PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: March 2, 2026 Issued by: FloridaBulldog.org | Fort Lauderdale, FL
FLORIDA JUSTICE ON TRIAL: FOUR INVESTIGATIONS THE PEOPLE OF TAMPA BAY — AND ALL OF FLORIDA — NEED TO READ
Florida Bulldog Reports on a Hillsborough Judge Targeted for Defeating DeSantis’s Favorite, a Tampa Law Professor Who Called Out the Florida Bar’s Bondi Hypocrisy, a $2 Million Tampa-Area COVID Grand Jury That Found Nothing, and the Bar’s Concealment of Its Own Misconduct in a Politically Charged Trial
In Tampa’s courtrooms, St. Petersburg’s community meeting rooms, Clearwater’s legal offices, and the living rooms of families across Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, and Hernando counties, the same questions keep arising: Are Florida’s courts being run fairly, or are they being run for the benefit of whoever holds political power? Is the legal profession holding its own members accountable, or protecting the connected and punishing the critics? Is the governor using taxpayer-funded institutions — grand juries, judicial qualification commissions, the Florida Bar itself — as instruments of political warfare? These are the questions that Florida Bulldog investigates. And in this edition, the answers are not reassuring.
Florida Bulldog is Florida’s only statewide independent nonprofit investigative newsroom, and while our physical home is Fort Lauderdale, our reporting reaches every corner of the state — including the Tampa Bay region, where some of the most consequential stories about Florida’s judiciary, its legal profession, and its political culture are unfolding right now. A Hillsborough Circuit Court judge who beat a DeSantis favorite is being singled out for discipline. A Tampa law professor who signed a coalition complaint against U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi put it plainly: she has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution and breached it. A $2 million COVID grand jury drawn from five judicial circuits around Tampa found nothing — yet DeSantis used it to justify going after Dr. Fauci anyway. These are Tampa Bay stories. They are also Florida stories. And they are stories Florida Bulldog is telling.
Florida Bulldog was founded in 2009 by Dan Christensen, an award-winning investigative journalist whose career at The Miami Herald and Daily Business Review produced reporting that sent a Broward sheriff to federal prison, sparked unanimous Florida Supreme Court rulings, and generated national attention for Florida’s record on government accountability. Today, Dan leads a team of veteran journalists — including Noreen Marcus, a Miami-based reporter with deep experience covering Florida’s legal institutions and the courts that govern every Floridian’s life. Together, they produce the kind of sustained, document-driven investigative journalism that no daily newspaper in Florida currently has the resources or the independence to match.
For Tampa Bay readers, the stories in this edition are not distant Tallahassee or South Florida abstractions. Hillsborough County Judge Nancy Jacobs serves the families and litigants of Tampa’s courts. The five judicial circuits whose grand jurors served on the DeSantis COVID grand jury include the Tampa area — meaning Tampa Bay taxpayers helped fund a $2 million investigation that DeSantis’s own jurors concluded found nothing. The Tampa lawyer who represented DeSantis critic Daniel Uhlfelder at his Florida Bar trial — Scott Tozian — is a well-known fixture of the Tampa legal community. And the Cooley Law School professor in Tampa who called the Bar’s handling of Pam Bondi an embarrassment represents the voice of Tampa Bay’s legal scholars who are watching Florida’s accountability systems fail in real time.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting on these stories is possible because we have built sources in Florida’s court system, its Bar proceedings, its government contracting offices, and its law enforcement agencies over 15 years of consistent, reliable watchdog journalism. We have obtained Bar files that were about to be destroyed. We have reviewed grand jury reports that government officials hoped would be read only as political theater. We have documented the asymmetric treatment of lawyers and judges based on their political affiliations in ways that directly affect the integrity of every courthouse in Florida — including the courthouses where Tampa Bay residents seek justice every day. This work is what Florida Bulldog does, and this work is what your support makes possible.
Florida Bulldog is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We accept no advertising and no corporate funding. Every dollar we receive comes from readers and donors across Florida — including Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Sarasota, and the dozens of communities across the I-4 corridor and the Gulf Coast who understand that democracy requires a press accountable to no one but the truth. If the stories in this press release matter to you — if you believe the courts that serve your community should be free from political interference — we ask you to support Florida Bulldog at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog. Every contribution is tax-deductible and goes directly to the reporting.
