DeSantis praises order to expunge Hope Florida report

Audio By Carbonatix

(The Center Square) – Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday the First District Court of Appeal delivered a “judicial smackdown” by ordering the leaked grand jury report expunged that accused his administration of misappropriating $10 million.

In an opinion published Wednesday, Judge James Lee Marsh said that while a grand jury can investigate and report, “it may not declare conduct unlawful and then decline to charge it, and it may not condemn people by name without indicting them.”

The leaked report said the DeSantis administration misappropriated $10 million in Medicaid settlement funds and funneled them through Hope Florida, an organization run by first lady Casey DeSantis, and then to a political committee controlled by Attorney General James Uthmeier.

However, the grand jury did not indict anyone despite naming individuals in its report.

“This process is now culminated in what I think is probably the biggest judicial smackdown that I have ever seen in my entire career as an elected official. All the narratives crash and burn with this opinion by the First District Court of Appeals,” said DeSantis.

He said the judge’s opinion confirms that saying the funds were misappropriated was a lie.

“That’s not a correct statement of the law. They said the grand jury report tried to have it both ways because they tried to say misappropriation in a legal sense but then they say, ‘Well, we don’t have enough evidence, we think the law should be changed.’ This opinion calls them on that and it absolutely destroys them. So as a matter of law, what they are saying is that ACHA, our health care agency, entered into a pre-suit settlement and fully complied with the law. There is not a way to view Florida law and the facts of this case and find a ‘misappropriation,’” the governor said.

The judge said the $10 million in question that was provided to Hope Florida was never public money.

“While some may question the propriety of settlements with payments to third parties, the Florida Legislature has not made such action illegal, as the grand jury’s recommendations implicitly acknowledge,” the judge wrote.

On Thursday, DeSantis accused “self-interested cabals” in the Florida Legislature of working to weaponize the legal system.

“There were a lot of really good people that got dragged in,” said DeSantis.

It’s unclear who leaked the grand jury report. The governor said the only crime was the report getting illegally leaked and called for whoever did it to be held accountable.

“Whoever leaked this report needs to be prosecuted. If you leaked the report, you violated the law knowingly, willfully, or at least recklessly. And there were people in that report who are private citizens, there are people in that report who are midlevel government employees who should have never been subjected to this. They never had an opportunity to have the law followed,” said DeSantis.