By Francisco Alvarado, FloridaBulldog.org
Entering its eighth year, a paternity case starring Donald Trump’s longtime campaign mouthpiece Jason Miller is exposing the MAGA leanings and GOP-fueled ambitions of some Miami-Dade County judicial officers.
Since 2017, Miller has been locked in a scorched earth legal war against A.J. Delgado, the mother of their 7-year-old son, William. Miller, who is married, had an affair with Delgado during Trump’s first successful campaign in 2016. The dalliance bitterly ended when Miller got Delgado pregnant.
Delgado alleges in multiple motions that over the past year Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Spencer Multack, who’s presided over the case since 2021, and Yadira Pedraza, a family court magistrate who took on the task of determining out-of-pocket expenses Delgado alleges Miller owes her, have shown bias because of his proximity to the president, as well as to Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Miller also advised during a short-lived 2016 U.S. Senate bid.
Indeed, Multack has used Miller vs. Delgado to help propel his career. When he unsuccessfully applied for a nomination to the Third District Court of Appeal last year, Multack included his scathing 2022 order denying Delgado nearly $390,000 in attorney fees as his top example of a judicial ruling. Multack also listed Coral Gables lawyer Jordan Abramowitz, an expert witness for Miller, as a reference in his application.
Pedraza, meanwhile, has hobnobbed with Trump. In 2017, her husband Robert Butler posted on his Facebook account a photo of himself, alongside the president and Pedraza attending a black-tie shindig at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach.
Multack, Pedraza and Miami-Dade Chief Judge Nushin Sayfie declined comment through Eunice Sigler, spokesperson for the 11th Judicial Circuit of Florida, who noted that judicial ethics rules prohibit judges from commenting on pending cases.
“It is an affront to order and justice that Trump-loving judges, and judges simultaneously auditioning for higher office, are permitted to preside over this case,” Delgado told Florida Bulldog. “Now it is clear why neither the law, nor facts, ever seem to matter.”
Miller declined an interview request via an email with a subject line that said, “Eat a dick, loser.”
FIGHT OVER OUT-OF-POCKET EXPENSES
Miller has remained a steady presence in Trump world, regularly appearing on cable television news shows as a campaign spokesman for the president’s failed 2020 re-election bid and MAGA’s triumphant comeback in 2024. He was recently a transition team advisor, but the White House press office did not respond to a Florida Bulldog inquiry about whether Miller has a current role in the Trump administration.
According to a 2023 financial affidavit, his most recently available, Miller earns $1 million a year.
A New York-licensed attorney who worked on the 2016 Trump campaign, Delgado is now unemployed, is certified indigent by the courts and is representing herself because she can no longer afford a lawyer. She’s also morphed into a never-Trumper Republican, and has a pending civil sexual assault lawsuit in New York County Supreme Court against Miller, the 2016 Trump campaign and Jamestown Associates, a public relations firm that employed Miller.
During the first five years of Miller vs. Delgado, a carousel of judges in Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties recused themselves from the politically volatile paternity case. A few of them admitted to being biased against Delgado. For instance, Miami-Dade Judge Valerie Manno Schurr, who was first assigned the case, stepped down six months later following a December 2017 hearing in which she said that she too would have sent an email similar to one Miller’s wife sent Delgado calling her “a ‘f*cking slut.’”
In 2020, Miami-Dade’s then-Chief Judge Bertila Soto, initially denied, but then granted a motion by Delgado to disqualify the entire circuit from hearing the case and forwarded it to the Florida Supreme Court for reassignment. After judges in Broward and Monroe counties also punted on the case, then-Chief Justice Charles Canady came up with an unusual arrangement to send it back to Miami-Dade, where Miller vs. Delgado landed in front of Multack a year later.
In 2023, Delgado and Miller appeared to have reached a resolution on some of their disputes. He agreed to pay $3,250 in monthly child support and cover out-of-pocket expenses, such as healthcare costs not covered by insurance, school supplies, speech therapy sessions, tutoring, summer camps and after-school care, court records show.
