FLORIDA BULLDOG Watchdog News You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: March 25, 2026 Source: FloridaBulldog.org — Independent Nonprofit Watchdog Journalism
Florida Bulldog, South Florida’s fearless independent nonprofit newsroom, brings you four more investigations exposing the rot at the heart of Florida’s political and legal establishment. This edition reveals how Florida lawmakers rubber-stamped a false report to cover for $6 billion in missing emergency contracts, how the Florida Bar’s five-year crusade to destroy a DeSantis critic finally collapsed under the weight of its own misconduct, how a former Florida Bar president accused Bar prosecutors of outright cheating, and how the DeSantis-packed Florida Supreme Court quietly rewrote judicial ethics rules to let a judge campaign as “a conservative.” This is the journalism that powerful Florida institutions count on you never seeing.
Florida Lawmakers Approve False Report Shielding $6 Billion in Hidden DeSantis Contracts
By Daniel Ducassi | FloridaBulldog.org | November 30, 2025
Florida Bulldog reporter Daniel Ducassi has uncovered a stunning act of legislative complicity: a Florida legislative committee voted to approve a report that Florida Bulldog’s own investigation had already demonstrated was false — a report that effectively covered for the DeSantis administration’s systematic failure to publicly post documentation for more than $6 billion in emergency contracts as required by state transparency law. The vote, which was bipartisan in its silence, revealed the degree to which Florida’s legislative oversight mechanisms have been captured by the same political forces they are supposed to check.
Florida Bulldog’s investigation had previously revealed that the DeSantis administration violated the Transparency Florida Act by awarding billions of dollars in emergency contracts to politically connected companies while failing to post the required documentation on the state’s public tracking website. The biggest winner of these hidden contracts was Miami’s CDR Maguire, whose affiliated companies racked up contracts valued at more than $537 million. The company’s top executives — Carlos Duart and Tina Vidal-Duart — and their associated entities have contributed nearly $2 million to political action committees supporting Governor DeSantis. CDR Enterprises also gave $275,000 to Attorney General James Uthmeier’s political committee in 2025, and another $100,000 to a committee supporting CFO Blaise Ingoglia.
When the legislative committee met to consider Florida Bulldog’s documented findings about the missing contracts, the result was not an investigation — it was a rubber stamp. Committee members voted to approve a report that Florida Bulldog’s reporting had already shown to be false, without any meaningful inquiry into why $6 billion in contracts had gone unposted. State Rep. Yvonne Hinson, D-Gainesville, was the only committee member to respond to Florida Bulldog’s questions, stating she “absolutely” believes the committee has a responsibility to investigate why the contracts were not posted — a position that, notably, did not prevent the committee from approving the false report anyway.
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The political connections between the companies that benefited from the hidden contracts and the officials responsible for oversight are impossible to ignore. CDR Maguire and its affiliates did not simply benefit from emergency contracts that escaped public scrutiny — they simultaneously funneled millions of dollars into the political operations of the very officials whose agencies awarded the contracts and whose oversight was required to catch the transparency violations. Florida Bulldog’s reporting documents this web of financial relationships in granular detail, giving readers an unobstructed view of how the machinery of Florida government self-dealing actually operates.
State Sen. Jason Pizzo, who had loudly questioned the city of Tampa’s choice of pickup trucks in a separate committee hearing, was conspicuously silent when the committee approved the false report about the missing contracts. Pizzo, who left the Democratic Party to become an independent and announced a gubernatorial bid, had received an email from Florida Bulldog about the missing contract documentation before the November 3 meeting. His staff acknowledged the email. His silence speaks volumes about the political calculations that override transparency accountability even among officials who position themselves as reformers.
The broader picture painted by Florida Bulldog’s reporting — the hidden contracts, the politically connected beneficiaries, the legislative rubber stamp, and the attorney general described as being “at the center of this corruption” — is one of systemic institutional failure. It is a picture that would not exist without Florida Bulldog’s persistent, document-driven reporting. Ducassi’s investigation is one of the most consequential accountability stories about Florida government published in 2025, and it continues to develop as new details emerge about the scope and depth of the contracting scandal.
Florida Bar’s Campaign Against DeSantis Critic Uhlfelder Collapses — Referee Recommends Lightest Possible Sanction
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | December 31, 2025
After more than five years of relentless pressure, a second ethics trial, the personal involvement of a DeSantis-aligned Florida Supreme Court, and what a former Florida Bar president would ultimately describe as prosecutorial “cheating,” the Florida Bar’s campaign to punish lawyer Daniel Uhlfelder for daring to challenge Governor Ron DeSantis’s COVID-19 pandemic policies has ended in a stunning collapse. The case’s referee recommended the lightest possible sanction: a mild reprimand that falls far short of the license suspension the Bar had been seeking for years. Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has followed this case from its beginning, and her reporting on this final chapter provides the most complete account available of how the Bar’s politically charged prosecution ultimately unraveled.
