After the midterms, CBS News reported that the White House has discussed nominating Ron DeSantis to replace Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense before his term as governor ends on January 5. The President says he is keeping Hegseth. I am writing in case that changes.
I have spent four years documenting how the DeSantis administration handles money, public records and citizen complaints. That record should end any talk of giving him the Pentagon. It should also follow him to any office he seeks afterward.
I will take it in order: the iGas money, the Hope Florida transfer, and what his office did when Floridians reported problems with their elections.
iGas USA is a refrigerant importer in Tampa run by Xianbin “Ben” Meng. In 2018 a Chinese manufacturer, Zhejiang Juhua, put $10 million into the company and kept a 34 percent stake. The U.S. Commerce Department has determined that the Chinese government controls Zhejiang Juhua.
The Miami Herald reported in November 2023 that companies and employees tied to iGas and Meng gave more than $1.1 million in political contributions over five years. About $340,000 of it went to DeSantis and committees affiliated with him. The giving rose from roughly $10,000 in 2019 to more than $800,000 in 2022, the year DeSantis held a campaign rally at the iGas complex in Tampa.
The Herald also reported that the EPA fined Meng’s companies $382,473 for failing to report refrigerant imports. My own review of FEC filings through 2025 puts the network’s federal giving at $2.43 million across 147 committees in both parties.
DeSantis’s campaign answered the Herald by pointing to his record against Chinese Communist Party influence. Meng is a U.S. citizen and the contributions were disclosed. Those facts are his defense, and they leave the real question standing.
The Secretary of Defense runs the department whose central planning problem is China. Every officer and civilian who holds a clearance must account for foreign financial ties in writing. A nominee who took $340,000 from the business partner of a Chinese state-controlled company, with no public report that he returned it, should be held to the same standard as a lieutenant filling out a clearance form.
Florida found that Centene, a Medicaid contractor, had overbilled the state about $67 million. The settlement sent $57 million to the state and $10 million to the Hope Florida Foundation, the charity tied to First Lady Casey DeSantis’s signature program. Centene paid the $10 million on October 4, 2024.
Within 18 days the foundation granted $5 million each to two nonprofits. Between October 17 and October 29 those nonprofits wrote checks totaling $8.5 million to Keep Florida Clean, the committee fighting the 2024 marijuana amendment. The chairman of that committee was James Uthmeier, the Governor’s chief of staff. DeSantis later appointed Uthmeier Attorney General.
A Leon County grand jury reviewed the transfer and, according to reporting by the Florida Trident, called the money “misappropriated” while finding too little evidence to charge anyone. In October 2026 the First District Court of Appeal ordered that report expunged. The court held that the $10 million was never public money and that the grand jury exceeded its authority.
DeSantis calls the whole matter a hoax and says he was not involved in the settlement. He is entitled to the court’s ruling, and I will state it plainly: no one was charged, and the report is gone.
The bank trail remains. Settlement money that arose from Medicaid overbilling went to the First Lady’s charity and reached a political committee run by the Governor’s chief of staff in under four weeks. A Republican legislator, Rep. Alex Andrade, took it to the IRS, which acknowledged his whistleblower claim in May.
The Pentagon controls the largest discretionary budget in the federal government. The Senate should decide whether a governor who sees nothing wrong with that sequence should control its contracts and its settlements.
In August and September 2022 I wrote to Governor DeSantis that Pinellas County mail-ballot envelopes violated section 101.6103 of the Florida Statutes, and that my comparison of the voter rolls against postal change-of-address data showed ballots going to undeliverable addresses. I asked whom in his administration I should work with.
My records now hold at least 229 emails sent to the Governor’s office since then by me and by other Floridians who copied me. Forty-five are mine. They cover vote-by-mail ballots, voter rolls, voting systems, public records and campaign finance.
Here is what came back:
- Thirty-three automatic replies from the Governor’s mailbox.
- One meeting request declined. His scheduling office wrote on December 14, 2022 that he could not meet.
- Three Inspector General files, all closed. The Chief Inspector General referred the first to the Department of State’s Inspector General on October 25, 2022 and closed it. In July 2024 the office told me it had no records on my request and closed that one too.
In April 2023 I asked Secretary of State Cord Byrd, a DeSantis appointee, for county machine reports from all 67 counties under Chapter 119. On May 12, 2023 the Department answered that it is not the custodian of those reports. Twelve days later, on the day he announced his run for President, DeSantis signed SB 7050. Citizen groups, including the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee’s election integrity subcommittee, had asked him to veto it.
DeSantis also chose the officials I have spent years asking for records. He appointed Julie Marcus as Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections in May 2020.
My file shows what his office did when it was told: it closed the files and went silent. Whether anyone above the Inspector General ever read those complaints is a question his office has never answered. A confirmation hearing is the place to ask it under oath.
If this nomination is ever sent to the Senate, the Armed Services Committee should put these questions to him under oath:
- Will you return every dollar from iGas, its affiliates and its employees? Did anyone in your office discuss the company’s matters before the EPA?
- Who decided the Hope Florida Foundation’s share of the Centene settlement would be $10 million, and when did you learn where the money went?
- What did your office do with the three Inspector General files on Florida election complaints, and who decided to close them?
Until he answers, Ron DeSantis has disqualified himself from the Pentagon. The same questions should meet him at the door of any other office, appointed or elected, that he seeks from here on.
We have been documenting the misfeasance, malfeasance, neglect of duty and official misconduct in Florida linked to DeSantis for years:
