Bulwark Takes - The $10M Scandal That Could Bring Down DeSantis!

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Sam Stein talks to reporter Alex Glorioso from the Miami Herald about her article Former federal prosecutors lay out possible crimes in Hope Florida saga  Ron DeSantis is facing a growing scandal over “Hope Florida,” a welfare-style initiative spearheaded by his wife Casey. The program rerouted $10 million in Medicaid settlement money meant into politically aligned nonprofits that fought marijuana legalization. Investigations suggest potential money laundering and fraud, and even some Republicans are turning on DeSantis as the fallout deepens. 

Hey guys, it's me, Sam Stein, Managing Editor at The Bulwark. I am joined by Alex Glorioso, who is the State Government Reporter at the Miami Herald. Thankfully, she agreed to do this. I really appreciate it, Alex. We're going to talk about something we haven't really talked about yet, but seems to be constantly popping up in my feed at least, but I'm a junkie. But it seems to be gaining a lot of steam, which is this saga and scandal down in Florida around a quasi-welfare initiative, an antipod initiative. Governor Ron DeSantis' top aides, his wife, and Republican state lawmakers. It's a real mix. A milieu, if you want to call it, before we get into it.

Subscribe to our feed, please. We really appreciate it. We get to bring you great stories like this with great reporters who can help you unpack the story. So Alex, thank you. Florida, never a dull moment, I have to say. I want you to walk us through the scandal in a way that sort of just treats us like we're fourth graders, like we just don't know anything about it. All I know is that there's an initiative. It's called Hope Florida. It's designed to sort of be a hybrid, right? It's getting SNAP benefits, welfare benefits, not through traditional means, which is the

government, but through sort of non-governmental means like churches. It's the brainchild or baby of Casey DeSantis or Ron DeSantis or both. And somehow it became a conduit for political activity, specifically $10 million in donations, two donations, to anti-pot initiatives that were on the ballot this past cycle that Ron DeSantis was very much against. That's all I know. Tell us about how this came to life and if I got any of those facts terribly wrong. No, that was a really good summary. And thank you for having me on your show today, Sam. I really appreciate it. Of course. So it's just been a wild April here in Tallahassee, Florida. I mean, we are ending our legislative session today, theoretically,

but we're not really ending because the Hope Florida saga has taken over the entire legislative session and everyone needs cooler heads to prevail. So they're probably going to come back later in the month or in June, which is, I don't know if it's unprecedented, but it's very unusual. So, you know, this whole thing started when there was a settlement last year between the state of Florida and a major Medicaid company called Centene. Centene, you know, provides Medicare and Medicaid insurance all over the United States. It's a major company that administers the Medicaid program here in Florida, which is health insurance for low-income people. Well, as part of a multi-state settlement, Centene agreed to settle with different states

around the country and give them- What had Centene done wrong? It was all related to overbilling and the prescription drug program. So they overbilled in Florida and Florida said, we're going to make a settlement with you. And what was the amount? It was $67 million. And this was quietly done, whereas, you know, many of the other states involved had promoted getting this money back for Medicaid. And nobody knew about this settlement until we started reporting on the whole Florida saga last month. And it came to light. There was a $67 million settlement with the state of Florida that was never publicized? It was never publicized. It came out in the healthcare budget committee this year. Wild. Okay. So you look, so people start looking into a totally different initiative, Hope for Florida, and that's where to discover the news of the

settlement. Yeah. So we started looking into the Hope Florida program because the governor who, you know, is- Well, let's stop right there. Just what is the Hope Florida program? Let's start there. The Hope Florida program is an initiative spearheaded by the First Lady, Casey DeSantis, intended to get people off of government aid. That includes traditional welfare benefits like, you know, food stamps, cash assistance, but it's also, we've discovered, written into the Medicaid contracts for 25 through, you know, 2025 to 2030. So it's also designed to get people off of Medicaid. And how does it get them off of that? I mean, is it providing medical services? Is it providing food services? What is it doing?

The whole point is that people come to the state government because they need services and the state government connects them with these so-called hope navigators who then connect them to the private community, you know, through a lot of it is faith-based, a lot of churches, a lot of Christian churches, and also some nonprofits. So instead of getting some snapAP benefit, I get connected through Hope to a private church, which then may help me get a job or some food or things I need. But it's not just a direct cash benefit in forms of food assistance. Exactly. It's like a diversion from the state program.