Hillsborough Judge Who Beat DeSantis Favorite Jared Smith Targeted for Discipline
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | September 2023
When Hillsborough Circuit Court Judge Nancy Jacobs unseated incumbent Judge Jared Smith in the August 2022 election — winning by roughly 7,900 votes after a campaign focused on Smith’s nationally publicized decision to deny a teenage girl an abortion and his reputation for blurring the line between evangelical faith and judicial rulings — many Tampa Bay legal observers celebrated the outcome as a demonstration that voters can hold judges accountable through the electoral process. What followed instead was a different kind of accountability: Jacobs was singled out by the Judicial Qualifications Commission for discipline based on her campaign conduct, while Smith — elevated to the new Sixth District Court of Appeal by DeSantis just four months after losing his seat — faced no public ethics charges whatsoever.
The asymmetry is stark and documented. Jacobs’s campaign made statements about Smith that the JQC characterized as inappropriate and disparaging — comments related to his controversial abortion ruling and church-state conduct covered extensively by the Tampa Bay Times and Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. But Smith’s own campaign was not without controversy: his wife, speaking at their evangelical church, Idlewild Baptist, told the congregation that the Jewish Judge Jacobs “needs Jesus” and urged “prayer warriors” to rally against her. A video attacking Jacobs for her “woke liberal agenda” appeared on a Facebook page connected to a digital advertising firm Smith paid $2,000 — and then quickly disappeared. Neither the church speech nor the video generated any JQC inquiry into Smith’s conduct.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting places the Jacobs case in the broader context of how DeSantis’s domination of the Florida Supreme Court has transformed judicial accountability in the state. The Supreme Court that will ultimately decide Jacobs’s fate is the same court that simultaneously ruled, in a separate case, that a St. Johns County judge who campaigned as “a conservative” did not violate judicial ethics rules. The message, as one lawyer told Florida Bulldog, is unmistakable: it is acceptable for Florida judges to announce they are conservative and Republican, but not to identify with progressive or liberal causes — and the JQC will find pretexts to investigate those who do.
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The Jacobs story matters enormously to Tampa Bay residents who use the Hillsborough Circuit Court for family law matters, civil disputes, criminal defense, and every area of legal life where a fair and impartial judge is essential. The prospect that judges who rule or campaign in ways that displease the governor’s political allies face a machinery of discipline designed to remove them — while judges who align with that ideology face no equivalent scrutiny — is not an abstraction for Tampa Bay litigants. It is a direct threat to the fairness of the courts they walk into.
Florida Bulldog’s Noreen Marcus has covered the intersection of Florida politics and judicial accountability with exceptional depth and persistence. Her reporting on the Jacobs case, the DeSantis court packing, and the Florida Bar’s protection of politically connected lawyers constitutes the most comprehensive independent record of how Florida’s judicial accountability system actually operates — available to Tampa Bay readers, their lawyers, and anyone seeking to understand what is happening to the courts that govern their lives.
The Jacobs story also has a direct human dimension. Jacobs, now a family court judge in Tampa, faces the prospect of removal from the bench for conduct in a campaign that Tampa Bay voters endorsed at the ballot box. The Tampa Bay Times endorsed her opponent — yet it was Jacobs who won with nearly 52 percent of the vote. The will of Tampa Bay voters is now subject to being overridden by a Supreme Court whose majority was appointed by a governor whose ally Jacobs defeated. That is the story Florida Bulldog tells — and it is a story every Tampa Bay resident deserves to hear.
AG Bondi Likely to Keep Her Florida Law License Despite Misconduct Evidence
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | March 15, 2026
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi — a Florida lawyer for 34 years and the state’s former attorney general — has breezed past a botched Epstein files rollout, a chorus of federal judges rebuking her subordinates, an ongoing ethics audit in Maryland, and an outraged response to her hostile performance before a House Judiciary Committee hearing where she sparred with lawmakers and refused to acknowledge Epstein survivors sitting in the same room. She has done all of this without suffering a single consequence to her Florida law license. Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has documented exactly why — and why legal scholars, including a Tampa law professor who signed the coalition complaint against Bondi, believe the system that protects her is fundamentally broken.
Jeffrey Swartz, a former Miami-Dade County Court judge who now teaches at Cooley Law School in Tampa, was direct with Florida Bulldog about why he signed the 70-lawyer coalition complaint against Bondi: “She has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and I think she has breached that obligation.” Swartz is not a fringe voice — he is a former jurist and legal educator at one of Tampa Bay’s law schools, representative of the legal community’s deep unease about what Bondi’s conduct and the Florida Bar’s non-response to it say about the integrity of Florida’s attorney discipline system. His co-signers included retired Florida Supreme Court justices, prominent lawyers, and law professors from across the country.
