- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

♪♪ - Coming up, a sealed grand jury report on Hope Florida is now public.

It found millions in taxpayer money were misused for politics, but it also found insufficient evidence to charge anyone.

The Florida Attorney General's office has appointed response of its own.

On the road to the midterms, Republican Byron Donalds has named his running mate in the race for governor, and the U.S.

Supreme Court has cleared the way for new restrictions on mail in voting nationwide.

How are election officials in Florida interpreting the ruling?

Plus, kindergarten vaccine exemptions are higher in Florida than most states.

A U.S.

virologist joins us to discuss what that could mean for community health.

All that and more is next on Florida This Week.

♪♪ Welcome back to Florida This Week, I'm Lisette Campos joining us today, we have Rochelle Shelley Rebak, criminal defense attorney, voting rights advocate, and a member of the Democratic Party.

Jake Hoffman, Florida national committeeman for the Young Republicans.

Divya Kumar, who is the education reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, and Dr.

Michael Teng of USF Health.

He's a virologist and a researcher in the Division of Allergy and Immunology at the University of South Florida College of Medicine.

We begin with big developments in the Hope Florida Foundation controversy.

A sealed grand jury report into the foundation was obtained and released by CBS News Miami.

Hope Florida is the signature charity of Casey DeSantis.

The report answers a question that we've been asking on Florida This Week for months.

What happened to $10 million that was supposed to go to help Florida families?

Centene overbilled Florida's Medicaid program years ago.

Then a settlement sat until September of 2020, four weeks before the general election when the state finalized the deal.

In it, $57 million went to the state and 10 million carved out for the Hope Florida Foundation was paid out in just seven days.

Within weeks, it was split between two nonprofits that had promised in writing not to use it for politics.

Most of it ended up at a committee called Keep Florida Clean, chaired by James Uthmeier.

Then the governor's chief of staff and now the attorney general.

The committee's mission was to defeat a marijuana ballot measure and sent millions to the Republican Party of Florida.

The grand jury found that money was misappropriated, end quote, misused for political purposes.

But the grand jury report also states that it found insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally.

No witnesses took responsibility for the original decision not to place all the Medicaid settlement in state coffers.

Testimony did tie Uthmeier to what happened next, directing a nonprofit leader to apply for the grant that later funded his committee.

Then Attorney General Ashley Moody, now a U.S.

Senator, was told about the Hope Florida payment and authorized her deputy, John Gard, to sign.

Governor DeSantis is not named in the findings.

Asked about the report at a press conference, he said he wasn't involved in the negotiations and is pleased with how it was handled.

- Well, the only crime that was apparent was whoever leaked the grand jury report.

I mean, there the settlement that ACA did was legally sound.

It was appropriate and advanced the interests of state.

- Uthmeier's office did not address the report's findings, instead focusing on how CBS Miami obtained the sealed report.

- Nobody did anything wrong here.

There was not even probable cause to move forward.

- Misappropriated, but no charges.

That's the wording of the grand jury report.

I'd like to bring in the panel.

Shelly and Jake.

How do you see all of this?

- Well, you know, another word for misappropriating is stealing.

This money was stolen from needy children's health care programs in the state of Florida.

It was stolen.

Let's be clear about that.

And I would like to see the transcripts of this grand jury where the legal advisor advised the members of the grand jury what evidence they would need in order to make charges or what evidence they didn't have to come up with charges because I spent 30 years as a criminal defense attorney defending the defendants in much more sophisticated fraud cases than this.

It seems clear to me that charges could have come out of this.

And one thing that I'm very encouraged by is the fact that David Jolly, the candidate for governor from the Democratic side, he has said that he would reopen the investigation when he's elected governor.

- Well, CBS News Miami knew that they would, of course, have pushback on the reporting on this.

And so they released the document.

And so our viewers can certainly read it in full.

And nowhere in the document do they use the word stealing.

They do use the word misappropriated.

- Yeah.

I think it's in the dictionary though, Lissette.

I think it's in the dictionary, as are the, the, thesaurus that another word for misappropriating is diverting or stealing from an appropriate source.

So the other thing I want to be clear on is the report doesn't include the instructions that the legal adviser, the prosecutor advising the grand jury would have given to them to explain what they had to find in order to charge anyone with crime.

