- November 17, 2024
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The individuals former Flagler County elections supervisor Kimberle Weeks secretly recorded on her iPhone weren’t just county and state officials, but included a funeral director and a woman whose ex-husband was seeing Weeks’ daughter, according to documents released by the State Attorney’s Office.
One recorded phone conversation between Weeks and Secretary of State Ken Detzner and other officials even included audio of Weeks asking to record the conversation, and Deztner saying no. She recorded it anyway.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation into Weeks’ recordings began Sept. 23, 2014, when the State Attorney’s Office sent the FDLE an email containing former Daytona Beach News-Journal reporter Julie Murphy’s questions about Weeks’ surreptitious recording of a whispered Aug. 25, 2014 conversation between County Attorney Al Hadeed and County Commissioner Charlie Ericksen. The State Attorney’s Office then sent another email containing a link to a Palm Coast Observer story headlined “Weeks taped officials without permission,” according to documents released by the State Attorney’s Office May 21.
Weeks herself had make the Aug. 25 recording public, saying it indicated illegal conduct on Hadeed and Ericksen’s part — the Florida Elections Commission found otherwise — and playing it at a Canvassing Board meeting, then sending it to Dennis McDonald and to the press.
FDLE Inspectors Phil Lindley and Luis Negrete first interviewed Weeks at her offices Sept. 27. She “insisted that she make her own recording of the FDLE interview,” according to the FDLE report of the encounter. But when Lindley asked her for basic public documents pertaining to the Aug. 25 Canvassing Board meeting — copies of the official newspaper notice of the canvassing board meeting, the canvassing board minutes, the sign-in sheet, a complete copy of the audio recording, the transcript and the excerpted copy she reportedly provided to the press — “Weeks declined to provide the items to Inspector Lindley acting in his capacity as an Inspector with FDLE,” according to the report.
Lindley rephrased his request as an official public records request, and Weeks relented on the meeting minutes, sign-in sheet and newspaper notice, but again refused to hand over the audio recording or the portions she’d sent to the press, all of which is public record under Florida law, and said she wanted to consult an attorney.
Investigators next spoke to Hadeed, who explained the circumstances surrounding the surreptitious Aug. 25 recording: The Canvassing Board had met in one room of the Supervisor of Elections Office building, then convened to another one to count absentee ballots. Hadeed stayed behind, alone, in the first room, and Ericksen walked in. The two had a conversation that was apparently recorded on Weeks’ iPhone.
“Hadeed stated he was giving legal advice to Ericksen as a Flagler County Commissioner and as one of his clients, and that their conversation was in the nature of an attorney-client, and it was private,” an investigator wrote in the FDLE report. “Hadeed stated he had an expectation of privacy because he was in a different room than the one in which the Board was conducting business, he was not part of the ballot counting, he was not on notice that recording was taking place, he was providing legal advice, and he did not consent for it to be recorded.”
Not only had Weeks’ recording of Hadeed and Ericksen’s conversation been surreptitious, Ericksen told investigators, but her recording of the meetings themselves had contravened her explicit statement to the rest of the board that she wouldn’t be taping board meetings.
The board only learned that she was, Ericksen said, when Weeks presented oddly detailed minutes of previous board meetings — including lengthy transcriptions of board conversations — during the Sept. 2 meeting, and Ericksen had remarked on how complete they were. “It was after Ericksen's comment, Weeks told the Board that she had been recording Board meetings,” according to the reports.
Weeks had wrangled with other officials over meeting minutes, rejecting those prepared by other officials, who expressed concern about her minutes’ accuracy, and in late October bringing in a court reporter to transcribe the meetings.
One elections office employee, Linda Constantine, told investigators that she’d developed a template for meeting minutes in 2011, at Weeks' request. But when, also in 2011, Constantine tried to produce meeting muinutes, “Weeks was not satisfied with Constantine's work,” according to the FDLE reports, and “undertook the task to transcribe the minutes by herself.”
Oct. 3, FDLE agents searched Weeks’ office, “imaging” the data on the office’s servers, computers and Weeks’ laptop and cell phone using a forensic imager, and seizing a Dell computer tower and a HP laptop. They also found something else: a blue steel Smith and Wesson .380 Body Guard firearm concealed in Weeks’ purse, sitting on the office floor. Although the FDLE reports say nothing of whether Weeks had a concealed carry license, she was not charged with any crimes having to do with the gun, which investigators held during the search and returned to Weeks once it was over.
When they analyzed the data from the computers, the investigators found that Weeks still hadn’t turned over the full audio recording of the Aug, 25 meeting or the clip she’s sent out to the press, according to the FDLE reports. She finally gave Lindley the audio of the Aug. 25 meeting Oct. 8, when he returned two computers that had been held for imaging.
More data came in in late December, when FDLE forensics sent Lindley information pulled from Weeks’ phone. There was a lengthy April 3 conversation between Weeks, Detzner, and several others in which Weeks asked Detzner for permission to record the call. “Detzner objected to Weeks recording the call, and told Weeks she could not record the call,” according to the FDLE report. Other voices in the recording were those of attorneys John Andrew Atkinson, Gary Holland, and Ronald Labasky. Yet another recording indicated that Weeks had “disseminated the recording of the April 3, 2014 telephone call with Detzner,” according to the reports. “Weeks’ voice was recorded saying she did not know if making the recording was legal,” according to the reports.
There was also a recording of a conversation between County Judge Melissa Moore-Stens and FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam, and another of a conversation between Weeks and Holly Hill Police Department Sergeant Michael Coomans.
Then there were other recordings, of conversations that didn’t include public officials.
According to the FDLE reports, Weeks had recorded a conversation with Johnson-Overturf Funeral Home Director Steve Overturf about arrangements for the funeral of Weeks’ father, William Wallace Weeks.
Overturf told FDLE agents that he recalled the conversation and hadn’t known he was being recorded, but that he didn’t want to participate in the investigation. He said his brother was supervisor of elections in Putnam County, that he’d had a “long business history with the Weeks family … did not want to cause political problems for his brother, and that he did not want to lose future business from the Weeks family,” according to the reports.
Another recording, taken in her Weeks’ front yard, recorded a conversation between Weeks and Shannon Brown, a Flagler County woman whose former husband was involved with Weeks’ daughter.
When FDLE agents interviewed Brown, she said “that Weeks was concerned that Weeks' daughter was involved with Brown's ex- husband and that Weeks was gathering information about the ex-husband,” according to the FDLE reports. Brown also “expressed the opinion that segments of the recording were deleted,” and “opined that Weeks had deleted portions that contained certain portions of Weeks' statements” — a statement that mirrors one county officials made about Weeks’ recoding of Hadeed's conversation with Ericksen: “The secretly recorded audio tape by Weeks had significant portions of discussions erased, including parts that were embarrassing to her,” according to a February 2015 Flagler County communications office news release.
Kaiti Lenhart, an elections office employee at the time of the taping scandal and now the governor-appointed Elections Supervisor, told investigators that Weeks recorded Canvassing Board meetings on her phone, then downloaded the recordings and transferred them to discs on the office computer. “
Lenhart knew of no editing programs on the SOE computer system, and opined that Weeks would have done the editing on the cell phone,” according to the reports. There were no added editing programs on Weeks’ computer, according to the reports.
