They Couldn't Erase the Facts. Now DeSantis's Party Wants to Erase the Ad.

OpinionFlorida Accountability
Written By Joseph Jackson

This is an opinion column. Every factual claim in it is sourced below.

At 11:36 on a Friday night, the Republican Party of Florida walked into a courthouse in Sebring, in rural Highlands County, and asked a judge to take a political ad off television before anyone could argue against it. None of the people it was suing is based in Highlands County. Asked why the party filed there, its chairman, Evan Power, said he didn't know.

The ad is about Hope Florida. Its central claim is that $10 million from a Medicaid settlement ended up in a political committee run by James Uthmeier, who is now Florida's attorney general and on the ballot this fall. The party isn't just suing the Democrats who paid for the ad. It's suing the owners of 11 TV stations in Orlando and Tampa Bay, and on the same Friday its lawyers told station managers that broadcasting the ad is "criminal conduct in Florida."

Then it sent the matter to the cops. The referral letter went to FDLE Commissioner Larry Keefe, to state attorneys in 11 of Florida's 20 judicial circuits, and to Statewide Prosecutor Brad McVay. McVay works in the attorney general's office. So the man the ad criticizes runs the office that employs one of the prosecutors his party wants to look at the people who aired it.

You don't need a law degree to see the problem.

As of Monday afternoon, Oct. 19, no judge had ruled. The case was assigned to Circuit Judge Heather Beato, whom Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the bench in 2020.

What the ad says, and what the party wants

The spot is 30 seconds long, paid for by the Florida Democratic Party and approved by its three statewide candidates: David Jolly for governor, Jose Javier Rodriguez for attorney general and Annette Taddeo for chief financial officer. It says a leaked grand jury report found taxpayer money was moved into a political committee Uthmeier controlled, and that $10 million was misappropriated. It closes with three words: "conspiracy, concealment, corruption."

The Republican complaint asks for a lot. It wants a restraining order entered before the Democrats or the stations can respond. It wants temporary and then permanent injunctions. It wants a declaration that the stations cannot lawfully run the ad. And the order it proposes would reach past this one spot to bar any other ad "that relays the content, gist, or import" of the grand jury report.

The legal hook is a criminal statute on grand jury secrecy, Section 905.27. The party has to lean on that law because, as its own complaint concedes, federal rules give stations immunity from libel suits over candidate ads they're not allowed to censor. So instead of saying the ad is false, the party is saying the ad is a crime.

The Florida Trident, which reviewed the filing, found some problems with it. The caption names the wrong judicial circuit. A certification explaining why the defendants didn't need notice is referenced but missing. And the party attached to its own complaint the appellate opinion that itself describes the $10 million and the grand jury's "sophisticated scheme" finding, the same information the party says no one may broadcast.

Where the money went

Some of this story is documented in campaign-finance filings and court records and is not seriously disputed.

  • In September 2024, as DeSantis was fighting the marijuana legalization amendment, his Agency for Health Care Administration finalized a settlement with the Medicaid contractor Centene over overbilling. Draft terms had sent $67 million to the state. The final deal sent $57 million to the state and $10 million to the Hope Florida Foundation, the charity behind First Lady Casey DeSantis's signature initiative.
  • The foundation gave $5 million each to two nonprofits, Secure Florida's Future and Save Our Society From Drugs.
  • On Oct. 11, 2024, Uthmeier, then the governor's chief of staff, texted the head of Save Our Society From Drugs asking for "a quick call." According to the grand jury's account of her testimony, he encouraged her to apply for a Hope Florida grant and connected her with the foundation's lawyer.
  • Within weeks, the two nonprofits sent $8.5 million to Keep Florida Clean, the committee Uthmeier chaired to defeat the marijuana amendment.
  • According to the grand jury, Keep Florida Clean then sent $7 million to the Republican Party of Florida, which returned $2 million, and $1.23 million to the Florida Freedom Fund, another committee Uthmeier chaired.

Put plainly: money from a Medicaid settlement passed through a charity and two nonprofits into a political committee run by the governor's chief of staff, and from there into the party that is now asking a judge to keep you from hearing about it.

What the grand jury found, and what happened to it

A Leon County grand jury convened by State Attorney Jack Campbell spent months on this. Its 116-page presentment, filed under seal on Jan. 28, 2026, said the $10 million was misappropriated "as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities." It said Uthmeier was in a position of authority over the people who settled with Centene, that testimony identified him as involved in directing the money, and that his committee was its prime recipient. It said Moody, as attorney general at the time, authorized her chief deputy to sign the settlement.

It charged no one. The jurors wrote that no witness would take responsibility for the decision, and no one could remember who made it.

The report stayed secret until Aug. 26, when CBS News Miami published it in full, a day after the First District Court of Appeal had privately barred Campbell from discussing the case. Asked about the report by a News 6 reporter, Florida's top law enforcement officer responded with a question of his own: "Are you trying to solicit a crime here in violation of the law?"

