On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a new “Task Force to Eliminate Fraud” to be led by Vice President J.D. Vance, whom Trump has unofficially dubbed his “Fraud Czar.”
“The very big thing that we’re doing — it’s about fraud, having to do with all of the fraud that’s taking place in our country,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Monday. “You’ve been seeing it, and seeing it pretty big, in Minnesota: $19 billion dollars, but that’s only for one little aspect of the fraud.” (In fact, federal prosecutors have suggested that the fraud in Minnesota, while staggering, was less than half that figure, estimating that roughly $9 billion in money earmarked for Medicaid-funded programs has been stolen since 2018.)
Trump’s announcement this week came after the president declared during his State of the Union address his intention to wage a “War on Fraud.”
“If we’re able to find enough fraud,” Trump said at the time, “We’ll actually have a balanced budget overnight.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports, in his two terms combined, Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 people convicted of fraud — many of whom are allies and donors. He’s been doling out the pardons at a faster rate in his second term, with nearly half of the total pardons and commutations coming since he retook office last January.
A number of pardons, the Times notes, were given to family members of Trump donors like Trevor Milton, founder of the electric vehicle start-up Nikola, pardoned after he and his wife donated $1.8 million to the Trump campaign, and Julio Herrera Velutini, granted clemency after his daughter gave a total of $3.5 million to MAGA Inc.
According to the Times’ report, those granted clemency by Trump owed a combined $700 million in restitution and fines. They include a number of individuals prosecuted for defrauding taxpayers, like Philip Esformes (owner of a string of South Florida nursing and assisted-living facilities sentenced to 20 years in prison after orchestrating a $1.3 billion bilking of Medicare and Medicaid that prosecutors called “the largest-ever criminal health care fraud case brought against individuals”), Salomon Melgen (a Palm Beach County doctor sentenced to 17 years in prison after he was convicted of stealing more than $42 million in a scheme to defraud Medicare), and Lawrence Duran (owner of a Florida mental health care company, who pleaded guilty to charges that stemmed from a $205 million Medicare fraud scheme).
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee last year tallied up the cost of restitution and fines owed by both the white-collar criminals and the January 6 protesters to whom the president issued a blanket pardon. The committee’s report estimated that the government lost $1.3 billion owed to taxpayers through Trump’s actions.
“The Trump presidency is overseeing a massive transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich but from the innocent to the guilty,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in a statement released at the time. “This is a golden age for politically connected criminal felons.”
Raskin went on to call Trump’s “pardon spree” “an astonishing giveaway to lawbreakers to keep the money they stole from their employees, their investors, and all the American taxpayers.” He added, “Whoever said crime doesn’t pay has certainly not studied the Trump Administration.”
