Herald requested some text messages sent and received by Manny Gonzalez, director of the county's trade office, while on the Asia trip. The request identified the number of the temporary phone he had identified in email messages as the number he was using during the trade mission.
Ten days later, on April 12, Tere Florin, a spokeswoman for the department where Gonzalez works, Regulatory and Economic Resources, said a reporter could come to County Hall the following morning to review Gonzalez's phone from China and read any text messages relevant to the request.
But later that day, Florin and Marquez called to say the IT executive assigned to the mayor's office, Jose Marticorena, told them the phone's data had been deleted as part of the security precautions taken after the China trip.
"When I got it, it was wiped," Marticorena said in an interview Tuesday. He said he did not know who had deleted Gonzalez's data, but assumed it was someone else in the IT department. The county apparently has no records showing who had done the wiping. While the log says "Wiped by User" next to the county official's name assigned the phone, several participants, including MIA director Lester Sola and Commissioner Jose "Pepe" Diaz, said they turned over their devices to IT with the data intact.
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| Myriam Marquez, former Miami Herald big shot - Turning into a sneaky person? Lobbyist Rafael A. Garcia-Toledo in the Background |
What are they hiding? This is what a Strong Mayor does. He dictates. Sorry Francis Suarez, I just can't vote for a Strong Mayor ever again. If Gimenez can turn Myriam into a sycophant, what other nefarious things is Mayor Gimenez doing? This smells so bad all I can say is: WTF?
