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Shortly after the 2024 elections, the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis awarded a new contract to a team of outside attorneys who helped secure a multimillion-dollar legal settlement that DeSantis aides used to fund political activities on behalf of the governor — in the scheme now widely known as the Hope Florida scandal.
The previously undisclosed contract — with a group of politically connected lawyers from Mississippi — was withheld for nearly two years from a public transparency database where state agencies are supposed to post details of all contracts and purchase orders. The DeSantis administration only disclosed the contract after Seeking Rents learned of its existence and made a public records request for it.
The pact is with the same attorneys who brought the Governor’s Office a proposed $67 million settlement with Centene Corp., a large health insurer that had been caught overbilling state Medicaid programs for prescription drugs. The governor and his team initially retained the lawyers to finalize an agreement for the state — but later fired them and negotiated a deal directly with Centene.
The deal struck by DeSantis’ staff diverted $10 million of the settlement proceeds into a state-backed charity called the Hope Florida Foundation, where it was eventually converted into campaign contributions for groups advertising against ballot measures that would have legalized recreational marijuana and ended a statewide abortion ban. A grand jury later condemned the financial maneuvering as “a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.”
Cutting the Mississippi lawyers out of the Centene settlement cost them an estimated $7 million in legal fees, based on the terms of their original contract with the state. But they could now earn as much as $50 million in fees under their new deal with the DeSantis administration.
It’s not clear why the governor and his staff decided to rehire attorneys they had fired the previous year. The new contract is with the Florida Department of Management Services, the state’s administrative-support agency, and representatives for DMS would not answer questions from Seeking Rents.
The law firms involved — one of which was co-founded by Haley Barbour, the former Republican governor of Mississippi — either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
The new contract was executed on Dec. 18, 2024, under then-DeSantis chief of staff James Uthmeier. And it was approved by the Attorney General’s Office, which was run at the time by Ashley Moody.
Uthmeier and Moody also played key roles in the Hope Florida scandal, according to a grand jury’s findings. DeSantis later promoted both, appointing Moody to an open seat in the U.S. Senate and Uthmeier to succeed her as Attorney General.
Uthmeier and Moody — both of whom are now running for election to full terms — are among half a dozen high-ranking state officials involved in the Hope Florida affair who got subsequent promotions from the governor.
A scandal years in the making
The origin story of the Hope Florida scandal dates back to at least June 2021.
That’s when a fundraising committee for Gov. Ron DeSantis deposited $1,000 checks from a trio of prominent attorneys in Mississippi: Barbour, the former governor of the state who later became a major lobbyist; Paul Hurst; Barbour’s former chief of staff; and Matthew McDonald, the son of a former staffer in Barbour’s administration.
The three are now partners at a firm called BarbourHurst. They were also, at the time, part of a legal team that had just negotiated an $88 million settlement for the state of Ohio with Centene over claims that the insurance giant had overcharged the state’s Medicaid program for prescription drugs through the use of a subsidiary pharmacy benefits manager, or PBM.
That legal team — which also included the Mississippi-based firm Liston & Deas — were now approaching other state governments to pitch similar deals with Centene, one of the largest Medicaid contractors in the country. The firms would get hired on contingency fee agreements to finalize settlement agreements and then pocket millions of dollars in legal fees, paid out of the settlement proceeds.
The Centene cases earned the firms involved at least $108 million in legal fees, according to a 2024 report by the New York Times.
Within weeks of those initial campaign contributions to DeSantis, records show that the Mississippi lawyers — including Paul Hurst, Matthew McDonald, William Liston and Lawrence Deas, as well as a Tallahassee lobbyist hired to represent them — were working on a similar arrangement for Florida with staffers in both DeSantis’ office and the Attorney General’s Office.
As the talks intensified, so did the campaign contributions. That September, businesses linked to Barbour and Hurst donated $50,000 each — a combined $100,000 — to the Republican Party of Florida, which would help finance DeSantis’ 2022 re-election run.
Hurst, records show, also donated $10,000 that same week to a fundraising committee controlled by then-Attorney General Ashley Moody.
Florida formally hired the lawyers in December 2021. The contract was between the Attorney General’s Office and Liston & Deas, though records show that both Hurst and McDonald continued working on the litigation — presumably as subcontractors — and that they did so with staffers in the Governor’s Office and the Agency for Health Care Administration, the state agency that runs Medicaid.
Outside attorneys ousted
Records show the parties continued to work on the state’s behalf through much of the next year — until March 2023, when Florida abruptly fired them.
It remains something of a mystery as to why the DeSantis administration ousted its outside counsel. The written notice of termination delivered by the Attorney General’s Office to Liston & Deas gave no reason.
