A sealed Florida grand jury report reveals how $10 million meant to reimburse taxpayers for a Medicaid overbilling scandal was secretly diverted to defeat a 2024 marijuana legalization measure — and why no one is going to take any criminal blame.
The money originated from a settlement with health care giant Centene, which had overbilled Florida's Healthy Kids program by tens of millions of dollars, reported CBS News. Rather than returning the full $67 million owed to taxpayers, the DeSantis administration quietly rewrote the deal twice within two days in September 2024, ultimately siphoning $10 million to the Hope Florida Foundation, a controversial nonprofit tied to first lady Casey DeSantis.
The grand jury didn't mince words about what happened next.
"Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida," the report states.
Within 25 days of receiving the money, Hope Florida had funneled it out through two suspicious $5 million "grant" applications to groups that had been coached by Attorney General James Uthmeier, then DeSantis' chief of staff, to apply. Nearly all of that money — $8.5 million total — landed directly in Uthmeier's own political action committee, Keep Florida Clean, which then sent $7 million to the Republican Party of Florida to help defeat the marijuana legalization amendment.
Hope Florida was founded as an initiative to reduce public dependence on government assistance programs. Questions about its opaque backroom dealings have left even many Republican lawmakers disturbed.
Despite finding clear misappropriation, the grand jury said it couldn't identify anyone to criminally charge, largely because officials repeatedly claimed they didn't recall key decisions.
Then-Attorney General Ashley Moody, now a U.S. senator, authorized her deputy John Guard to sign off on the deal despite his own reservations that it might anger the Legislature. Guard has since become a state appellate judge, appointed by DeSantis after Trump's own nomination of him to the federal bench collapsed under pressure from Sen. Rick Scott.
DeSantis has publicly called the entire episode a "hoax," while Uthmeier has dismissed it as a "nothingburger." Neither testified before the grand jury, whose report has remained sealed for seven months amid ongoing legal battles over its release.