Michele Fiore guilty on all counts, and Scientology link proven at trial

You may have seen the news out of Nevada yesterday, that local judge and former Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore was found guilty after her trial on federal wire fraud and conspiracy charges and she now faces some pretty serious prison time.

A jury decided that the feds had proved their case that Fiore used her position as a well-known (and very colorful) politician to raise money to pay for a statue to a fallen law enforcement officer, when the statue had already been paid for and Fiore instead used the money to pay her own rent and for other personal things like her daughter’s wedding.

It’s quite a fall from grace for Fiore, who has been known not only for her promotion of gun culture but who also inserted herself in the Bundy federal standoff in Oregon in 2016. Fiore claims that it was her political stances on these issues that motivated federal investigators to target her in what she characterizes as an overblown case involving small amounts of money. But records pretty clearly showed that she had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars people had donated for a statue on herself and her daughters.

The reporters covering Fiore’s trial have been doing a really great job, and we also want to thank our own Pan for keeping an eye on it and updating us.

This wasn’t a trial that we could watch carefully ourselves, but you can bet we had an interest in it.

Why? Well, it all goes back to a picture of a dolphin.

You know that readers are kind enough to forward to us various mailers and fliers and magazines that Scientology sends out to its members. We have looked through so many of them over the last couple of decades, and they can turn out to be major stories, so we do pay close attention.

And in October 2017, we had to do a double-take at a particular image from Scientology’s Freewinds magazine, which promotes its cruise ship of the same name in order to convince church members to spend the big bucks to go there. Here’s what we said about it to our readers…

OK, now this last one is really bizarre, and we’re asking for your help. This photo of a woman swimming with dolphins was on a page in the magazine promoting all the fun you’ll have on the Freewinds. But it really gave us a start. We’re sure we must be wrong, but that sure looks like Michele Fiore to us. Can someone tell us whether Fiore has been swimming with dolphins lately, and whether she’s connected to Scientology in some way? We have serious doubts on that score, but still, it’s her spittin’ image.

The reason that we recognized Fiore in the photo was that a couple of years earlier, when your Proprietor was the executive editor at Raw Story, we had published a great story by one of our writers about Fiore’s surprising past as a would-be movie star. By then, 2015, she was already known as a nutty conservative politician who claimed that cancer was a fungus that could be flushed out with salt water. But our reporter dug into her earlier attempt at fame, when she produced a 2006 movie starring herself as an unlikely singing star. Ah, good times.

Well, we were glad we asked, because one of our readers quickly confirmed that we were right and it was Fiore in the photo with the dolphin because her own campaign had also sent out the photo, and it had showed up at the Nevada Independent…

Our readers also told us that Fiore had promoted Scientology’s front group, Drug Free World, and had made an appearance at Scientology’s Las Vegas Ideal Org, and that she was quick to refer reporters to information from another Scientology front, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR).

Ever since then we have been pointing out that the only people who get to go to Scientology’s cruise ship are Scientologists themselves, and there’s no way Michele Fiore would be there swimming with dolphins if she hadn’t been on course or getting auditing.

Michele Fiore was not only a brash right-wing political lightning rod, she was also (but much more quietly) a Scientologist.

Fiore next got on our radar in 2021 when she put out a wild, attention-grabbing video that featured her shooting things in the desert as she announced she was running for governor of Nevada. She changed her mind and ran for state treasurer and lost. But by then, it was known that the FBI had raided her home earlier that year. What kind of trouble was she in, and was the wild ad intended to distract attention from it?

In July, that question was finally answered when Fiore was indicted on charges about using money raised by her political organizations for personal expenses.

The trial came up quick. And then, last week, the government unsealed some documents in the case and put them in the public docket. They included an affidavit that detailed what the government had found in Fiore’s financial records and that they argued justified a warrant to search her house.

In that affidavit were these paragraphs, (with some explanatory notes from us in brackets)…

95. Personal travel to the Caribbean. On June 9, 2017, Fiore made an online deposit into the TIP [an LLC she owned, “Truth in Politics, the Magazine”] derived from payouts from FN [her city council campaign, “Fiore for Nevada”] for $4,800 and POTW [another LLC she owned, “Politically Off the Wall”] for $1,500, for a total of $6,300. The $1,500 check payout from POTW was derived from a payout from FN on June 5, 2017, for $12,000.

96. Following the TIP deposit of $6,300, the next seven payouts from TIP, totaling approximately $6,300, were used to pay for rent, personal airfare to the Caribbean, fares on Majestic Cruise Lines, and purchases associated with the Flag Ship Service Organization ("FSSO"). The FSSO is a religious retreat for members of the Church of Scientology which take place on the Freewinds cruise ship. The Freewinds' home port is the island of Curacao.

97. On July 24, 2017, Fiore paid out $3,400 from FN to TIP by making an online transfer. Following this payout, Fiore paid out $3,000 from TIP by making a check deposit into her personal account with Chase Bank. After making the deposit into her personal account, Fiore made a series of purchases for personal use in the form of travel and utility expenses.

98. Fiore then continued to use the TIP account to pay for personal benefits arising from a trip she made to the Caribbean between August 3 and 8, 2017. For example, TIP bank records show that on August 7, 2017, Fiore used the TIP debit card for two transactions, at the Curacao Dolphin Academy, totaling $168. On August 8, 2017, Fiore posted a picture on her public Facebook account posing with a dolphin over a caption reading, "On a personal note, I'm taking a couple days for a little R&R this week, and I started it off yesterday morning with a kiss from Mosa."

Bingo. There it is. Receipts showing that Fiore had, indeed, gone to the Freewinds and had paid FSSO, the Scientology subsidiary.

UPDATE: Once again, we get help from our readers…

The FSSO is the Scientology organization that delivers OT 8 and the OT Hatting courses, as well as the “OT debug service” (ironically a program to handle your personal ethics) aboard the Freewinds. So Fiore must have been there doing a Scientology service as well as swimming with the dolphins.

She had been there in August 2017, and then we had spotted the photo of her swimming with Mosa the dolphin that October.

Well, that’s satisfying. And once again we want to thank our wonderful readers, who help us keep a vigilant watch on Scientology by forwarding to us the voluminous output that the church emits to its followers.

Of course, Michele Fiore’s Scientology involvement is the least of her troubles now.

Yesterday, she was found guilty of six counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Each one of them carries a penalty up to 20 years in prison.

You can bet that the Church of Scientology at one time was pretty happy to have roped in an actual elected Nevada official. But you can also bet that the church won’t utter a thing about her downfall.

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