Florida House ending Hope Florida investigation after witnesses decline to testify
House lawmakers are ending their probe into Gov. Ron DeSantis' Hope Florida Foundation without hearing testimony from the organization's lawyer or leaders of two groups that got $5 million grants from the charity.
Rep. Alex Andrade, the Pensacola Republican who has been spearheading the investigation, said Thursday that he believed Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and the charity's lawyer, Jeff Aaron, committed criminal acts when they moved $10 million from a Medicaid overbilling settlement to the foundation.
The foundation gave the money to two other nonprofits, which then gave $8.5 million to a political committee controlled by Uthmeier.
But Andrade said his committee wouldn't be the ones to prosecute them. The legislative session is scheduled to end next week.
'While I'm firmly convinced that James Uthmeier and Jeff Aaron engaged in a conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud, and that several parties played a role in the misuse of $10 million in Medicaid funds, we as legislators will not be the ones making the ultimate charging decisions,' Andrade told lawmakers Thursday.
'I believe our work on this topic in this capacity as a subcommittee will be concluded,' he added.
The $10 million came from the state Medicaid contractor Centene as part of a $67 million legal settlement for overbilling for prescription drugs. State officials 'directed' the company in September to donate the money to the Hope Florida Foundation.
Over the next three weeks, the foundation board held a secret meeting to award $5 million of it to a 501(c)(4) overseen by Florida Chamber of Commerce CEO Mark Wilson, and the board's chairperson awarded another $5 million to St. Petersburg-based Save Our Society from Drugs. The groups don't have to disclose their donors.
Both those groups then sent nearly all the money to a political committee overseen by Uthmeier, who was then the governor's chief of staff. The committee was created to defeat Amendment 3, the failed ballot initiative that tried to legalize recreational marijuana.
Text messages showed Uthmeier told the leader of Save Our Society from Drugs, Amy Ronshausen, to apply for the money.
'There's no question that these were Medicaid funds steered by the governor's chief of staff through secret and clandestine actions to his own political committee,' Andrade told lawmakers Thursday.
Andrade said earlier this month that he was going to issue a subpoena to Uthmeier, but backed off the threat the next day. He still has numerous requests for records, including text messages and call logs, outstanding with DeSantis' agencies.
'The Governor's office WANTS this to become a spectacle to distract from the real issues,' Andrade said in a text message afterward. 'I know what I need to know as a legislator, and it's up to the FBI and DOJ (Department of Justice) to care about fighting public corruption.'
He added that 'next session I'll be working on policy fixes to address the obvious public corruption exhibited by James Uthmeier.'
Wilson and Ronshausen said they would testify before Thursday's committee, but both backed out minutes before it began, Andrade said. Aaron initially said he could attend a hearing Friday, but he, too, backed out.
Each cited legal or confidentiality issues.
Aaron wrote Andrade that not all Hope Florida Foundation board members had waived their attorney-client privilege.
Wilson wrote Andrade that further 'inquiry' into his organization's involvement in using the money to fight the legalization of recreational marijuana 'would infringe bedrock associational rights, undermining the organization and chilling its constitutionally protected conduct.'
Ronshausen wrote she wanted to 'preserve all privileges on behalf' of her organization, 'legally or otherwise.'
'Doing so is even more necessary now as, the one time I was asked to speak 'off the record' with a member of this Committee, I was assured it would remain confidential,' Ronshausen said in her 7:47 a.m. email to Andrade.
Andrade told reporters after the committee that the parent organization of Save Our Society From Drugs — Drug Free America — 'feels misled by Jeff Aaron and James Uthmeier.'
'They've activated their insurance policy. They're concerned about liability. They're taking steps to rectify that, and they've already provided some documents in response to our request for documents,' Andrade said.
Andrade could convene a special committee to compel Ronshausen and Wilson to testify, but he said the record already showed the $10 million was funneled to Uthmeier's political committee to fight Amendment 3. He spent several minutes Thursday reciting the timeline of the scandal.
'I gave a summary just now that's pretty succinct and backed up by facts,' Andrade said. 'I'll leave the rest of the investigation up to the FBI and Department of Justice.'
Rep. Debra Tendrich, a Lake Worth Democrat who serves on the committee, said she had hoped to ask basic questions about the money, such as who told Wilson to request the $5 million.
Tendrich, who runs her own nonprofit, noted the grant was never advertised, and she said she wondered why Wilson's organization wrote on its grant application that it would 'not voluntarily disclose' that it received the money. Both are highly unusual for nonprofits.
She said taxpayers deserved to have answers about what was done with the money.
'Not showing up, it implicates them that they had some wrongdoing in this,' Tendrich said.
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