Hope Florida was back in the news last week when Florida’s First District Court of Appeals ordered the grand jury report expunged, saying the jury made mistakes and was wrong to declare state leaders misspent the money.

This apparently means it was lawful to funnel $10 million from a Medicaid settlement to the Hope Florida Foundation; perfectly fine when the money was then funneled through a series of nonprofits, some of them controlled by Attorney General James Uthmeier, then Chief of Staff for Gov. Ron DeSantis.

And following this logic, it was perfectly reasonable for Medicaid settlement money to be used to torpedo the 2024 ballot initiative aimed at legalizing recreational marijuana use.

Bottom line, the court says it’s not a thing, not a story.

Except now it’s a bigger story than it was before.

Gov. DeSantis wants to find out who leaked the report and charge him/her. Meanwhile former Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, isn’t buying the District Court’s decision, saying: “This was $10 million that was supposed to go for poor kids. Are the people who spent the money going to give the money back? And then, if somebody did anything wrong, are they going to be held accountable? Bottom line, there ought to be a thorough investigation, and the facts ought to all come out.”

Then there was the story from the Florida Trib on how state officials who fought to prevent the grand jury report from being released hired private lawyers — paid for by the state, i.e. you — to help quash it.

“Collectively, the law firms hired to represent the state officials have taken in more than $444,000 in state funds since the Hope Florida grand jury began its investigation in August of 2025,” reported the Trib. 

Along for the ride on the gravy train: Uthmeier, who “relied on the legal counsel of attorney Christopher Kise, who previously represented President Donald Trump related to the then-former president’s 37-count criminal indictment for mishandling classified documents.”

That’s quite a high-powered lawyer to retain if you did nothing wrong.

Jose Javier Rodriguez, the VoteWater-endorsed Democrat running for attorney general, accused Uthmeier of celebrating “like a criminal defendant who got off on a technicality.”

“None of the facts have changed; $10 million was taken out of the Medicaid program. It should’ve gone to sick kids, and it didn’t,” said Rodriguez, who promised to “go after” the $10 million if elected.

Good. For it’s clear no one currently in Tallahassee is going to hold Uthmeier, et al, responsible for what happened.

But on Nov. 3, you can vote for accountability. And we suggest you do just that.