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 news organization, presents four more explosive investigations from its recent reporting archive. This edition covers a Broward lawyer who drafted a plan to let President Trump seize the 2026 midterm elections, Roger Stone’s lucrative lobbying contract to aid Christians in Nigeria after failing to deliver a pardon, the climate of fear and division that is paralyzing ICE resistance across South Florida, and Governor DeSantis’s push to weaponize his new attorney general against Dr. Anthony Fauci — despite a Florida grand jury finding no criminal basis for prosecution. Each story is a testament to what nonprofit watchdog journalism can expose when it follows the facts without fear or favor.
Broward Lawyer Peter Ticktin Pushes Draft Executive Order to Give Trump Sweeping Control Over 2026 Midterm Elections
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | March 1, 2026
In a story that quickly ignited a national firestorm about the integrity of American democracy, Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus revealed the central role of Deerfield Beach attorney Peter Ticktin in drafting a sweeping executive order that would authorize President Donald Trump to declare a national emergency and seize unprecedented control over the administration of the 2026 midterm elections. The 17-page draft order — which Ticktin confirmed to Florida Bulldog he drafted and has been circulating among the president’s allies — claims that Chinese hackers are prepared to corrupt U.S. voting results, using this unverified allegation as the legal pretext for an extraordinary assertion of executive power over elections that the Constitution explicitly reserves to the states.
Ticktin’s ties to Donald Trump run deep. The two men have known each other since their teenage years at the New York Military Academy in the early 1960s, where Ticktin served as Trump’s platoon sergeant. That decades-long personal relationship has given Ticktin unusual access to Trump and his inner circle, including figures like retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon. In an interview with Florida Bulldog, Ticktin described himself as “an outside person who’s attempting to influence things,” and characterized Trump’s proposed election action as being in the best interests of the American people.
The draft executive order would mandate nationwide hand-counted paper ballots, require voters to re-register for the 2026 midterms with proof of citizenship, ban mail-in ballots except for military personnel, and authorize an array of federal agencies — including the DOJ, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Social Security Administration, and the Postal Service — to play roles in identifying allegedly ineligible voters. Its stated legal basis rests on the National Emergencies Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, both of which legal scholars have quickly and emphatically stated confer no authority whatsoever over the conduct of elections.
The constitutional problems with the proposal are fundamental. America’s Elections Clause clearly vests the authority to administer elections in state legislatures, with Congressional oversight — not the president. Norman Eisen, executive chair of the nonprofit State Democracy Defenders Fund, was direct in his response: “If Trump tries this we will be in court in the blink of an eye. If he tries this, he will fail. There’s no constitutional basis for this.” Legal scholars across the ideological spectrum have echoed this assessment, calling the order’s legal reasoning riddled with errors and its fundamental premise blatantly unconstitutional.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting revealed that the Chinese hacking threat forming the supposed emergency basis for the order is entirely unsubstantiated. U.S. intelligence agencies have consistently debunked 2020 election-interference conspiracy theories, including those involving China, ever since Trump lost to Joe Biden. Despite this, Ticktin and his allies — including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne — have continued to promote the unverified Chinese interference narrative as justification for an emergency declaration.
Ticktin is no stranger to high-stakes election-denial litigation. He currently represents Tina Peters, the former Colorado county clerk serving a nine-year prison sentence for her role in allowing Trump campaign aides unauthorized access to voting machines after the 2020 election. Ticktin has consistently described Peters as a “political prisoner,” aligning himself squarely with the movement that continues to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 results.
When asked about the draft order, President Trump told a PBS reporter he was not considering declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections — even as his own February 13 Truth Social post had teased an upcoming executive order on election integrity, writing that he had “searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject.” Florida Bulldog’s exclusive interview with Ticktin and its early, detailed reporting helped drive national coverage by the Washington Post, PBS, ABC News, and others. It is precisely this kind of locally-rooted, source-driven investigative work — identifying and interviewing the Broward lawyer at the center of a scheme with national implications — that makes Florida Bulldog irreplaceable.
Fired Because He Couldn’t Deliver a Pardon, Roger Stone Lands $9 Million Contract to Aid Christians in Nigeria
By Dan Christensen | FloridaBulldog.org | February 4, 2026
In a story that illuminates the extraordinary and often murky world of influence peddling around the Trump administration, Florida Bulldog editor Dan Christensen has reported that political operative Roger Stone — convicted felon, Trump loyalist, and one of Washington’s most notorious operators — was fired by a client after he failed to deliver a presidential pardon, then quickly landed a lucrative new lobbying contract worth $9 million to advocate on behalf of Christians in Nigeria. Florida Bulldog’s reporting connects that contract to the dramatic U.S. military strike Trump ordered on Christmas Day 2025.
