How Miami Beach traffic stops led drivers to online pitches for Trump 2024 merchandise

In Miami Beach, getting pulled over by city police didn’t just mean a ticket for some drivers. Officers also handed them an invitation to check out a website selling Trump 2024 merchandise.

A city police flier in circulation until last week explaining how to resolve minor traffic tickets online dropped a crucial hyphen for a Miami-Dade County courts website, steering drivers away from a bland judicial portal and to an online store selling flags, videos and caps celebrating former President Donald Trump and his potential third run for the White House.

Offerings at miamidadeclerk.com include Trump 2024 camouflage caps, a DVD exploring the possibility of a “one-world centralized government” without Trump in the White House, and two Trump-themed flags featuring the obscenity “F***” (one paired with “Biden”, the other with “Your Feelings.”)

“We’re aware of this typographical error now,” Miami Beach police spokesperson Ernesto Rodriguez said of the fliers on Monday. “We put out a notice to officers to discontinue using them.”

After the Miami Herald inquired about the fliers, Rodriguez said police administrators last week removed them from a room at headquarters where officers pick up paperwork. A Herald reader who asked not to be identified provided a copy of the info sheet that she said she received during a traffic stop.

This week, the police department launched an inquiry of how the Trump-merchandise website ended up on agency fliers, Rodriguez said Wednesday. “An internal affairs review is now underway,” he said.

The flier has both the wrong (miamidadeclerk.com) and the correct address (miami-dadeclerk.com) for the county court site, each in different parts of the instructional information.

The un-hyphenated site does not appear to be linked to an official entity for the former president or his political apparatus as he prepares for a potential 2024 campaign. Instead, the miamidadeclerk.com link instantly redirects to an online store on findsale.com. Click on the Trump merchandise there, and users are taken to an Amazon page where merchandise branded with “Trump 2024” is for sale.

But the Trump retail link didn’t last long after this story published Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, the site no longer redirected to findsale.com and instead led visitors to the website for the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission, which handles complaints about judges. It’s not known what caused the switch. Mark Martinez, a deputy clerk in Miami-Dade, said he had asked a Clerk’s Office lawyer to explore options for directing the site to the county courts portal. “He’s looking at different things,” Martinez said.

Court administrators said Miami Beach — where President Joe Biden won 60% of the 2020 presidential vote — appears to be the only agency with the typo in the kind of fliers that began circulating countywide in May of 2020 promoting the new online options. The program rolled out as courts grappled with restrictions and health concerns from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The information sheets outline a new remote method for resolving non-moving citations, such as having a faulty brake light or being unable to produce a vehicle registration. Rather than going to court, drivers can upload proof online of the situation being fixed and a hearing officer can dismiss the case.

“You don’t have to go to court,” said Judge Steve Leifman, an administrator in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. “You save a tremendous amount of money.”

A court spokesperson provided the original flier sent to Miami-Dade police in May 2020 that included the appropriately hyphenated website address in all mentions. Miami Beach produced its own version of the notices and the error was inserted at some point during the printing process, Rodriguez said. He couldn’t say how long the fliers were in circulation or how many drivers may have received them.

Leifman, a judge in the state system, called it unfortunate that the merchandise site appears to have the preferable address, without the need for internal punctuation with a hyphen. The judge called it “disgusting” to see political merchandise sold at a web address with a judicial veneer. Leifman said he hopes the Clerk’s Office can take ownership of the site and direct it to the system’s official web page.

A database of website information shows someone first registered miamidadeclerk.com in 2007, but the records don’t reveal the owner of the address. The real clerk site, miami-dadeclerk.com, was registered in 1999. The Miami-Dade Clerk’s Office — an agency independent of the state’s circuit court system and run by the county’s elected clerk, Harvey Ruvin — registered its properly hyphenated site in 1999, according to the registry.

Since pulling the fliers from distribution last week, Miami Beach told police officers to hand out dated brochures with traffic tickets that don’t include the new options for avoiding court from non-moving violations. Rodriguez said drivers will still learn of those options when they visit the court website, and that new fliers with only the proper web address are being printed.

The afternoon notice to police to stop giving drivers the flawed fliers included no explanation as to what went wrong. The Feb. 9 email had the subject line “COVID-19 Traffic Instruction Mailer” and stated: “Good afternoon, Effective immediately, do not use the below traffic mailer and use regular traffic pamphlet. Thank you.”

Paul Ozaeta, a lieutenant and president of the city’s police union, said he’s confident police officers would have spoken up if anyone had noticed the flubbed website address.

“Most officers don’t sit there and say, ‘Let me make sure all of the links are right,’” he said. “If they say hand them out, you hand them out.”

This story was originally published February 15, 2022 at 12:13 PM.