Awkward: When an "Evil" Agency is More Ethical than the Government Investigating It

Florida's Governor Rick Scott, whose previous job earned him the Biggest Medicare Fraud Fine Ever Levied Against a Hospital Corporation, became so upset over the deceptive Planned Parenthood videos he ordered an immediate investigation into Florida's 16 Planned Parenthood clinics. Well, fine, every state has an agency to do this sort of thing and they do inspect regularly, so at best the Governor's order would serve to reassure Floridians that their PP clinics were legitimate healthcare providers, or at worst find evidence of wrongdoing and thus get those bad actors shut down.

But when the state investigators returned a clean bill of health for all 16 clinics, the Governor did something far worse than the convicted felon who created the dishonest videos in the first place: he chose to edit his own investigators' report to lie to the citizens of Florida about those findings.

The state released its findings of the Planned Parenthood investigations on Aug. 5. Emails between the governor’s office and AHCA, obtained by POLITICO Florida through a public records request, show the agency prepared a press release that same day noting that “there is no evidence of the mishandling of fetal remains at any of the 16 clinics we investigated across the state.”

Scott's office revised the release to exclude that sentence, an email sent by Scott’s communications director, Jackie Schutz, shows.