MONEY, POWER & ACCOUNTABILITY: FLORIDA BULLDOG EXPOSES WHAT SOUTH FLORIDA’S POWERFUL WOULD RATHER KEEP HIDDEN
Watchdog News You Can Sink Your Teeth Into South Florida’s Award-Winning Nonprofit Investigative Newsroom | FloridaBulldog.org
PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: March 8, 2026 Issued by: FloridaBulldog.org | Fort Lauderdale, FL
Pick up a newspaper in Fort Lauderdale. Open a browser in Miami. Scroll through social media in Boca Raton, Pembroke Pines, or Hollywood. Chances are that the most important stories about how your tax dollars are spent, how your law enforcement agencies are managed, and how the legal institutions that govern your community actually operate are not being told by any of those sources. They are being told by Florida Bulldog — South Florida’s only independent, nonprofit investigative newsroom, operating since 2009 without a single advertiser, corporate owner, or political patron calling the shots.
Florida Bulldog was founded in Fort Lauderdale by Dan Christensen, an award-winning former investigative reporter for The Miami Herald and Daily Business Review who has spent his career holding South Florida’s most powerful institutions accountable. His reporting helped send a Broward sheriff to federal prison. His investigations produced unanimous Florida Supreme Court decisions that changed state law. His 9/11 reporting forced the FBI to confront what it knew about the Sarasota Saudis and the hijackers. Today, Dan leads a team of veteran journalists who share his commitment to the truth — no matter who it implicates.
Florida Bulldog covers the communities where South Floridians live: Broward County, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and the full length of Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts. We cover the Broward Sheriff’s Office and the Miami-Dade Police Department. We cover the Broward School Board and the universities that educate our children. We cover the courts where justice is supposed to be dispensed, the attorney general who is supposed to enforce the law, and the governor whose administration controls billions in taxpayer dollars. We are the newsroom that reads the budget, files the public records requests, and sits through the depositions that nobody else will sit through.
In the four investigations featured in this press release, Florida Bulldog exposes stories that directly affect the people of South Florida: a Broward sheriff who took his budget fight to Tallahassee while his own numbers don’t add up; a Florida Bar that let former Congressman Matt Gaetz walk free despite a congressional finding that he committed statutory rape; a Boca Raton attorney’s tenacious effort to hold U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi professionally accountable after the Florida Bar dismissed his complaint in a single day; and an examination of whether former University of Florida president Ben Sasse will ever be required to repay the “best dang university” for the millions his spending scandal cost.
These are not stories that originate from government press offices, university communications departments, or campaign spokesmen. They come from court filings, audit reports, budget documents, Bar records, depositions, and sources who trust Florida Bulldog to use what they share responsibly and accurately. That trust has been built over 15 years of reporting that has proven, repeatedly, that Florida Bulldog follows the evidence wherever it leads — regardless of which party or institution it implicates. That is what sets Florida Bulldog apart from every other news outlet operating in South Florida today.
Nonprofit investigative journalism in South Florida is not cheap and it is not easy. Every story in this press release required days or weeks of reporting, records analysis, and source development. Florida Bulldog does this work entirely on the generosity of readers and donors who believe their communities deserve a watchdog press. If the investigations you are about to read matter to you — if you believe that South Florida’s residents deserve to know the truth about the institutions that govern their lives — we ask you to support Florida Bulldog with a tax-deductible donation at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog. Now, read on.
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 traveled to Tallahassee this year to make the case before Governor DeSantis and his Cabinet — sitting as the Florida Administration Commission — that Broward County has been shortchanging his agency, making “arbitrary and capricious” cuts to BSO’s budget that have hampered the county’s ability to provide public safety services. It was an unusual step: Broward police chiefs and county officials noted that a sheriff’s appeal to the state for more money is rare. But Florida Bulldog editor Dan Christensen found something that makes the appeal even more remarkable — BSO’s own published budget documents contain significant discrepancies that call into question the accuracy of the very numbers Tony presented to Tallahassee as the basis for his funding demand.
Florida Bulldog’s analysis of BSO’s adopted budget books for fiscal years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 found a pattern of discrepancies between the revenue figures listed in the budget summaries and the backup detail information that breaks down expenses by unit. In one of the largest discrepancies, BSO’s budget book states that the Special Details Unit generated actual revenue of $9.74 million in fiscal year 2023-2024. But the detailed backup information for the same unit totals only $4.85 million — a difference of $4.88 million that Broward County’s Independent Auditor Robert Melton told Florida Bulldog appears to show revenues exceeding costs by several million dollars for special detail services.
The budget discrepancies are not confined to a single unit. Florida Bulldog’s analysis found inconsistencies across multiple BSO municipal service contracts, where the numbers in current budget documents do not match what prior-year budgets stated about the same fiscal years’ actual performance. For the City of Oakland Park, for example, the numbers shift significantly between budget years — raising questions about whether BSO’s financial documentation is accurate enough to support a credible funding appeal to the state.
