A Florida grand jury just confirmed that $10 million meant to help poor children get health insurance was diverted to a charity run by Ron DeSantis’s own wife, then funneled straight into a political fight against legal weed. Ashley Moody’s office knew about the scheme while it happened. DeSantis then rewarded her with a Senate seat. Now Florida voters are being asked to hand her a full six-year term.
A Florida grand jury found that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration had “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer money it diverted to a charity connected to his wife, but declined to file criminal charges, citing a lack of evidence identifying who specifically was responsible.
The Money Was Supposed to Help Poor Kids Get Health Insurance
The Leon County grand jury completed its report in January, investigating Hope Florida, the charity started in 2021 by Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis. Hope Florida’s stated mission is helping financially struggling families connect with churches and aid groups to keep them off publicly funded assistance programs.
Instead, according to the grand jury’s findings, $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement, money specifically intended to help poor children get health insurance, was routed to the charity and then moved again into political action committees. Those PACs used the money to campaign against a 2024 statewide ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana for adults in Florida. DeSantis opposed that measure. It ultimately fell just short of the 60% supermajority it needed to pass.
In plain terms: money meant for sick kids on Medicaid ended up funding a political campaign the governor personally wanted to win, and the people who ran that scheme are now the top elected officials in the state.
“We Can’t Prove Who Is Responsible”
The grand jury’s own language leaves little ambiguity about what happened, even without naming a name to charge. “Despite our finding that the money was misappropriated, we find insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally,” the report concluded.
The reason wasn’t a lack of evidence that a crime occurred. It was that no one involved would take responsibility or claimed no memory of who authorized sending the money to the charity in the first place. “We recognize that this would be an impediment to criminal prosecution,” the grand jury wrote. “While we can’t prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again.”
That’s a grand jury explicitly stating the money was stolen for political use, while acknowledging the investigation hit a wall because everyone at the top developed selective amnesia at exactly the right moment.
Senator Ashley Moody Knew
The report didn’t leave every name out of it. It found that James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s chief of staff at the time, “was in a position of authority over those involved in settling,” and that his own political committee, Keep Florida Clean PAC, was the prime recipient of the diverted $10 million.
But it’s Ashley Moody whose role deserves the closest look right now. The grand jury found that Moody’s office, when she was serving as Florida’s Attorney General, knew about the plans to divert Medicaid settlement money meant for poor children into a political fight over marijuana legalization. She didn’t stop it. She didn’t flag it publicly. Weeks after leaving the Attorney General’s office, DeSantis handpicked her for a vacant U.S. Senate seat, a direct appointment with no election required.
Now Moody isn’t just occupying that seat quietly. She just won her party’s primary for the special election to keep it for a full six-year term, and she’s running a deliberately low-key campaign that Politico itself has described as designed to avoid the kind of scrutiny her Hope Florida role invites. She faces Democrat Alex Vindman in November.
When confronted about her role, Moody’s response was to distance herself with a technicality rather than deny knowledge. In a post on X, she said her office was only one of several agencies that signed off on the initial settlement and claimed she “had no knowledge of how funds would be spent” by Hope Florida or anyone else involved. That’s a carefully worded denial. It says she didn’t know the specific destination of the funds. It does not deny that her own office knew a diversion scheme was underway, which is exactly what the grand jury found.
Uthmeier, for his part, went on offense instead of answering questions, suggesting at a news conference that Democrats were behind the leak of the sealed report and calling renewed public attention on its findings “a politically motivated hoax.” He’s also seeking reelection to the office Moody vacated.
DeSantis’s Response: Don’t Question the Findings
DeSantis himself, when asked about the report obtained and published by CBS News Miami, did not dispute that it was real. He insisted no laws were broken, but made clear his priority was identifying whoever leaked the sealed documents, promising they would face “consequences.”
Notice what’s missing from that response: any actual explanation of who ordered $10 million in Medicaid settlement money redirected to his wife’s charity and then into his own preferred political campaign. DeSantis addressed the leak. He did not address the theft, and neither has the woman he promoted to the U.S. Senate immediately after it happened.
Democrats Want the Case Reopened
David Jolly, the Democratic nominee for Florida governor, has called for the grand jury investigation to be reopened rather than closed with no accountability. Jolly faces Republican Byron Donalds in November. DeSantis, under Florida’s term limits, cannot seek a third term as governor, but the network of officials who benefited from this scheme, Uthmeier and Moody among them, are both on the ballot asking voters for full terms of their own.
A Florida grand jury has confirmed that $10 million meant to help low-income children get health insurance was diverted through the governor’s wife’s charity and used to fight a ballot initiative the governor personally opposed, while Ashley Moody’s own office knew what was happening and said nothing. She was rewarded with a Senate seat for it. Now she’s asking Florida voters to give her six more years, running a campaign that’s kept this exact story as quiet as possible.