- But there is quite a bit in there.

Jake, how do you see it?

- Well, I think I have a very unique perspective on this one, because I was the political director on the amendment three campaign as a Republican, as a conservative, as someone who supports the governor.

And on the other side of this campaign, we knew that money was coming from places that were not where it should be.

And this was something that we got attacked over that I got personally attacked over by the governor's office and the now attorney general and their office as well.

So if they want me to come out and defend them on this, it's going to be a little tough.

This money obviously was moved from somewhere that it was intended to go, and then it was brought in and done to stop an amendment on the ballot in a couple of years ago.

And it's not like this is something new, because this was something that was being used and probably still is used quite a bit at the federal level.

This was going on a lot under Obama, and there was a congressman named Ron DeSantis, who filed a bill to try to close this loophole for settlements where that were then being turned around and used in political campaigns or issue based campaigns and things like that.

So they knew exactly what they were doing.

It's been done, and it's now it's happened in Florida.

I would love to see a bill come in the state of Florida that prevents this type of thing from happening again.

But again, it's been very difficult in a supermajority Republican state to get anything done about this, because who is going to prosecute it?

The AG who is at the center of this.

- And.

- And the grand jury report does, does make suggestions so that this cannot happen again.

There there specific verbatim.

They say despite our finding that the money was misappropriated, we find insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally.

Um, you know, this is it's interesting to see the characters that the people who were interviewed by the grand jury and those that were not James Uthmeier was not brought in.

Um, we had Ashley Moody was not brought in.

Governor DeSantis was not brought in, and at no point in the grand jury it says, did they hear anyone give a specific tie to the governor.

However, James Uthmeier's name does come in quite a bit.

- Yeah, but and then everyone involved in this directly involved got kicked upstairs.

Meyer was the chief of staff to governor DeSantis at the time this occurred, and he was then appointed the attorney general, who was the chief law enforcement officer for the state.

Ashley Moody was appointed to the Senate, and her deputy, who signed off on this misappropriation, John Gard became a second district Court of Appeals judge.

So everybody involved got kicked upstairs.

- In the grand jury report, it does state that Ashley Moody knew that the money was going to hope Florida.

However, it did not state that there's any indication that she knew that it was going to then be diverted to two political action committees, but that's.

- Different.

She authorized that the way the money was moved through her deputy, John Gard.

- From the Medicaid settlement to the Hope Florida Foundation.

- And and let me say that this is there's a reason why charges were brought.

I mean, there's probably some political reasons why they weren't brought.

But part of it is because that there is still loopholes that exist for this type of thing.

When when this these settlements come in, which is a whole nother issue, by the way, that they're overbilling and that they have to give all this money back to the state in the first place.

But there are loopholes.

And again, it's happening at the state level.

It's happening at the federal level.

It's happening for a long time.

And so that's why it's up for interpretation.

And again, I'm not a legal expert.

I'm not a lawyer.

And I, I don't really know exactly how it works, but I can tell you that it's not so black and white as to what it can go be used for.

And if they were going to go to court, they would make the argument that this was being used to fight, you know, drugs and everything.

But again, that interpretation is then that it was done to stop a ballot measure involving marijuana.

- Let's not forget that these were two citizen initiatives.

The citizens of Florida put those initiatives on the ballot and then voted a majority approving both of these political initiatives.

- I wanted it passed.

I was trying.

- You know, the marijuana, the marijuana Initiative and the Abortion Rights Initiative.

These are things that citizens in the state of Florida want.

It's clear a majority voted for them, although it didn't reach the 61%.

A majority voted for them.

And we have our governing our governor and his, uh, his regime working against the desires of the citizens of Florida.

Let's not forget that.

- Well, we're going to turn now to the governor's race, which is another big item on the agenda.

Republican Byron Donalds has made his pick for lieutenant governor.

Donalds named State Senator Bryan Avila of Miami-Dade County as his running mate on Tuesday.

Avila is the son of Cuban exiles.

He has served in the Florida Legislature since 2014 and is the captain in the Florida Army National Guard.

Democratic nominee David Jolly is running alongside Gwen Graham.

She is the daughter of former governor and U.S.

Senator Bob Graham.

