Florida’s Governor is firing back as the Hope Florida Foundation funding controversy now involves a freshly launched criminal probe.
Speaking in Winter Haven, Gov. Ron DeSantis said First Lady Casey DeSantis didn’t get “one red cent” from the $10 million routed toward political advertising last year. That money came from what he called the “cherry on top” from a Medicaid settlement with provider Centene.
“You had one state Representative with a political agenda,” DeSantis said about Republican Rep. Alex Andrade. “He has a political agenda to try to smear Hope Florida, to try to smear people associated with the administration, even my wife, who’s done a great job for this state.”
Andrade’s House Health Care Budget Subcommittee probed the finances that saw the $10 million go to the Hope Florida Foundation before being routed through two political committees last year.
From there, the bulk of it was sent to another committee controlled by James Uthmeier, who was the Governor’s Chief of Staff and is now the appointed Attorney General. Uthmeier called the eight-figure bonus a “sweetener.”
“She has led an initiative to help people, and you have one jackass in the Legislature … who’s trying to smear her,” DeSantis added. “Somebody with an agenda dropped off documents, and that’s all that custodian of record said. There is no basis to do an investigation on these facts. Everybody knows it. Everybody knows that this is political.”
The Governor wasn’t finished slamming Andrade, saying he “cast aspersions” at the Attorney General and tried “to enlist a local attorney’s office into trying to advance” Andrade’s “political agenda.”
“I’m used to the Left and the media, you know, shooting and lying and doing all that. How pathetic is it that we have a Republican Representative who’s engaging in lawfare to try to advance a political agenda? It stinks and everybody knows it,” DeSantis said, before using military slang to call the situation a “Charlie Foxtrot.”
DeSantis has offered more legalistic defenses of the unusual transactions, saying the foundation “acted totally appropriately.”
Uthmeier has said “the media misunderstands the difference between issue committees and political candidate committees under the IRS code.”
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