Citing attorney-client privilege, Jeff Aaron won’t appear in House Committee probing Hope Florida

Hope Florida’s lawyer won’t attend Friday’s scheduled meeting of the Health Care Budget Subcommittee after all.

In a letter to Chair Alex Andrade, Orlando lawyer Jeff Aaron says he is “very disappointed” that he must decline his voluntary appearance.

Aaron says he has “been informed that some board members have decided not to waive their attorney-client privilege.”

Andrade has spent the last few weeks trying to understand how $10 million from a Medicaid settlement reached with the state of Florida ended up in political committees for messaging against constitutional amendments last year. He balked at Aaron’s message.

“Jeff Aaron was implicated in defrauding his client, the Hope Florida Foundation. It’s dishonest of him to now claim he has obligations to his client, especially when the public records act makes clear that, other than circumstances that do not apply here, he does not have the legal right to assert attorney-client privilege without identifying the impending litigation or active litigation justifying the privilege,” Andrade told Florida Politics Wednesday evening.

Aaron previously told the media that he couldn’t attend Thursday’s subcommittee hearing but would be available on Friday, which led Andrade to schedule the second meeting of the week. However, Aaron’s reversal frustrated Andrade.

Andrade has requested the Governor’s Office to provide records, including emails and texts, related to the Hope Florida Foundation.

Andrade is also asking for the 1099 tax documents from the Hope Florida Foundation, the organization’s contracts, emails and other financial records.

The attorney’s refusal to attend comes as Gov. Ron DeSantis and Attorney General James Uthmeier mount a legalistic defense of the use of what seemed to be public money for a political campaign, regarding $10 million directed to the Hope Florida Foundation in a Medicaid settlement.

DeSantis has called that funding pot a “cherry on top” of the overall settlement payment, while Uthmeier dubbed it a “sweetener” for the larger deal.

“The agency puts out a document. It goes through the different agreement. The agreement they reached with the company was for about $56 million to recoup for this PBM Medicaid thing. It’s there, it’s documented. And then they got a $10 million private donation on top of that, which is what the agency said from the beginning. And so this is an attempt to try to manufacture a narrative where there’s really nothing there,” DeSantis said Wednesday.

“I think the media misunderstands the difference between issue committees and political candidate committees under the IRS code,” Uthmeier said. “An issue committee can fight against a ballot initiative and I’m very thankful those groups stepped up and helped us secure a big win.”

Uthmeier ran the issue committee that helped deploy settlement funds routed through external political committees.

Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) General Counsel Andrew Sheeran wrote lawmakers, including Senate President Ben Albritton, House Speaker Daniel Perez and Andrade, to say the deal is aboveboard.

Sheeran differentiated between the $57.8 million in “potential Medicaid-related damages to the state” and the sum that went to the Hope Florida Foundation as a direct support organization (DSO). That money reportedly ended up being used to enrich political consultants and help program message advertising, a move Sheeran framed as “neither illegal nor illicit.”

“The remaining $10,800,000 component of the offer was not to compensate the State for loss of Medicaid funds, but rather ‘to provide reimbursement … for any other potentially alleged damages (contractual or otherwise) as a result of the alleged covered conduct and to otherwise incent (the State) to pursue settlement on these terms without doing formalized claims audits that would cause further delay and cost to the parties.’ The $10,000,000 donated to the DSO was therefore not Medicaid funds,” the lawyer wrote.