And Casey DeSantis spearheaded this. and the idea was you were going to save state money by contracting out essentially with churches and other non-governmental groups that help with these types of things. Yeah, the governor has been saying that they've saved about $108 million through the program. Okay. All right, so why do people start looking into it if it's

such a great thing? Well, you know, it all began about three weeks into the legislative session, you know, at the end of March, essentially, when I was looking for a story to write. And I, you know, was working on stories about the condo crisis in Florida, and there just wasn't an appetite this session from lawmakers to really talk about that or do anything on that. And so I was looking for something, and I noticed that the governor, he doesn't have a bill, but state lawmakers had bills that would enshrine the governor's wife's key initiative, Hope Florida, into state law. So far, it's been acting under the governor's authority. He's on his way out from state government. We have term limits here in Florida, so he's terming out. And he wanted to, in his legacy, have this government program enshrined into statute. And it would also give Casey DeSantis, should she decide to run for governor, to replace her husband,

a significant legislative win, which would be great for her because she doesn't have any actual political experience in office. And it would need to be enshrined because what you're doing is taking state funds. You're spending some state funds because you're sending them to navigators and I think maybe some nongovernmental groups in terms of administrative help. So you need an appropriation. You need to put it into law. I can't just operate off of the – I don't even know. What were they – how – I guess I should ask.

If it wasn't in law to begin with, it was just being administered by the governor, how were they doing it statutorily? What was the legality of it? Where were they getting the money for it? Well, the governor has been putting in asks, you know, for money for this program and different departments have been putting in asks for money for this program, but it has been operating under his executive authority. He has pretty broad authority, but after he leaves, anything that he administers under his executive authority from the governor's office effectively shuts down. Gotcha. All right. So lawmakers are looking to codify this,

and you're looking for a story, which is a totally rational journalistic instinct. I've been there many times, need a good story. And what do you find out? Well, what I find out is that his, you know, key bill is stalled and, you know, the legislative session is 60 days long. Around three weeks is when you really start to get a landscape as a journalist and also as a politician in the process and a lobbyist in the process of what's going to really move and, you know, what are people's priorities? And it's just a good time to reevaluate the stories that I'm working on, I find usually. And so I find this bill, I realize that it hasn't been heard in committee. And I start asking the committee chair people, you know, why that is. One of them is now Congressman Randy Fine, and the other one

is Representative Lauren Mello. And they both kind of, you know, put me off to some degree, saying that there's no real reason why this isn't being heard, but we're all backed up because we had three special sessions in January, all related to immigration. And it just logistically backed everything up. But then, you know, my husband, Lawrence Maurer with the Tampa Bay Times, we're colleagues. He started pulling, you know, all of the documents for the Hope Florida Foundation, which was part of the program. And we realized that there were no documents and that they weren't. And then we figured out what the foundation was that was supposed to be for, you know, supporting the Hope Florida program. It's like a state sanctioned

charity and has a lot of reporting requirements. And we realized it wasn't doing any of those reportings, like an independent audit, for instance, or it's by requirements. And we realized it wasn't doing any of those reportings, like an independent audit, for instance, or it's bylaws. And it's supposed to be reporting back to the legislature. So when we realized that we wrote a story about like, what's the holdup here for the governor's key initiative? And what's this going to do to his wife's campaign? And what is this program? Why doesn't it have any of the required documentation? Right. Because we knew it was supporting things, but we didn't know where the money was coming from and they weren't giving any documentation around it. Yeah. Back in February

we requested the foundation's ledger. And so while there's like the whole Florida program that's in state government, there's the separate charity that is financially supporting the program by giving money to the outside community organizations to help bolster them in their effort to get people off of government aid. So they're supposed to be like a symbiotic organism. Gotcha. So when you start asking around, how do you get from that to discovering uh the uh what is called centenny corp centene centene how do you get from point a to discovering centene had given 10 million dollars in what should have been state settlement money to this um hope florida initiative well somebody said something to me really interesting when i wrote that first story with Lawrence Maurer. They told me that the chairwoman of the, you know, like, why does she have questions? And we had questions then. And we knew the governor the following week was going to come

and do a press conference. So we were planning to ask him about it. Our story came out on Thursday, came out on my birthday, which I was really excited about. And then, you know, the following week, we got ready to ask the governor questions about this foundation attached to his wife's legacy program. And that morning for his press conference, we woke up and started looking to see if there were any bill analyses out, which in state government are like layman's, you know, a summary of what the bill does. And it's written by committee staff in each chamber. And the Senate one was pretty, you know, I don't even remember what was in the Senate staff analysis, but the House staff analysis answered why the chairwoman had questions.

