MONTGOMERY, Ala. β Of all the places Andrew Warren imagined his career would take him, it was never here: the lobby of an upscale chain hotel in downtown Montgomery, huddling with his legal team and preparing for a hearing that β maybe within a year if heβs lucky β will result in him getting his job back.
βI didnβt ask to be the tip of the spear in this fight for freedom and democracy,β Warren said, settling into a tall wingback chair on the morning of May 2, several hours before he was due in a federal appellate court just down the street. βBut the governor picked a fight with me, so Iβm fighting on behalf of everyone who cares about these issues.β
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It has been over nine months since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Warren, accusing the twice-elected Democratic prosecutor for Hillsborough County of βincompetenceβ and βneglect of dutyβ in a scathing 29-page executive order last August. The Florida Constitution gives the governor the power to remove elected officials in cases of extreme misconduct. But those powers have rarely, if ever, been used in a case like Warrenβs.
βThis is something youβd expect to see happen in Turkey or North Korea or China. This is not something youβd ever expect to see happen in the United States,β said Warren, whose general measured demeanor during our interview sometimes gave way to a quiet rage about the whole episode.
βThe governor is the one who did wrong here,β Warren told me, βand no one else should have to adjust their behavior to the whims of the dictator.β
Frothing with the polite but pointed anger of a clean-cut attorney, Warren described the surreal events of the past year, which has included: Learning of his suspension in the middle of grand jury proceedings for a decades-old cold case. Being escorted from his office with his belongings by armed sheriffβs deputies. Watching the governor brag about his suspension on Fox News. Reading about his suspension in the governorβs book. Hearing about his suspension in the governorβs stump speeches. Reliving this episode of his life over and over again β in court, in interviews, in conversations with friends and strangers. Having his career and life essentially frozen. Receiving death threats against his family because of the bright spotlight that DeSantis put him under.
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βThis has been very difficult for me professionally,β said Warren, who is still living with his family in Tampa, βbecause I care so much about the office. Itβs been very difficult for me politically, because the most powerful Republican in the country is targeting me specifically, as an individual. And itβs been very difficult for me personally β everything from just the huge disruption itβs had on my life with my family, to getting death threats from people who tell me that my children deserve to die for the things Iβve done.β
In his lawsuit, now winding its way through federal courts and currently being heard by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here in Montgomery, Warren argues that DeSantis violated his constitutional right to free speech and removed him without cause. It will likely be decided as DeSantis is running for president on his record of governing βthe free state of Florida.β
DeSantis is expected to announce his campaign for the Republican nomination in the coming days. He has already made Warrenβs firing a staple of his stump speech, using the episode to show how heβs crushed foes using his executive fist. β[These state attorneys] want to weaponize the power of their office to target people they donβt like,β DeSantis said last month in Manchester, New Hampshire. βAnd when we had an attorney like that, a district attorney in Tampa who had been funded by [George] Soros and said he would not uphold the laws of the state, I removed him from his post. Heβs gone.β
Warren was never bankrolled by Soros, the Democratic mega-donor who is a perennial target of conspiracies and hate on the right β but he likely benefited from contributions Soros made to the Florida Democratic Party at one point or another. DeSantis, perhaps projecting, also misrepresented the argument he used to fire Warren, who has never been accused, in either the executive order suspending him or in subsequent court filings, of going after people he didnβt like.
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The governorβs office, which generally only interacts with certain friendly news outlets, never responded to a request from HuffPost to provide a comment for this article.
Although itβs easier to describe Warren as having been removed or fired, heβs technically in a state of suspension that could be reversed β or made permanent β pending a hearing by the Florida Senate. But given the heavy Republican makeup of that body, Warren is exploring other remedies.
Warrenβs suspension came two months after he co-signed a letter with more than 80 other progressive prosecutors opposing the criminalization of abortion and transgender health care, in the wake of the Supreme Courtβs reversal on abortion rights. In his executive order, DeSantis cited both the letter and what he characterized as a βblanket refusalβ to prosecute some low-level crimes, such as the aggressive ticketing of Tampa bicyclists, most of whom were Black. Warren disputes that his office had βblanketβ policies that endangered public safety, as DeSantis tried to argue in his order β and his case hinges on whether a panel of majority-conservative appellate judges see it the same way.
βThe governor has his talking points, which are divorced from reality. From the day I was suspended, I said this was a publicity stunt, the allegations are false, this is un-American,β said Warren, on the edge of his seat, his legal team hovering nearby.
