Nikki Fried says she’s divesting medical marijuana holdings, promises ‘day one’ action on abortion

Nikki Fried says she is liquidating her financial interest in the state’s biggest medical marijuana operator as she faces questions about potential conflicts of interest if she’s elected governor.

The Democratic agriculture commissioner has made weed her signature issue, vowing to legalize it for recreational use.

But she also has a personal stake in the industry, one that could be a source of attack and a potential political liability as she seeks to defeat Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Fried is vying with former Florida governor and current U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist for the Democratic nomination.

In an 90-minute interview Wednesday with the editorial boards of the Orlando Sentinel and the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Fried made her case for why voters should pick her, touching on issues spanning from abortion to immigration to her personal finances.

[ RELATED: Will Fried and Crist play nice in the Democratic primary for governor? ]

As governor, Fried said she would deploy executive powers on her first day in office to increase access to abortion services, including cutting funding to state attorneys who prosecute women who had abortions or physicians who performed them in violation of Florida’s new 15-week abortion ban.

Fried promised to use “the full weight of the governor’s office” to get an amendment to the Florida Constitution explicitly protecting abortion rights.

Without DeSantis as governor, Fried maintained she’d be able to convince the state Legislature, which almost certainly will be controlled by Republicans next year, to reverse the votes they took in 2022 and restore the previous state law, under which abortion in Florida was legal until the 24th week of pregnancy.

She said she’d also implement two other “Day One’’ executive orders. One would focus on the state’s housing affordability crisis.

The other would limit enforcement of “anti-woke” legislation signed into law this year by DeSantis. She said she would “put executive orders into place to make sure that teachers are not being sued or harassed or prosecuted or fired because” of new laws.

One state law restricts the way race-related issues are taught in public schools and another prohibits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade and limits it in older grades.

Fried lamented ‘heartbreaking stories from teachers that may be in same-sex marriages that can’t put their pictures of their loved ones in their offices.”

Questions about Fried’s finances could pose problems for her on the campaign trail.

Her assets include a roughly $183,000 stake in Trulieve, the state’s largest medical marijuana operator, according to her latest financial disclosure statement filed on June 14. Fried worked as a marijuana lobbyist before being elected to public office.

Fried said Wednesday she is in the “process of liquidating” her Trulieve shares. Previously, Fried has said she would sell her marijuana holdings if elected governor.

“There is no conflict,” she said. “I made it very clear to the people of the state in 2018 that I came from the industry. That is what got me into my activism, my desire to not only expand the medical marijuana program, but also get to legalization.”

[ RELATED: Nikki Fried’s personal, financial connections to cannabis complicate her campaign for governor ]

Fried said she is no longer in a relationship with Jake Bergmann, a medical marijuana entrepreneur with numerous investments in Florida, including a company permitted by Fried’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Service to extract hemp.

Fried said she had a “firewall” in her agency and had no involvement in those permits. Fried’s agency handles hemp, but medical marijuana is mostly under the direction of the Department of Health and the governor. Fried is also facing an ethics complaint with a probable cause finding that she failed to properly report $351,480 in lobbyist earnings.

She said the discrepancy was an “honest mistake,” and she corrected the filings.

Fried said she supports issuing driver’s licenses or ID cards to undocumented immigrants living in Florida.

“It is important to make sure that those individuals feel that they’re safe here in the state of Florida, that they can work,” she said, noting that they are already driving on state roads. She argued it’s better to make sure people go through the requirements for a driver’s license and can get insurance.

Fried said immigrants living in Florida without documentation include 1 million working in agriculture, which she said is half the industry’s workers.

“Look, we’re not sending a million-plus people home. That’s not happening, or the 17 million, I think is the number, across the country. That’s not realistic,” she said. “We’ve got to do what we need to do on the state level to make sure that those that are working here, living here have protections.”

During the interview, Fried continued her line of attack against Crist from recent months: That his past as a Republican elected official shows he doesn’t truly believe in Democratic Party principles and policies he espoused during his years as a Republican hurt Floridians.

“He doesn’t take accountability for any of his past actions,” she said. “Charlie’s record is a big concern, and most importantly he’s not willing to say, ‘I’m sorry.” He’s not willing to say, ‘I made a mistake,’ or he’s not willing to say even ‘I’ve evolved.’”

Fried, a former lobbyist, has in the past donated to Republican political campaigns. But she said that’s “comparing apples and oranges” given Crist’s past as a Republican elected official, including a term as governor from 2007 to 2011.

Democratic primary voters, she said, want “somebody who knows how to fight for what we believe in, and that is not Charlie.”

She indicated that if she loses the primary she’d support Crist, but she thinks he would lose to DeSantis “in epic proportion.”

[ RELATED: Crist says he’ll only debate Democratic primary rivals once ]

She also excoriated DeSantis. “He is a threat to democracy. He is a threat to our civil rights. He is a threat to our LGBTQ+ community. He is a threat to everything decent that is America.”

Winning the primary, Fried said, would give her a burst of momentum and unleash a seemingly unlikely outpouring of anti-DeSantis sentiment.

Fried said a range of Republican presidential candidates — including former President Donald Trump — would see polls tighten and conclude DeSantis could lose in November. As a result, she asserted, those potential Republican presidential candidates would work toward a DeSantis defeat to remove him as a potential candidate for the GOP nomination in 2024.

“The second that blood is starting to be smelled from across the nation, the Republicans are going to come in and want to take down Ron DeSantis,” Fried said. “He has stepped on a lot of people, and I’ve spoken to a whole lot of them along the way that are going to come in and say, ‘Well wait a second. He’s not invincible. He is beatable.’”

sswisher@orlandosentinel.com; aman@sunsentinel.com