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Crazy Joe Carollo’s attorney is the only man for the job.
That’s what Victoria Mendez, the City of Miami’s Attorney, believes, anyway.
Mendez asked for an emergency waiver of conflict at the July 23 Commission Meeting for hiring attorney Ben Kuehne to expand polling stations.
Kuehne is also the attorney representing Carollo in two cases regarding his recall and in a federal lawsuit which the City has bankrolled to the tune of $200,000 so far.
The latest lawsuit Kuehne filed on behalf of Carollo is against the City of Miami to stop the City Clerk from forwarding recall petitions to Miami-Dade County for verification and to begin the recall, as a judge directed the City to do.
Attorney David Winker set off this fire drill when he filed a Motion to Disqualify Carollo’s attorney in Miami-Dade Circuit Court last week calling for Kuehne to be removed from the recall fight, citing Florida Bar rules forbidding a lawyer from simultaneously representing a client and suing that same client.
That rule makes sense, but Mendez now wants to try to fix up this ethics mess by getting the Miami Commissioners to pass a waiver of the conflict in hiring Kuehne while he is on the ramparts of the City of Miami throwing legal bombs against it. It will now be up to the Court to decide if Vicky’s after-the-fact waiver can fix the ethical issues kicked up by the City’s insistence on hiring Crazy Joe’s attorney.
Two peas in a pod, Carollo and Kuehne. The latter is a tad smarter than the forme, but they’re both edgy gamesters.