MS NOW's Jen Psaki kicked off the night with a devastating overview of the Hope Florida scandal — a situation, she said, where a grand jury just revealed "corruption on top of corruption on top of corruption."
"Let me just start at the beginning of this story, because back in 2021, officials in Florida learned that a health care company called Centene may have overbilled the state for prescription drugs for kids on Medicaid ... the company was alleged to have overbilled a bunch of states to the tune of nearly $1 billion," said Psaki. "So some states sued the company for Medicaid fraud and started winning back their money in settlements." Florida, however, ignored the case for years, but then suddenly forced a settlement — with a bizarre condition.
Specifically, said Psaki, the grand jury found [Ron] DeSantis' allies "allegedly diverted $10 million from a settlement that was supposed to give poor kids health care and directed that money through a nonprofit affiliated with the governor's wife, and then into political action committees aligned with DeSantis himself, as well as to the Florida Republican Party. And then somehow a bunch of the people involved in making that happen all wound up getting huge promotions from Governor DeSantis."
"If this were written into a TV show pilot about a political scandal, is one of those storylines that would seem too far-fetched to be real," Psaki exclaimed.
Ultimately, she noted, the money ended up being used on campaigns to stop a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in Florida. "For whatever reason, fighting against recreational marijuana has been one of Governor DeSantis' hobby horses. And in the 2024 election, defeating that ballot initiative was clearly one of his very top goals," said Psaki.
Perhaps most damningly of all, she said, CBS Miami reported "a whole bunch of the people involved in this saga appeared to know how bad it all looked from the start ... Centene's lawyers were concerned about the $10 million they were handing to Hope Florida. Of course they were, especially because it was going to a charity aligned with the governor's wife."
"If that is not a freaking red flag, I don't know what is," she added.