The net tightens around key figures in the Hope Florida scandal

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Source: The Florida Channel

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

On Sept. 10 of last year, shortly before voting began in Florida’s 2024 elections, aides to Gov. Ron DeSantis scheduled a briefing to discuss, among other things, a $67 million settlement offer from a prescription drug-contractor that had overbilled Medicaid, the public health insurance program for the poor and disabled.

By the next day, records show, administration staffers proposed a plan to siphon some of that settlement money away from the state treasury and put it instead into a charitable foundation closely associated with the governor’s wife.

And within about a month, that money — $10 million in total — had been filtered through the Hope Florida Foundation to a pair of dark-money nonprofits that in turn pumped millions of dollars into a political committee controlled by the governor’s chief of staff.

An email showing staffers in the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration preparing for a Sept. 10 briefing with the Executive Officer of the Governor.

The detailed timeline and rapid turnaround were revealed last week by the Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times and Orlando Sentinel, which obtained hundreds of pages of public records related to the Hope Florida scandal — a scandal in which $10 million of public Medicaid settlement money appears to have been converted into cash for a campaign DeSantis waged last fall against a constitutional amendment that would have legalized recreational marijuana in Florida.

The timing here is important.

The new records show that the DeSantis administration began discussing a potential settlement with Centene Corp. — the contractor caught overbilling Medicaid programs around the country — as eary as July 2021.

That’s when outside attorneys approached senior aides in the Governor’s Office pitching a prearranged deal with company for precisely $67,048,611.46.

Centene Corp. offered to pay Florida $67 million to settle Medicaid overbilling claims as early as July 2021.

But the issue languished, unresolved, for more than four years — until September 2024, just as DeSantis was gearing up for line-crossing campaigns against both the marijuana amendment and a second ballot measure would have overturned a statewide abortion ban.

September 2024 is the same month that the DeSantis administration began spending millions of dollars in Florida taxpayer money on television advertisements attacking the marijuana and ballot measures. It’s also the same month that DeSantis aides turned another publicly funded nonprofit into a tool for their anti-abortion campaign.

After stagnating for years, the settlement talks with Centene suddenly started moving with lightning speed once the DeSantis administration proposed diverting a portion of the proceeds to the Hope Florida Foundation, a nonprofit that the administration had created as part of a welfare initiative spearheaded by First Lady Casey DeSantis.

Records show an attorney for the Agency for Health Care Administration formally presented the concept to Centene on Sept. 13. The deal was done two weeks days later.

The general counsel for Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration sent Centene Corp. a revised settlement agreement proposing a portion of the money be diverted to the Hope Florida Foundation on Sept. 13.

The final settlement was for $67,048,611 — the same amount, down to the dollar — that Centene had first proposed all the way back in the summer of 2021.

Except now Centene had to pay $10 million of it to the Hope Florida Foundation.

The final settlement agreement required Centene to make a $10 million “donation” to the Hope Florida Foundation.

The money didn’t stay there long. The Hope Florida Foundation immediately passed the $10 million to a pair of dark-money nonprofits — giving $5 million each to “Secure Florida’s Future,” an organization controlled by executives at the Florida Chamber of Commerce, and “Save Our Society From Drugs,” an advocacy group founded by a late Republican Party megadonor.

And those two groups subsequently donated $8.5 million to “Keep Florida Clean,” a political committee that had been set up to fight the marijuana ballot measure — and that was personally controlled by DeSantis’ then-chief of staff, James Uthmeier.

The new records also cinch Uthmeier — whom DeSantis has since elevated to attorney general of Florida — even more tightly to the affair.

Emails and calendar entries show that Uthmeier was deeply involved in the Centene settlement discussions, at least early on. “This is definitely on our list for follow-up,” he wrote in a June 2022 email to a lobbyist for one of the outside law firms that had been brought in to help with the case.

Uthmeier insists he had nothing to do with the specific decision to insert the Hope Florida donation into the final Centene settlement. “I was not involved in the settlement negotiations related to the Hope Florida contribution,” he told reporters earlier this year.

That is — to put it mildly — implausible.

Just to recap: While James Uthmeier was serving as Ron DeSantis’ chief of staff, staffers working under him arranged to have $10 million diverted from a sensitive legal settlement — a legal settlement that Uthmeier was, at least early on, directly involved with.

That $10 million was diverted into a charitable foundation — a charitable foundation that was personally and politically important to Uthmeier’s bosses, Ron and Casey DeSantis.

And that foundation promptly passed the $10 million onto a pair of dark-money groups that were providing funding to an anti-marijuana political committee — a political committee that Uthmeier himself controlled.

What’s more, Uthmeier seems to have known in advance that this cash was coming.

The executive director of Save Our Society From Drugs — one of the two dark-money groups that got $5 million “grants” from Hope Florida right after Hope Florida got $10 million from the Centene settlement — later said that Uthmeier instructed her to ask Hope Florida for the money. She told that to state Rep. Alex Andrade, a Republican from Pensacola who presided over a series of Hope Florida oversight hearings earlier this year.

And she provided Andrade with text messages that show Uthmeier reached out her before the Hope Florida Foundation’s own board of directors was formally notified of the $10 million coming from the Centene settlement.

The good news is that we may yet get more clarity on who ultimately orchestrated this scheme. That’s because the independently elected state attorney in Tallahassee has opened an investigation into the scandal.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.

Make Nemik proud

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Everyone wanted CYA clauses

Lawyers in Hope Florida Medicaid settlement distanced clients from rushed deal (Miami Herald) ($)

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From the guy who once called himself a Teddy Roosevelt Republican

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