A state appeals court has expunged an entire critical grand jury report on Hope Florida, as if it never happened. The only person we can see celebrating this is Gov. Ron DeSantis, who claims complete vindication.

As politicians scramble to cover their tracks, this odious coverup gives voters another reason why a central figure in the mess, James Uthmeier, should not be elected attorney general on Nov. 3.

First was the $10 million that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ people diverted from a Medicaid settlement, mostly to be spent on his campaign against legalizing marijuana. Then, after the grand jury’s report, the governor’s gang spent at least $327,000 of public money, with more to come, on law firms hired to help keep it secret.

A three-judge panel of the highly politicized First District Court of Appeal secretly weighed the fate of the grand jury’s report. The panel barred a circuit judge from notifying anyone who might intervene that an appeal had been filed from his decision to release part of the report. So the appeals court apparently heard only from those who wanted the truth suppressed — an execrable miscarriage of justice.

Justice denied

Among those excluded were the Florida Center for Governmental Accountability and its executive director, Michael Barfield, who had won a court order to be notified of any appeal. But the court did hear from a recently retired judge of that same court, Brad Thomas, who was acting as attorney general in Uthmeier’s place.

Reporting on the outcome, the center’s Florida Trident noted how much the state has paid lawyers so far. Yet to come is the fee for a lawyer hired 12 days before the grand jury began hearing witnesses. His client was not identified.

“Using taxpayer money to pay a public employee’s lawyer for a grand jury appearance is barred by a longstanding attorney general’s opinion,” the Trident wrote. That opinion, still posted on Uthmeier’s website, is from 1994, when Bob Butterworth was attorney general.

The unelected Uthmeier was one of at least seven people, perhaps as many as 12, who asked the DCA to suppress the grand jury report. His lawyer, the opinion revealed, was one of those whom the governor paid.

An official whitewash

The three-judge, see-no-evil panel did not stop with citing old Supreme Court cases denying the power of grand juries to criticize people without indicting them.

It sought to whitewash the scandal itself, holding in a footnote that the $10 million, which Medicaid contractor Centene Corp. offered the state as part of a $67 million pre-litigation overbilling settlement, was never public money to begin with. If that is so, why did the state Agency for Health Care Administration acknowledge that it was public by reimbursing the federal government for a proportionate share?

The people of Florida would know none of this if someone had not leaked the grand jury’s 19-page summary to CBSMiami reporter Jim DeFede. That leak caused “irreparable harm,” the DCA judges complained.

The judges also criticized Tallahassee-area State Attorney Jack Campbell for distributing copies of the report to 49 people, including Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, who had exposed the scandal and took it to the grand jury.

The thrust of the DCA opinion is that “a grand jury may investigate and report, but it may not declare conduct unlawful and then decline to charge it, and it may not condemn people by name without indicting them.”

Among its precedents, the panel cited a 1956 case that suppressed a Miami-Dade grand jury’s scathing criticism of a judge and several lawyers who disposed of an estate. Miami State Attorney George Brautigam won a 6-0 Supreme Court decision to expunge the report and a $100,000 libel suit against the Miami Herald over its editorials criticizing him.

But the public was outraged by the state attorney’s secrecy — and Brautigam lost the next election.

The three DCA judges responsible for the Hope Florida decision are Lance Neff, a recent DeSantis appointee whom the governor is applauding, and M. K. Thomas and Ross Bilbrey, both chosen by former Gov. Rick Scott, who has repeatedly criticized the Hope Florida mess.

A lack of accountability

A reason why Hope Florida stays in people’s minds is public outrage over no one being held to account. In hindsight, perhaps Campbell should have sought an indictment, even though no one in this cast of characters claimed to know who was responsible.

But voters can do something — run, not walk, to the polls and replace Uthmeier with his highly qualified Democratic opponent, José Javier Rodriguez.

He would reopen the case, and he has already demanded that the governor’s office preserve all relevant records.

Perhaps eventually, justice will prevail. We hope.

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