FLORIDA BULLDOG Watchdog News You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: March 25, 2026 Source: FloridaBulldog.org — Independent Nonprofit Watchdog Journalism
Florida Bulldog, South Florida’s independent nonprofit investigative newsroom, presents another essential edition of accountability journalism that names names, follows the money, and exposes the ways Florida’s most powerful figures abuse the public’s trust. This edition investigates how Rep. Byron Donalds’s wife quietly steered millions in taxpayer-funded charter school contracts to her own for-profit companies, how a conservative court revolution has effectively destroyed FEC enforcement and made election corruption easier, how Byron Donalds may be violating state law by running two campaigns simultaneously, and how two DeSantis-appointed Florida Supreme Court justices have secured what amounts to lifetime jobs insulated from meaningful public accountability. Read on — and please consider supporting the journalism that makes these stories possible.
Erika Donalds’s Firms Net Millions in Taxpayer-Funded School Contracts
FloridaBulldog.org | June 29, 2025
Florida Bulldog has published one of the most significant investigations of the 2025 political season: a detailed, document-driven exposé revealing that Erika Donalds — wife of U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, a leading candidate for Florida governor — used her position as founder of the nonprofit Optima Foundation to build a charter school management empire that quietly funneled more than $10 million in taxpayer-financed contracts to two for-profit companies she personally owns. The investigation, based on materials filed with Florida’s Auditor General and cross-referenced with state and federal financial disclosures, exposes a web of financial relationships that raises serious questions about conflicts of interest, undisclosed self-dealing, and the integrity of Florida’s school choice system.
At the center of the story is the Optima Foundation — a nonprofit Erika Donalds launched in 2017 and recently renamed the Education Freedom Foundation — and its affiliated network of “classical academies” that receive public charter school funding. Florida Bulldog’s investigation found that the Optima Foundation and its affiliated schools paid more than $10 million to two for-profit companies Erika Donalds owns herself: Optima Management Services and OptimaEd LLC. In essence, taxpayer dollars flowed from public charter schools through a nonprofit into the for-profit companies she controls — a structure that allowed public school funding to generate private profit while remaining obscured from straightforward public scrutiny.
Florida Bulldog also uncovered a previously unreported financial relationship between Erika Donalds and State Rep. John Snyder, R-Stuart — an aggressive advocate for charter school funding in the Florida legislature whose own company provided payroll services to Optima-affiliated academies and paid an additional salary directly to Erika Donalds. The discovery of this financial relationship between the wife of a congressman who voted on federal education policy and a state legislator who advocated for the very charter school system that enriched her companies adds a significant new dimension to the conflict-of-interest concerns at the heart of Florida Bulldog’s investigation.
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The investigation further revealed that Rep. Byron Donalds had failed to fully disclose his wife’s financial stakes in these companies on his mandatory House Ethics Committee financial disclosure forms — a lapse Donalds moved to correct only after Florida Bulldog’s story was published. Two weeks after the original report ran, Donalds amended his 2023 disclosure and filed a new 2024 disclosure acknowledging Erika’s ownership of Optima Management Services for the first time. The new filings raised fresh questions: they revealed the company’s value was between $1 million and $5 million — vastly exceeding any previous assessment — while simultaneously listing her income from the company as “N/A.”
The structural picture revealed by Florida Bulldog’s reporting is one of interlocking entities designed to obscure the flow of public money to private benefit. Erika Donalds controls both Optima Management Services and OptimaEd through a Delaware LLC called Onesto LLC — an entity that previous disclosures had acknowledged without revealing its relationship to the Optima companies. Multiple charter schools in the Optima network terminated their contracts with the foundation after auditors found accounting deficiencies, and at least one school sued the foundation alleging it had unilaterally transferred duties to the for-profit OptimaEd without consent. These terminations coincided with a dramatic drop in the value of Optima Management Services.
For Florida taxpayers who fund the state’s rapidly expanding charter school sector, the Donalds investigation is a window into how the intersection of political power and school choice policy can create opportunities for self-enrichment that go undetected — and undisclosed — for years. This investigation required painstaking analysis of state auditor filings, federal financial disclosures, Florida corporate records, and court documents. It is the kind of story that no algorithm or press release will ever produce — only a reporter with the skills and time to dig through thousands of pages of public records.
Courts’ Conservative Shift Weakens FEC and Makes Election Corruption Easier
By Dan Christensen | FloridaBulldog.org | May 15, 2025
Florida Bulldog editor Dan Christensen has documented how the conservative transformation of the federal judiciary has effectively dismantled the Federal Election Commission’s ability to enforce campaign finance law — using the extraordinary 13-year saga of ex-Congressman David Rivera as the defining case study. The story of how the FEC spent more than a decade chasing Rivera to the brink of a federal trial, only to abruptly collapse its case and close the matter without explanation or consequence, is a story about what happens to democratic accountability when courts decide that documented campaign finance violations no longer warrant meaningful punishment.
