Florida’s Statewide Nonprofit Investigative Newsroom FloridaBulldog.org | Fort Lauderdale, Florida | Est. 2009
PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION STATEWIDE Date: March 1, 2026 Source: FloridaBulldog.org — Florida’s Independent Nonprofit Investigative Newsroom
WATCHDOG FILES: FLORIDA BULLDOG INVESTIGATES WHAT THE STATE’S MOST POWERFUL FIGURES WOULD RATHER KEEP HIDDEN
Four Statewide Investigations: A Broward Sheriff’s Budget That Doesn’t Add Up | The Florida Bar Lets Matt Gaetz Walk Free | A Boca Raton Lawyer’s Fight to Hold Pam Bondi Professionally Accountable | Whether Ex-UF President Ben Sasse Will Ever Repay Floridians for His Spending Scandal
This is a Florida press release. Not a political campaign advertisement. Not a corporate announcement. Not a government statement carefully crafted to say as little as possible. This is a press release from Florida Bulldog — the state’s only independent, statewide nonprofit investigative newsroom — and it contains the kind of information that the people and institutions it covers would prefer did not exist: documented investigations into how Florida’s sheriffs, lawyers, attorneys general, university presidents, and professional discipline bodies operate when they think no one is watching.
Florida Bulldog was founded in Fort Lauderdale in 2009 by Dan Christensen, an award-winning former investigative reporter for The Miami Herald and Daily Business Review whose career has produced reporting that sent a Broward sheriff to federal prison, generated unanimous Florida Supreme Court decisions that changed state law, and forced the FBI to confront what it knew about the Sarasota Saudis and the 9/11 hijackers. Today Dan leads a team of veteran journalists who bring the same relentless, evidence-based approach to every story they publish — regardless of which party, official, or institution is implicated.
Florida Bulldog is distributed statewide and published at FloridaBulldog.org, where every investigation is freely available to every Florida resident, journalist, editor, blogger, podcast host, and civic organization that wants to use it. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We accept no advertising. We are owned by no corporation. We are affiliated with no political party. We are members of the Investigative News Network. Our only obligation is to the truth and to the Floridians who depend on accurate reporting to make sense of the institutions that govern their lives.
The four investigations in this press release span the state from top to bottom. In Broward County, Bulldog editor Dan Christensen found that the sheriff who took his budget fight to Tallahassee published financial documents riddled with internal inconsistencies that undercut his own funding appeal. In Tallahassee, Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus obtained and published the Bar file on former Congressman Matt Gaetz — a document the Bar was about to destroy — revealing how the state’s attorney discipline system decided that a congressional finding of statutory rape had nothing to do with fitness to practice law. In a Maryland federal courtroom, a Boca Raton attorney’s refusal to accept the Florida Bar’s one-day dismissal of his ethics complaint against U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi produced a result that the Bar could not: an active disciplinary investigation by a judge with lifetime tenure. And at the University of Florida, the audit trail from a $6.2 million presidential spending scandal raises a simple question that no one in Gainesville appears willing to ask out loud: will anyone make the taxpayers whole?
Florida newsrooms of every size and format are welcome to use Florida Bulldog’s reporting. Our work is produced by experienced investigative journalists using primary documents, on-the-record sources, public records requests, court filings, and original data analysis. Every story is fact-checked and edited before publication. When we make mistakes, we correct them on the record. We do not traffic in rumor, speculation, or unnamed sources whose identities we cannot verify. That standard is what makes Florida Bulldog’s reporting publishable in every media market in Florida — and what has made it the most trusted source of independent investigative journalism in the state for 15 years.
Florida Bulldog survives entirely because Floridians believe their state deserves a free and fearless press. If the reporting in this press release matters to you — if you believe editors, publishers, broadcasters, and citizens across the state should have access to investigations that no advertiser can suppress and no political donor can influence — please share these stories and consider supporting Florida Bulldog with a tax-deductible donation at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog. Now, read the investigations below.
