Could it be that Florida first lady Casey DeSantis committed wire fraud as well as laundering money? Billy Corben asked Alexandria Glorioso and Lawrence Mower from the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times about it. Billy also asked Florida state representative Alex Andrade, who questioned the potential illegal activity on the dais. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Hope Florida Foundation and how did it receive $10 million?
State lawmakers asking tough questions about how $10 million was funneled into a nonprofit called Hope Florida and not into a state bank account. The charity was spearheaded by First Lady Casey DeSantis. The money was baked into a $67 million settlement between health giant Centene and the Agency for Healthcare Administration. $57 million went back to taxpayers.
$10 million went to Hope Florida, a welfare assistance program to help people become less reliant on taxpayer-funded programs.
Cash quickly went out the door to two nonprofits for $5 million grants and promises that the money would be used to further hope Florida's mission, not politics.
Chapter 2: How was the $10 million settlement money allegedly diverted?
But those nonprofits later gave millions to a political committee fighting and defeating last year's recreational weed amendment, Keep Florida Clean, a group chaired by former DeSantis Chief of Staff turned Attorney General James Uthmeyer.
Follow the money. That was the great lesson from Deep Throat in the movie version of All the President's Men. I don't think that happened in real life, but it was a great line that the screenwriter came up with. And that has been sort of the mantra of every investigative reporter, particularly in political corruption stories. And no different here.
Chapter 3: Who are the key reporters breaking this story and what did they find?
Over the last like 10 days or so, this story has metastasized into a full-blown story.
scandal here in the state of Florida and turn the Republican Party against each other into this wild kind of internal battle between what appears to be kind of the Trump Republicans versus really the DeSantis is by themselves, both the governor, Ron DeSantis, and the first lady, Casey DeSantis, who's planning a run for governor in twenty twenty six.
And this Hope Florida Foundation has been like her pet project as the Florida first lady. And it's turning into a possible investigation into money laundering and wire fraud. And I just this is a crazy story. And the Woodward and Bernstein of this story are Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times reporters who cover this.
the state capitol in Tallahassee, Florida, Alexandra Glorioso and Lawrence Mower, who are joining us now. And they broke this story about this, we'll call it questionable. When I say questionable, I mean possibly illegal $10 million donation to Casey DeSantis' foundation. First up, Alexandra, what is it that you guys first found that kind of
led you to ask this question here about like, what was this money? Where did it come from? Was it legal? What what happened initially?
So I got a copy of Meeting Minutes from October, 2024. And this is a charity sanctioned by the state in state law. So the Meeting Minutes are supposed to be public, but they haven't been. So when I saw the Meeting Minutes, I was really intrigued. And what the Meeting Minutes said was that there was a $10 million allocation
to the foundation due to a longstanding dispute between what eventually came out was the State Agency for Healthcare Administration and the state's largest Medicaid contractor, Centene, which had been overbilling the state for prescription drugs, essentially. And they were settling over it.
You know, we didn't know everything when we got those minutes, but we knew that the foundation was getting $10 million. And that was the first donation that we knew about to the foundation because everything has been so secretive.
And this was a settlement between the state and this provider of which the money was, I guess, supposed to go to the state. But this $10 million was kind of diverted to the First Lady's foundation. Generally speaking, does this foundation take in that kind of money? Do they commonly get multi, multi-million dollar donations like of this size?
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Chapter 4: What is the connection between the Hope Florida Foundation and political committees?
Well, we don't exactly know the legal ramifications yet, but, you know, something that was noted in the committee on Wednesday is that, you know, there was a SAVE rep who runs a charity and asked, you know, why was there no press release about this? You know, usually when people give to charities, there's a big press release. They have letterhead everywhere.
You know, the 501c4 that got $5 million, the one that's controlled by the Chamber of Commerce, Mark Wilson, that grant application says that we will not disclose where the money came from, which also was noted in the committee.
And that also seems very strange considering, you know, usually if a charity is giving out money like that, they want a press release, they want their name on letterhead, they want promotional activities, you know, based on it. They want the recipient to say, hey, we got this money from the United Way or something like that. And none of that was done here.
And so, yeah, certainly to some lawmakers, that's highly suspicious.
And I will say just minutes before this interview began, breaking news, the executive director of Hope Florida Foundation resigned. Eric Dellenbach, after just three months on the job, is now, I guess, scapegoats going to scapegoat. Is that who is ultimately responsible for this? This guy?
No. I mean, the people who are responsible for Hope Florida are the DeSantis's. I mean, this is a vision of Casey DeSantis. She wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about it. And, you know, Eric Dellenbeck, however, has been very central to their mission, which is to essentially integrate church and state. You know, there's an office of
Faith counsel that they're trying to enshrine into law, and he has been the liaison from DeSantis to the faith community essentially since he assumed office. The fact that he is gone now is pretty significant, I think.
And I'll note that, you know, in the committee last week, the head of, you know, the agency for basically the longtime previous secretary for DCF, which is kind of running the Hope Florida operation, was asked repeatedly, who's in charge of Hope Florida? There's nobody in charge. And none of the people could answer that anyone was in charge. They didn't think anyone was in charge.
Meanwhile, this guy has had the title since January. So, no, he's probably not the one who's been orchestrating all this.
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Chapter 5: What are the potential legal issues involved with the money flow?
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Still have no idea why this was justified. I have very strong beliefs that this was not legal.
Lawmakers were shocked over a number of revelations made in a committee hearing today. What are y'all doing with the $10 million?
That is a question for the foundation. That's a question for ACA.
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Chapter 6: How did lawmakers react to the revelations about Hope Florida's finances?
