Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is refusing to say if he is trying to block the release of a grand jury report into the Hope Florida scandal.
Uthmeier was asked several times during a press conference in Miami this week whether he had formally requested that the judge overseeing the grand jury keep the findings secret.
“I don’t think anybody cares about this topic any more than the liberal media,” he said. “Again, there was a grand jury proceeding under Florida law; the contents thereof are confidential. That’s not my choice. That is Florida law. What I can tell you is I have not been indicted. I’ve not been a suspect or a target. I have not been involved in any criminal activity. Nobody did anything wrong here.”
Last year, a grand jury was empaneled in Leon County to investigate possible criminal wrongdoing after the DeSantis administration secretly diverted $10 million from a Medicaid settlement with the state into the Hope Florida Foundation. That taxpayer money eventually ended up in a political action committee controlled by Uthmeier and used as part of the governor’s campaign against the marijuana amendment in 2024.
At the time the funds were diverted, Uthmeier was DeSantis’ chief of staff. DeSantis later appointed Uthmeier to be the state’s Attorney General, replacing Ashley Moody, who had been appointed to the United States Senate.
Uthmeier will face voters for the first time this November.
It appears the grand jury probe wrapped earlier this year, and normally, the grand jury’s findings would be made public so that citizens could learn what happened and outline exactly what actions Uthmeier took. The report would also likely include recommendations to avoid similar missteps.
“It’s very unusual for these reports to be redacted for that reason,” said Miami Herald reporter Alexandra Glorioso, who, along with Lawrence Mower of the Tampa Bay Times, broke the story about Hope Florida. “The cases that we reviewed and the legal opinions that we reviewed on these grand jury presentments really favor releasing these reports
But the report hasn’t been released, leaving some to wonder if some of the people named in the report – like Uthmeier – have secretly petitioned the court in Tallahassee to keep the report locked away so that no one can ever see it.
“The attorney general has never answered questions about what exactly was his role in this whole thing,” Mower said. “He appears to have been involved from literally the very beginning of the [Medicaid] settlement, and his political committee was obviously the one getting most of that $10 million. So, there are serious questions here. Who was involved? Who did what? What did he do? I think a lot of people want to know. And of course, at this point, this is an election issue and a lot of people think, this should be released in time for that election.”
Uthmeier declined a request to be interviewed by CBS News Miami. His opponent in the November election, Democrat Jose Javier Rodriguez, blasted Uthmeier’s refusal to directly answer the question.
“First of all, as attorney general, I would focus on tackling costs and tackling corruption,” he told CBS Miami’s Jim DeFede during an appearance on Facing South Florida. “This attorney general is focused on being part of the corruption and part of the cover-up. And the most he can say is that he is not currently under indictment. I mean, that’s not the kind of thing you want to hear from the chief legal officer.”
Uthmeier’s claim that nobody cares about how $10 million of taxpayer money was used as part of a dark-money campaign to influence an election is itself fairly revealing, Javier Rodriguez said.