Stone’s involvement in the Nigeria lobbying contract came through DCI, a Washington lobbying firm whose managing member Justin Peterson signed a services contract with Aster Legal, representing Nigeria’s national security advisor Malam Nuhu Ribadu. The contract, effective December 12 and signed by both parties on December 17, required half of the $9 million total fee — $4.5 million — to be paid upfront. Eight days after the contract was signed, on Christmas Day 2025, President Trump announced that he had ordered a U.S. military strike against ISIS terrorists in northwest Nigeria who had been targeting Christians.
The timing raises questions that Florida Bulldog places squarely before its readers. Did Stone’s lobbying — and the $4.5 million paid upfront — play any role in influencing the Trump administration’s decision to launch that military strike? Stone’s Senate lobbying disclosures state that he was also lobbying the Executive Office of the President and the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of his top-paying client, the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana — the same tribe whose chairman last July announced a plan to nominate Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, a tribal subsidiary landed a $10 million State Department contract.
Stone’s legal and political biography is one of the most remarkable in modern American politics. In 2019, he was convicted by a federal jury on seven felony counts: obstruction of a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and witness tampering. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison in February 2020 but never served a single day — Trump commuted his sentence days before he was to report, and later issued a full pardon.
The New York Times covered the Christmas Day Nigeria strike in a lengthy story but referenced only a $9 million contract with a “Washington lobbying outfit” without naming the firm or noting Stone’s involvement. Florida Bulldog’s reporting filled that critical gap, providing readers with the specific details that make the connection between Stone’s lobbying work and the administration’s Nigeria policy visible and accountable. Without Florida Bulldog, this chapter in Stone’s post-pardon career might have remained invisible to the public entirely.
This story is a vivid illustration of why Florida Bulldog’s model of independent, deep-sourced investigative reporting is so valuable. The connection between a South Florida-linked political operative’s lobbying contract, a $4.5 million upfront payment, and a U.S. military strike ordered on Christmas Day is exactly the kind of story that only a newsroom committed to following the money and the power — regardless of where the trail leads — can produce.
Terror, Indifference, and Division: Why ICE Resistance Has Largely Failed to Take Hold in South Florida
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | February 20, 2026
While protests against ICE enforcement operations have drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and cities across the country, South Florida has seen a markedly different response. In a deeply reported examination of why a region with one of the largest and most diverse immigrant populations in the United States has failed to mount a sustained, visible resistance to federal immigration enforcement, Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus paints a complex portrait of a community fractured by fear, political indifference, and historical divisions that predate the current administration’s enforcement surge.
The story opens with a striking juxtaposition: the image of Liam Conjeo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy in a blue bunny hat seized alongside his father and transported from their Minneapolis suburb home to a Texas detention camp. That story evokes a powerful echo for South Floridians — the 26-year-old saga of Elian Gonzalez, the 5-year-old Cuban boy rescued from the waters off Fort Lauderdale after a boat wreck took the lives of his mother and ten other Cuban asylum seekers. The Elian case convulsed South Florida and the nation, and it left lasting scars on the region’s political landscape that continue to shape how immigrant communities here respond to federal enforcement actions today.
South Florida’s immigrant community is among the most politically complex in the United States. It is not a monolith. Cuban Americans, who form a large and politically influential segment of the population, have historically supported conservative immigration enforcement policies — at least when those policies applied to undocumented immigrants from countries other than Cuba. Venezuelan Americans, who fled a socialist government, have similarly tended toward support for Trump and his administration. This internal division within the region’s immigrant communities has made unified resistance to ICE enforcement politically and logistically difficult.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting documents the climate of fear that has settled over undocumented communities in Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties. Sources interviewed by Marcus describe people afraid to drive to work, take their children to school, or seek medical care — not because enforcement is constant, but because the unpredictability of enforcement creates a pervasive sense of vulnerability. This fear is itself a form of social control, chilling ordinary civic activity even in communities not directly targeted by recent raids.