It said in the footnotes of the analysis that they had been asking for the same documentation we were back in February, you know, so like five weeks, you know, before at that time, six weeks before, and they still hadn't gotten anything. So the lawmakers had not gotten anything on the books of Hope Florida. Always read the footnotes, by the way, always read the footnotes. Again, though, how did we, so how do we start discovering what's going what the funding sorry sorry sorry that's okay no i like this this is a good drama i appreciate it well okay so that day we asked the governor why hasn't your foundation filed any of its tax returns and he like explodes i've never seen him react like this at the time i mean he's had some similar things before that, but at the time,

and it was just like on after that, like everyone knew that this was really touchy for the governor and everyone knew that there was something weird going on with this foundation. And we ended up getting, I ended up getting the like one meeting minute from last October, you know, which said that Hope Florida Foundation was getting a $10 million allocation from a quote, longstanding dispute between the state agency for healthcare administration. And I don't know if it said a third party, but it definitely said the state agency for healthcare administration. And I don't know if it said a third party,

but it definitely said the state agency for healthcare administration. And it was getting $10 million from that. And that was the only donation we had known about Hope Florida because it wasn't filing any of its documents. Did it note in there that it was the centen... I'm going to mispronounce it again. Centene Corporation, or was it not noted in there? It did not. But I knew that there was not just $10 million lying around at the Agency for Healthcare Administration because most of its money comes from Medicaid, which is highly regulated money. But the settlement had not been made public yet. It had not been made public. And so we started reporting on the document, you know, and we saw in the documents properties that the chairman was the author. The chairman of the board was the author of the document. So we believe that.

And we wrote a story just about this mystery settlement and how the legislature wasn't notified about it. And that on its own could be illegal. Right. This is not DeSantis' money. This is the state's money, right? Right. But we didn't even know that it was Medicaid money. We just had a hunch at that point.

But regardless, they didn't notify the state because it was more than a million dollars. And they legally have to notify the state of assailant in more than million dollars and I think send it back to state coffers and nobody knew about it like so it was a mystery of where this came from so that was the first story the next story we wrote which was you know there was a 10 million dollar donation to Hope Florida Foundation was it legal and then um you know there was rumblings that it was Centene, but it was for the wrong reason. You know, we had known about one other large Centene settlement, you know, from a story I had written a few years earlier that was kind of like a landmark settlement, which was for $9.1 million with the state over some other problems the company had. So we wondered if it was Centene

and we started pushing about Centene. And then I think the chairman of the house healthcare budget committee decided to hold a hearing. And as part of that asked for Centene documents. I don't know. I don't know how he did that or how the settlement came into his possession, but he announced it during the first committee hearing on this. And who was the chairman?

Sorry. That's Representative Alex Andrade, a Republican from Pensacola. He's the chair of the House Health Care Budget Subcommittee. That's right. Yeah. Okay. So Alex Andrade is going to play a big role here. But our first introduction to him is he's hosting this hearing. And then out of the blue, although he probably knew something, he requests documents around the Centene settlement.

And those documents are produced, I presume? Like I said, I don't know how he got these documents. But in the committee meeting, referenced to them so when we knew that there was a settlement with centene we started asking our sources for you know the document 10 million right because you're putting two and two together like okay there's a settlement here we know that a settlement money went into here are these the two things exactly and i was confused because in the committee meeting he said the settlement was for $67 million. It was.

So this is carved out from that. What's the $10 million up to? What ostensibly there to facilitate quasi-welfare for people, is spending that money, the $10 million, on two donations. And that's $5 million each to the Amendment 3 initiative, which is to defeat recreational marijuana in Florida, which they did successfully, if I'm correct. Am I correct? You're right. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

All right. So how do we get from point A to point B? So you've kind of pieced together where that $10 million came from, but how do we then discover what the $10 million went to? So once we got the settlement, we realized in the settlement, the state directed the company to send 10 million of it to the charity, the Hope Florida Foundation. And we realized from the meeting minutes, which we had that, you know, below the part where they said that there was an allocation of $10 million, there was also a grant proposal listed from secure Florida's future,

which is a 501 C for, you know, dark money organization because it doesn't list its donors controlled by the Florida chamber of commerce. And so I don't remember if it said the amount that they got in that, in those meeting minutes, but just after several days of bugging people, reporting, doing the basic stuff,

we found out that two groups, Secure Florida's Future and Save Our Society from Drugs, which were both against the Amendment 3 initiative to legalize recreational marijuana, applied using nearly identical letters for $5 million apiece, and then shortly thereafter donated similar amounts, $8.5 million total, to a political committee controlled by the governor's then chief of staff, James F. Meyer, which then went on and used that money to fight the amendment. Like that committee was dedicated to it. It was called Keep Florida Clean.

