For $50K, DeSantis gives 2 hugs. What else?

We Americans value our personal space. People, men especially, don’t often hug each other without some reason.

It can be the sharing of sorrow, the celebration of triumph or the reunion of old friends.

So what are Floridians to make of those scenes showing a beaming Gov. Ron DeSantis, on the night of his election last year, embracing two men whom he wanted us to believe he hardly knew?

It turns out that they contributed $50,000 to his campaign.

That’s worth a hug, no doubt.

But questions linger: What else did they get? More importantly, what might they have been expecting?

The men were Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two of the four people whom the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan has charged with illegally laundering foreign money into American political campaigns. The indictment did not specify any in Florida, but the contributions here raise eyebrows, nonetheless.

In the wake of their arrests, the media reported that their company gave $50,000 to DeSantis’ campaign a day before Donald Trump endorsed him in Florida’s Republican primary. It also came out that they had invested $20,400 to elect former Gov. Rick Scott to the U.S. Senate and gave $2,432 to Rep. Brian Mast, R-Palm City.

All are disgorging the contributions, DeSantis and Mast to the federal government and Scott to a charity, which will give him credit he doesn’t deserve. The IRS should keep an eye on how he reports it.

Nothing has been said about the disposition of money raised from others by Parnas and Fruman, who were listed as hosts on at least two DeSantis fund-raising events. The Democratic Party is demanding, quite reasonably, that DeSantis give away that money, too.

Sad to say, such big and even bigger gifts are so common now that these would have gone unnoticed but for the arrests — and for what else Parnas and Fruman have been up to.

They figure in Trump’s impeachmentworthy Ukraine scandal because of their connection to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney and international meddler. Fruman and Parnas have been linked to Giuliani’s attempts to get the president of Ukraine to throw mud at former Vice President Joe Biden, who may be Trump’s opponent next November.

But instead of coming clean with the public, DeSantis and his staff reacted to the news by trying to make it seem the men were virtually strangers.

Helen Aguirre Ferré, his communications director, said that Parnas and Fruman “may” have attended Republican events during the governor’s campaign.

She added that “the governor does not have a relationship with these individuals.”

Four days later, Ferré’s fiction was exposed when the Tampa Bay Times published videos and photos that its photographer had taken at DeSantis’ victory party. There, were the hugs. No relationship? But Ferré soldiered bravely on. The event was “open to the public,” she said, adding later that “donors were likely invited.”

That doesn’t explain the hugs. Did everyone at the party get a hug?

Or just those who gave $50,000 or more?

DeSantis finally admitted to reporters that “I knew Parnas. I didn’t know the other guy as much.”

“He was at a lot of these things, was I think viewed as one of the top supporters of the president in Florida,” DeSantis said. “It was like any other donor, nothing more than that.”

Most recently, it came out that Parnas flew from one DeSantis campaign event to another, either on the governor’s plane or on Giuliani’s, which tracked the same flight path. Just like “any other donor?”

At last word, DeSantis has said that Parnas wanted — but didn’t get — an appointment to one of his transition committees, the one dealing with public safety.

Parnas and Fruman had tried, but failed, to get into the legal marijuana business in Nevada. It is not known whether they had a similar angle in Florida, which has legalized medical pot and faces a push for recreational use.

If that’s what they were after, strings to pull in law enforcement would have been a helpful asset.

They’re now so toxic, obviously, that Floridians don’t need to worry about what might be with them, only about what might have been.

It’s another reminder, though, how money has distorted American politics from the top down.

Florida still pretends to limit individual contributions to campaigns. For a governor’s race, that’s $3,000 in the primary and $3,000 more in the general election — $6,000 total, not $50,000.

So how did Parnas and Fruman get away with giving more?

It went to a political committee, Friends of Ron DeSantis, that supposedly couldn’t coordinate its spending with his. It raised $41 million, compared to $19 million that went to DeSantis directly.

Ben Wilcox, executive director of the public interest group Integrity Florida, explains how it works:

“Florida’s campaign finance system has been purposefully designed by the Florida Legislature to give the illusion that there are regulations and contribution limits in place to reduce the corrupting influence of money in politics. Anybody can easily set up a political committee and raise and spend unlimited amounts of money without restriction and with minimal disclosure to the public. When it comes to financing campaigns, Florida is truly the wild, wild west.”

This is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It is problem because both parties have shared in the spoils, always pretending that they sell nothing but “access” to large investors, er, contributors.

It’s what DeSantis’ political staff was planning to do before leaked memos put the kibosh on charging investor-donors $25,000 for a round of golf with the governor, or $125,000 for a personal, private meeting. Readers will recall that President Clinton also put a price on overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom.

“Access” is hardly an innocuous word. It’s the basic tradecraft of every lobbyist, every fixer, every influence peddler. Without access, they accomplish nothing.

In that game, Parnas and Fruman were just two of many, many people paying to play.

Trouble is, there are many, many others. And after so much dissembling, can Florida trust the governor’s office to be forthcoming about those many others?

America’s

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Sergio Bustos, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.