The story also examines how Florida law, under legislation pushed by Governor DeSantis, actively restricts local governments from limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement — a legal framework that forecloses the formal sanctuary city options available to local officials in states like California, Illinois, and New York. Several local officials and law enforcement agencies have adopted positions of studied neutrality or quiet cooperation with federal authorities as a result.
Marcus’s reporting captures the moral complexity of the issue for many South Florida residents who are themselves immigrants or children of immigrants. For communities that came to America fleeing communism or authoritarianism, the rhetoric of immigration enforcement — framed in terms of national security and the rule of law — carries a different valence than it does for communities whose members arrived through different pathways. This complexity makes organizing and coalition building across South Florida’s diverse immigrant communities uniquely challenging. Florida Bulldog’s examination is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why the national immigration debate looks so different from the perspective of this region.
DeSantis Unleashes New AG Uthmeier on Dr. Fauci — Despite Florida Grand Jury Finding No Federal COVID Crimes
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | February 2025
In yet another episode in Governor Ron DeSantis’s prolonged political war against federal public health officials, Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has revealed that DeSantis is counting on newly appointed Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to launch a criminal prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci — even though the Florida grand jury that DeSantis himself convened to investigate federal COVID-19 conduct explicitly concluded that no criminal statute existed that would support a federal indictment arising from the pandemic response. The story is a vivid case study in the use of prosecutorial power for political purposes, and in the gap between what political leaders claim the law permits and what it actually does.
DeSantis convened a statewide grand jury to investigate the federal government’s COVID-19 response — a process that unfolded over 18 months and produced three separate reports. Florida Bulldog’s reporting details what those reports actually found: during their 18-month tenure, the grand jurors stated definitively that “we did not find any statute that we believed would be an appropriate vehicle for a criminal indictment.” The final report was delivered to the Florida Supreme Court in November and unsealed on January 6. Despite this explicit conclusion by his own grand jury, DeSantis publicly announced he is counting on AG Uthmeier to pursue criminal charges against Fauci, describing the former federal public health director as the “chief henchman” of the U.S. coronavirus response.
The legal landscape for any such prosecution is deeply complicated by the fact that former President Biden issued a preemptive pardon of Fauci as one of his final official acts. Biden’s pardon protects Fauci from federal prosecution. It does not, however, protect him from state prosecution — which is precisely why DeSantis and Uthmeier believe Florida may have a pathway that the federal government does not. Whether any such state prosecution could withstand constitutional scrutiny is, at minimum, highly questionable, given the absence of any identified state criminal statute that Fauci’s conduct is alleged to have violated.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting provides critical context about what the Florida grand jury’s reports actually found, as opposed to what DeSantis has characterized them as finding. The grand jury’s second interim report attempted to establish that federal public health officials caused drug overdoses by suppressing information about unproven COVID treatments like Ivermectin. The grand jury boldly declared, in italicized type, that it laid “every overdose that occurred at the feet of those who authored this campaign of vilification.” Notably, Fauci’s name appears nowhere in any of the three grand jury reports.
President Trump has himself taken aim at Fauci, removing his Secret Service security detail as one of his first official acts after returning to office. Both Trump and DeSantis have used Fauci as a political symbol of the federal public health establishment they sought to discredit during and after the pandemic — regardless of what the legal record supports in terms of prosecutable criminal conduct.
Noreen Marcus’s reporting on DeSantis and Fauci is part of a broader body of work holding Florida’s political leadership accountable to factual rigor. Her reporting consistently asks not what politicians claim the law says but what it actually says — and what the public record actually supports. A state attorney general who pursues criminal charges against a federal official over conduct that the governor’s own grand jury found no criminal basis to charge is not enforcing the law. He is conducting politics by legal means. Florida Bulldog’s reporting makes that distinction clear, and provides Floridians with the factual foundation they need to evaluate their governor’s claims and their attorney general’s priorities.
ABOUT FLORIDA BULLDOG
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 former investigative reporter for The Miami Herald and Daily Business Review — Florida Bulldog is staffed by veteran professional journalists whose reporting has triggered criminal indictments, government reforms, and landmark Florida Supreme Court decisions. Florida Bulldog covers government, politics, the courts, law enforcement, education, business, the environment, health, and public safety with no corporate owners, no political patrons, and no advertiser influence over editorial decisions.
As a federally tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization and a member of the Investigative News Network (INN), Florida Bulldog relies entirely on the generosity of readers and donors who understand that independent watchdog journalism is not a luxury — it is a necessity for a functioning democracy.
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