Everybody Got Promoted

Here is the money, because the money is the only part of this nobody disputes. In September 2024 the State of Florida settled with Centene, the Medicaid contractor it had accused of overbilling, for $67 million. On September 12 the settlement was amended so that $62 million would go to the state and $5 million to the Hope Florida Foundation, the charity arm of the program the First Lady, Casey DeSantis, founded and fronts. On September 13 it was amended again: $57 million to the state, $10 million to the foundation. No one has ever explained why the number doubled overnight. Centene wired the $10 million on October 4. Within 25 days it was gone. Two nonprofits applied for $5 million each, one of them approved within a week and the other within hours, and within days of receiving it they passed $8.5 million along to a political committee called Keep Florida Clean, whose chairman was James Uthmeier, the Governor's chief of staff, and whose purpose was defeating the marijuana amendment on that November's ballot. Keep Florida Clean then sent $7 million to the Republican Party of Florida. Medicaid is health insurance for poor children and their parents. Senator Rick Scott, a Republican who knows a thing or two about Medicaid settlements, put it to the Tampa Bay Times this way: "This was $10 million that was supposed to go for poor kids."

A Leon County grand jury spent the better part of a year on this and finished its report in January. The paper has read it, because CBS News Miami published it on August 26, and it is not a long document. It found that "the full Centene settlement was taxpayer reimbursement," that the $10 million was "misappropriated," and that what happened to it was "a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities." It also found that it could not charge anyone, and the reason is the sentence the paper keeps coming back to. "While we can't prove who is responsible," the jurors wrote, "we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes." Nobody who testified would say who decided the money should go to the foundation. Nobody remembered. The three people most likely to know were never called: the Governor, the Attorney General whose office signed the settlement, and the chief of staff who ran the committee that ended up with the money. A grand jury can only subpoena the people the prosecutor puts in front of it, and the prosecutor put none of them in front of it. So the report says what it saw, says it cannot name a defendant, and stops.

Then, two weeks ago, the report stopped existing. On October 7 the First District Court of Appeal ordered it expunged, which in Florida means the state must behave as though it was never written. The opinion was by Judge Lance Neff, who found the report "careless in its grammar, mistaken in its law, and unfaithful to its own record." The court's reasoning was that a grand jury may not accuse people of crimes it declines to charge them with, and that the report was handed around too widely before the people named in it could object. The paper is not a court and will not pretend the grand jury's grammar is above reproach. It will note three things. The opinion does not say where the $10 million went, because it does not address where the $10 million went. The Governor appointed Judge Neff to that court on March 2 of this year, five weeks after the report was sealed. And the judge's one factual quarrel with the jurors, that the money was never the taxpayers' because it went straight from Centene to the charity, is a position the Governor's own administration abandoned when it mattered: when the state calculated how much of the settlement it owed back to the federal government, which pays most of Florida's Medicaid bill, it counted the $10 million. The administration says it did that out of "an abundance of caution." You cannot have been cautious with money that was never yours.

The Governor did not take the ruling quietly. In Miami the next morning he called it "probably the biggest judicial smackdown that I have ever seen in my entire career as an elected official." He said, "There was no misappropriation. That's a lie. That's a hoax." And he said, "There's been one crime committed, and it's the people that leaked the report illegally." The Attorney General added that the leak was something "law enforcement is looking at." Hold onto that. The State of Florida's official position, as of this month, is that the only crime in the Hope Florida matter was committed by whoever let the public read a report about the Hope Florida matter. The crime is that you know.

Now the paper gets to the part it actually wants to write about, which is the org chart. Forget guilt for a minute; the grand jury could not establish it and the paper will not pretend to. Just follow the careers. Ashley Moody was the Attorney General whose office signed the settlement. She did not sign it personally; she authorized her chief deputy, John Guard, to sign it after consulting with her, and the grand jury found he did so "without conducting his due diligence." In January 2025 the Governor appointed her to the United States Senate. Mr. Guard, the man who signed, served as acting Attorney General until her replacement arrived. The replacement, sworn in on February 17, 2025, was James Uthmeier, the chief of staff who chaired the committee that received the money, and who is now the state's chief law enforcement officer, the official in charge of deciding whether any of this is a crime, and the man whose considered legal judgment on the matter is, "Nobody did anything wrong here." The job he left, chief of staff to the Governor, went to Jason Weida, who had been running the Agency for Health Care Administration, the agency that negotiated the settlement. And in March of this year, the Governor put Lance Neff on the court of appeal, and in October Lance Neff wrote the opinion that erased the report. The paper has looked for anyone in this story who was demoted, dismissed, or so much as reassigned to a smaller office, and it has found one category of person: the whistleblower. Alex Andrade, the Republican state representative from Pensacola who ran the House investigation that started all this, has an IRS whistleblower complaint pending and not much else to show for it.