The structural reason for Bondi’s legal invulnerability traces to a secret 1982 Florida Supreme Court order — and to the current court’s willingness to extend that protection. The Bar’s Board of Governors urged the Supreme Court to adopt a rule explicitly exempting government officials from Bar investigation. The Bar’s own Public Interest Law Section strongly objected: Hallandale Beach lawyer Anthony Musto wrote that the proposal is “a bad one. A very bad one. Not good for lawyers, for constitutional officers, for the public, or for justice.” The Supreme Court, dominated by DeSantis appointees, was unmoved. The exemption was formalized, giving officials like Bondi a structural shield that private attorneys — including the thousands practicing in Tampa Bay’s courts — do not have.
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The DOJ is now moving to extend Bondi’s Bar immunity to all 10,000 lawyers who work for her — including those who prosecute federal cases in Tampa’s Middle District of Florida courthouse every day. The proposed regulation would prevent state Bar regulators from investigating complaints against federal prosecutors until the attorney general herself finishes reviewing them, with no time limit. A DOJ that tells its lawyers political objectives come before their Bar obligations is a DOJ whose prosecutors appear in Tampa’s federal courtrooms. Florida Bulldog’s reporting ensures that Tampa Bay residents and their lawyers have the factual record they need to evaluate what is happening to their legal system.
Swartz told Florida Bulldog that politics is clearly at play in the Bar’s handling of the Bondi complaint, noting that if Bondi were disbarred it would disqualify her in the eyes of voters, and an opponent would use that against her. The implication is plain — the Florida Bar’s protection of Bondi is not merely an institutional decision but a political one, shaped by awareness of her future electoral prospects and the consequences that professional accountability could have for them.
For Tampa Bay residents, the question of whether the attorneys who prosecute cases in the Middle District of Florida are subject to the same professional accountability standards as everyone else is not hypothetical. Florida Bulldog’s reporting ensures that Tampa Bay residents and their lawyers have the factual record they need to evaluate what is happening to their legal system — and what Cooley Law School’s Jeffrey Swartz, one of Tampa Bay’s own legal voices, says clearly about it.
DeSantis Unleashes AG on Fauci Despite Tampa-Area Grand Jury Finding No COVID Crimes
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | February 20, 2025
Governor DeSantis convened a statewide grand jury to investigate the federal government’s COVID-19 response — drawing its 18 members from five judicial circuits around Tampa and costing Florida taxpayers approximately $2 million over its 18-month term. The grand jury operated with zero public transparency. Florida keeps grand jurors’ names confidential. Its final 144-page report criticized major pharmaceutical companies, questioned COVID vaccine research, and argued that public health officials caused drug overdoses by suppressing information about unproven treatments like Ivermectin. And then, in the single most important sentence in the entire document, the grand jurors stated plainly: “We did not find any statute that we believed would be an appropriate vehicle for a criminal indictment.” Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has reported on what DeSantis did with that finding — and it is as troubling as it is revealing.
What DeSantis did was announce that he expects his newly appointed Attorney General James Uthmeier to prosecute Dr. Anthony Fauci criminally — despite the explicit conclusion of his own grand jury that no criminal statute applied. He described Fauci as the “chief henchman” of the U.S. coronavirus response and suggested that Biden’s preemptive pardon of Fauci “may have actually sparked state-based efforts to ensure his accountability.” If the pardon made it easier for DeSantis to politically pursue Fauci through state channels, then in DeSantis’s telling, the pardon is not a shield for Fauci but an invitation for DeSantis to keep going.
The grand jury report DeSantis is citing is itself a deeply unusual document. Florida Bulldog’s reporting notes that it reads nothing like a standard grand jury report grounded in legal findings. It has exactly one footnote — on page 67 — and instead of containing source lists and citations, its appendices complain about subpoena resistance and question Paxlovid’s efficacy. Fauci’s name appears nowhere in any of the three reports produced by the grand jury. DeSantis and Uthmeier are pursuing prosecution on the basis of a grand jury that did not find what they needed it to find.
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Legal experts consulted by Florida Bulldog expressed serious skepticism about any prosecution of Fauci by Florida. Fauci’s agency directed national policies, not Florida-specific ones — meaning Uthmeier would have difficulty establishing that Fauci’s conduct “hurt Floridians” in the way required for state jurisdiction. Additionally, public officials like Fauci are indemnified from prosecution in theory, precisely so they can make professional decisions without fear of political retaliation.