So as I'm reading this, the minutes made clear that Hope Florida was a carve out. They were going to give $10 million from the settlement to Hope Florida, but very clearly it was going to then go to these two 501c3s that were devoted to defeating the marijuana initiative. Hope Florida never was going to receive that money, as far as you understood. Hope Florida had that money for very little time. I mean, they're great applications. Well, we know that the meeting minutes were in Octoberober of 2024 where they announced this we know that the settlement with centene was signed at least by i think one of the parties in late september so at the end of september and then you know they ended up doing these transactions with the political committee in October. So it was all largely done in the same month.

Okay. Tell me about Jeff Aaron. Jeff Aaron is the attorney for the Hope Florida Foundation. And he is close with the DeSantis administration, has represented them, I think, on different matters. But where he's really central in this, you know, saga is that he is the attorney for the foundation. And he's instrumental in, it appears, the transfer of these funds to at least one of the dark money organizations. What was the role he played in the transfer? Well, text messages that we obtained from Representative Andrade and published on our

news sites show that around the time this was all going down, you know, the chief of staff, James Ethmeyer, reached out to the executive director, Amy Ronshausen from Save Our Society from Drugs and asked her to call him. And then a little bit later, she reaches out to Jeff Aaron, the attorney, and says she's getting ready to submit her grant application and how much should she request and who should she send it to. So he responds with secure Florida's futures application and tells her to copy that. So they both end up applying for $5 million. And then after she submits it, he like, you know, remains with her throughout the, you know, like this was like on a Friday and on Monday, he's like, did you get the wire? Like, you know, he asked her, you know, where he should send the money. He follows up with her like, are we good? Did you get the wire transfer? And we've published this. She responds with the receipt. She responds with the screenshot of the wire, which we redacted, you know, to protect sensitive information. But he responds saying, yep, got it. And he responds in all caps, excellent. So

that is why representative Andrade has accused Aaron and Uthmeyer of being in a scheme to defraud healthcare and money and money laundering. You know, it all starts, well, the first, you know, possible crime would have been diverting Medicaid money. And then after it starts to travel to different places, it's like, you know, it could be money laundering. So Centene, what does the Florida statute about say about settlement money from Medicaid fraud? Is there a law specific to what the state had to do with the $67 million

that Centene settled? Well, there are federal guidance, you know, really regulating this at the end of the day. And like the buck stops with the federal government. The laws are about settlement, you know, dollars in general in Florida, where if it's a million dollars, you have to notify the legislature and send it back. Notification is one thing. Notification is one thing. But oh, so you do have to send it back to the state. Yeah, you have to send it back to the state. Notification is one thing. Notification is one thing. But, oh, so you do have to send it back to the state. Yeah, you have to send it back to state coffers.

But then in terms of federal guidance, because Medicaid money is mostly federal money in Florida. Yeah, it's federal with a small state match, yeah. Yeah, it's a 57% federal match in Florida. And you have to notify the federal government of the settlement. You have to send back the full amount to state coffers. And in Florida, it gets earmarked into the medical trust fund. And then you divide out what you owe to the federal government in like a separate line item. You send them a specific, you know, form 64 and you notify them of the full amount and then what you will owe

them. Right. Now the, the, the thing you could say is, well, why wouldn't Centene just, you know, I mean, the way to think about it, the way I think thought about is what if Centene had just decided, you know what, we're going to give 10 million straight to Hope, straight to the Antipod initiatives. We're not even going to go through Hope for Florida. We're just going to go right into those Antipod initiatives. People would have been going to go through Hope for Florida. We're just going to go right into those anti-pot initiatives. People would have been like, no, that's crazy. These are Governor DeSantis' political initiatives. You can't do that with settlement money.

So it seems very clear to me that they used Hope Florida as a conduit. But I think for the viewer, they might not understand, and this is where I could use your help, how important defeating that recreational marijuana initiative was to DeSantis. Like, why did he care so much? What is the motivation for getting that $10 million into those two groups? Florida has historically been a purple state. You know, Florida elections have historically been very, very close. Presidential elections have been very, very close.

But the Republicans have been in government for several decades now. They've done a very good job gerrymandering a lot of the elections. And also the governor takes great pride on having a kind of self-selection go down in Florida. And he has said publicly, you know, to members of the party that it was crucial that they defeat the recreational marijuana amendment and the, you know, amendment that would have legalized abortions up until probably 24 weeks, because that means that then people who come to Florida will be more likely to be Republican. And he has really tried to make sure that Florida will remain a red state. And so these two amendments were very important to him politically.

