In 2024, Floridians voted, by a margin of 55.9% to 44.1%, to legalize recreational marijuana. Unfortunately, the threshold for passage of “Amendment 3” was 60% and the measure failed.

So far so bad … but it gets worse.

Nearly two years later we’ve learned that state government officials misappropriated millions of dollars in taxpayer money; funneled it through a charity founded by governor Ron DeSantis’s wife and into Republican PACs operated by the man who later became the state’s attorney general, with the approval of the then sitting attorney general, now a US Senator; and poured it into a campaign to defeat the measure.

We know this because someone leaked a grand jury report on the matter to CBS News Miami.

“Based on the impending ballot initiative, the expedited nature of the movement of these funds  … and the quick disbursement of the funds to their final destination,” the report reads, “we conclude that these funds were misappropriated as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.”

Unfortunately, the grand jury couldn’t figure out exactly who to charge  with which elements of the criminal conspiracy and didn’t issue indictments: “Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida … or had any memory of who made it.”

De Santis’s response to the matter: “The only crime that was apparent was whoever leaked the grand jury report.”

Now-AG James Uthmeier, who seems to have been the central figure running the $10 million embezzlement operation, calls the affair “a politically motivated hoax” which “shows that the Democrats had to collude with the press to break the law.”

It’s not their fault they embezzled taxpayer money to rig an election, see? It’s everybody else’s fault for finding out!

If that grand jury had minded its own business, if that whistleblower had kept the report under wraps, if the media hadn’t told the public about it, IF IT WEREN’T FOR THOSE MEDDLING KIDS … the word that comes immediately to mind is “Clintonesque.”

What’s next?

Hopefully we’ll get a new, more vigorous investigation that finds out who did and knew what, when they did and knew it, and charges those responsible. I hate to leave anything to the federal government, but Florida’s state government is too tightly under the control of the perpetrators for it to get done any other way.

We should also get another vote on the recreational marijuana measure, this time an un-rigged one.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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