Bulwark Takes - Criminal Probe Launched Into DeSantis Linked Charity

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Sam Stein is joined by Lawrence Mower of the Tampa Bay Times to break down a growing scandal involving Ron and Casey DeSantis. A $10 million Medicaid settlement meant for nonprofits was allegedly funneled through a state-created charity and into political committees tied to the governor’s allies. Now, a criminal investigation is underway. Tampa Bay Times: Criminal investigation launched related to Hope Florida, prosecutors say

Hey guys, it's me, Sam Stein, Managing Editor at The Bulwark, and I am joined by Lawrence Maurer, not Mower, Maurer, I got that right, who works for the Tampa Bay Times and has a really important news break up. It was yesterday, the Post followed it today, the Washington Post followed it today, but he and his wife have been on top of this storyline from the jump. It involves Ron DeSantis, Casey DeSantis, potential Medicare fraud, or Medicaid fraud, I should say, and the possibility that their futures in politics are jeopardized by all this. Lawrence, thanks for joining us. I do appreciate it.

Before we get into it, subscribe to the feed for those who are watching. When I talked to your wife, I think it was a couple weeks ago, this scandal was kind of just coming to the surface. And I do want you to kind of give us the Cliff's Notes version of it. But the story today is that an investigation has been launched into this Hope Florida Fund, which is Casey DeSantis' initiative to essentially provide services that are traditionally done by the government for a social safety net to do them through things like churches. So let's start with the breaking news, and then let's get into how we got to this place. What is the actual breaking news? Yeah, the breaking news is that there's actually now a criminal investigation underway,

at least involving the Leon County State Attorney's Office. That's the state attorney that covers Tallahassee. It covers pretty much all of state government up here. And we know that investigation is taking place. They're not saying what exactly they're investigating, who's involved, that kind of stuff. But we know that they're investigating Hope Florida Foundation or relating to it because we asked for records that we know were given to the state attorney's office. And the state attorney's office came back and said, well, we can't give those to you because it's part of an open, ongoing investigation. When they told you that and your eyes skid across that part of the statement, were you like, holy shit? Yeah, yeah. It was my colleague, Justin Garcia was the one who made the request.

Yeah. And we're both, and us and Alex were like, huh, okay. That's the first confirmation we've seen that there's actually some kind of law enforcement investigation going on. Of course, people have called for an investigation, but this is the first confirmation we've had. Do you know how long the investigation has been going on. Of course, people have called for an investigation, but this is the first confirmation we've had. Do you know how long the investigation has been going on for? We don't, unfortunately not. I mean, we know that the representative, Alex Andrade, turned over records to them last month. It looks like late last month. So it probably started around then. It could have started earlier, but at least by then, it seems. Okay.

Let's talk about how we got to this place. Hope, Florida. What is it? Why are they under such scrutiny? Just give us the sort of 30,000-foot version of what is happening here. Sure. I'll start with Hope. Good luck.

Yeah, I know. It is complicated. Hope Florida itself is this initiative that Casey DeSantis, the first lady, came up with, that basically what they're doing is, or they say they're doing or trying to do, is take people off government services so that it looks like the state is saving taxpayer money. And the way they're supposed to be doing that is somebody will call the state for help. They call this HOPE hotline. This HOPE navigator will say, oh, well, we can put you in touch with a local church or a local nonprofit that will provide you basically what you need. And that's supposed to be going on at the state level. That's a state

function across numerous state agencies. Well, they've also created this charity, the state created a charity called the Hope Florida Foundation. And this is literally a 501c3 under the IRS. And it is created by the state. It's controlled by the state. And it's supposed to be taking in donations and giving them out to churches and nonprofits that help people. Okay. Yeah. That's basically how it's supposed to work. So it's been going on now since the foundation was launched in 2023. But things kind of went a little sideways last year, around September, October last year. Basically,

the governor was going around trying to defeat these constitutional amendments last year. There were two amendments in Florida, one to legalize recreational marijuana, one to overturn the state's six-week abortion ban. And the governor was spending state money running ads against them. And what it seems to be is that he was looking for more money to do this. And so they found a pot of money with this through this company called Centene. Centene is one of the largest Medicaid provider. I think it's the largest Medicaid provider in the nation. They're the largest in provider. I think it's the largest Medicaid provider in the nation. They're

the largest in Florida. And they had an outstanding settlement dispute. They'd overbilled the state for prescription drugs, and they'd overbilled about 20 other states for prescription drugs. And the governor's office, basically they owed $67 million. And the governor's office said, well, as we crowd, we're going to agree to $67 million in damages here. But as part of the settlement, we're going to tell you to direct $10 million to the Hope Florida Foundation. And that's what the settlement ended up being. They directed $10 million to the Hope Florida Foundation. Well, the money did not stay with the Hope Florida Foundation. And certainly it did not go to pay nonprofits or anything else.