It’s possible that DeSantis staffers thought they might be able to wrest more money out of Centene. The administration had recently announced plans to audit all pharmacy benefit managers providing services to the state’s Medicaid program. And Uthmeier, records show, had told the attorneys at one point that Florida was still considering a lawsuit rather than a settlement.
It’s also possible that the governor’s team had new ideas about how to structure a settlement. March 2023 is the same month that a DeSantis-backed bill was filed in the Florida Legislature that led to the creation of the Hope Florida Foundation, the state-backed charity that many thought might become a platform to promote First Lady Casey DeSantis ahead of a possible run for governor of her own.
Whatever their rationale for firing the outside attorneys, the DeSantis administration did eventually settle with Centene.
The final deal, completed in September 2024, compelled Centene to pay $67,048,611 — the same amount, down to the dollar, that Centene had been offering when the Mississippi attorneys first approached the DeSantis administration more than three years earlier.
Except now there was a new wrinkle: Instead of paying the full $67 million into the state treasury, the deal required Centene to break off $10 million as a “donation” to the Hope Florida Foundation. The Foundation immediately gave the money to two other nonprofits that then used it to make a series of large campaign contributions. Most of the money, the grand jury found, eventually ended up in the Republican Party of Florida and a pair of political committees controlled by James Uthmeier.
It would soon explode into arguably the biggest scandal of DeSantis’ tenure as governor, sparking oversight hearings in the Florida Legislature, at least one criminal investigation, and a blistering grand jury report declaring that the DeSantis administration had “misappropriated” $10 million that rightfully belonged to Florida taxpayers.
But grand jurors ultimately opted not to issue any individual criminal indictments, citing contradictory and gap-filled testimony from key witnesses.
Back on contract
Meanwhile, the Mississippi lawyers didn’t stay fired for long.
In December 2024 — just after the elections and just before the Hope Florida scandal erupted in public — the DeSantis administration rehired essentially the same team of lawyers.
The new contract is with BarbourHurst, the firm whose partners include Haley Barbour, Paul Hurst and Matthew McDonald. But Liston & Deas is also named in the agreement as a subcontractor.
BarbourHust intended use another firm as a subcontractor, as well, according to the contract: King Street Legal, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that was founded and run at the time by an attorney named James Burnham.
Burnham, who once worked with James Uthmeier at the law firm Jones Day, was later hired by Elon Musk as general counsel of xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company.
Under Florida law, state agencies are supposed to post copies of contracts they award and key details about the agreements in a public database known as the Florida Accountability Contract Tracking System.
But the Department of Management Services did not add the BarbourHurst contract to the database until Sept. 11. That was three days after Seeking Rents submitted a public records request to the agency seeking a copy of it.
The contract itself is sparse on specifics. Much like the original deal in the Centene case, it is a contingency fee contract promising the attorneys a percentage of any funds recovered through trial or settlement — a sliding scale that starts at 25 percent of the first $10 million and is capped at $50 million in total fees.
The new engagement also targets PBMs: The contract says the lawyers have been retained to “provide legal advice and representation in regards to pharmacy benefits management practices and billing arrangements.”
The agreement was originally supposed to expire on June 30 of last year. But it has since been extended for an additional two years and is now set to expire on June 30 of next year.
BarbourHurst has landed at least three other PBM-related contingency fee contracts from other states in the past year. Two are with the state of Iowa, including one focused specifically on insulin pricing and another on drug rebate calculations. The third contract is with state of Missouri and also concerns drug rebate calculations.
Liston & Deas is a co-counsel on at least one of those deals.
Meanwhile, the agreement with BarbourHurst is one of at least four legal contracts that the state of Florida has handed out in connection with PBM litigation.
Both the Department of Management Services and the Attorney General’s Office have hired Tallahassee-based Lawson Huck Gonzalez and The Ferraro Law Firm of Miami on contingency fee agreements in litigation related to insulin pricing.
DMS has also awarded another contract paying up to $595 an hour to DownsAaron, a firm co-founded by Jeff Aaron, a fundraiser who is personally close with James Uthmeier.
Aaron — who was recently appointed by DeSantis to a panel that screens potential judges on a powerful appellate court in Florida — was also involved in the Hope Florida controversy.
The exact nature of DownsAaron’s PBM-related work is unclear. Aaron did not respond to emailed questions and the contract says only that his firm has been hired to represent the Department of Management Services in connection with “pharmacy benefits management services received by the Department.”
You have the goods on this arrogant and dishonest team. We need to soundly defeat Ashley Moody and Byron Donalds to send an undeniable message.
If we do not elect David Jolly into office on November 3rd we will never have the answers to Hope Florida and what DeSantis has been doing with our tax dollars. If Byron Donalds is elected I would bet money we will be seeing the same things in his administration as we are seeing with DeSantis. Corruption out in the open with no accountability or justice.