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A trim 46-year-old with light salt-and-pepper hair, Warren sometimes doesnβt blink when heβs talking. During an interview, he comes off as a deeply focused person who has spent the last nine months of his life consumed by two overlapping objectives β getting his job back and sounding the alarm on DeSantis, whom he sees as a threat to democracy. βPowerful people without a moral compass are dangerous,β Warren said. βPoliticians who are willing to break the law to get votes or to get applause are dangerous.β
Politics aside, however, the two men have, if not a lot, at least some major things in common. They are both Florida natives in their mid-40s. They followed similar paths into public service after graduating from elite law schools (Warren from Columbia, DeSantis from Harvard). As young lawyers, they both worked for the Justice Department as federal prosecutors. And theyβve both confronted family tragedies in recent years β Warren, after his pregnant wife was involved in a car crash and the couple lost their baby, and DeSantis, after his wife was diagnosed and underwent treatment for breast cancer.
Their paths diverged dramatically once DeSantis became a congressman and joined the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, and Warren, having moved from Washington to Tampa to raise his family, decided to challenge a longtime GOP incumbent for state attorney.
The job of chief law enforcement officer, by its very nature, relies heavily on the discretion of the individuals doing the job to determine how crimes are prosecuted and sentenced. Thatβs why Warrenβs case is so tricky and precedent-setting. Itβs also why, in nearly every state, prosecutors are locally elected and therefore not subject to the political whims of a faraway official β the same principle behind a governor not picking the members of your city council or school board.
DeSantis isnβt the only Florida governor who has kneecapped a prosecutor. Sen. Rick Scott, the Republican who preceded DeSantis, got a judge to allow him to reassign murder cases from an Orlando prosecutor who was opposed to using the death penalty. But Scott didnβt try to get that prosecutor fired. βWhen I was there I was very clear β you have to prosecute your cases,β Scott told HuffPost, declining to comment on whatβs happening now between DeSantis and Warren.
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Warren came into office in 2016 after upsetting a longtime Republican in the purple west-central Florida county that encompasses Tampa, the stateβs third-largest city. He says his backers were both Republicans and Democrats drawn to his mission of more equitable criminal justice outcomes amid a national reckoning over police brutality. Accusing his opponent of being too heavy-handed when the times demanded the opposite, Warren won a surprise victory followed four years later by his reelection to a second term.
At a time when Florida Democrats are desperately trying to build their bench, Warren has been floated as a possible U.S. Senate candidate against Scott in 2024. His close friend Nikki Fried, the newly elected chair of the Florida Democratic Party, told HuffPost that Warren would make a great candidate for any number of Republican-held positions that Democrats are hoping to contest. βHeβs a true leader with a big heart, and unfortunately in politics right now you donβt find a lot of those,β Fried said.
Warren can also raise money. While he declined to give an exact figure, he said heβs brought in βseveral hundred thousandβ dollars through a nonprofit for his legal defense.
But Warren isnβt interested in another office, at least not right now. βItβs wonderful to have people who are so confident in your leadership to encourage you to run for different positions,β he said. βBut my focus is on the state attorneyβs job.β
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Running statewide in Florida wonβt be easy for any Democrat. So far, no serious candidates have emerged to challenge Scott in what was once a Senate battleground. A bellwether for these times, Warrenβs own swing county, Hillsborough, lurched to the right in the last election, shedding several Democratic officeholders.
DeSantis cites his own blowout reelection last year to justify the heavy leverage of his executive powers. The governor has single-handedly spearheaded measures such as banning transgender medical therapy for minors and expanding the stateβs controversial βDonβt Say Gayβ law into high schools. He also amped up his feud with a beloved American corporation that happens to be one of his stateβs largest taxpayers. DeSantis wears these battles as a badge of honor. βMy view is simple,β he told an audience last month at Liberty University, uttering a line thatβs become a staple of his speeches and the overriding ethos of his governorship. βI may have earned 50% of the vote, but that entitled me to wield 100% of the executive power.β
DeSantis might even be going after another Democratic prosecutor. Monique Worrell, Orlandoβs state attorney, said this month that she believes DeSantis is building a case to target her next, accusing the governor of seeking to βexploit his political agenda against me.β
Fried, Floridaβs former agriculture commissioner and the last Democrat elected statewide, said DeSantis has created a climate of fear in Florida.
βWeβve got a governor who believes heβs the ultimate ruler of the state. Heβs taking away peopleβs freedom of speech and heβs removing officers who have been elected by their constituents at the local level,β she said.
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Warrenβs best shot at reversing his suspension lies with the appellate court, which is reviewing his challenge to an earlier ruling from a federal judge in Florida. This ruling was both good and bad for Warren β good in that it seemed to generally side with Warren that DeSantis violated his free speech and removed him from office without citing βeven a hint of misconductβ; bad because despite all that, the judge still found he didnβt have the constitutional authority to restore Warren as a local prosecutor.
