Appeals court orders Hope Florida grand jury report wiped from the record
A Tallahassee appellate panel says a Leon County grand jury's findings on a $10 million Medicaid settlement must be expunged, a ruling with implications for how Florida agencies handle public money and secrecy.
What the court did
Florida’s 1st District Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday that a Leon County grand jury report alleging $10 million in Medicaid settlement funds was “misappropriated” must be expunged from the record. The 19-page opinion, written by Judge Lance Neff, found the report should never have become public in the form it did, even though it has already been widely leaked and reported on. State law requires grand jury reports that don’t result in indictments to stay sealed until the people named in them get a copy and a chance to argue for suppression. That didn’t happen here, the court said, and the fault lies with State Attorney Jack Campbell, who oversaw the proceedings and distributed the final report to people not authorized to see it in January.
The grand jury itself did not indict anyone, citing insufficient evidence, but it concluded the settlement arrangement violated state law because executive agencies aren’t allowed to route settlement money to third parties. The appellate court disagreed on that legal point too. Because no civil lawsuit had actually been filed before the settlement was reached, the judges found, the law barring third-party payouts in “court settlements” never applied. And because the $10 million went straight to the Hope Florida Foundation rather than to the state first, the court said it wasn’t “diverted” money in the legal sense the grand jury used.
The money trail behind the ruling
The case traces back to a 2024 settlement in which Centene, a Medicaid managed-care provider, paid Florida $57 million to resolve allegations of overpayments, plus a separate $10 million to the Hope Florida Foundation, a nonprofit tied to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signature anti-poverty initiative. That $10 million moved on to two other nonprofit groups, which then gave it to a political committee chaired by James Uthmeier, who was DeSantis’s chief of staff at the time and is now Florida’s attorney general. The committee spent money opposing two 2024 ballot measures, one that would have legalized recreational marijuana, another that would have enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution. Both measures drew majority support but fell short of the 60 percent threshold needed to amend Florida’s constitution.
State law also requires agencies to tell the Legislature when settlement talks begin. Lawmakers weren’t told about the Hope Florida provision until reporters uncovered it. It was a 2025 House investigation led by Rep. Alex Andrade that first exposed loose financial controls at the Hope Florida Foundation and led directly to the Leon County grand jury’s inquiry. Andrade declined to comment on Wednesday’s ruling.
Why this reaches the Nature Coast
Cedar Key and Levy County have no direct stake in the Centene settlement or the political committee it funded. But the ruling matters here for two reasons. First, it sets a precedent for how much secrecy state agencies can maintain around settlements involving public health dollars, the same Medicaid system that funds care for rural Nature Coast residents. Second, it narrows what counts as an improper diversion of settlement funds under Florida law, a standard that could apply the next time a state agency strikes a deal involving money meant for local communities.
The ruling did not address Uthmeier’s personal role in directing where the $10 million ultimately landed. DeSantis and Uthmeier aides declared the decision a vindication; Jeremy Redfern, Uthmeier’s deputy chief of staff, called the original grand jury findings a “hoax” on social media following the ruling. There is no indication of further appeal as of this writing, and no state comment window is open since this is a court decision rather than a proposed rule.