The FEC’s case against Rivera, a Miami Republican who served in Congress from 2011 to 2013, centered on allegations that he knowingly and willfully made more than $75,000 in illegal contributions “in the name of another” — secretly funneling money to boost the 2012 Democratic primary campaign of Justin Lamar Sternad in order to weaken his general election opponent Joe Garcia. A federal district court judge found in 2021 — after reviewing the evidence — that Rivera had violated federal campaign finance law and assessed a civil penalty of $456,000. Trial on remaining issues was set for June 16, 2025.
But the case never made it to trial. The FEC sent Rivera’s lawyer a six-line letter notifying him the agency had closed its long-running enforcement case. No explanation. No expression of regret. No acknowledgment that the government had failed. The collapse traces directly to an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling — decided by Trump appointees Robert Luck and Barbara Lagoa along with Clinton appointee Charles Wilson — that fundamentally changed how FEC cases are decided. The panel ruled that Rivera’s sworn denial alone created a “genuine issue of material fact” requiring a jury trial — even in the face of documentary evidence supporting the FEC’s case.
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After the 11th Circuit’s ruling, the case was reassigned — following the death of the original judge — to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist who became nationally known for her handling of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. With the FEC’s path to victory drastically narrowed and the case before a judge whose impartiality had been publicly questioned, the agency apparently concluded its prospects were too uncertain. The result: Rivera walked free after 13 years of federal pursuit.
The implications for future campaign finance enforcement are severe. A campaign finance lawyer consulted by Florida Bulldog put it plainly: “This is going to present a huge enforcement challenge for the Federal Election Commission going forward. People who get in trouble will learn from this case that if you just refuse to settle, the odds are that eventually the case will be dismissed.” In a legal environment where defendants can defeat well-documented FEC cases simply by denying under oath that they did anything wrong, the deterrent effect of campaign finance law is fundamentally undermined.
Florida Bulldog’s analysis places the Rivera outcome in the broader context of a decade-long conservative judicial transformation that has systematically weakened the regulatory apparatus designed to protect the integrity of federal elections. From Citizens United to the FEC’s partisan deadlock to the 11th Circuit’s new summary judgment standard, the legal architecture that once made meaningful accountability for campaign finance violations possible has been dismantled piece by piece. Florida Bulldog’s reporting gives readers the tools to understand how that dismantling happened — and what it means for democracy.
Byron Donalds Running Two Campaigns — Possible Violation of Florida Law
FloridaBulldog.org | August 24, 2025
Florida Bulldog has reported that U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds — the only declared Republican candidate in the 2026 Florida governor’s race — appears to be running two simultaneous campaigns in potential violation of Florida state election law. While Donalds has publicly announced his gubernatorial bid and has already raised more than $22 million toward that race, he has also maintained an active federal congressional re-election campaign committee — a dual status that Florida Bulldog’s reporting suggests puts him in legal jeopardy under the state laws governing how and when candidates must formalize their transitions between races.
The legal tension involves the Federal Election Commission’s rules governing candidate status and the obligations they create. An FEC analyst notified Donalds’s campaign that his “status as a candidate” for congressional re-election ended on February 25, the date of his gubernatorial announcement, and that contributions received after that date must be refunded. Donalds’s campaign manager Bradley Crate pushed back, arguing that Donalds had not formally ended his congressional re-election campaign and therefore contributions to his federal committee did not need to be refunded. The FEC had not formally responded at the time of Florida Bulldog’s publication.
The financial stakes are significant. Donalds previously transferred $1.2 million from his federal congressional war chest to Friends of Byron Donalds, the state PAC formed by Crate the day after Donalds announced for governor. His federal fundraising has continued to grow, with nearly $10 million of his $22 million gubernatorial haul coming from a small group of billionaires: Jeffrey Yass ($5 million), Richard Uihlein ($2 million), Thomas Peterffy ($1 million), and cryptocurrency exchange founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss ($500,000 each). The concentration of billionaire funding and the dual-campaign structure together paint a picture of a campaign testing the boundaries of election law from the very start.
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Florida Bulldog’s reporting frames the dual-campaign issue in the context of the 2026 governor’s race, already shaping up as one of the most consequential in Florida’s recent history. With DeSantis term-limited, his potential successor will have enormous influence over Florida’s judiciary, public universities, regulatory environment, and position in national Republican politics. Whether the leading Republican candidate is willing to stretch or break election law rules from the outset of his campaign is not a minor procedural matter — it is a character and integrity question that Florida voters deserve to have answered.