Nothing probably care for kids instead within days, they, the profit without most of the board's knowledge or vote steered the money to gave the money away to two 501 C four groups. These are known as dark money groups that don't, you know, don't disclose their donors. And those two groups then turned around and gave at least $8.5 million to a political committee controlled by the governor's chief of staff. So to back up a second, they took $10 million from a Medicaid settlement, routed it through the charity, and then through two other nonprofits,

and then eventually to get to the chief of staff's political committee. Now, the governor's office says, no, no, no, no, no. The settlement was actually $57 million. An extra $10 million was sort of decided to by the companies and team to basically go through this route anyway. I guess, why would they do it? I don't know. Do they have, they offer an explanation for why the company would do this? Yes, they offered an elaborate explanation for this. First of all, it wasn't Centene's idea to do this. We got a copy of the original settlement agreement from 2020, I believe it was 2022, that said that the original settlement amount was the exact amount, $67 million. Centene owed the state, by their calculations, $67 million. And so what the state is now saying is that, well, $10.8 million of that is not part of the settlement or is not part of Medicaid damages because it's kind of like the settlement was broken up in three tranches, basically.

And $10.8 million was basically the baseline for damages. Like every state that settled with Centene got a minimum of that much, got a minimum of a $10.8 million. Plus whatever else that the company knew that they owed. Okay. So people we talked to said, this is no doubt that this is Medicaid money. It's part of a Medicaid settlement. And again, like the federal government is owed a portion of this money. You know, Medicaid is a state federal program and the feds need their cut of that money and so if it was 57 million if this true

settlement was 57 million then the state would be refunding the feds 50 based on the 57 million dollars yeah they don't appear to be doing that they appear to be refunding them based on the 67 million so a couple questions here so the state republican part republicans in the state government were investigating this, which I guess from the outsider's perspective, it's kind of interesting because there's been this perception that DeSantis has the state on lock and that the Republican Party is lockstep behind him. But it's very evident that there are lawmakers in the state party that do not feel like they need to run cover for DeSantis here. No, not at all. In fact, you can almost count them on one hand in the legislature who are actively out there defending the governor on all this stuff. What happened? Because in an outsider's perspective, it's a little bit befuddling, right?

It's like DeSantis, we assumed, had the state unlocked, that they were doing his bidding. Well, and this is basically long simmering tensions. I mean, early on, DeSantis, I mean, came into office. He had a lot of goodwill. He was very popular and he's still very popular among voters in the state. There's no doubt about that. But, you know, he basically is browbeaten the legislature year after year after year and not fostered relationships with the people in the legislature year after year after year and not fostered relationships with the people

in the legislature. You know, this is an infamously, you know, touchy governor. I mean, he's not somebody who is warm and cuddly. He's not somebody who works to build relationships and consensus among people. He tells you like it is. And if you don't go along with that, there will be hell to pay. I mean, he's very vindictive, and his administration is. And this has been building in the legislature for years. Privately, they've been telling us that lawmakers have told us to

express frustration to us over this. And it came to a head with this new House Speaker and Senate President. Both of them were like, look, you're a lame duck now. These are your two final years in office. We're not going to do whatever you want. And, you know, it's not like the governor was kind of operating in a spirit of openness with them. He basically said, I want immigration reform this year because that's what the new president is getting. President Trump is getting headlines over. I want immigration reform. Go do it. And they kind of went like, well, what do you want us to do?

You're not giving us any proposals. And also, we're about to meet in a month. Can you just give us a month to meet and pass this stuff? And he said no. And it caused this huge rift with the legislature. So he's clearly burned some bridges. But one in particular, Representative Alex Andrade, is that how you pronounce it? Andrade, yeah.

So he was doing the bulk work of the investigation into what was happening with Hope Florida. But according to your article, he abruptly stopped. Is it your sense that he stopped the investigation because Leon County prosecutors have taken over the case? Or is there another reason to extrapolate from that? It's not exactly clear, but if you kind of read between the lines, he stopped and he said, the ball is now in both the DOJ's court. He gave these records to the DOJ as well and to the state attorney's office. This is now a criminal investigation.

