Florida Gubernatorial Candidate Accused of ‘Grooming’ Minor May Not Be Eligible For Election
Plus, Trump channels Andrew Jackson in Davos and the New York Times hires a reporter to cover US Jews
James Fishback, the 31-year-old investor accused of “grooming” a high-school student, is running in the GOP primary to succeed Ron DeSantis—but he may not even be eligible to become Florida’s next governor. Fishback claimed a D.C. condo as his primary residence through 2025 and voted in the nation’s capital in 2020, records obtained by the Free Beacon show. Florida’s constitution requires gubernatorial candidates to live in the state for the seven years preceding Election Day.
Fishback is a Florida native, but the paper trail suggests the Georgetown dropout was a D.C. resident within the seven-year window. The records for Fishback’s D.C. mortgage include a sworn affidavit certifying that Fishback “occupied” the property for “nontransient residential dwelling purposes”—in other words, it was his primary residence. Fishback collected homestead property tax deductions on the property as recently as 2025, a deduction he didn’t claim on his Florida home, and his D.C. voter registration remains active.
Perhaps ironically, on Wednesday, Fishback proposed a $50,000 tax on out-of-state buyers of Florida homes, which he calls “the Mamdani tax.”
The revelation about his own residency “is the latest setback for Fishback, a chronic X poster who regularly calls [Trump-endorsed Byron] Donalds—who is black—a ‘slave,’” our Collin Anderson reports. The board overseeing Fishback’s troubled asset management firm voted to terminate two of its exchange-traded funds in October, and Fishback’s Tesla Model Y was repossessed one month later. Then, in December, an NBC News report revealed that Fishback “was accused of initiating an inappropriate relationship with a student involved in a middle and high school debate program he founded. The student, who was 17 years old at the time (Fishback was 27), wrote in a court filing seeking a restraining order that Fishback ‘explicitly directed’ her to keep their relationship secret, ‘an isolation tactic commonly employed in grooming scenarios.’”
READ MORE: Florida Gubernatorial Candidate Accused of ‘Grooming’ Minor May Not Even Be Eligible For Election
Donald Trump displays a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office and he brought Jackson’s energy with him to Davos on Wednesday, Free Beacon columnist Mike Watson writes.
The American elites who preceded Jackson wanted to build up through government programs, not through land acquisitions. “The Jacksonians thought this was backward,” Watson writes. “They were hardly technophobes, but they preferred to double down on America’s greatest comparative advantage—practically unlimited fertile land—and expand as fast as possible. Elected officials were meant to fend off America’s land and keep pointy-headed bureaucrats out of the way.” Which brings us to Trump’s Greenland gambit.
“Of course the greatest controversy at Davos raged over Greenland. Trump wants to acquire the Danish-owned island and cited his concerns about Arctic security and missile defense. He ruled out seizing the island forcefully, which had stoked fears among America’s allies in recent weeks, but he is exerting a lot of pressure. He posted Wednesday that he and Rutte reached an agreement that ‘will be a great one for the United States of America, and all NATO Nations.’
“If so, this would be in line with one of Jackson’s greatest successes. Jackson thoroughly despised his political opponents, but some of his greatest accomplishments came with them. He teamed up with diplomatic superstar John Quincy Adams to pressure Spain into selling Florida to the United States. This removed a national security threat and gave southeastern Americans access to waterways they needed to export to international markets.” The United States emerged from Jackson’s presidency as the dominant power in North America. If Trump can press forward and keep America’s allies on board, his own portrait could one day rival Jackson’s for prime Oval Office wall space.
READ MORE: Andrew Jackson Comes to Davos
The New York Times is hiring a new religion correspondent focused on “Jewish life in America,” a notable move for a newsroom that has long struggled to cover religion—and Judaism in particular—with basic literacy, Free Beacon senior writer and veteran Times critic Ira Stoll notes:
“The Times job listing puts the base pay for the religion correspondent job at between $124,979.94 and $170,000. It lists ‘Detailed and expert understanding of Judaism and clarity about the intricacies of its place in America’ as a basic qualification. ‘Preferred qualifications’ include ‘Collegial and collaborative behavior, integrity with assignments.’ How anyone at a news organization approved a job listing that discusses integrity as anything other than a basic requirement is a puzzler, but I guess enough time has passed at the Times since the Jayson Blair scandal that some editor okayed this. ‘Accuracy’ isn’t listed as a qualification, either, though the editors are seeking someone with ‘an eagerness to experiment with new story forms and a passion for bringing Times journalism to a global audience across digital, print and other media.’”
“Sometimes these job listings are just go-through-the-motions performances for when the paper already has a preferred internal candidate that it is planning to hire. If the Times actually hires someone good from outside the paper, it’d be a small miracle, but even so, that person would have to reckon not only with the paper’s editors but also with its audience, heavy with Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders voters in America and with even worse in Europe. Maybe after the hire is made, the editors can announce whether they found someone with integrity or if they had to settle for only some but not all of the preferred qualifications. Eventually, those intelligent Times readers who remain will have a way of figuring it out.”
READ MORE: New York Times Hiring a Reporter to Cover U.S. Jews
Additional reading:
The Treasury Department sanctioned six Gaza-based nonprofits that “claim to provide medical care to Palestinian civilians but in fact support the military wing of Hamas.” The move is aimed at dismantling “Hamas’s insidious practice of operating behind civilian organizations.”
Speaking of Hamas, the IDF on Tuesday discovered a weapons cache in southern Gaza, suggesting Hamas is rearming even as the United States moves toward phase two of Donald Trump’s peace plan, which requires Hamas disarmament. Trump told reporters Wednesday that Hamas will “be blown away very quickly” if it doesn’t comply.
A day after Trump said he may have a deal with Harvard—”but who the hell knows with them”—Education Secretary Linda McMahon gave an update in an interview with the Daily Signal: “He’s right. It’s ongoing. … Harvard’s made some concessions. They’ve come to the table on some things.”
Great news, Texas Republicans: Left-wing lunatic Jasmine Crockett says she “consulted with” Joe Biden and Kamala Harris “multiple times” before deciding to run for Senate.
On the Republican side, Michele Tafoya, the former NFL sideline reporter best known from NBC’s Sunday Night Football, launched a Senate campaign in Minnesota that’s backed by National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Tim Scott.
Virginia’s next gubernatorial election is nearly four years away, but former Republican AG Jason Miyares is already plotting a bid, National Review’s Audrey Fahlberg scooped. If term-limited Abigail Spanberger’s first 48 hours on the job are any indication, Miyares will have plenty of material to work with on the campaign trail.
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Solid investigative work on the residency angle. The homestead tax deduction discrepancy is the smoking gun here since those filings require sworn affidavits about primary residency. I've seen similiar eligibility challenges in local races before and the seven-year rule exists for good reason. What really gets me is him proposing that out-of-state buyer tax while having D.C. as his own primary residence through 2025.