Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell said she’s been told Gov. Ron DeSantis is about to remove her from office for a second time in three years, a potential move she claims is meant to avert attention from the Hope Florida scandal that has embroiled the governor’s administration.
She also implied her potential removal may be a way of preventing her office from investigating the scandal.
Worrell, speaking Tuesday at a downtown Orlando news conference, said someone had called her Monday night to tell her DeSantis would soon be suspending her, as he did in 2023. Although she declined to name her source, Worrell said the person was credible and that she was taking the warning seriously.
“These rumors don’t start themselves…they have a tremendous impact on the work that is being done in this office…it is politics,” she said. “And every single time the attorney general or the governor invokes this office, they create chaos, they create confusion and they distract from public safety.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, the governor’s office has not released an executive order announcing her removal.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a key DeSantis ally and Worrell’s most vocal critic, spoke Tuesday morning at his own news conference in Osceola about an unrelated matter. When asked by reporters if the governor was suspending Worrell, Uthmeier said he wasn’t aware of such a decision.
“If that’s happening, the governor didn’t let me know,” Uthmeier said.
Talk of Worrell’s possible removal from office is nothing new. Uthmeier has frequently and publicly clashed with Worrell since she was re-elected in 2024 and returned to office. Worrell has long said the criticism is a way to build a pretext for DeSantis to suspend her from office again.
But Worrell said Monday’s late-night warning was especially concerning given she had just said last week she was willing to look into the Hope Florida scandal, in which a grand jury found top members of the DeSantis administration took part in a “sophisticated scheme” to divert $10 million of a Medicaid settlement intended for poor, sick children to “political purposes.”
Uthmeier, who at the time was DeSantis’ chief of staff, was in a “position of authority” over the people involved in the settlement agreement, according to a grand jury report.
Worrell said she had heard that some of the misappropriated funds were spent within the Ninth Judicial Circuit, giving her office jurisdiction to launch an investigation. She implied DeSantis removing her may be to keep her from looking into his administration.
“I had received information that some of the funds misappropriated were spent in the media market here in Central Florida and that we should look into it,” she said. “In the event that I am removed, it won’t be because we aren’t doing our job. It will be because of concerns about what doing our job could look like for the people on the other end of that removal.”
Worrell said she is looking into information on the scandal that has been sent to her office and declined to comment on the grand jury’s findings given that it is part of a potential investigation.
She added she considered the warning about her removal as credible because of the specificity of the details, including that a former prosecutor from her office who now works in the Office of Statewide Prosecution, which is under Uthmeier, was being considered as her replacement. Worrell did not name the former prosecutor, however.
Read more State asks judge to reconsider bond of ex-state rep in child sex abuse case
DeSantis’ 2023 removal of Worrell, a progressive Democrat, was allegedly due to accusations of her incompetence and negligence for supposedly not prosecuting certain cases more aggressively.
The Orlando Sentinel had previously reported that many of the drug trafficking cases in Osceola County that later formed part of the basis for her removal, which had been released by then-Sheriff Marcos Lopez, were actually dubious. Lopez was later arrested on charges of running an illegal gambling ring.
Her suspension, however, was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court.
Since her return to office last year following a decisive election win over DeSantis-appointed State Attorney Andrew Bain, Uthemeier has lobbed repeated attacks against her office.
In the first months of her new term, the attorney general blasted a new policy seeking to reduce a case backlog involving suspects who had not been arrested pending reviews by prosecutors. The policy was labeled “soft on crime” despite a nearly identical, pandemic-era policy by the neighboring Fifth Circuit State Attorney’s Office led by Republican State Attorney Bill Gladson.
Much of the backlog, which dated back several administrations, was cleared following assistance by statewide prosecutors dispatched to help Worrell’s office.
But it wasn’t long before Uthmeier renewed his attacks on Worrell, including for refusing to drop the murder case against Tina Allgeo, convicted of killing a man in a road rage shooting. Uthmeier entered the fray amid claims by her defense attorney that it was a likely “Stand Your Ground” case, only for the case to end in a guilty plea to a lesser charge in exchange for a shorter prison sentence.
Worrell issued a letter to Uthmeier’s office in October demanding he cease his “campaign of misinformation and intimidation.” The letter also cited six cases highlighted by the attorney general as examples of her misconduct in office, including Allgeo’s, many of which were dropped due to lack of evidence or resulted in an outcome approved by Bain.
The attacks continued this year. In January, Uthmeier pinned responsibility on Worrell for the killing of three tourists in Kissimmee, whose killer years earlier was found not guilty by reason of insanity for a shooting at a Wawa gas station. Worrell at the time noted the verdict came from a bench trial, meaning a judge and not a jury decided his fate.
In May, Uthmeier blasted Worrell for what he said were lenient sentences to teenagers accused of serious crimes. The sentences were handed to teens labeled “youthful offenders,” a designation ultimately decided by judges, not prosecutors.
Most recently, Uthmeier criticized Worrell following the arrest of a 17-year-old in the killing of two people in DeLand, pointing to a juvenile arrest record handled mostly by her office. However, the teen’s most recent arrest was by the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, and the case ended with him being placed in a pretrial diversion program.
At his Tuesday news conference in Osceola County, Uthmeier chuckled as reporters asked repeated questions about the rumors of Worrell’s removal, saying, “You guys seem to be looking for something.”
“I just want people to do their job; I want people to put bad guys away,” Uthmeier said. “When somebody kills another person or tries to kill another person, I don’t want them to get a slap on the wrist — I want them to go away forever. I want them to make sure that they cannot hurt another individual, and any state attorney that disagrees with me on that, in my opinion, is not doing his or her job effectively.”
Read more Former UCF center Tacko Fall signs training camp deal with Philadelphia Sixers