State police raid criticized as 'over-the-top'
A day after the raid, there was also disagreement over exactly what happened inside Jones' Tallahassee home.
Jones released a video she took showing an officer pointing his gun up a stairwell in her house. She said he was pointing the firearm at her 2-year-old daughter, 11-year-old son and her husband, who she said were in the stairwell, although the video doesn't make that clear. Outside her house, out of sight of the video, another officer "pointed a gun six inches from my face," Jones said.
But Rick Swearingen, the department's commissioner, said in a statement that "at no time were weapons pointed at anyone in the home." Agents knocked on her door and called Jones on the phone multiple times, and she hung up on them and refused to come to the door for about 23 minutes, the department said. The department did not respond to a question about whether the officers at her house were wearing body cameras.
"Agents exercised tremendous restraint throughout the execution of the search warrant yesterday, especially considering the significant delay they faced in gaining entry," said Plessinger, a spokesperson for the department.
Walters, Jones' lawyer, said "she took a few minutes to get dressed because she believed the police were there to arrest her."
The dramatic video that Jones took of officers entering her house with guns drawn quickly went viral, and her tweet with a clip of the video had more than 120,000 retweets as of Tuesday morning.
Several Democratic elected officials in the state condemned the raid.
"The guns drawn FDLE raid on the home of Rebekah Jones was shocking, over-the-top, and demands a full explanation," Charlie Crist, a congressman and former Florida governor, said in a statement. "Unless we get more information showing otherwise, it looks like an act of retaliation or an attempt to silence Ms. Jones for her critiques of the state's COVID-19 response."
And Ron Filipkowski, a lawyer appointed by DeSantis to a judicial nomination commission, publicly resigned Tuesday in what he said was a protest over the governor's handling of the coronavirus crisis and the raid of Jones' home.
"This is not being done to ferret out a crime," Filipkowski told CNN. "It's being done to intimidate."
Jones said that while she wouldn't stop her work publishing coronavirus data, she was planning to move her family away from Florida.
"We're going to move the hell out of here," she said. "It's one thing to point a gun at me, it's a completely different one to point it at my children."