And he read through all the facts they'd uncovered and accused the chief of staff, who's now the attorney general and a lawyer working on behalf of the foundation, who's very close to the attorney general, accused them of committing federal crimes. And so, yeah, it does seem like there's a specter of, you know, is he doing this just to, you know, to get out of the way and let the, you know, the criminal investigators look into this? It could be that. We've not like definitively answered that yet. Do you expect his office to release any public report about what they found? Who, the Leon County State Attorney? No, Andrade. Maybe.

We don't know yet. I mean, he's requested a lot of records from state agencies about Florida. State agencies, by the way, we've reported in the last few weeks are not turning them over to him, which is kind of extraordinary. And he's not personally giving up on it. So he's going to be releasing this stuff. He has released a bunch of stuff already. And so, yeah, I do expect there. I don't know if there's gonna be a formal report, but I do expect this to continue into the next legislative session.

I mean, he's he's in office again for the next year. Let's talk about the legal system in Florida and obviously DOJ. Pam Bondi is the attorney general, former attorney general of the state of Florida. I don't really know from any reporting what her relationship is like with DeSantis, but I can say with some confidence that the Trump Justice Department is not quite in the business of trying to investigate Republican governors. I think that's fair. What about locally, though, the local attorneys, the state attorneys? What are the expectations on whether the investigation into what happened will go forward in an impartial manner? Well, going back to the DOJ part, I mean, it's not like the governor does not have people who don't like him in D.C.

I mean, that's true. Trump's staff is not a fan because, yes, Susie Wiles just, you know, just dumped her, you know, right after she had basically given him help, helped him win the governor's race back in 2018. And we have a new state U.S. attorney here just appointed who's a longtime Rick Scott guy. Rick Scott also does not have a great relationship with the Tandem. So we don't know exactly what's going on on the federal level like that. But Jack Campbell himself is a Democrat. Tallahassee, Leon County is a historically blue dog Democrat area. It's a government town. Jack Campbell is not one, though, who's a liberal.

Nobody really accused of being a liberal. He's clashed, actually, with the liberal city commissioners here. And he's also stayed out of the fray with DeSantis. I mean, last year, Nikki Freed, when accused DeSantis of and DeSantis officials of breaking state law about electioneering, using state resources to electioneer because he was spending all the state money trying to defeat these amendments. And she sent a formal complaint to Jack Campbell's office and Jack did nothing with it. I have an outstanding records request there, and they have not used the excuse that this is an open investigation for me in that case. So he's not someone, he's someone who's tried to stay out of the political fray. You know, he's, you know, historically, you know, it's been a touchy relationship between the local state attorney who's, you know's a Democrat usually because these are blue dog Democrats here and the Republican controlled legislature. I mean,

historically, there have been some charges brought against lawmakers, but it's very, very rare and hasn't happened in a long time. And in this case, who knows what will happen? It seems like at least Jack Campbell has to evaluate what's going on here because, again, the evidence, there evaluate what's going on here. Because, again, the evidence, you know, there's a lot of evidence here. Last question for you. And this involves Casey DeSantis, because kind of looming over this is whether or not she will run for governor. And obviously, this factors into things. What's the latest scuttle on whether or not she'll make a bid and how this impacts it? Well, they seem to be doubling down on this whole thing. I mean, on Hope Florida, at least.

And, you know, she's out there. They're giving press conferences defending Hope Florida and, you know, not being shy about it. And Casey, you know, is an excellent retail politician. She's very good out there on the stump. And she's trying to make her pitch. And, you know, it could be something that like you know she's trying to audition for donors or something as as alex has mentioned um you know or you know it's it's she's just kind of testing the field and telling donors how how she responds

to what appears to be a significant scandal at this point you know so nobody really knows what's going on yet and it could be that you know she waits until later this year to announce, kind of waits this out. But, you know, with the prospect of a criminal investigation going on, it looks like this thing could, you know, could last a while. There are at least going to be a few more news stories out of it. Well, we're looking forward to reading them in your paper, Lawrence. Thanks so much for doing this.

Really appreciate it. Glad you finally got the first byline uh compared to your wife i mean no wait you did it wait who had the first byline on that story i i did yesterday i mean she's really been the one driving this thing but you know so i'm glad to get my piece but yeah i had the lead oh man yeah i wonder what the dinner conversations are like when the paper all right. All right, Lawrence Mauer of the Tempe Times. Appreciate it, man. Really do.

Keep on the story. Keep us posted on what you find. It's fascinating. It's juicy. It's a great story. Thank you for joining us. And thank you guys for watching. Please subscribe to the feed, and we'll talk to you later.