Yet, the agreement allows Miller to contest any expense submitted by Delgado, who is required to provide him and his lawyer, Sandy Fox, with a spreadsheet itemizing the expenses along with copies of all receipts.
Last August, Delgado sought an evidentiary hearing before Multack to deal with the issue of out-of-pocket expenses. Jason Miller also refused to reimburse Delgado for expenses dating back to her pregnancy, her motion states.
Multack referred the matter to Pedraza because she supposedly could hear it sooner as the judge did not have a spot open on his calendar until Jan. 13 of this year.
PEDRAZA HEARING GOES OFF THE RAILS
On Oct. 30, a week before the presidential election, Miller, Fox and Delgado appeared via Zoom for the hearing presided by Pedraza. Miller attended the virtual proceedings using the Zoom account of Chris LaCivita, the Republican strategist who co-managed Trump’s successful campaign to reclaim the White House. Jason Miller also dialed in from a campaign office with visible Trump 2024 signage behind him, court records show.
The optics appear to have worked in Miller’s favor. Throughout the hearing, Pedraza harangued Delgado about not having witnesses to verify some of her receipts, including requests for $27 to cover a George Washington costume William wore for a President’s Day event at his school, as well as $10 for gifts she bought for her son’s class Valentine’s Day party. Pedraza denied the reimbursements.
“Am I going to have somebody from the school tell me that it was an official event?” Pedraza hissed, according to audio of the Zoom hearing. “You have that today?”
Pedraza also refused to rebuke Miller for being on his cellphone during portions of the hearing. At one point, Miller unmuted himself while he was talking to an unidentified person about a lunch campaign stop with Arab Americans in Dearborn, MI.
When an exasperated Delgado pleaded with the magistrate to instruct Miller to end his phone call because he was distracting her, Pedraza snapped: “You know what Ms. Delgado, I’m not even looking at Mr. Miller. I’m not sure why you are either. Whatever, okay.”
An hour into the hearing, Pedraza abruptly stopped the proceedings and rescheduled the matter for a later undetermined date. The magistrate informed Delgado, Miller and Fox that her judicial assistant would get back to them with dates after January — defeating the purpose of having the matter resolved before the end of last year because Multack’s calendar was fully booked.
On Nov. 14, Delgado fired off a letter to Chief Judge Nushin Sayfie, Family Law Division Administrative Judge Samantha Ruiz-Cohen and Magistrates’ Administrative Judge Carlos Fernandez requesting the out-of-pocket expenses hearing be referred to a different magistrate because Pedraza “seemingly seeks to curry favor with the Trump-advisor father.”
In her correspondence, Delgado also included a photo of another Miami-Dade Circuit Judge, Ariana Fajardo Orshan, cheek-to-cheek with first son Eric Trump. The judge posted the image on her personal X social media account in 2021. Fajardo Orshan, who served as South Florida U.S. Attorney during Trump’s first term, is taking over as chief judge on July 1 after beating Sayfie in an internal election. “Perhaps the 11th Circuit is best summed up in this one photo,” Delgado wrote.
Sayfie and the other judges did not respond to Delgado’s letter. Four days later, she filed a motion to disqualify Pedraza, which the magistrate quickly rejected. In her filing, Delgado accused Pedraza of violating a judicial canon by not enforcing decorum, and that she allowed him to convey the impression that he was in a special position to influence the court.
“If the mother were to be on a work or personal call, in full view of the court, during a hearing, she would be severely reprimanded,” Delgado wrote. “But hearing officer Pedraza has a different standard for the male father with a paid attorney.”
MULTACK’S THIRD DCA APPLICATION
On Feb. 6, Delgado filed a motion to disqualify Multack after she received a copy of his Third DCA application from Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office five days earlier. In April of last year, Delgado made a public records request for the application when she learned that Multack had sought an appointment to the appellate court the previous month, the motion states.
A former Broward prosecutor appointed to his judgeship in 2011 by then-Gov. Rick Scott, Multack chose to highlight a 2022 order he issued against Delgado from hundreds of cases he’s heard as his primary “writing sample” in his application, the motion states. He currently had 450 active cases, Delgado noted at the time.