INVESTIGATION NO. 1 — LAW ENFORCEMENT & GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY
BSO Takes Budget Fight to Capitol, But Its Own Budget Doesn’t Add Up
By Dan Christensen | FloridaBulldog.org | February 2026
Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony made news this winter by traveling to Tallahassee to argue before Governor DeSantis and his Cabinet — sitting as the Florida Administration Commission — that Broward County has been making arbitrary and capricious cuts to his agency’s budget. It was an unusual move: a sheriff’s appeal to the state for more money is rare, and Broward police chiefs publicly questioned the wisdom of it. Florida Bulldog editor Dan Christensen found the reason for their skepticism embedded in BSO’s own published financial documents — budget books containing significant internal discrepancies that cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the numbers Tony presented in Tallahassee as the foundation of his funding demand.
Florida Bulldog’s analysis of BSO’s adopted budget books for fiscal years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 found a striking pattern: the revenue figures listed in the agency’s budget summaries do not match the backup detail information that breaks down income and costs by unit. In one of the most glaring examples, BSO’s budget book states that its Special Details Unit generated $9.74 million in actual revenue in fiscal year 2023-2024. But the detailed backup information for that same unit totals only $4.85 million — a discrepancy of $4.88 million. Broward County’s Independent Auditor Robert Melton told Florida Bulldog the numbers appear to show revenues exceeding costs by several million dollars — suggesting either a data error or unreported surplus.
The discrepancies are not isolated to a single unit. Florida Bulldog found inconsistencies across multiple BSO municipal contract accounts, where numbers in current budget documents contradict what the same years’ prior budgets showed. “How can you ask for more money when your own numbers don’t add up?” one Broward police chief told Florida Bulldog. That question — blunt and unanswered — sits at the center of this story about accountability at the county’s most powerful law enforcement agency.
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Florida Bulldog’s inquiries about the discrepancies were forwarded to BSO’s public information office, which said it would research the matter. The agency’s Inspector General — who serves at Tony’s pleasure and reports solely to him — has not addressed the inconsistencies Florida Bulldog identified. Broward County’s own assessment of Tony’s financial management, which touched on other concerns, made no mention of the budget discrepancies documented by Florida Bulldog.
Florida Bulldog’s coverage of the Broward Sheriff’s Office under Gregory Tony is the most sustained and comprehensive in Florida media. No other outlet has documented the full arc of Tony’s tenure — from his concealed 1993 murder arrest to his ethics proceedings to his rapid-fire personnel purges to the financial questions now surrounding his budget presentation to state officials.
The BSO story is also a story about the accountability infrastructure surrounding Florida’s 67 county sheriffs — a group of constitutionally independent elected officials who command enormous budgets and broad law enforcement powers with limited external auditing. When a sheriff’s own budget documents contain material inconsistencies and his appeal for more taxpayer money is built on those documents, the question of who checks the checkers is not abstract. It is the foundational question of democratic governance — and Florida Bulldog is the outlet asking it.
INVESTIGATION NO. 2 — LEGAL ACCOUNTABILITY & THE FLORIDA BAR
Florida Bar Lets Gaetz Off the Hook — Statutory Rape Not a Bar Matter
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | January 21, 2026
Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has obtained and published the complete Florida Bar file on former Congressman Matt Gaetz — a 70-page document the Bar would have quietly destroyed later this year — revealing in full detail how the state’s attorney discipline organization downplayed a bipartisan congressional finding that Gaetz committed statutory rape, before abandoning his prosecution without discipline of any kind. Gaetz’s Florida Bar profile now lists him as an attorney in good standing with a clean 10-year disciplinary history. Legal ethics scholars told Florida Bulldog that outcome is an embarrassment to the legal profession — and a window into the double standards that govern Florida’s attorney discipline system.
Roughly the top half of the 70-page file is devoted to a bipartisan U.S. House Ethics Committee report concluding that Gaetz — President Trump’s original nominee for U.S. Attorney General — took illegal drugs and paid women, at least one of whom was underage, for sex for more than three years. The Bar’s grievance committee took preliminary investigative steps, then used what Florida Bulldog describes as an unorthodox rationale to close the case. The committee chair’s closure letter stated explicitly that the decision was not based on a finding that the House report’s findings were inaccurate — meaning the Bar accepted the factual record established by a bipartisan congressional investigation and still chose to take no professional action whatsoever.
