Published by the Florida Center for Government Accountability
Florida’s new attorney general: An advocate for secrecy in government
With so much chaos in Florida politics lately, little attention has been paid to something that should be big news: The state is about to get a new attorney general for whom none of its citizens voted.
With Ashley Moody heading to the U.S. Senate, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he was choosing James Uthmeier, his chief of staff and former campaign manager, to fill the final two years of Moody’s term as A.G.
Now, most Floridians wouldn’t recognize Uthmeier if they tripped over him. But you should know that he has some radical ideas about how government officials should be allowed to keep secrets from the citizens they serve.
As the governor’s chief of staff, Uthmeier has been in a two-year legal fight to hide his cell phone records from the public. And now DeSantis wants him to be the top law enforcement officer whose responsibilities including enforcing the state’s public records law.
This is like hiring an atheist as your church’s pastor.
“His actions reflect either a blatant disregard for public record law or a calculated effort to shield officials from that law,” said Michael Barfield, the director of public access for the Florida Center for Government Accountability.
The nonprofit center sued the state back in 2022 for records connected to DeSantis’ decision to spend hundreds of thousands of Florida tax dollars to fly Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.
There were lots of questions about this political stunt — about its legality and why DeSantis was so focused on ridding Texas of migrants when he has claimed his own state is full of undocumented workers. (Maybe because Florida employers who donate to campaigns have said they want to keep undocumented workers on their payrolls.)
But one of the biggest questions, as the Sentinel previously reported, was why the DeSantis administration agreed to pay a ridiculously overpriced amount of more than $600,000 for two flights in a no-bid deal awarded to a politically connected company. (These guys should try Travelocity.)