For Tampa Bay residents whose grand jurors were among those who sat through 18 months of COVID-related proceedings and concluded that no criminal charges were appropriate, the spectacle of DeSantis ignoring that conclusion and directing his attorney general to pursue prosecution anyway is a direct statement about how the governor views the grand jury process: as a political tool rather than a genuine fact-finding institution. The $2 million cost of the grand jury was borne in part by Tampa Bay taxpayers. Their conclusion is being dismissed by the official who empaneled them in the first place.
Florida Bulldog’s coverage of the COVID grand jury connects directly to its broader reporting on how DeSantis uses the machinery of Florida government — courts, grand juries, the attorney general’s office, the Florida Bar — for political purposes. The common thread is a governor who treats Florida’s legal and institutional infrastructure as instruments of his personal political agenda — and a newsroom, Florida Bulldog, that is documenting exactly how he does it.
Florida Bar Concealed Prosecutions of Its Own Witnesses in DeSantis Critic’s Trial
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | October 21, 2025
When Daniel Uhlfelder — the Florida lawyer who dressed as the Grim Reaper to protest Governor DeSantis’s refusal to close Florida beaches during COVID-19 — finally had his long-awaited Florida Bar ethics trial in April 2025, he was represented in part by Scott Tozian, a well-respected Tampa criminal defense lawyer who brought his courtroom experience to bear on a case that many Florida legal observers had come to see as a politically motivated prosecution. What Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus then revealed was a development that shocked even experienced Bar watchers: the Florida Bar had concealed from Uhlfelder and his entire defense team the fact that its two star witnesses were themselves the subjects of active Florida Bar disciplinary proceedings at the time they testified against him.
The due process problem this concealment created is fundamental. A witness who faces active disciplinary proceedings by the same body whose case they are supporting has an obvious potential motivation to present that body’s narrative favorably. Cross-examination of such a witness would typically probe exactly that potential motivation. By withholding the existence of its own proceedings against its star witnesses before trial, the Florida Bar blocked that cross-examination entirely — denying Uhlfelder and his Tampa lawyer Scott Tozian information that is routinely disclosed as a basic requirement of fair judicial process.
Former Florida Bar president Henry “Hank” Coxe, who joined Uhlfelder’s defense team after Florida Bulldog’s reporting exposed the concealment, called it “cheating” and filed a motion to dismiss the case based on the Bar’s own misconduct. In his characterization of the Bar’s conduct more broadly, Coxe described it as an “attack dog role” played on DeSantis’s behalf — an “absolutely brainless and unethical jihad” that has “completely demolished the Bar’s credibility.” These are not the words of a fringe critic but of a former president of the institution he is describing.
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The Tampa connection in this story runs through Scott Tozian’s involvement as defense counsel — a choice that reflects both Tozian’s standing in the Florida legal community and the geographic breadth of the Uhlfelder case’s significance. This is not just a Tallahassee or South Florida story. It is a story about what happens to Florida lawyers statewide when a governor decides to use the Bar as a weapon. Tampa lawyers know Scott Tozian. They know what it means for a lawyer of his caliber to sign on to a defense built around the argument that the Florida Bar itself committed prosecutorial misconduct.
The accumulation of misconduct documented in Florida Bulldog’s reporting on the Uhlfelder case has produced a remarkable outcome: a referee who recommended the absolute lightest sanction available — a mild reprimand — rather than the 91-day suspension the Bar sought. But the case is not over. The Florida Supreme Court — six of whose seven justices are DeSantis appointees — will have the final word on what punishment, if any, Uhlfelder faces for challenging the governor’s pandemic policies in a Grim Reaper costume.
For the lawyers, law students, and legal professionals of Tampa Bay who use the Florida Bar every day and practice under its rules, Florida Bulldog’s multi-year investigation of the Uhlfelder case is essential reading. It documents, in granular and irrefutable detail, the degree to which the Bar’s disciplinary function has been compromised by political influence from the very highest levels of Florida state government. That compromise affects every Florida attorney who might one day need the Bar to act independently — and every Florida citizen who might one day need a lawyer who trusts that the Bar will protect them if they do the right thing.
ABOUT FLORIDA BULLDOG
Florida Bulldog is Florida’s independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization, reporting for Tampa Bay, the Gulf Coast, and all of Florida since 2009. Founded by award-winning journalist Dan Christensen — a veteran of The Miami Herald and Daily Business Review — Florida Bulldog covers Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, Hernando, and Manatee counties as part of its statewide coverage of government, politics, the courts, law enforcement, education, business, the environment, health, and public safety. We are ad-free, corporate-free, and answer to no political party. Florida Bulldog is a 501(c)(3) organization and a member of the Investigative News Network (INN).
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