There is one more line in the ledger. Four of the officials named in the report, Mr. Uthmeier among them, were represented in the fight to keep it sealed by private lawyers from three firms, at rates up to $875 an hour, and more than $444,000 of those bills were paid by state agencies, which is to say by the same taxpayers. There is a standing Attorney General's opinion in Florida that public money may not be used to pay the legal fees of public employees called before a grand jury. It is still posted on the Attorney General's website. The Attorney General is Mr. Uthmeier.

The paper would like to say the Democrats have covered themselves in glory here, and they have covered themselves in about half of it. Angie Nixon, the state representative from Jacksonville who is running against Senator Moody, went on CNN last Wednesday and was asked by Kasie Hunt, straight out, whether she wanted her opponent locked up. "Basically, yes," she said. "Because of what she did, yes. I absolutely would want that to happen." She had been answering attack ads that say she wants to abolish prisons, and her answer was: "Why would I want to do that when I want her locked up and punished in jail for what she has done?" The paper has been told by every serious person in Florida that this was a gaffe. The paper has read the grand jury report, and it notes that Ms. Nixon is the only candidate for statewide office in Florida who has said out loud what a grand jury of her fellow Floridians wrote down under oath. The polls have her well behind. The paper would like it noted that she was not behind because she was wrong.

David Jolly is the other half. Mr. Jolly is the Democratic nominee for Governor, and he has pledged, more than once, to reopen the Hope Florida investigation if he wins. "As governor, we will reopen a fact-finding investigation," he said again on October 12. Good. But back on August 28, two days after the report leaked, standing in Tallahassee, Mr. Jolly also said this about the First Lady: "I think she was used. I don't think the first lady had anything to do with this." The paper has no evidence that Casey DeSantis had anything to do with it either, and will not say she did. The documented record is that a charity that carries her program's name took in $10 million and moved it out in 25 days, and that no one has asked her a question about it under oath. That is also the record for her husband. So here is the paper's quarrel with Mr. Jolly. You cannot promise Florida an investigation and announce its verdict on the Governor's wife in the same news cycle. Mr. Jolly spent three years in Congress as a Republican from Pinellas, left the party in 2018, and registered as a Democrat eighteen months ago. The paper does not hold the journey against him. It holds the reflex against him: the old instinct of a man who spent a career in rooms where the Governor's wife is presumed to be decent and the question is presumed to be rude. If the investigation is worth reopening, it is worth reopening without a list of people who are already cleared.

Which brings the paper to what it actually wants, since "jail" is a word for juries and the paper is not one. It wants the people whose names are on this to answer questions under oath, in a room where lying is a felony, which not one of them has done. Not the Governor, not the First Lady, not Senator Moody, not Attorney General Uthmeier. The grand jury could not say who decided because nobody it heard from would say, and the people who could say were never asked. There is a state attorney in Orlando, Monique Worrell, who is reviewing the matter, and there is the IRS, and there is whatever a Governor Jolly does in January. Any one of them could put those four names on a witness list. Until one of them does, the Governor's "hoax" is a claim no one has tested, and his "smackdown" is a ruling about grammar.

So, the clowns. The paper is rating the Governor, who did not sign the settlement, did not chair the committee, did not write the opinion, and appointed every single person who did. It is rating a man who stood in Miami and announced that the one crime in a $10 million story was the reading of it. Four clowns, with the fifth held in reserve for the day a judge the Governor did not appoint gets a look at the file. There are two Floridians on the November 3 ballot who were in this story before it had a name. One of them authorized the signature on the settlement and is now a United States Senator. The other said she should be in jail. The paper will leave the voters to decide which of those was the mistake.