Uhlfelder first attracted the Florida Bar’s attention — and DeSantis’s fury — in 2020 when he began appearing on Florida beaches in a “Grim Reaper” costume to protest the governor’s refusal to close beaches during COVID-19. The First District Court of Appeal tossed Uhlfelder’s COVID lawsuit as “frivolous,” issued a contempt referral, and demanded a Bar investigation — a cascade of consequences that most legal observers attribute more to the political climate surrounding the case than to any genuine misconduct by Uhlfelder.
The case the Bar ultimately brought against Uhlfelder — its second attempt, after the Florida Supreme Court rejected leniency and ordered a harder second look — boiled down to a highly technical allegation: that Uhlfelder failed to properly notify the appellate court when his co-counsel withdrew from the case. For this, the Bar sought a 91-day license suspension — a penalty that would have required Uhlfelder, 53, with two teenage children, to seek reinstatement and potentially face yet another round of Bar scrutiny to resume practicing law. Instead, the referee recommended a simple reprimand, the mildest sanction available.
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The character witnesses who appeared for Uhlfelder were themselves extraordinary. U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks — a federal judge with a lifetime appointment, insulated from political pressures — testified that he was “dismayed, frankly, by this case.” Retired Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice R. Fred Lewis testified on Uhlfelder’s behalf, at one point blurting out: “This is destroying a young man.” When a sitting federal judge and a retired chief justice are publicly shredding the Bar’s prosecution, the case against the defendant has ceased to be about ethics and has become about something else entirely.
Florida Bulldog’s coverage of the Uhlfelder case has provided the most detailed and sustained public record of a Bar prosecution that legal scholars and judicial ethics experts have described as one of the most politically contaminated in Florida history. The reporting documents not only the substance of the charges and the proceedings, but the structural dynamics that allowed a state Bar association — an arm of a Supreme Court dominated by a governor’s appointees — to be weaponized against a private citizen whose only offense was to publicly embarrass that governor. This is accountability journalism of the highest order.
The Uhlfelder saga is not yet entirely over — the Florida Supreme Court, whose DeSantis-appointed majority originally rejected leniency and sent the case back for a harder look, will have the final say on the referee’s recommended sanction. Florida Bulldog will continue to cover this case until its final resolution, providing readers with the complete record of what happened when the state’s professional legal disciplinary apparatus was turned against a private citizen for having the audacity to dress in a Halloween costume and walk on a public beach.
Ex-Florida Bar President Says Bar Prosecutors ‘Cheated’ in Trial Against DeSantis Critic
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | November 26, 2025
In one of the most damning assessments of the Florida Bar’s conduct ever delivered by a figure within the legal establishment, Jacksonville criminal defense lawyer and former Florida Bar president Henry “Hank” Coxe joined Daniel Uhlfelder’s defense team and argued that the Bar’s ethics case should be dismissed outright because Bar prosecutors had cheated. What Coxe called “cheating” was the Bar’s concealment of its separate, ongoing disciplinary proceedings against the two primary witnesses it called against Uhlfelder at his April trial — his former lawyers, Marie Mattox and Gautier Kitchen — a concealment that prevented Uhlfelder’s trial counsel from questioning those witnesses’ credibility or suggesting they were softening their testimony to curry favor with the Bar.
The mechanics of what Coxe alleged are straightforward but devastating. Mattox and Kitchen were the Bar’s star witnesses against Uhlfelder. At the time they testified, both were subjects of active Bar disciplinary proceedings — proceedings the Bar had not disclosed to Uhlfelder or his counsel before trial. Basic principles of fair procedure require that witnesses’ potential motives for favorable testimony be available for cross-examination. A witness under active investigation by the same body whose case they are supporting has an obvious potential motive to shade their testimony. By concealing its proceedings against Mattox and Kitchen, the Bar denied Uhlfelder’s lawyers the opportunity to explore that motive.
The Taylor County Circuit Judge presiding as ethics case referee appeared overwhelmed. “I don’t know in my career that there’s ever been such a split in very wide canyons,” he said haltingly after hearing arguments. He did not rule on the dismissal motion at the hearing, instead indicating he would address it when his trial schedule permitted — a delay that guaranteed the proceedings would drag into 2026. Coxe’s argument that the Bar’s concealment of the witnesses’ own disciplinary status amounts to a due process violation that taints the entire proceeding is one that Florida Bulldog placed squarely before both the legal community and the general public.