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Some of Broward’s own police chiefs privately questioned Tony’s decision to appeal to Tallahassee. “How can you ask for more money when your own numbers don’t add up?” one chief told Florida Bulldog. If BSO’s published financial documents contain the kind of discrepancies Florida Bulldog identified, what confidence can Tallahassee officials, Broward taxpayers, or the municipalities that contract with BSO have in the accuracy of the financial picture Tony presented?
Florida Bulldog’s inquiries to BSO’s budget office about the discrepancies were forwarded to the agency’s public information office, which said it would “research” the matter. The agency’s Inspector General — who serves at Tony’s pleasure and reports directly to the sheriff — has not addressed the issues Florida Bulldog identified. Broward County’s own assessment of Tony’s financial management did not mention any of the budget discrepancies Florida Bulldog found.
The BSO budget story is the latest chapter in Florida Bulldog’s years-long coverage of Gregory Tony, which has documented a pattern of financial irregularities, concealed history, ethics violations, and political misconduct that no other South Florida news outlet has covered with comparable depth or persistence. For residents of Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Pompano Beach, Deerfield Beach, Davie, and the dozens of other Broward communities served by BSO, the question of whether their sheriff’s financial documents are accurate is not abstract — it is a matter of public safety, fiscal responsibility, and basic government accountability.
Florida Bar Lets Matt Gaetz Off the Hook on Statutory Rape Findings
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | January 21, 2026
Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has obtained and published the Florida Bar file on former Congressman Matt Gaetz — a 70-page document the Bar would have quietly destroyed later this year — revealing how the state’s attorney discipline organization downplayed a congressional finding that Gaetz committed statutory rape before abandoning his prosecution entirely. The case was closed without discipline. Gaetz’s Florida Bar profile now lists him as an attorney in good standing with a clean 10-year disciplinary history. That outcome, legal ethics scholars told Florida Bulldog, is an embarrassment to the legal profession.
The 70-page file Florida Bulldog obtained includes roughly the top half 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 initially took preliminary steps toward investigating Gaetz, then closed the case using what Florida Bulldog describes as an “unorthodox excuse.” The committee chair’s letter stated explicitly that the closure was not based on a determination that the House report’s findings were inaccurate — meaning the Bar accepted the facts and still chose to do nothing.
The committee’s reasoning drew a 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, agreed to review the Gaetz Bar file for Florida Bulldog and was direct: “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’s reporting notes the particular injustice of a system that requires extensive character background checks for law students seeking admission — yet finds that the same standards do not apply to a licensed attorney found by Congress to have committed statutory rape.
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The timing of Florida Bulldog’s publication of the Gaetz Bar file carries its own urgency. Under Bar rules, once a case is closed without producing charges, the Bar preserves the file for only one year before destroying it. If Florida Bulldog had not obtained and published the file, the written record of Gaetz’s brush with the Florida Bar’s disciplinary process would have disappeared from the public domain entirely — leaving future clients, legal colleagues, and voters with no documentation of what the Bar found, what it was asked to do, and what it chose not to do.
The Gaetz Bar case is part of a pattern that Florida Bulldog’s Noreen Marcus has documented across years of reporting: a system that treats ordinary lawyers and politically connected figures by demonstrably different standards. 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 — a contrast that legal scholars and civil rights advocates have described as fundamental to understanding how the Florida Bar actually operates.
For South Florida residents, the Gaetz story has a direct local dimension: Gaetz’s family roots, his political connections to Florida’s Republican establishment, and the state Bar’s decision to protect his professional standing all reflect on Florida’s legal and political culture in ways that affect every citizen who might one day need the legal system to work fairly and consistently. Florida Bulldog’s decision to obtain and publish the Bar file before it could be destroyed is exactly the kind of public interest journalism that holds institutions accountable not just for what they do, but for what they quietly choose not to do.
Bondi Bar Complaint Revived in Landmark Maryland Immigration Case
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | July 8, 2025
When the Florida Bar dismissed a sweeping ethics complaint against U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on June 6 — the day after it was filed — Bondi’s chief of staff Chad Mizelle mocked the 70 lawyers, legal scholars, and retired judges who signed it as “out-of-state lawyers” showing “less intelligence — and independent thoughts — than sheep.” It was a dismissive response to a serious complaint that accused Bondi of directing DOJ lawyers to ignore professional ethics obligations, firing a prosecutor for telling the truth to a federal judge, and overseeing the mistaken deportation of a Maryland construction worker to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT torture facility. But Boca Raton criminal defense attorney Jon May — the author of the Bar complaint — was not deterred.
May, whose career includes representing Manuel Noriega during the Reagan administration and who is known in South Florida legal circles as one of the most experienced and tenacious defense attorneys in the region, told Florida Bulldog exactly what his strategy had been all along: “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.” The case May referenced is the landmark immigration matter of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the Maryland man wrongly deported to CECOT whose case became one of the most watched judicial confrontations between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary in 2025.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis — appointed for life and insulated from the political pressures that shape Florida’s Bar and its DeSantis-packed Supreme Court — received the Bondi ethics complaint as part of the Abrego Garcia litigation and referred it to her district court’s disciplinary committee, where it remained under active investigation at the time of Florida Bulldog’s reporting. The same allegations. The same evidence. A different institutional context — one where politics cannot as easily reach the decision-maker.