You are an officer of the court. You're an attorney. And so when you use these terms, you talk about I've heard you reference a possible conspiracy to use Medicaid money for campaign activity. You've just said, you know, wire fraud, money laundering. I mean, these are some pretty serious allegations. But and you do so, though, from a point of view of someone who understands what that means.
What evidence so far, if any, do you have to indicate that those alleged crimes might have occurred here?
Well, when James Uthmeyer involved himself in the settlement with Centene and he directed that $10 million go to a 501c3, and then he immediately, personally, we have text messages and phone call records showing that he personally reached out to these two dark money groups, told them to ask for this money.
and the second those two groups got the money wired to them it ended up in his pack so he's been he's involved at every step of the way in this process and and that's where you get into this kind of conspiracy he knew it was medicaid money when it was part of the settlement he knew it was a tax deductible donation to a charity when it went to the charity
And then he knew that the second these two dark money groups would receive the money, they would send it to him and his pack. Shoot, if if he was acting in a, you know, above board manner, he would have raised red flags, said, hey, literally last week I told you guys to ask for millions of dollars from this charity. Now you're sending me money. Please tell me it's not the same money.
He didn't do that. In fact, he's he's proud of it. He gave statements today saying essentially the ends justify the means. And, you know, he's fighting for kids because he fought against Amendment 3.
This is what I call the whisper test. Does it pass the whisper test? And what we do with the whisper test is we whisper something to describe something. And we'll say, like, for example, like, let me tell you what I'm going to do, Roy. I'm going to raise some money, millions of dollars, and I'm going to donate it to a charity that helps children in underserved communities.
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Chapter 7: What are the political implications within the Florida GOP regarding this scandal?
Yeah, why are you whispering? Right, why are we whispering? That doesn't sound the least bit suspicious. But now, Roy, let me tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to divert $10 million in a Medicaid settlement into the charity of the first lady of the state of Florida.
And then I'm going to immediately send out $5 million each donations into these political dark committees that we're going to use for political advertising, one of which is actually run by the then chief of staff of the governor. That sounds like some shady shit. It does not pass the whisper test. It's like, wait a second, no, that sounds like you should be whispering that.
That sounds mighty shady and mighty suspicious. And mighty illegal. And mighty possibly, allegedly illegal. So what do we even know, representative, about this charity, Hope Florida Foundation? Co-founded, if not outright founded, by Casey DeSantis, Ron DeSantis' wife, a presumptive gubernatorial candidate in 2026 here in the state of Florida. What do they do? How much money have they ever raised?
Ten million dollars sounds like a lot of money to get in one fell swoop. Two five million dollar grants sounds like a lot of outgoing money from an organization like this. What do they do? What do we know about them? What is their kind of public facing filings and reputation? And what is this all about?
It's been a black hole. So they've never filed a Form 990 as a charity, meaning they've never reported to the IRS how much money they've raised or how much money they've distributed. Based on information that we now have, other than this $10 million dark money Medicaid fund transfer fund,
They'd only raised about $2 million in total, and they'd doled out about $500,000 to charities in the form of like $10,000, $20,000, and $30,000 grants to charities around the state. So those donations, those $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 donations, those went through a process at the Florida Department of Children and Families.
The state agency had to review those grant applications, had to sign off on them, make sure that they were above board and everything like that. In the instance of the $10 million that went to these two dark money groups and then both of those dark money groups sending it to James's PAC, there was no review by DCF.
We found out yesterday that DCF wasn't even told that this $10 million was going into this bank account. It's shocking to me that the state's attorney general couldn't even cover his tracks better. Yeah.
Do you honestly believe that's credible? I mean, this is the problem now. The guy can't even crime right. Guy can't even crime straight. I mean, like you'd hope that the attorney general would be able to cover up his criming a little bit more efficiently. Let me ask you this.
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Chapter 8: What are the next steps in the investigation and what new evidence has emerged?
I'm looking at some of the the donors to this organization from what we do know from like its first year, I think I have here. And it looks like. They're like all state contractors. Is it a conflict of interest for companies who do business with the state like this? Do they feel pressured to donate to a Casey DeSantis pet project?
You've got companies here like Simply Healthcare, Centene, who was the company that was responsible for that initial $67 million Medicaid settlement, $10 million of which was diverted to this organization. But you've got Medicaid companies who...
who just got re-procurement, who got multi-billion dollar, multi-year contracts with the state of Florida, who seem to be the only people really donating to this charity to begin with.
I would say there's nothing necessarily untoward about contractors wanting to curry favor with the governor's office, right? It's probably in their best financial interest to try and develop a good relationship with the governor's office however they can. I mean, we have state contractor vendors that make campaign donations to campaign accounts all the time.
The issue here is that, yeah, I have heard reports, a lot of reports, about pressure on people to make donations and pressure on vendors of the state to make contributions to the Florida Foundation. And depending on how that message was conveyed and how much pressure was applied, that would be a problem. But I don't have the information right now to say whether or not that happened.
Now, the governor, Ron DeSantis, has been forced into responding to this because your investigation has been ongoing. It has been kind of metastasizing this scandal. I think you're at least your second subcommittee meeting about this. You have another one coming up next week.
He has been forced to respond in a series of press conferences, including one in your district that he seemed to program or schedule as counter-programming to your most recent subcommittee meeting at like exactly the same time.
to the governor this is a manufactured hoax and you have liberal media and liberal democrats pushing this and we have some of these leaders in the florida house who are stabbing their constituents in the back to try to sabotage all the great success that florida's had none of these republican leaders got elected on the platform that they were going to launch baseless attacks against the governor and first lady
Shame on you in the Florida House and your terrible behavior and leadership. Some people feel threatened by the first lady. Let's just be clear about that. They know this is that you saw her up here. You know, if you're if you're looking at, you know, like 2026 and and you've got, you know, some some horse that you don't want to you don't want her anywhere near that.
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