Documents unearthed in discovery support the argument that DeSantis doled out a punishment driven overwhelmingly by his political agenda. An early version of the executive order made numerous references to Soros, the political lightning rod, which DeSantis ultimately struck out with a blue marker. Beyond that, the governorβs attorney struggled to build a case showing that Warren had undermined public safety, according to a New York Times analysis of the discovery documents.
That didnβt stop DeSantis from declaring, in an Aug. 4 press conference announcing the suspension, that Warrenβs tenure had been βdevastating to the rule of law.β He made similar comments that night to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
βTucker, youβve documented the destruction that weβve seen with these Soros prosecutors around the county, where they basically take it upon themselves to determine which laws should be followed and which laws should not be followed,β a grinning DeSantis said, with photos of Warren proceeding to flash across the screen.
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Warren disputes that his policies had any negative impact on crime, noting that, by the state of Floridaβs own crime reporting metrics, overall crime declined in Hillsborough County under his watch. βThis isnβt a Portland or San Francisco scenario,β he said.
Republicans blame soft-on-crime policies, and the βwokeβ district attorneys they say promote them, for the visible homelessness and addiction in places like Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, an idea thatβs been relentlessly reinforced by conservative media. I asked Warren to define a βwoke prosecutor,β and he didnβt know where to begin. In general, the term has become a catchall on the right for anything deemed too liberal or politically correct. βYou have to ask the people on Fox News [what it means],β Warren said. βIβm a moderate prosecutor from a moderate county. I have done things that have frustrated the far left as much as the far right.β
Warrenβs suspension was a direct result of DeSantisβ war on βwoke,β his attorneys argue, a pretext the governor has used to go after schools, government agencies and businesses in a way that Democrats, at least, find chilling.
βThe animus here toward woke ideas and woke viewpoints was a motivating factor,β Warrenβs attorney David OβNeill argued to the appellate panel. Republicans have made the word so pervasive that itβs being used now in a deadly serious manner in federal courts.
DeSantis was represented in Montgomery by two young attorneys for the state of Florida who returned to a single, much-examined line in the abortion rights letter that Warren signed last June. The sentence in question seems to signal, beyond just the general opposition to the criminalization of abortion, that the co-signers would go a step further and refuse to prosecute abortion crimes altogether. Warren, as far as he knows, is the only prosecutor from the letter who lost his job over this single sentence.
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In the chaotic and emotional days that followed the Supreme Courtβs abortion ruling and the letterβs release, Warren said he attempted to clarify that he didnβt mean he would disregard abortion law in its entirety. At the time, Florida lawmakers had just passed a 15-week abortion ban. Since then, theyβve passed a six-week ban, which DeSantis put his signature on last month but hasnβt said much about since.
Warren can expect a ruling sometime within the next year. It may not be the ruling heβs hoping for.
The appellate panel is composed of three judges: one Democratic appointee and two Republicans, including a Trump nominee. And beyond this panel of judges in Alabama, there are only dead ends β the Republican-controlled Florida Senate and equally conservative Florida Supreme Court β underscoring how entrenched Republicans have become in Florida under DeSantis and throughout the age of Donald Trump.
Warren, who might violate the terms of his suspension if he were to take another legal job, has had a lot of downtime to reflect on this battle and what it all means. For himself and his future. For Florida. For the country, if DeSantis beats both Trump and Joe Biden and tries to run the federal government like the state of Florida β which heβs promised to do.
βThe governor has made it clear that if he disagrees with who you are or what you said or what you stand for, then youβre at risk for being attacked,β Warren said. βI mean, look at the people heβs gone after. Disney, obviously. The Special Olympics. Heβs attacked businesses. Heβs attacked teachers. Heβs attacking the LGBTQ community. Heβs attacked universities and professors and boards of regents. Heβs attacked elected officials. If you donβt say what he wants you to say, then you are at risk.β
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My final question for Warren was whether he regrets signing the abortion letter β after all, had he not, he might still be employed. Would he risk this all over again? Or would he try to find another, less out-there way to signal his opposition to the abortion climate? Warren shifted uncomfortably in his seat. For the first time in our conversation he became a little less lawyerly and a little more pissed, channeling, in a certain sense, his nemesis.
βYour question to me is β should I have done something differently and not spoken my mind so as not to annoy the governor of Florida? Should I not have exercised my constitutional right to free speech? So I didnβt run the risk of the governor breaking state and federal law?β he said. βAmericans donβt need permission slips to exercise their constitutional rights. No, I wouldnβt change a thing, and I shouldnβt have to change a thing.β