Democrat staff reports

Federal prosecutors confirmed in court filings late Friday that FBI investigators were conducting “multiple investigations in Tallahassee” during the time they were conducting undercover operations targeting suspended Tallahassee City Commissioner Scott Maddox and others.

Maddox and his long-time friend Paige Carter-Smith were indicted in December by a federal grand jury on numerous charges, including racketeering, extortion, wire fraud and bank fraud. Tallahassee businessman J.T. Burnette was indicted in May on charges including racketeering and fraud.

The Democrat reported Wednesday that Maddox and Carter-Smith are expected to plead guilty to at least some of the counts at a hearing next Tuesday.

Burnette, however, has maintained his innocence and asked the court to delay his trial from November until early 2020 because of voluminous discovery approaching one million pages of documents and including hundreds of hours of recordings.

Back story:Burnette legal team asks to push back trial date to 2020 to comb through mountain of evidence

The government argued against that motion in a Friday filing, contending it had turned over everything the court had required.

But embedded in those arguments was a rare glimpse into the scope of the investigation – or, more accurately, investigations.

At one point in the motion, prosecutors shared that in addition to recordings that included Maddox, Carter-Smith or Burnette, they also turned over other recordings of federal agents’ investigative work in the capital city.

These recordings “did not, to the government’s knowledge, capture any of the three defendants or government witnesses aside from the FBI undercover employees, who were conducting multiple investigations in Tallahassee,” according to the court filing.

What the FBI has said and hasn't said:

The motion marks the first time the U.S. Attorney’s Office has referred to “multiple investigations.”

The only indictments so far were the result of an investigation dating back to at least the summer of 2015, when undercover FBI agents posing as developers and medical marijuana entrepreneurs arrived in the capital city. The agents got close to Maddox, joining him on a trip to Las Vegas, and then-Mayor Andrew Gillum, accompanying him during outings in New York City, including a performance of “Hamilton.”

Gillum has long asserted that he met with FBI agents in the summer of 2017, just after he launched his campaign for Florida governor, and was told he was not a focus of their investigation. However, the bureau has never confirmed that.

Through its investigations of the case, the Tallahassee Democrat has reported on multiple elected officials and leaders who met with the undercover agents.

They met Mike:

While prosecutors said they did not plan on using the recordings in question at trial, they turned them over to the Burnette defense team anyway “since the same FBI undercover employees were being used for the various investigations occurring in the Tallahassee area at the time, and since those employees could testify at trial, the Government decided to make these recordings available for the defendants’ review.”

The motion also alluded to the extent of the recordings – some conversations were being recorded by multiple devices in different locations.

New light was also shed on the breadth and depth of the government’s investigation into Burnette.

The government produced a large trove of documents to the Burnette defense on June 14. The motion reads: “A large portion of these documents are bank records belonging to companies controlled by Burnette or other internal investigative records relating to those companies, none of which have a direct nexus with the allegations in the Superseding Indictment.” Also included in those documents were “complaints or reports by civilians that were collected by the FBI in the course of the investigation.”

Chronicling the case:

Prosecutors indicated they did not expect to use those records at trial.

The government also characterized as “absurd” a claim by Burnette that exculpatory information in the form of a draft consulting agreement, sent by Carter-Smith to federal agents, was “buried” in discovery. Federal prosecutors dispute that the agreement is exculpatory and contended that “the referenced document was disclosed to Burnette the day after the Court entered the protective order.”