Recommendations of the Editorial team
On Monday, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a new “Task Force to Eliminate Fraud”, to be led by Vice President JD Vance – unofficially appointed “Fraud Czar” by Trump.
“The very big thing we’re doing — it’s about fraud, all the fraud that’s going on in our country,” Trump said Monday in the Oval Office. “You saw it, quite clearly, in Minnesota: $19 billion — but that’s just a small aspect of the fraud.” (In fact, federal prosecutors have pointed out that while the fraud in Minnesota was shockingly large, it was less than half that size: it is estimated that around $9 billion has been stolen from funds earmarked for Medicaid-funded programs since 2018.)
Trump’s announcement this week followed his State of the Union address, in which he declared a “war on fraud.”
Trump’s War on Fraud
“If we can uncover enough fraud,” Trump said at the time, “we will have a balanced budget overnight.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Trump has granted pardons to more than 70 people convicted of fraud in his two terms in office combined – many of them allies and donors. In his second term, he has been even more generous: almost half of all pardons and sentence reductions have occurred since his return to the White House in January.
Several pardons, the Times said, benefited family members of Trump donors – such as Trevor Milton, founder of electric vehicle startup Nikola, who was pardoned after he and his wife donated $1.8 million to Trump’s campaign, and Julio Herrera Velutini, who was granted immunity from prosecution after his daughter transferred a total of $3.5 million to MAGA Inc.
According to the Times report, those pardoned by Trump owe a combined $700 million in restitution and fines. These include several people who were convicted of fraud against taxpayers. Philip Esformes (operator of a series of nursing homes and assisted living facilities in South Florida, sentenced to 20 years in prison after orchestrating a $1.3 billion fraud against Medicare and Medicaid – described by prosecutors as “the largest health care fraud case prosecuted against individuals”), Salomon Melgen (a Palm Beach County doctor, sentenced to 17 years in prison after being convicted of stealing more than $42 million in one Medicare fraud scheme) and Lawrence Duran (owner of a Florida mental health care company who pleaded guilty in a case arising from a $205 million Medicare fraud).
Democrats are reckoning
Last year, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee added up the amount of outstanding restitution payments and fines – both for the white-collar criminals and for those who took part in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, to whom the President had granted a blanket amnesty. The committee’s report estimated that the state lost $1.3 billion that would have been owed to taxpayers as a result of Trump’s actions.
“The Trump presidency is overseeing a massive redistribution of wealth – not just from rich to poor, but from innocent to guilty,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) in a statement released at the time. “This is a golden age for politically connected criminals.”
Raskin called Trump’s “pardon spree” “a stunning gift to lawbreakers so they can keep the money they stole from their employees, their investors and all American taxpayers.” He added: “Whoever said crime doesn’t pay clearly hasn’t studied the Trump administration.”