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May told Florida Bulldog he remains hopeful that the Florida Bar will eventually take the complaint seriously, noting that the entire justice system is at risk when government leadership tells attorneys that political objectives come before their ethical obligations to the Bar. Ethics regulators in New York, California, and Washington, D.C. disbarred former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others who conspired to overturn the 2020 election results. The Florida Bar, by contrast, has dismissed every complaint against Bondi — three so far — using different procedural rationales each time.
The Abrego Garcia case has become one of the defining legal stories of the Trump administration’s second term. Abrego Garcia was deported to CECOT under circumstances a federal judge called a government error. The administration resisted his return for months. When he was finally brought back to the U.S. in June 2025, he was immediately charged with alien smuggling and jailed in Nashville — a sequence of events that critics described as retaliation for the judicial attention his case had attracted.
Florida Bulldog’s coverage of the Bondi accountability saga is rooted in South Florida. Jon May practices law in Boca Raton — at the heart of Palm Beach County. His refusal to accept the Florida Bar’s dismissal, his strategic redirection of the complaint to a Maryland federal court, and his continued public advocacy for the principle that no lawyer — including the attorney general of the United States — is above professional accountability, is a South Florida story with national implications.
Ex-UF President Sasse Could Repay Florida Taxpayers for His Spending Scandal — But Will He?
FloridaBulldog.org | August 14, 2025
Former University of Florida president Ben Sasse called UF “the best dang public university in America” when he arrived in Gainesville in early 2023, fresh from resigning his U.S. Senate seat representing Nebraska. He departed 541 days later, citing his wife’s ill health — and left behind a spending scandal that the university’s own auditor general described in a February 2025 report as including “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 — and neither UF, its board of trustees, nor Sasse himself has indicated any intention to return a dollar of it. Florida Bulldog is asking why not.
The audit findings, first surfaced by student journalists at the UF’s Independent Florida Alligator and then confirmed and expanded by the state auditor general, documented 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 U.S. Senate staff and Republican officials.” Individual expenditures included hundreds of thousands of dollars for private jet travel, $1.3 million for catering events, a $38,000 sushi bar at one holiday party, and a $7,000 liquor tab at another. These were the expenses of a man running a public university — funded by Florida taxpayers and student tuition — as if he were entertaining at a private club.
The political dimensions are impossible to separate from the financial ones. Sasse was recruited to UF at a moment when Governor DeSantis was aggressively reshaping Florida’s public universities. When Sasse’s spending became a scandal, DeSantis and then-CFO Jimmy Patronis both called publicly for investigation — a remarkable posture for officials who had championed Sasse’s appointment. Yet following the audit’s release, UF issued a memo that “acknowledged some wrongdoing but defended itself,” and there has been no move to recover the losses through legal action.
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Florida Bulldog’s reporting highlights a particular irony: Sasse, despite resigning the UF presidency, continues to draw a salary from the university as “president emeritus and professor.” He also has access to his federal campaign committee, Ben Sasse for U.S. Senate, which holds $2,468,153 in funds never spent on any Senate race — money that, while legally his to deploy within FEC rules, represents a financial resource available to a man who denies any “inappropriate spending” occurred on his watch.
The University of Florida is a statewide institution that educates tens of thousands of students and receives hundreds of millions of dollars annually in state appropriations and student tuition. For the South Florida families whose children attend UF, and for the taxpayers across Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties who contribute to its funding, the question of whether a president who oversaw $6.2 million in excessive spending will face any financial accountability is not a Gainesville story — it is a statewide story about whether Florida’s public institutions are managed with the basic fiscal discipline that public trust requires.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting on the Sasse spending scandal connects to a broader pattern documented across multiple investigations: the recurring gap in Florida between public rhetoric about fiscal responsibility and the actual conduct of politically appointed officials who face no real financial consequences for mismanaging public resources. The CFO who preaches transparency while hiding contracts. The sheriff who appeals for more money while his budget doesn’t add up. The university president who ran Florida’s flagship institution into a deficit and continues to collect a salary from it. Florida Bulldog is the newsroom connecting those dots — for South Florida, and for all of Florida.
ABOUT FLORIDA BULLDOG
Florida Bulldog is South Florida’s independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization — proudly headquartered in Fort Lauderdale since 2009. Founded and led by award-winning journalist Dan Christensen, Florida Bulldog is staffed by veteran reporters who have worked for The Miami Herald, the Miami News, the Sun Sentinel, and other leading news organizations. We cover Broward County, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and all of Florida — reporting on government, politics, law enforcement, the courts, education, business, the environment, health, and public safety. Florida Bulldog is a 501(c)(3) organization and a member of the Investigative News Network (INN). Ad-free. Corporate-free. Political-agenda-free. Just the facts.
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CONTACT INFORMATION
For general inquiries: Mail@floridabulldog.org
Editor and Founder: Dan Christensen dchristensen@floridabulldog.org Phone: 954-603-1351
Director of Development: Kitty Barran kbarran@floridabulldog.org Phone: 954-817-3434
Mailing Address: Florida Bulldog P.O. Box 23763 Fort Lauderdale, FL 33307
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