TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The board of directors of Hope Florida was expected to discuss the state of the organization, its finances, public records, and public meeting laws on Thursday.
Instead, the meeting was disrupted by online participants who began hijacking the meeting.
What You Need To Know
- Hope Florida leaders planned to meet Thursday to discuss issues within the organization, but the online meeting was disrupted and ended after just 20 minutes
- It has come under fire after receiving $10 million through a state settlement, then donating the money to groups that transferred it into the fight against recreational marijuana
- SEE ALSO: Erik Dellenback resigns as Hope Florida's executive director one day after testifying in Tallahassee
Trolls were able to derail the online meeting with porn, profanity and hate symbols, essentially ending the 20-minute meeting.
Before the disruptions started, the board of Hope Florida adopted a new ethos vowing transparency and good stewardship.
“My focus as chairman is to restore confidence in an innovative approach to combating the crisis of poverty and reliance on government welfare programs in the state of Florida that we all have come to know as the Hope Florida program," said Hope Florida Foundation Chair Joshua Hay.
The board later stopped the meeting and instructed participants to wait for a solution and an updated virtual meeting link.
The Florida Department of Children and Families website that informed the public of the meeting, now says "We apologize for the earlier disruption to the public meeting. The Department of Children and Families is actively working to address the incident. Please monitor this website for information on when the meeting, which is currently in recess, will reconvene and for an updated link."
On Wednesday, executive director Eric Dellenback said he will step down on May 1.
Thursday was the first meeting since text messages have come to light between the governor’s former chief of staff, now Attorney General James Uthmeier, Hope Florida and the political group "Save Our Society From Drugs.”
Up until this point, Hope Florida’s leadership has only acknowledged that they’ve made some possible mistakes when it comes to oversight, but a series of text messages may show a possibly illegal donation from Hope Florida into political groups.
Which is what the Florida House probe is looking into.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is calling all of this a smear campaign. He points to the good the charity has done for Floridians but has not yet commented on the actual details of the alleged money trail.
“I think that these are people that are just trying to be desperate for any type of attention that they can get, but they’re not doing the people’s business,” DeSantis said. “I can tell you there's nothing coming out of the Florida House of Representatives that is going to rival the success that Hope Florida has had.”
State lawmakers are looking for more answers.
"It looks to me like they are hiding something from the public," said Democratic Rep. Fentrice Driskell. "And we have to continue to ask these questions to really understand how deep this goes."
Speaking Thursday afternoon in response to the latest developments, Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried called the controversy an illustration of "the clear pattern of corruption coming out of the governor's office."
The DeSantis administration is accused of steering $10 million from a Medicaid settlement to Hope Florida, an organization spearheaded by First Lady Casey DeSantis.
In September, the state of Florida settled with health care company Centene for $67 million in relation to a dispute over Medicaid funds. Part of that settlement included what some state leaders have called a donation of $10 million, which was paid to the state and later sent to Hope Florida.
Shortly after that disbursement, Hope Florida reportedly sent $5 million dollars each to two separate not-for-profit organizations: Secure Florida’s Future, run by the Chamber of Commerce and Save our Society from Drugs.
Around the same time, those groups reportedly sent $8.5 million to a third not-for-profit organization, Keep Florida Clean. That committee was created to defeat Amendment 3, the failed ballot initiative that tried to legalize recreation marijuana.
At the time, Keep Florida Clean was controlled by the governor’s then chief of staff, James Uthmeier.
"And the center of all of this seems to be our newly unelected attorney general, James Uthmeier, the state's chief law enforcement officer," Fried said Thursday. "It's becoming clear to me that this money laundering scheme was an organized plot to take down Amendment 3 and advance their political ambitions."