The story also develops Florida Bulldog’s ongoing coverage of the Donalds family’s complex financial interests, documented across multiple investigations covering Erika Donalds’s charter school companies, Rep. Donalds’s undisclosed financial interests, and now his dual-campaign legal exposure. Taken together, these investigations present a comprehensive portrait of a political family whose relationship with disclosure obligations and legal compliance deserves the kind of sustained scrutiny that only an independent, nonprofit newsroom can provide.
The 2026 Florida governor’s race is entering its critical early fundraising phase, and the rules that candidates follow — or bend — during this period establish patterns that tend to persist throughout a campaign. Florida Bulldog’s reporting on Donalds’s dual-campaign legal exposure, combined with its earlier reporting on his wife’s undisclosed charter school business interests and his failure to accurately report her financial stakes, creates a record that Florida voters and election officials alike will need to grapple with as the race develops.
DeSantis Supreme Court Justices Francis and Sasso: De Facto Lifetime Jobs
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | October 11, 2024
Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has published a comprehensive examination of why two of Governor DeSantis’s appointees to the Florida Supreme Court — Justices Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso — faced retention votes in the November 2024 election that posed essentially no real threat to their continued tenure. The story documents a structural reality about Florida’s judicial retention system that should concern every Floridian who believes in the democratic accountability of their courts: despite the nominal existence of a process by which voters can remove appellate judges, that process has never once succeeded in Florida’s 44 years of merit retention — making gubernatorial appointment effectively permanent for justices who avoid major public scandals.
Francis, 45 at the time of her appointment, and Sasso are both young enough to serve on the court for decades to come. Both are ardent conservatives who presented their Federalist Society credentials prominently in their judicial nominating commission interviews. Both have already demonstrated a willingness to rule in alignment with the conservative ideological agenda DeSantis champions. Their presence on a court where they join four other DeSantis appointees — giving him five of seven justices — creates a supermajority that legal scholars say has fundamentally transformed Florida’s judicial landscape.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting highlights a particularly troubling development that occurred before the retention election: the Florida Bar ended its 45-year tradition of polling its nearly 100,000 lawyer members to help voters evaluate which appellate judges to retain and which to remove. The Bar’s Board of Governors discontinued the poll — which had long served as one of the few independent assessments of judicial performance available to Florida voters — based on concerns about scientific validity and potential manipulation. Critics argue that eliminating the poll removes one of the last meaningful mechanisms for giving voters information about judicial performance, further insulating DeSantis’s appointees from meaningful public scrutiny.
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Florida Bulldog’s reporting on Justice Sasso includes detailed documentation of the potential conflicts created by the fact that her husband, Michael Sasso, held multiple DeSantis-connected appointments including a seat on the Judicial Nominating Commission for the Sixth District Court of Appeal — the very court from which Meredith Sasso was elevated to the Supreme Court. The web of DeSantis-connected appointments involving both the justice and her spouse illustrates the degree to which the governor’s influence has permeated Florida’s entire judicial selection and oversight infrastructure.
The retention election results confirmed what Florida Bulldog’s analysis predicted: both Francis and Sasso easily won retention, with no meaningful organized opposition despite newspaper editorials in prior cycles urging voters to remove conservative justices. Voters pay scant attention to judicial retention elections, particularly in off-presidential years, and without the Florida Bar’s lawyer poll to amplify concerns about judicial performance, there is virtually no mechanism for converting dissatisfaction with a justice’s record into a retention defeat. DeSantis has not merely appointed ideological allies to the Florida Supreme Court — he has done so in a legal and political environment that makes removing them almost impossibly difficult.
Florida Bulldog’s sustained coverage of the Florida Supreme Court — from the ideological transformation of the bench under DeSantis to judicial ethics proceedings to the retention elections that pose no real threat — provides Florida’s readers with the most comprehensive independent record available of how the governor has reshaped the state’s highest court. For a state where the Supreme Court plays a pivotal role in abortion rights, criminal justice, voting rights, environmental regulation, and labor law, understanding who sits on that court and how they got there is essential knowledge for every Floridian who cares about justice.
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Florida Bulldog is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization serving South Florida and the state of Florida. Founded by award-winning journalist Dan Christensen — a veteran of The Miami Herald and Daily Business Review — Florida Bulldog is staffed by veteran professional journalists whose work has triggered criminal indictments, government reforms, and landmark court decisions. No advertisers influence coverage. No corporate owners. No political agenda. Only a commitment to the truth and the public interest.
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