In the order, Multack blamed Delgado and her then-attorney, Laline Concepcion-Veloso, of sabotaging their own efforts to have Jason Miller cough up roughly $385,529 in attorney fees. “It became clear to this Court that the mother and Ms. Concepcion-Veloso were rowing the same boat in opposite directions,” Multack wrote. “The Jekyll & Hyde approach to the litigation caused a three-month delay.”
Multack also blamed Delgado for a court docket “rife with unnecessary proceedings and pleadings” and that “much of the delay is attributed to the behavior and tactics of the mother.” In another rebuke of Delgado, Multack accused her of ghost-writing pleadings that Concepion-Veloso submitted. Multack claimed he recognized Delgado’s writing style, describing it as “verbose, histrionic, convoluted, and generously uses bold, underline CAPS, and (parentheses).”
In his application, Multack also had to provide contact information for six attorneys who have “appeared before you on matters of substance.” The first lawyer on his list is Jordan Abramowitz, who testified for Miller in the fees dispute in 2022. Abramowitz believed many of Delgado’s pro-se filings and Concepcion-Veloso’s pleadings “were strikingly similar in style, as if the same person was writing both,” according to Multack’s 2022 order.
In her Feb. 6 motion, Delgado accused Multack of “auditioning for a promotion” with DeSantis, who selects Third DCA appointees, by showing the governor “an order involving your friend, Jason Miller.”
“The one case Judge Multack somehow decided to use was the case involving Jason Miller,” Delgado wrote. “What a jaw dropping coincidence!”
Four days later, Multack denied Delgado’s motion, noting it was her sixth attempt trying to get him kicked off the case: “This Court maintains its ability to stand fair and impartial between the parties.”
In another striking coincidence, Multack noted in his appellate court application that he “had the honor of delivering personal remarks on behalf of Judge [Alexander] Bokor upon his investiture to the Third District Court of Appeals” on Jan. 20, 2022. Over the past three years, Delgado’s attempts to reverse unfavorable Multack rulings have been futile.
For instance, Bokor has been on Third DCA panels that denied five out of six appeals Delgado filed during that timespan.
Most recently, on Feb. 13, a day after Multack dismissed her motion, Third District Court of Appeals judges Norma Lindsey, Bronwyn Miller, Kansas Gooden and James Jorgenson quickly denied her petition to prohibit Multack from continuing to preside over Miller vs. Delgado.
ROUND TWO WITH PEDRAZA
On Feb, 24, Delgado was back in front of Pedraza, but this time, Jason Miller was a no-show for the Zoom hearing. Pedraza started off by overruling Delgado’s objection about Miller’s absence from the evidentiary proceedings. Pedraza then proceeded to give Delgado a hard time about some of the receipts, starting with two invoices for prenatal care she received when she was four months’ pregnant.
The magistrate suggested Delgado should have brought in the obstetrician who treated her to verify the charges. “Well, it’s done pretty routinely,” Pedraza said. “They get subpoenaed, and they can come here and testify.”
An hour into the hearing Pedraza had approved roughly $7,000 in reimbursements that Miller’s lawyer did not object to, but the proceedings unraveled when Delgado asked to be repaid for travel and lodging costs in October 2023 when she and her son spent a week in Spokane, WA so William could receive speech therapy sessions.
“Do you believe you’re responsible for any portion of this, Ms. Delgado?” Pedraza said. “Why was your income zero? Why were you not working?”
After a few minutes of Pedraza and Delgado arguing with one another, the magistrate ended the proceedings. “I just cannot go on,” Pedraza said. “I’m gonna go ahead and do an order of recusal.”
In her order, Pedraza wrote: “ISSUES have arisen during the course of this matter which I believe makes it necessary to recuse myself, and therefore this matter should be reassigned to another general magistrate.”
As a result, Pedraza sent Delgado back to the starting gate in her efforts to have Jason Miller repay the out-of-pocket expenses. “This apparent quest to curry favor with a politically connected litigant is disgraceful,” Delgado told Florida Bulldog. “All the more so in a case involving a child’s welfare.”
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