The Bar’s reasoning drew a formal distinction between offenses of personal morality or alleged crimes “which do not have a connection to fitness for the practice of law” and those that do. Lisa Lerman, professor of law emerita at The Catholic University of America, reviewed the Gaetz Bar file for Florida Bulldog and delivered a direct verdict: “It’s an embarrassment to the legal profession and I think the Florida Bar should be embarrassed because for the system to be respected, it has to be applied evenhandedly.” Florida Bulldog noted the particular injustice: the same Florida Bar that requires extensive character background checks for every law school graduate seeking admission decided that a licensed attorney found by Congress to have committed statutory rape meets the standard for continued good standing.
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The timing of Florida Bulldog’s publication carries its own urgency. Under Bar rules, once a disciplinary case is closed without charges, the Bar preserves the file for just one year before destroying it. Had Florida Bulldog not obtained and published the complete record, the documented history of what the Bar found, what it was asked to do, and what it declined to do would have vanished from the public domain entirely.
The Gaetz Bar case is part of a pattern Noreen Marcus has documented over years: a system that applies demonstrably different standards to politically connected lawyers than to ordinary ones. The Bar that let Gaetz walk on a congressional finding of statutory rape is the same Bar that spent five years aggressively pursuing DeSantis critic Daniel Uhlfelder for a technical communications failure in an appellate case.
Every Florida media outlet should know that this Gaetz Bar file exists, that Florida Bulldog obtained it before it was destroyed, and that it is available at FloridaBulldog.org for republication with attribution. This is a story about Florida’s legal system, Florida’s standards of professional accountability, and a Florida lawyer whose national profile makes this one of the most significant Florida Bar stories in years.
INVESTIGATION NO. 3 — ATTORNEY GENERAL ACCOUNTABILITY
Bondi Bar Complaint Rejected by Florida, Revived in Maryland Immigration Case
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | July 8, 2025
On June 5, 2025, a coalition of 70 legal scholars, retired Florida Supreme Court justices, and former judges filed a sweeping ethics complaint against U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi — accusing her of directing DOJ lawyers to subordinate their professional ethics to the administration’s political objectives, and of firing a federal prosecutor for honestly acknowledging in a Maryland courtroom that immigration agents had wrongly deported a Maryland man to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT detention facility. On June 6 — one day later — the Florida Bar closed the complaint. Bondi’s chief of staff mocked the coalition’s members as displaying “less intelligence — and independent thoughts — than sheep.” But the coalition’s lead attorney, Boca Raton criminal defense lawyer Jon May, was not finished.
May — who earned national recognition during the Reagan administration for his representation of Manuel Noriega — told Florida Bulldog that the Florida complaint was always intended as the predicate for something bigger: “That was always my goal, to have an ethics complaint in Florida that could be presented to Judge Paula Xinis in that case. This whole thing is just beginning.” On June 18, Lawyers for the Rule of Law submitted a companion complaint directly to Judge Xinis in the Abrego Garcia immigration case. The judge referred the matter to her district court’s disciplinary committee. The disciplinary investigation that the Florida Bar closed in a day is now actively proceeding in a federal court where a lifetime-appointed judge operates without Florida’s political constraints.
The Abrego Garcia case is one of the landmark legal confrontations of the Trump administration’s second term. Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a Maryland construction worker and father of three — was wrongly deported to CECOT, an El Salvador prison notorious for torturing inmates, after a government error. The administration resisted his return for months. When he was brought back in June 2025, he was immediately charged with alien smuggling and jailed in Nashville — a sequence critics described as retaliation. The attorney general whose department oversaw all of this is now under active professional investigation in the court where those events unfolded.
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May told Florida Bulldog he remains hopeful that the Florida Bar will eventually engage seriously with the complaint, noting that the entire justice system is at risk when government officials tell lawyers working for them that political objectives come before their professional obligations to the Bar.
Ethics regulators in New York, California, and Washington, D.C. disbarred former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others who worked to overturn the 2020 election results. Florida’s Bar has dismissed three ethics complaints against Bondi using three different procedural rationales, each time without substantive engagement with the documented allegations.
