DeSantis Probably Wouldn’t Be Governor Without the Orlando Sentinel Reporter He’s Now Attacking

AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has one thing in common with the man who stomped all over his White House dreams, President Donald Trump: a seething disdain for the media. There’s one Florida reporter to whom DeSantis owes a major debt — arguably even the political career that got him in the presidential conversation at all — but that isn’t stopping the governor from targeting this reporter for attacks.

The latest governor vs. press kerfuffle arises from the Hope Florida scandal, specifically the reporting by Jeffrey Schweers, Capital bureau reporter for The Orlando Sentinel.

Hope Florida is a state-created charity program that says it connects private nonprofits and faith-based organizations with individuals needing assistance, with the goal of getting them off government welfare. It’s viewed by many as having been founded to create a platform for Casey DeSantis to launch her own campaign to follow her term-limited husband as governor, but it’s been dragged down by a series of controversies including failing to file the required charitable organization paperwork, needing to amend its tax return, and accusations that it was used to improperly divert $10 million out of a $67 million settlement with a Medicaid provider that had overbilled for medications to political PACs running attack ads against the marijuana legalization constitutional amendment that was on the Florida ballot last November.

A criminal investigation was launched last month, and several Republican legislative leaders have publicly accused the DeSantises and Attorney General James Uthmeier — the governor’s former chief of staff — of possible criminal activity.

Schweers is one of the Florida reporters who has covered the Hope Florida story in detail, including several investigative reports debunking claims made by the organization. This put Schweers in DeSantis’ crosshairs, and on June 6, the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF), an agency that reports to DeSantis, sent an unsigned cease and desist letter to the Sentinel, Schweers, and Sentinel executive editor Roger Simmons. The Sentinel’s editorial board defiantly responded that it would not yield to what it described as an “attempt to bully our newsroom.”

The attack by the DeSantis administration was especially rich, since without Schweers’ previous work, it’s very likely that DeSantis might never have been elected governor.

In the 2018 Florida gubernatorial race, DeSantis entered the race an underdog. At that point, he was in his third term of a mostly unremarkable stint in Congress and going up against former Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam’s stronger name recognition and family connections to Republican powerbrokers and elected officials across the state. Trump’s endorsement gave DeSantis a significant bump among GOP primary voters, but then he had to get through a a brutal slugfest of a general election against Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum.

Gillum’s primary win was a shock. The Democratic frontrunners — including real estate billionaire Jeff Greene, former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine, and former Rep. Gwen Graham (D-FL), the daughter of Florida’s still-beloved former governor and senator Bob Graham — burned through millions of dollars clobbering each other while mostly ignoring Gillum.

That meant that, despite festering rumors about Gillum engaging in unethical activity and grumbling in Tallahassee that he was an incompetent mayor, he showed up for his general election battle against DeSantis nearly unscathed.

The DeSantis campaign, Republican Party of Florida, and related PACs spent nearly $40 million in the general election, and a significant part of that was used to try and define Gillum for voters but racism accusations against DeSantis dominated the campaign news cycle for awhile, and polling steadily showed Gillum with a narrow lead.

Some of the key reporting on Gillum during this period was spearheaded by Schweers when he was at the Tallahassee Democrat, including digging into the implications of the mayor’s ties to shady lobbyists who were the subject of a federal corruption probe.

As Schweers’ colleague opinion columnist Scott Maxwell wrote, the articles by Schweers and other reporters at the Democrat were “so damning” they provided the content for DeSantis to bludgeon Gillum with attack ads.

DeSantis just barely squeaked out a victory, winning by a mere 0.4%, or 32,463 votes out of 8,220,561 cast statewide. Several of the college football stadiums in this state could easily hold double that number of people.

Needless to say, DeSantis — a young Congressman with a voting record postively-rated by conservative groups but still lacking major legislative accomplishments — would have had no plausible path from which to launch a presidential campaign if he had not won the votes of that half-stadium’s worth of voters in 2018 and then been re-elected in 2022.

In 2018, DeSantis’ campaign spent millions of dollars urging Floridians to read Schweers’ articles. In 2025, his administration is sending a threatening letter with dubious legal authority trying to scare Schweers away from a story, and as Maxwell noted, the governor is also deliberately inciting online trolls into harassing Schweers:

There was no proof. No specifics. The letter wasn’t even signed by anyone — maybe because no reputable attorney would put their name on a document that looked like it was written by a Twitter bot trying to cosplay as a lawyer.

It was just an anonymous, undocumented claim that someone had heard something about harassment, which the governor then tweeted along with the comment: “Bottom feeders gonna bottom feed…”

The governor’s tweet — which included Jeff’s email address — prompted the kind of online reaction DeSantis surely expected. One of the governor’s followers called for Jeff to be arrested. Others responded to the governor’s name-calling with more name-calling, either opting for antisemitism or just blanket statements like: “Journos are some the worst people alive. Scum of the earth.”

Schweers had responded to DeSantis’ “bottom feeders” tweet with a blunt question: “Why not respond to my numerous public records requests?”

It appears that the governor’s office still has not responded to Schweers’ public records requests — par for the course for an administration known for slow-walking responses, taking steps to circumvent the Sunshine Laws, pushing for statutory amendments to to reduce public access to government records, and mocking reporters for asking questions.

The reason DeSantis hasn’t replied to the records requests “is becoming increasingly obvious,” Maxwell wrote. “Because the more the facts get out, the worse things look for DeSantis. So the state’s top elected official is trying to use all the influence he can to stop journalists from even asking questions.”

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.