Angry that a memo leaked detailing his conflict of interest between his position on the state ethics committee and a $400,000 per year job being Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “muscle” harassing Disney, Glen Gilzean accused the committee he once led of “weaponizing” the information to make him look bad, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
“[I]t is deeply inappropriate that your legal opinion was disseminated to the press at the same time you sent it to me,” Gilzean wrote in the email whining to the commission. “As far as I’m concerned, someone on your staff knowingly leaked this memo and weaponized it, how did this happen?” The memo, in fact, had not been leaked and was released pursuant to a public records request from a journalist.
Gilzean was chosen by DeSantis to head the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, the new organization DeSantis created to replace the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the entity that provided oversight of Disney development, because Disney opposed DeSantis’s anti-LGBTQ policies that criminalize discussing non-straight Christian relationships and target minorities for scorn and violence. Gilzean, who led the non-partisan ethics committee–claimed he did not know he could not take a public sector job and remain on the volunteer ethics committee, even though the rules for members on the committee expressly bans it.