Free Republic

A pair of Republican senators are asking the Trump administration to investigate Planned Parenthood for potential financial fraud stemming from the COVID era, as Congress moves to allow continued prosecutions for COVID-related fraud. Senators Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently sent a letter to Kelly Loeffler, head of the Small Business Administration (SBA), asking her to look into Planned Parenthood’s “unlawful” collection of over $100 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds and to provide Congress with related documents which the Biden administration previously withheld. According to the senators, Planned Parenthood affiliates were alerted in the first half...

A Long Island tax preparer allegedly bilked the IRS out of $12 million in a COVID scheme she used to buy jewelry, a Honda — and a house in the Dominican Republic. Damaris Beltre, 57, filed false tax returns for her clients between 2021 and 2024, and launched a scheme to illegally obtain Payroll Protection Program loans during the pandemic, federal prosecutors said. “The defendant’s fraudulent work as a tax preparer and in furtherance of a COVID-19 loan scheme, cost the government millions of dollars,” John Durham, US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement...

Almost five years on from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Social Security trust fund has financially benefited following the deaths of more than a million Americans. More than one million Americans died from the coronavirus between 2020 and 2023, meaning those premature deaths saved billions and billions in Social Security payments. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, around $294 billion has been saved as a result. The figure would have been higher if not for lost tax revenue offsetting the total by approximately $205 billion. Survivor benefits to children and spouses of the deceased contributed to the money saved...

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz definitely doesn’t need another scandal a month before Election Day, but he’s getting one anyway. While Walz had enough to deal with after his mediocre vice-presidential debate performance opposite Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance on Tuesday, CNN is putting more on his plate by reaching back into his handling of his state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. On Friday, CNN published a story about fraud under Walz’s governorship as the misappropriation of state funds led to what the Department of Justice called “the single largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the nation.” Feeding Our Future — a program...

The House Education and Workforce Committee subpoenaed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Wednesday for records related to a $250 million COVID-19 relief fraud scheme that occurred on his watch. Walz, 60, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, was ordered to hand over any documents about the scandal, which involved pandemic relief funds being distributed via “the Minnesota Department of Education’s (MDE) administration of federal child nutrition programs (FCNP).” Rather than nourishing hungry children, however, the money funded lavish lifestyles — including fancy cars and real estate holdings as far away as Turkey and Kenya — for the operators of a fraudulent...

WASHINGTON – Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) today issued a subpoena to Governor Tim Walz’s administration to hold it accountable in what has been called the “largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the nation.” Subpoenas were also issued to the Biden-Harris administration’s U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its Office of Inspector General (OIG). In 2022, a U.S. attorney charged 70 individuals associated with Minnesota-based Feeding Our Future (FOF) for their alleged roles in defrauding the USDA of over $250 million in taxpayer funds—money intended to feed hungry children. To date, five individuals have been convicted of...

Charlie Kirk @charliekirk11Welcome to the race, Tim Walz!Let’s make sure America knows who you are.You helped ignite the George Floyd riots, the worst the country had seen in decades. While Minneapolis burned, you stalled on deploying the National Guard for an entire day, blaming the city for not submitting the right paperwork. You let your daughter leak the Guard's deployment plans online, so that rioters would know how long they had to loot the city with impunity. Minneapolis is a war zone because of you.Just days after the attempted murder of Donald Trump, you called him and his supporters "fascists,"...

A Minnesota jury found 5 of the 7 Somali defendants guilty of stealing millions of dollars in Covid funds intended to feed children. 70 members of the Somali community in Minnesota stole about $250 million in Covid funds. The seven defendants on trial related to the scheme were accused of stealing more than $40 million in taxpayer money. Millions of dollars went overseas to Somalia. 80% of the stolen Covid money was never recovered. “The verdict confirms what we’ve known all along, which is that defendants falsified documents, they lied and they fraudulently claimed to be feeding millions of...

The first seven of 70 Minnesotans charged with defrauding taxpayers of a quarter of a billion dollars in pandemic food aid are standing trial Monday. Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Mohamed Jama Ismail, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Said Shafii Farah, Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin, Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff, and Hayat Mohamed Nur are accused of taking money that was supposed to feed underprivileged children and allegedly spending it on property, cars, jewelry, and other luxury items.

Often the Joe Biden administration has claimed that COVID-19 attacked families and workers through no fault of their own, and what was needed was its progressive spending agenda, specifically helping "people of color, immigrants, and low-wage workers." In reality, however, Biden's spending, "billions and counting – has gone to unrelated causes and the administration’s COVID relief program continues to fleece American taxpayers," according to a report from government watchdog Judicial Watch. The organization reported that, "Fraud and corruption are so rampant in the U.S. government’s mammoth pandemic relief program that the Justice Department created a special COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task...

SEATTLE (KOMO) — The leader of a fraud ring that stole more than $6.8 million in pandemic benefits from nearly every major COVID-19 pandemic assistance program was sentenced to prison. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), 29-year-old Paradise Williams personally received more than $2 million in fraudulent proceeds and spent the money on luxury cars, lavish trips, cosmetic surgery, jewelry and designer goods. The DOJ said Williams was sentenced to five years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering. “Paradise Williams was relentless in her efforts to steal pandemic benefits throughout the entire duration of our national emergency,...

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp (GA) opposes launching a criminal probe into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, instead preferring an oversight committee investigation that would slow-walk accountability, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) exclusively told Breitbart News. Kemp and Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr are seeking to use the state’s oversight committee to investigate Willis for her alleged improper relationship with a top prosecutor in their case against former President Donald Trump, according to Greene. The committee operates like a disciplinary commission with the power to remove county prosecutors from public office. As with all committees, they move very slowly and...

Efforts by the Biden Administration to recover the $280 billion in stolen COVID relief funding have been largely unsuccessful, with only about $8 billion recovered so far. As Just The News reports, the money that has been recovered was retrieved through prosecutions by the Department of Justice (DOJ). However, a letter from Congress has raised concerns about the overwhelming failure of the Biden Administration’s attempts to recover the full $280 billion. The letter was sent to the DOJ last week by Congressman James Comer (R-Ky.), Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who expressed his belief that the majority of the...

The former owner of a Beverly pizza place admitted last week he obtained federal Covid-19 payroll-support funds based on employees he didn't have so he could retire to the life of a gentleman alpaca farm and cryptocurrency radio host in Vermont, the US Attorney's office reports. Dana McIntyre, 59, who still lives in Grafton, VT, despite having his woolly dreams interrupted by federal investigators, now awaits sentencing on July 12 on four counts of wire fraud and three counts of money laundering. