As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis campaigns for the White House, government accountability watchdogs point to the long shadow of secrecy cast by his administration.
In the four years since DeSantis took office, his administration has routinely blocked the release of public records, passed a series of new legal exceptions aimed at keeping more information out of the public eye, and waged legal battles against advocates of open government, the press and other vigilantes.
DeSantis, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former federal prosecutor, is the only Florida governor known to use “executive privilege” to keep records hidden, experts and transparency advocates said.
His travel records, previously under media scrutiny, are now secret, thanks to a new legal exemption, one of a record number created in 2023 by the Republican-led Legislature and approved by the governor.
DeSantis has also fought to hide information about some of the biggest events during his tenure, including withholding data on covid infection and blocking the release of records about the controversial resettlement of dozens of immigrants on Martha’s Vineyard, reports show. legal documents.
It’s hard to compare DeSantis to previous Florida governors on transparency issues, in part because his administration has withheld key information sought by NBC News and other media organizations that would show how often it rejects requests for records and how long it takes to release them.
Still, DeSantis’ record on transparency has alarmed open government advocates, particularly because he could bring the same spirit to the White House, if he wins in 2024.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Michael Barfield, director of public access for the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a nonprofit open government watchdog. “It is impressive the amount of material that has been taken from the table of a state that many have considered the most transparent. We have quickly become one of the least transparent in the space of four years.”
Barfield called the DeSantis administration the least transparent “of anything I’ve witnessed in the nearly 35 years that I’ve been doing transparency work in Florida.”
DeSantis, a fierce critic of the media who generally avoids mainstream reporters, declined interview requests from NBC News to discuss his record on transparency issues for this story and did not respond to written questions.
Adam Marshall, an attorney with the nonprofit National Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said transparency in Florida had fallen before DeSantis, but “the decline is now accelerating.” He added that transparency at the federal level is already bad and probably wouldn’t improve under a DeSantis presidency. “Could it be much worse? Yes,” he said.
Testing the law
Florida has long had a reputation for government transparency, with some of the most extensive public records and open meeting laws in the country. In 1992, Floridians overwhelmingly approved an amendment to enshrine citizen access to public records and open meetings as rights in the state constitution, the first state to do so.
These rights include access to records held by the state governor. Only the Florida Legislature is constitutionally authorized to make exceptions to the state’s Public Records Law, as long as it can justify each exemption as a “public necessity” and that it is “no broader than necessary.”
Since taking office in 2019, DeSantis has repeatedly tested the letter and spirit of Florida laws and constitutional guarantees, sometimes bypassing the Legislature in novel ways, experts say.
In legal filings, the governor’s lawyers have asserted that DeSantis can exercise executive privilege to withhold records at his discretion, though no such exemption is mentioned in state law or its constitution.
In a January ruling on one of those lawsuits, a case involving an anonymous requester seeking the names of DeSantis advisers to decide his state supreme court picks, a Leon County judge agreed he could invoke the authority. The ruling, the first in favor of DeSantis on the issue, is not binding on other courts, but some open government activists and media groups fear it will embolden DeSantis’ use of executive authority.
Catherine Cameron, a professor of media law at Stetson University School of Law who has researched the issue, said DeSantis is among a handful of governors who use executive privilege to withhold public records, and he appears to be the only governor of Florida in history to do so.
“I couldn’t find any instances of any Florida governor claiming executive privilege before DeSantis did,” Cameron told NBC News.
The issue had never made it to a Florida court, as other governors “probably didn’t want to rock the boat,” he added.
‘The biggest threat to freedom of expression’
In February, DeSantis livestreamed a panel discussion calling for reforms to the defamation law. Later, Republican lawmakers introduced legislation to make it easier for elected officials and other public figures to sue the media for defamation over news stories and critical comments.
Among other changes, the measures were aimed at stripping reporters of legal privileges to keep anonymous sources confidential and lowering the “actual malice” standard required for public officials to prove defamation. That standard, established by a landmark 1964 US Supreme Court ruling, requires public figures to prove that journalists knowingly published false information or did so with “reckless disregard of whether or not it was false.”
The First Amendment Foundation, a Tallahassee-based open government advocacy group, called DeSantis’s attempt to recast the defamation law “the greatest threat to free speech and free press” during the state’s legislative session. said Bobby Block, the group’s chief executive.
The bills failed to advance out of committee.
But other legislative efforts to undermine public access have been successful. By the foundation’s count, the Florida Legislature created 23 public records exemptions this session and reinstated nine others that were about to expire. It’s been nearly a decade since lawmakers came close to that, when they introduced 22 public records exemptions in 2014, Block said.
One of them prohibits the disclosure of the governor’s travel logs and visitor logs to his mansion.
In a public appearance in May, DeSantis said the bill “wasn’t necessarily something I came up with,” adding that it was “motivated by a security concern.”
Freshman state Rep. Jeff Holcomb, a Republican who introduced the legislation, told NBC News the bill was “given to me by leadership” to address security “glitches.”
“I would introduce this bill for a Democratic governor,” said Holcomb, who called characterizations that the waiver keeps the public in the dark about vital information “garbage.”
Block said lawmakers could have tailored a measure to redact specific details about personnel and security strategies. But instead, they approved a “wholesale exemption” that now keeps secret details like where the governor went, who he met with, the reason for his trip and how much it cost.
Disclosure of such information in the past has helped identify taxpayer-funded travel abuses by at least two governors and other state officials, he said. In addition, the waiver was applied retroactively, keeping hidden details of DeSantis’ previous trips where safety concerns are no longer an issue, Block said.
fighting for the secret
DeSantis’ office has denied any records exist in response to some public records requests, including one related to Hurricane Ian, a natural disaster with multiple casualties.
Late last year, the Executive Office of the Governor denied a public records request from NBC News for any communication (texts, emails, voicemails or other exchanges) sent or received by DeSantis in the days before and after arrival. of the hurricane, becoming one of the deadliest tropical storms in modern history. The office closed the request after less than a business day, saying a search “did not produce any documents that were responsive” to the request.
DeSantis made national headlines in September when his administration flew nearly 50 mostly Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and dropped them off to protest President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. After the Florida Government Accountability Center filed requests seeking communications and other records about the controversial flights, DeSantis’ office responded two and a half weeks later by releasing documents unrelated to what the group had requested, the records show. court records.
Only after the watchdog group sued did DeSantis’s office begin releasing some responsive records, though parts of them were redacted. On October 25, a trial judge ruled that DeSantis’s office had violated the Public Records Act by incorrectly redacting some records and failing to turn over others within a reasonable amount of time.
The judge ordered DeSantis’ office to pay the group’s legal fees and costs and to turn over the remaining records within 20 days. But DeSantis’ office did not turn over all the records by the court deadline, according to the judge’s order.
The office has since released some records, including ones showing that a senior administration official sent emails through a private Gmail account while seeking to help a former legal client secure a contract to oversee the relocation program for immigrants. DeSantis’ office is now appealing the judge’s ruling that he violated state records law by failing to release the records within a reasonable amount of time.
“It is scandalous. They are using private electronic accounts and devices to conduct official business,” Barfield said. “And when challenged, they fight tooth and nail.”
Similarly, the Florida state health department under DeSantis continues to fight a two-year lawsuit alleging it violated the state’s records law by failing to make Covid-19 data available during the height of the pandemic. .
The DeSantis administration, which has touted the lifting of pandemic restrictions in Florida before most other states, became a national outlier when it stopped publicly releasing detailed Covid-19 data in June 2021, just as infections spiked amid the delta variant.
Carlos Guillermo Smith, then a Democratic state representative from Orlando, later sued, alleging that the information was “vital to the ability of citizens to understand the risks and make informed decisions about their lives.”
The case remains pending amid state appeals.
“When they violate the Public Records Act, we must hold them accountable,” said Guillermo Smith.