And they would have affected not only his legacy, but also his wife's ability then to run for governor. So he had a lot going, he had a lot personally at stake and politically at stake in defeating those amendments. And they almost passed. I think the marijuana amendment had 57% support and the, you know, pro-abortion amendment had 54% support. So they both were over 50%. But in Florida, we have a very high threshold of 60% for constitutional amendments to pass. Yeah. All right. So where do things stand now with three people? First, let's talk about James Uthmeyer. He is now the state attorney general. Is he under suspicion for anything more than what we talked about? Is his job at jeopardy?

What is going on with him? I mean, the DeSantis administration denies this. He denies this. Their supporters deny this. What do they say what is what they're specifically saying is that this was not medicaid money that it was a sin it was a donation that centene decided to make on its own um i don't know why it would be pinned in the medicaid settlement if that is the case and also you know we obtained in our reporting an early draft agreement from 2022 of the settlement because this settlement has been taking years and there was counsel and then the counsel was let go by the state. settlement. And then in addition to that, they gave $10 million to Hope, Florida, that this was nothing to do with that $67 million. Is that right? Yeah. They argued that the actual damages

in the overbilling case were about $57 million. So it's $57 million. And then on top of that, $10 more million. Have they accounted for the other 57 million dollars? Yeah, they have said that this, you know, is going back to state coffers and back to the federal government. What Andrade, the representative looking into this has said, and I have, you know, gone through the state ledger and seen the numbers myself, though it doesn't say specifically for the Centene settlement, it says for a Medicaid fraud. But they are setting aside, it appears, the full amount for the federal government of what is owed of the $67 million, not of the $57 million. Gotcha. So DeSantis claims he's Uh, has Uthmeyer said anything?

Yeah. Uthmeyer and DeSantis are saying essentially the same thing that this was, you know, their whole argument is that this was not Medicaid money, because if it is Medicaid money, then that's when all of, you know, we've interviewed former federal prosecutors who have said the original crime starts with a diversion of federal funds like Medicaid. And so their whole argument is centered on the fact that they say this is not Medicaid money. Okay. And then the last thing I want to get is at the sort of politics here, because from the outsider's perspective, DeSantis is, you know, not a god king, but close.

That Florida is a reliably Republican, that he's turned the state ruby red, that he's basically romped over state lawmakers to this point, and putting aside a fairly disastrous presidential run, that he has rather unchecked powers. But in this case, the people who are pushing back on him are Republicans. Andrade is a Republican. The speaker, Daniel Perez, is a Republican. You know, what does this say about DeSantis' own standing, both in the state and within his party? Well, DeSantis is experiencing what it means to be a lame duck. So he is really on the tail end of his governorship. And I think that that pushback

that he's getting from his own party to some degree is inevitable. But also the legislature did many favors for him when he was running for president. They really executed his agenda, his culture war agenda, because he convinced them that this would be politically advantageous. I mean, that's just clearly what they were doing and what they said they were doing at the time, that we want to support the governor. We believe in the governor. We want the governor to have a full agenda to run on. And he did. He ran on his policy wins. But I think that there's a feeling of resentment by Republican leaders who, you know, you're a Senate president in Florida, and you have a nice life,

like you have a lot of power, you touch a lot of people's lives, you shape policy, you sometimes get books written about you, like, you know, occasionally. So these are not people who are used to having their power minimized and i think that you're seeing now the pushback when they see that the governor is politically vulnerable and it's also been an unusual session in that the two leaders of the chambers have not exerted as much top-down control as they usually do. And so people are just bucking. They're expressing themselves in ways that they haven't been able to in the last six years. Wow. All right. Well, we'll be watching this very closely, thanks to you. What's the next chapter here before we let you go? What are you looking for next? Well, like I said, you know, we on Thursday published a story about

the possible federal crimes in the Hope Florida saga. The representative has accused the Attorney General James Utmeyer and the Hope Florida attorney, Jeff Aaron, of a conspiracy to defry healthcare, of money laundering. So I think we're going to see where that goes. There's nothing I can say about that right now. I hope you see where that goes. That's a big one. And yes, I understand why you might not be able to get ahead of it, but wow, this is wild stuff. I appreciate your reporting on this. I would encourage everyone to read your story.

It's called Former Federal Prosecutors Layout Possible Crimes in Hope, Florida Saga. I will note that you are the first byline, not your spouse. Just saying. Not going to point. Got to make note. But we'll be reading the Herald. Everyone should be subscribing to the Herald to follow the story. Alex, thank you so much.

I genuinely appreciate this. And thank you guys for tuning in and watching us. I hope you watched the whole thing. It's fascinating. We will be talking to you again shortly and thanks for tuning in. Thank you, Sam. I really appreciate being here.