Jolly said in a statement that the race, he believes, will not come down to Byron's relationship with Avila in the Cuban community, but rather Byron's relationship with Donald Trump.

I'd like to ask you, Jake, what can you tell us about Avila?

- Well, I think he's a very good pick in this situation.

I think that you want someone from South Florida.

That's great.

You know, Byron Donalds has been representing the other side of South Florida, which is definitely Naples is very different than Miami.

And so the fact that you're able to get somebody that's a, you know, Cuban American, that is someone who speaks Spanish, someone that's going to be able to talk to that that demographic that is increasingly voting Republican in the state of Florida.

David Jolly can talk all he wants about how it's going to be a referendum on Trump.

And to some extent, there will be.

But I'm excited as a Republican, that we get to go and we get to vote in for the first the first black governor of the state of Florida, and that I have a bunch of Democrats who are now going to look me in the face for the next three months and say that I need to vote for a cis, hetero, white male and somebody who's the daughter of a former governor.

And that is that is the Democratic ticket.

And then we've got this side that's that's actually very diverse, and that's going to be able to speak to people.

And I think that one of the things that's going to be very overlooked during this campaign is what we did in Venezuela.

So people can be mad all they want about Donald Trump and Iran and everything.

But in South Florida, they care about the fact that they just took Maduro out.

I think that we're going to get every Venezuelan vote in South Florida and all these Cuban votes, Colombian votes, and all this Hispanic.

And I think that's going to be under researched between now and November.

- Well, Jolly's running mate also has deep ties with South Florida.

Bob Graham, very beloved in the Miami Lakes area.

Specifically.

How do you see this?

- Well, I have to agree that with the reasons that Jake cited for appointing Avila to the job, he's a Latin from a very Latin community in South Florida, and he's going to be running around that area talking about the Democrats are all socialists.

And I should know because I'm Cuban.

That's going to be his pitch to the Latins in South Florida.

And, you know, it seems clear that's the main reason he was selected is that, you know, he's going to make that pitch.

- Well, other news around midterm elections, the U.S.

Supreme Court cleared the way for new restrictions on mail in voting nationwide.

In a 6 to 3 ruling, the court allowed a Trump administration executive order restricting mail voting to move forward.

It includes new rules on ballot design and a requirement that states report who's voting by mail to the United States Postal Service.

The court did not rule on whether the order is legal, leaving it up to each state to decide how they will run their election.

23 Democratic led states have sued to block Trump's executive order here in Florida, election supervisors are saying that it's just too soon to know what changes may occur by November.

- The state has said that at this time, our duties or roles haven't changed in how we're going to process vote by mail.

It's still, I think, a lot to work through the legal system on that.

There are also some of the requirements regarding the 90 days and 60 days, and we're quickly approaching that 60 day mark ahead of the elections.

- Shelley, the tracking that will now be done on each of these mail in ballots, that's one of the rules that the United States Supreme Court.

- That's not a big deal for Florida because we already, you know, pretty much track ballots.

So that is not an issue.

What is an issue here is that the United States Constitution provides that states and states alone are have the prerogative to manage their own elections.

And what has happened is the Trump regime has tried to take over the management of elections, or at least the management of those Voters who want to vote-by-mail through the Post office, because, of course, the Post Office is under the executive branch, which means it's under the president.

So the so the Trump regime has issued an order that said that all states have to submit to the Post Office a list of people who have requested mail in ballots.

And the Post Office is then supposed to manage that list.

Um, I, I, I'm a little concerned that leaving that in the hands of the Trump regime is going to all of a sudden leave all the Democrats off the list and they don't get their mail ballots.

And too bad.

So sad.

- Until the other side of the coin, don't we trust the United States Postal Service to deliver the mail in ballots?

- It's not about the delivery of it.

They become the election regulator.

They become the arbiter of who's eligible to vote, who's who, who can vote.

And that's a very dangerous thing to put that in the hands of a political entity.

- I think that, um, you know, the mass mail-in ballots that we saw in 2020 is one of the worst possible scenarios for election integrity as a whole.

And luckily, in the state of Florida, I worked on a bunch of legislation in 2021 to help some of our legislators come up with ideas and implement some different things here in the state of Florida, where we actually have to now request it every two years, which is a huge improvement because some of these other states that you're seeing, again, they're just sending mail out mail in ballots all over some of these states.