Florida Bulldog’s coverage of the Bondi accountability story connects to its broader, multi-year documentation of how the Florida Bar and Florida Supreme Court have operated under political conditions that have compromised their independence. The Bondi story, the Gaetz story, the Uhlfelder story — they are not isolated episodes. They are different manifestations of the same institutional dynamic, and Florida Bulldog is the newsroom that has covered all of them with the sustained rigor they require.
INVESTIGATION NO. 4 — HIGHER EDUCATION & PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY
Ex-UF President Sasse Could Repay Florida Taxpayers — But Will He?
FloridaBulldog.org | August 14, 2025
Former University of Florida president Ben Sasse — who called UF “the best dang public university in America” — arrived in Gainesville in February 2023 and departed 541 days later, citing his wife’s illness, leaving behind a spending scandal that the university’s own auditor general documented as involving “apparently both unnecessary and unreasonable spending” and lax controls over the president’s budget. The office of the president spent $14.8 million in fiscal year 2023-2024 — $6.2 million, or 72 percent, more than the prior year. Sasse denies any “inappropriate spending” occurred. Neither he nor the university has indicated any intention to make taxpayers whole. Florida Bulldog is asking why not.
The audit findings, first surfaced by student journalists at the University of Florida’s Independent Florida Alligator and then confirmed and expanded by the state auditor general, found that most of Sasse’s extraordinary spending was driven by lucrative contracts with big-name consulting firms and high-salaried remote positions for Sasse’s former Senate staff and Republican political operatives. The specific expenditures documented in the audit include hundreds of thousands of dollars in private jet travel, $1.3 million in catering and events spending, a $38,000 sushi bar at a holiday party, and a $7,000 liquor tab at another. These are the documented expenses of a man who was running Florida’s flagship public university on the Florida taxpayers’ dime.
Both Governor DeSantis and then-CFO Jimmy Patronis publicly called for investigation of Sasse’s “exorbitant spending” — yet following the audit’s release, UF issued a memo that acknowledged some wrongdoing while defending the institution, and no lawsuit to recover the losses has been filed. Sasse continues to collect a salary from UF as “president emeritus and professor” — and his federal campaign committee, Ben Sasse for U.S. Senate, still holds $2,468,153 in unspent campaign funds. Florida Bulldog asks the obvious question that Tallahassee and Gainesville are both avoiding: who will hold this man accountable?
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The Sasse spending scandal is a statewide Florida story. The University of Florida is funded by taxpayers from every county in the state. Every Florida family whose child has applied to or attended UF — and every Florida taxpayer whose money flows to the state university system — has a direct stake in whether a university president who oversaw $6.2 million in unnecessary spending will face any financial accountability.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting on the Sasse scandal connects directly to its broader coverage of how DeSantis’s political appointments have transformed Florida’s institutional landscape in ways that diminish accountability at every level. Sasse was a DeSantis appointment. The board that refuses to sue him is appointed by DeSantis. The CFO who called for an investigation and then did nothing is a DeSantis ally. That pattern is not coincidental. And Florida Bulldog is the newsroom documenting it.
Every Florida outlet that covers higher education, state government, fiscal policy, or political accountability should know this investigation exists and is freely available at FloridaBulldog.org. We ask only for attribution. We require no payment, no partnership agreement, and no prior approval. If your audience includes Floridians who pay state taxes and believe public university presidents should be held to the same financial standards as everyone else, this story belongs in your publication.
ABOUT FLORIDA BULLDOG
Florida Bulldog is Florida’s independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan statewide investigative newsroom. Founded in Fort Lauderdale in 2009 by award-winning journalist Dan Christensen — a veteran of The Miami Herald and Daily Business Review — Florida Bulldog covers government, politics, law enforcement, the courts, education, business, the environment, health, and public safety from a statewide perspective. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit and member of the Investigative News Network (INN). Ad-free. Corporate-free. Political-agenda-free.
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CONTACT INFORMATION
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Editor and Founder — Dan Christensen: dchristensen@floridabulldog.org | 954-603-1351
Director of Development — Kitty Barran: kbarran@floridabulldog.org | 954-817-3434
Mailing Address: Florida Bulldog | P.O. Box 23763 | Fort Lauderdale, FL 33307
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