Florida Grand Jury Hears Evidence in Investigation of Charity Tied to Casey DeSantis

Prosecutors in Florida brought witnesses before a grand jury in Tallahassee on Tuesday as part of an investigation into a charity tied to Casey DeSantis, the state’s first lady. The investigation is focused on the charity’s $10 million contribution last fall to political committees backing a campaign led by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

One of the witnesses, State Representative Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican, led a legislative subcommittee that investigated the charity’s finances this year.

“I received a subpoena, and I complied with it,” Mr. Andrade said in an interview after he appeared at the Leon County Courthouse on Tuesday.

The office of the county’s state attorney, Jack Campbell, a Democrat, confirmed in May that it was investigating the charity, the Hope Florida Foundation. Mr. Campbell declined to comment at the time, and did so again when asked recently whether a grand jury had been impaneled in the case.

Grand juries in Florida are secret. But Tallahassee, like many state capitals, is a small place when it comes to politics, and word about subpoenas going out to witnesses started to spread a couple of weeks ago.

Testimony from Mr. Andrade and other witnesses could lay the groundwork for potential criminal charges, though the exact target of the investigation remains unclear.

The foundation is the fund-raising arm of Hope Florida, a project that Ms. DeSantis started in 2021. It aims to keep low-income families off public assistance by connecting them with churches and local groups that might help them with their needs. The governor and his wife have staunchly defended Hope Florida’s work and dismissed the legislative investigation into its spending as politicking.

At the center of the investigation is a $10 million payment that the foundation quietly received last year from Centene, a Medicaid contractor that had overbilled the state. The foundation quickly gave the money to two nonprofit political committees that helped Mr. DeSantis and his allies defeat a November ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana.

The money came from a September 2024 settlement related to Centene’s overbilling. Mr. Andrade has called what happened with the $10 million a potential “conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud.” The DeSantis administration has disputed that the $10 million counted as Medicaid funding, which is highly regulated.

Several current and former DeSantis appointees and administration officials were involved in the $10 million transaction. Among them was James Uthmeier, then the governor’s chief of staff and now the state’s attorney general. Mr. Uthmeier, a Republican, has denied any wrongdoing.

Several people from outside the administration, including from the political committees that received the $10 million from the charity, were also involved.

The investigation has brought considerable scrutiny to Mr. DeSantis, who is term-limited, and to his wife, who is weighing whether to run for governor next year to succeed him.

Mr. Uthmeier, whom Mr. DeSantis appointed as attorney general in February, is running for a full term in 2026. President Trump endorsed his candidacy last week.

Before last year, the Hope Florida Foundation had raised only about $2 million over three years.

Soon after receiving the $10 million windfall last fall, it gave $5 million to Secure Florida’s Future, which is run by the Florida Chamber of Commerce. Another $5 million went to Save Our Society From Drugs, which seeks to prevent drug use. The two nonprofit political committees are known as “dark money” groups because they do not have to release detailed financial reports.

The two groups then routed a total of $8.5 million to Keep Florida Clean, a political action committee created to oppose Amendment 3, the ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana.

Then, between October and December 2024, Keep Florida Clean sent $10.5 million to the Republican Party of Florida and $1.1 million to the Florida Freedom Fund, Mr. DeSantis’s PAC. Both those groups spent money opposing Amendment 3, arguing that it would hurt Floridians’ quality of life.

At the time, Keep Florida Clean and the Florida Freedom Fund were both run by Mr. Uthmeier. Although a majority of voters supported the marijuana amendment last November, it failed to get the 60 percent of votes needed to pass.

Amy Ronshausen, of Save Our Society From Drugs, was also at the Leon County Courthouse on Tuesday, The Tampa Bay Times and The Miami Herald reported. Her lawyer declined to comment to reporters in court and did not immediately respond to a request from The New York Times on Wednesday.