You can't even go into a polling station anymore.

They are 100% mail in ballot, um, states for their elections.

- But that's what they've decided.

- That's what they've decided.

But, but one of the things and that was hit on is that somehow that Trump is, you know, trying to inject the federal government into the states elections when I would say is that we saw under Obama that there was a huge Supreme Court case where they actually were trying to inject themselves into the Arizona elections because Arizona, the state said, well, we want to make sure we take voter ID.

They got sued.

They lost.

Now, in Arizona, you can get a federal ballot and you can get a state ballot.

You can get two different ballots.

One, because they refused to to allow you to be able to vote without an ID.

And there are there are these types of issues that are happening all over the place.

I think the more restrictions there are on mail-in ballots, the safer we are as a whole.

I think that people like to believe that there's fraud that goes on at polling stations and like they're changing, but the only place that fraud is possible is, is in mail, in ballots that go to wherever and then are returned.

And then whether they're bad addresses, whether they're somebody who moved or whatever.

That is the only place where there is a vulnerability in our elections.

- That you brought up election integrity overall.

And I just want to point out, the Trump regime has stated that they want to send 1000 polling station monitors into the November election, the quality of people that they are choosing to put in place to manage their election integrity unit is really suspect.

I mean, they have a person, a Florida lawyer, I believe his name is David Levine, who has been convicted of hacking into election websites in the state of Florida.

And he is now employed by the Civil Rights Division of the Trump Department of Justice.

And one of the people working sent to Minnesota to monitor elections.

You know, the federal government is so politicized it should not be involved in.

- You know, every year the DOJ and the FBI, they send out people every year to different counties.

They actually just sent them down to Miami-Dade to watch our primaries.

People don't really realize this, but the federal government has been involved in monitoring our elections for a long time, and they tend to pick the counties with the biggest problems.

And if you go back historically, it's I.

- Don't think the FBI agents have been convicted of election related crimes like the people that.

- Because nobody's looking at them.

- And there are organizations on either side of the political spectrum that do send representatives to the polls to make sure that they are comfortable with the way things are running.

- And again, I don't think that there's a problem at the polling stations.

I think that I'm happy, you know, look, you can volunteer.

Anybody that's watching this show can go volunteer at the polling station.

You can watch it themselves.

You get Republicans, you get Democrats, you get independents.

Again, I don't think that's where there's an issue.

It's really not where there's an issue.

Where there is an issue is when there is massive mail in ballots that go out that are not accounted.

- For, never been an issue in Florida.

We have so much control over mail in ballots.

In Florida.

- I would say in 2020, it was a much bigger issue.

Again, when you're talking about sending them out to everybody who's registered, this is why we've put such an emphasis on going in and trying to look at the records that exist from the DMV, from the and actually cleaning up these voter rolls all over the state.

We've had to sue over and over again, California in these places that have millions of extra voters on their roll, and then they lose.

- Before we run out of time in Sarasota, there's been a political shakeup.

Um, the county school board just flipped, ending a conservative majority.

Two seats went to two Democrat backed candidates.

A third heads to the runoff in November.

Just a reminder that these are supposed to be nonpartisan races.

Jake, how do you see this change?

Were you surprised by it or not so much?

- Well, first of all, I don't think there's anything that exists that's a nonpartisan race in 2026.

I know that every school board district wants to try to pretend.

Every school board candidate wants to pretend that they're not partisan, and I just am here for the kids.

They are completely aligned on one side of the aisle or the other.

They are backed by one side of the aisle or the other.

And does it mean something in Sarasota County?

I think it actually does.

I don't think it's a good sign for Republicans.

I think that it is another indication that we're not going to have a 20 point victory like we did with DeSantis, or a ten point victory with Donald Trump years ago.

The statewide.

I think that there is there are indications to take care of people being unhappy with the current administration that we have as a supermajority Republican, state and nation.

So that is something to look at here as far as school boards go, people look at school boards very differently.

The average person does think that these are nonpartisan.

They like to pretend that they're not.

And so what I've seen is that, you know, the county could go Republican.

We could elect a bunch of Republican county commissioners and keep.

But the school board people will still vote a little bit more Democratic because they believe it's nonpartisan and they want it out of schools.