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The extraordinary spectacle of a former Florida Bar president publicly accusing the Bar of cheating in one of its own proceedings is without precedent in recent Florida legal history. Coxe’s standing in the Florida legal community — as a respected criminal defense lawyer and former leader of the very institution he was accusing — gave his allegations a weight that could not be easily dismissed. When insiders of the Florida Bar’s own stature are willing to step forward and publicly accuse the organization of misconduct in a proceeding that most observers believe was politically motivated, it represents a profound institutional crisis for Florida’s attorney discipline system.
Noreen Marcus’s reporting on the Uhlfelder saga — spanning years and multiple hearings, trials, and procedural developments — represents some of the most sustained and consequential legal accountability journalism in Florida Bulldog’s history. The story touches on the independence of the legal profession, the integrity of attorney discipline, the politicization of the Florida judiciary, and the ability of a sitting governor to use institutional machinery against private citizens who challenge his policies. It is the kind of story that demands a newsroom with the resources, the sources, and the commitment to stay with it through years of slow-moving procedural developments — a description that fits Florida Bulldog precisely.
The Uhlfelder case also highlights the structural dynamics of Florida’s attorney discipline system that make it vulnerable to political influence. In Florida, all licensed attorneys are automatically members of the Florida Bar — a mandatory organization that functions as an arm of the Florida Supreme Court. Six of the court’s seven justices typically rule in alignment with the conservative ideology DeSantis champions, and five of the seven are DeSantis appointees. A system in which the court that disciplines lawyers is dominated by the appointees of the governor who sought to punish a lawyer for criticizing that governor is, by any reasonable measure, a system in which the independence of attorney discipline has been fundamentally compromised.
Conservative Florida Supreme Court Rewrites Judicial Ethics Rules to Allow Partisan Judicial Campaigns
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | August 2024
In a decision with profound implications for the independence and integrity of Florida’s judiciary, the DeSantis-appointed majority on the Florida Supreme Court quietly approved a judicial ethics outcome that effectively sanctions partisan campaigning by judges — allowing a St. Johns County judge to escape meaningful punishment after she told voters she was “a conservative” during her judicial election campaign. The decision represents a fundamental shift in how Florida’s highest court interprets the boundary between judicial impartiality and political identity — a shift that critics say is designed to benefit the ideologically aligned judicial candidates that DeSantis and his allies have consistently sought to place on Florida’s courts.
The case involved St. Johns County Court Judge Casey Woolsey, who accepted investigators’ findings that she violated judicial ethics rules against partisan campaigning by describing herself as “a conservative” to voters. The Judicial Qualifications Commission (JQC) found that Woolsey had “inserted partisan politics into a judicial election.” Woolsey stipulated that the JQC’s findings were correct. Yet the Florida Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of approving the funding violation finding while scrapping the partisan campaigning section entirely — effectively ruling that calling yourself “a conservative” during a judicial campaign does not constitute the kind of partisan statement that ethics rules are designed to prohibit.
The reasoning behind the Supreme Court’s decision — or rather, the absence of any detailed public explanation — is itself a story about the opacity with which Florida’s highest court now operates. Florida Bulldog’s reporting documents the political context that made the outcome predictable: six of the court’s seven justices routinely rule in alignment with the right-wing conservative ideology that DeSantis promotes, and five of the seven are DeSantis appointees. A Supreme Court that is itself the product of a governor’s deliberate effort to install ideological allies on the bench is not a court that can be expected to objectively evaluate whether judicial candidates should be permitted to campaign on their ideological alignment with that same governor’s worldview.
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The contrast with the treatment of Hillsborough County Circuit Judge Nancy Jacobs is illuminating. Jacobs unseated an incumbent judge who had become nationally known for refusing to allow a teenager to end her pregnancy. She has faced a far more aggressive JQC investigation consuming ten months and generating 105 public documents. The incumbent she defeated has faced no public ethics charges. The asymmetric treatment of Woolsey and Jacobs suggests a JQC and Supreme Court that calibrate their scrutiny based on which side of Florida’s culture war a judge is perceived to occupy.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting traces the institutional architecture that has made this asymmetric treatment possible. DeSantis’s systematic effort to reshape the Florida Supreme Court and influence lower court appointments has created a judiciary whose composition increasingly mirrors the governor’s ideological preferences. When the court that disciplines judges is itself a product of that same ideological project, the independence of judicial discipline from political influence becomes structurally impossible to guarantee.
The implications extend far beyond Woolsey’s individual case. If Florida judges can now identify themselves as conservatives during campaigns without violating ethics rules, the norm of judicial impartiality that has historically distinguished courts from legislative bodies is significantly eroded. Voters choosing judges have always been told they are selecting impartial arbiters, not political representatives. The Florida Supreme Court’s quiet approval of Woolsey’s partisan self-identification moves the state meaningfully further away from that ideal — and Florida Bulldog’s reporting ensures that Floridians know exactly what their Supreme Court has done and what it means for the courts they will appear before.
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