Photo courtesy of  STOCK

By JOHN-MICHAEL LAWRENCE

My friend, Perry Jennings of New Orleans, shared this about Ron De Santis and his wife depriving sick children: The deceptive advertisements “A grand jury looked at what Ron DeSantis’s administration did with $10 million meant to insure poor children and concluded, on the record, that it got laundered through his wife’s charity and spent to win an election.

Here is how the money was supposed to work. A health care contractor named Centene got caught overbilling Florida for the coverage that keeps low-income kids insured.

The state clawed back $67 million.

Every dollar of it belonged to taxpayers.

Then somebody quietly rewrote the deal.

Ten million was peeled off the top and steered to the Hope Florida Foundation, the pet charity of First Lady Casey DeSantis.

Within days it was split between two nonprofits, and from there roughly $8.5 million landed in a political committee run by James Uthmeier, who was DeSantis’s chief of staff at the time and is now his handpicked attorney general.

That committee spent the money to crush Amendment 3, the ballot measure to legalize marijuana. Sit with that route for a second.

Cash owed to the public because a company overcharged for sick kids’ care became the fuel for a partisan campaign. A settlement meant for children turned into a slush fund for politics.

The grand jury did not soften it.

They called it a sophisticated big scheme to fund political activities.

They used the word misappropriated. Ordinary citizens read the paper trail and saw exactly what it was. THEFT And still, nobody was charged.

Not because the scheme wasn’t real, but because every official the jurors questioned suddenly could not recall who decided to hand $10 million of public money to a charity.

The decision was made itself.

The money moved on its own. No fingerprints.

The report was sealed in January and sat hidden for seven months.

Then it leaked, and CBS Miami put it in front of the public.

That is when you learn what these men actually believe.

Confronted with a finding that his administration diverted children’s health money into political warfare, DeSantis walked up to the cameras and announced that the only real crime here was the leak. Not the scheme.

The person who told you about it. Uthmeier went one better.

When a reporter asked him about the report, he flipped it around and asked whether the reporter was soliciting a crime just by bringing it up.

Read that twice. The man whose committee took the majority of the money suggested you might be breaking the law for asking where it went.

They drained the fund that keeps poor kids covered, spent it to win a fight they cared about, got caught in writing by a jury of their own citizens, and decided the real villain was whoever handed you the receipt.”