On Oct. 7, the appeals court ordered the presentment expunged in its entirety. The opinion was written by Judge Lance Neff, whom DeSantis appointed in March. It held that the $10 million "was never public money" and that a grand jury may not condemn people by name without indicting them. According to the Trident's reading of the case, no party argued in the report's defense: Uthmeier was an appellant, and "the State" was represented by specially appointed counsel from his own office. The governor's office paid three law firms $327,170.50 in public money in the grand jury matter, according to invoices obtained by the Trident.

DeSantis called the scandal a "hoax" and said whoever leaked the report should be prosecuted. Uthmeier called the grand jury "weaponized."

Here is the honest scorecard:

  • Charged: No one. Not Uthmeier, not Moody, not Casey DeSantis. The grand jury said it lacked the evidence to indict.
  • Accused by name: State Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican who led the House investigation, has said he is "firmly convinced" Uthmeier and the foundation's lawyer engaged in a conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud. That is his accusation, which Uthmeier's office has called baseless. No court has made that finding.
  • Federal inquiry: The administration says the Justice Department dropped its look in February. DOJ has never confirmed that publicly.
  • IRS: The agency's Whistleblower Office acknowledged Andrade's claim in May. That does not mean an audit has been opened.
  • The leak: The appeals court has ordered Campbell to show cause why a special master should not investigate who leaked the report.

The appellate ruling is not the last word

The court said the grand jury had no business naming people it didn't indict. That is a ruling about what a grand jury may write. It says nothing about whether the money moved. It did, and the campaign-finance filings show it.

The opinion also leaves a hole. CBS News Miami, the Trident and Andrade have all pointed out that the state reimbursed the federal government for its share of the Centene settlement as if the $10 million were Medicaid money, which is hard to square with a holding that the money was never public. The court did not address the point.

Why the lawsuit is the real scandal

In my view, the lawsuit is worse than anything in that report, because it shows how this crowd treats information it doesn't like: as contraband.

The Republican theory is that once the appeals court expunged the report, saying out loud what was in it became a crime, and the crime extends to its "content, gist, or import." The report has been public since August. The appellate opinion the party attached to its own complaint describes the central findings. The U.S. Supreme Court already struck down part of this same statute in 1990, in a case about a reporter who wanted to write about his own grand jury testimony. And the appeals court itself, in a footnote, said it was expressing no view on whether the press could lawfully publish the report. Under the party's logic, Florida's courts, its newspapers and you, sharing this column, are all accessories.

The party wants the order entered without hearing from the other side. That is a prior restraint, which courts treat as the most serious form of censorship. It is aimed at core political speech about a candidate who is on the ballot, filed as early voting opens. The complaint openly worries that voters who cast ballots based on the ad can't recast them. That sentence is the whole case. Their problem isn't a crime. It's voters.

Nikki Fried, the Florida Democratic Party chair, called it "a cover-up with a filing fee." Barbara Petersen of the Florida Center for Government Accountability said she couldn't imagine people going to jail "because of a message that a political party doesn't want to hear." The party's lawyer, Michael Sasso, says the report and the ads are wrong on the law and the facts, and that broadcasting them is a crime.

We have seen this before

In October 2024, DeSantis's Department of Health sent cease-and-desist letters to TV stations airing an ad for the abortion-rights amendment, threatening misdemeanor prosecution. At least one station pulled the ad after the letters, the amendment's campaign said at the time. The department's former general counsel later swore in an affidavit that the letters arrived pre-written from a lawyer in the governor's office.

Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker shut it down with a restraining order and a line that should be framed in every office in Tallahassee: "To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it's the First Amendment, stupid." The chair of the Federal Communications Commission at the time called the threats dangerous.

Two years later the formula is the same. Threaten the broadcasters, invoke a criminal statute, and count on station lawyers to blink before a judge ever rules. The only change is that the party, rather than a state agency, is holding the pen.

The rest of the record fits the pattern:

  • Andrade complained in April 2025 that the administration was withholding Hope Florida records from the House.
  • Key witnesses declined to appear before his committee, and the probe was halted.
  • The governor's office told the Trident there were "no responsive public records that can lawfully be produced at this time" for invoices it was paying with your money.
  • The appeals court moved to silence the prosecutor in secret before the report ever became public.
  • When Andrade kept asking questions, Uthmeier's office urged anti-abortion groups to protest him. Andrade called it retribution.

Where I come down

This is a political operation that treats the First Amendment as an obstacle whenever the First Amendment gets inconvenient. DeSantis built the machine and spent public money defending it. Uthmeier chaired the committee that received the money and now runs the office that employs a prosecutor his party wants on the case. Moody's deputy signed the settlement at her direction, and she still says her office had no knowledge of how the funds would be spent. The Republican Party of Florida took the money and now wants a judge to keep you from hearing about it.

None of them has been charged with a crime, and I'm not claiming they committed one. I'm saying something simpler and fully supported by the record: when the people with power over prosecutors start calling journalism and campaign ads crimes, the threat to Florida isn't the ad.

Every station on that list should keep the spot on the air. Judge Beato should deny the order. And every voter should ask why, for two straight Octobers, the answer to an uncomfortable question has been a lawyer, a seal, or a threat.

Sources

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