- Do you think, Shelley, that this is a one off, or do you think that we're going to see more of this in November?

- No.

Bridget Ziegler is gone from the Sarasota County School.

- Co-founder of moms.

- Co-founder of Moms for Liberty.

This is a sign.

And it's and it's been in school board races recently around the state.

People are sick of the culture wars.

They do not want the school boards, their local school boards that control their kids public education to be involved in banning books and, you know, restricting the ability of parents to make decisions about their kids vaccines or, you know, I mean, they want they want the school boards to focus on education, and they don't want these culture wars that have been fomented by conservatives like Bridget Ziegler and her cohorts on the Sarasota School board.

- Divya, turning to you.

You cover education.

There's the hope, right, that the school board races would not be as politically, politically charged.

Hillsborough County will have a big one.

Now coming up, can you explain to us what's going to be happening there?

- Yeah.

So in November, I think voters will decide if the superintendent, which is currently an appointed position appointed by the elected school board members, should also be a position that voters can elect.

And that came by because the legislature passed a bill this last session that would give voters that choice.

And I think people who are in support of an elected superintendent say that adds more accountability for voters to have that.

But I think people who are against it, and I think so Currently, all the candidates that were running for the school board, other than one, have said they're against an elected superintendent because they think that will inject more politics into that position.

And whoever is running for that is going to have to spend their time campaigning instead of doing the job.

- So we'll hear a lot more about that in the coming weeks and months leading into November.

Well, it's back to school season and kindergarten vaccine exemptions in Florida are higher than most states.

That's according to a new Johns Hopkins analysis of CDC data.

And the state is now considering dropping four vaccines from school entry requirements entirely.

Dr.

Teng, you studied this field directly.

What can you tell us?

- Well, the problem with loosening vaccine exemptions as proposed and taking away some of the vaccines that are necessary, is that we have young children who are really susceptible to these infections.

And a lot of the infections occur Uh, really early before kindergarten age.

So if you try to take away these vaccines from the kids, you're going to have a sicker population of kids and some of these vaccines that they're trying to take away, like Hepatitis B, like varicella, these are viruses that can cause lifelong infections.

And so if you're now dealing with not just the initial infection for the kids, but you're now dealing with long term effects, Hepatitis B is associated with liver cancer.

Um, varicella zoster virus, which causes chickenpox, is associated with shingles.

And then, you know, when we have different rules across the state, we have kind of different pockets of places in the state that have different overall vaccine coverages.

- And that just contributes to a lot of confusion on the part of parents who are hearing about announcements that for vaccinations in the state of Florida may be dropped.

The state has a list of seven that are mandated, seven mandated vaccines.

Um, how do you see this issue?

Where should parents go for concrete information so that they can make their decisions?

- Yeah.

It's difficult.

We have a lot of different information sources now, but I think the best source would be your trusted physician.

Um, hopefully we have pediatricians for every one of our children.

And pediatricians study these things.

They keep up on their information.

These are the people that have probably the best information for you.

- Does the data show that areas that have a higher exemption rate have more cases of these viruses?

- Yeah.

And the one that's the most striking is measles virus.

And we are suffering from the worst outbreak of measles in this country since 1991.

Um, and you can see if you look at a map of where the measles outbreaks are, you can see that it's concentrated mostly in those places with lower vaccination rates.

And if you look at the kids that have gotten measles, 95% of them about have been not vaccinated.

- Divya, when you looked at the statistics, what stuck out to you?

- Yeah.

So I think in both Hillsborough and Pasco County, the immunization rate is lower.

In Hillsborough right now, it's around 85.4%.

Just five years ago, it was about like almost 96%.

Um, Pasco, it's 91 right now.

Same about five years ago.

It was around 95.

Pinellas is slightly up.

This year it's like 87.4.

The year before it was 87.3, but again, down from five years ago where it was around 92%.

- Thank you so much for your time.

We really appreciate your expertise.

Dr.

Teng, thank you for talking to us about all of the research.

It's it's so important to have someone with your expertise break it down.

There's so much misinformation that you see online.

Thank you so much.

And thank you to our panelists, Rochelle Rebak, Jake Hoffman, Divya Kumar and Dr.

Michael Teng.

We know you've got plenty of choices for your news and information, and we thank you for choosing us.

♪♪