Ron DeSantis Never Answered the Lee County Forgery File, Then a Grand Jury Found $10 Million and Charged No One
Governor Ron DeSantis has never been charged with covering up a forgery. The activists who forced a Lee County prosecutor’s alleged crimes into a federal appendix say the silence around those papers is the story. A different inquiry, finished years later, shows what a Florida grand jury is willing to write down when the money is easier to trace than a signature. In January 2026 a Leon County grand jury found that the DeSantis administration misappropriated $10 million. It charged nobody. The forgery file and the Medicaid file are not the same case. They rhyme.
Anthony Kunasek was chief of special prosecutions in Florida’s 20th Judicial Circuit, the office led by State Attorney Amira Fox. Sworn filings placed in Equality Florida v. DeSantis, Northern District of Florida case 4:22-cv-00134-AW-MJF, describe Kunasek forging a show-cause order at Fox’s direction. Two judicial recusal orders are also in that record as forgeries. The papers do not make clear whether Kunasek or courthouse staff produced those two. DeSantis and then-Attorney General Ashley Moody never answered those factual claims on the merits. The first notice and the injunction motion against DeSantis are still posted on this site. They are allegations. They are also sworn, and they sat in a public docket while the governor’s lawyers talked about a classroom statute instead.
Kunasek was found dead in his Fort Myers home on April 30, 2022, of a gunshot wound to the head. The State Attorney’s Office said the death was not a homicide. WFLA reported the death. Activist filers say it came 30 days after the forgeries were laid out in federal court during the lawsuit over what opponents called the Don’t Say Gay law, and a day after the FBI requested an interview about the alleged crimes. A medical examiner’s non-homicide finding is not a theory of murder. It is also not an answer to the orders sitting in the appendix. A dead witness is a closed mouth. It is not a closed file.
A Miami burial, then a federal shrug
The same filers say DeSantis and Moody used the 11th Judicial Circuit in Miami and the Third District Court of Appeal to bury the forgery claims in 2021 and 2022. Trump-appointed Judge Allen Winsor later dismissed the claims aimed at DeSantis on his own, without a party having filed an opposition to those specific allegations. Both the governor and the attorney general stayed silent in the district court on the corruption papers. Slate wrote at the time about Winsor’s assignment to the classroom case. Assignment is not guilt. Silence in the face of a sworn forgery allegation is a choice about what a defendant is willing to deny under oath.
An appeal in the 11th Circuit, docket 22-12392-GG, put the cover-up theory back under oath and alleged violations of 18 U.S.C. §§ 241 and 242, conspiracy against rights and deprivation of rights under color of law. The appellate papers asked the court to stop conduct that would continue a speech ban memorialized in a state-court order the governor’s office had supported. The emergency injunction motion and a further 11th Circuit filing are public. Deadlines for the state to oppose the corruption claims came and went. This account draws on filings and on wires from Florida activists. The criminal accusations against DeSantis, Moody, and Fox have not been proven in court.
The statute settled. The forgeries did not.
The lawsuit that carried the allegations into the federal record, Equality Florida v. Florida State Board of Education, settled on March 11, 2024. The Parental Rights in Education Act stayed on the books. The settlement narrowed enforcement. Students and teachers may discuss sexual orientation and gender identity. They may identify as LGBTQ+. Pride flags, safe-space stickers, and Gay-Straight Alliances are not banned by the deal. Books with incidental LGBTQ+ references do not violate the statute. Roberta Kaplan, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said the agreement made clear that LGBTQ+ students can say they are gay. DeSantis’s office called the outcome a win because the statute survived. Nobody in that settlement tried the forgery file. A consent decree about classroom speech cannot launder a show-cause order.
DeSantis then took the unfinished argument national. He launched a presidential campaign, finished a distant second to Donald Trump in the January 15, 2024 Iowa caucuses, suspended the race on January 21, 2024, and endorsed Trump. He went back to Tallahassee to finish the term. The Lee County papers The AEGIS Alliance has tracked for years did not travel with him onto a debate stage. Readers who want the local half of that file can start with the reporting on Sheriff Mike Scott, fabricated evidence in Lee County, Pam Bondi’s handling of a court cover, and the later record on Sheriff Carmine Marceno and the Amira Fox forgery dispute.
A grand jury that found the money and lost the memory
The newer record is not a theory from an activist appendix. It is a grand jury. A Leon County panel completed its presentment in January 2026 and filed it under seal on January 28. CBS News Miami obtained the report in August 2026. Jurors wrote that $10 million from a Centene Medicaid settlement was misappropriated through the Hope Florida Foundation, the nonprofit tied to First Lady Casey DeSantis’s signature program, as part of what they called a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities. The money moved within days through two nonprofits and into a political committee controlled by James Uthmeier, then the governor’s chief of staff and later the appointed attorney general. Most of it was used to fight the 2024 ballot measure that would have legalized recreational marijuana. Reporting on the same presentment says about $7 million reached the Republican Party of Florida. The New York Times, on August 27, 2026, reported the same core finding: public money, a charity tied to the governor’s wife, political committees, and no charges.
The sentence that should be read twice is the one the jurors wrote after the finding. Despite the misappropriation, they found insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally. Witnesses would not take responsibility for sending the money to Hope Florida. Nobody had any memory of who decided. The report noted that virtually everyone involved was a lawyer acting on the advice of other lawyers, which the panel treated as an impediment to prosecution. It placed Uthmeier in a position of authority over the people who arranged the settlement, and it said Moody’s office knew of the plan to divert the money and signed off. DeSantis did not dispute that the leaked document was the real report. He said no law was broken. He said whoever leaked a sealed presentment would face consequences. Uthmeier has denied wrongdoing and has accused State Attorney Jack Campbell of abusing the grand jury process. Denial is not a finding. Neither is a leak.
In September 2026 the human side of Hope Florida was in the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald. People with disabilities described a navigator program that pointed them at dead ends, including a job link and a library website, while more than a dozen sheriffs told the Times the program had not connected them with trained liaisons. The grand jury’s political-money finding and the program’s thin help for the people it was named after are now public at the same time. A Change.org petition still asks the Justice Department to look at the older 241 and 242 theories from the Lee County papers. Petitions are not indictments. A grand jury that names a scheme and charges no one is not an acquittal either. It is a record of a room full of lawyers who could not remember a $10 million decision.
Watergate became a nickname because a president’s people tried to keep a burglary from becoming a case. Nobody has proved that DeSantis ordered a forged order, or that he ordered a Medicaid diversion. What the dockets show is narrower and still damning as a pattern of unanswered paper. A prosecutor is accused under oath of forging a show-cause order, dies before an FBI interview, and the governor’s lawyers never join issue on the facts. Years later a grand jury says taxpayer money was misused for an election and then writes that memory failed at the exact moment a name was required. Readers who follow politics and U.S. news from The AEGIS Alliance will recognize the shape. The crime, if there is one, is sitting in the gap between a finding and a charge. The Lee County forgeries are still in that gap. So is the $10 million.
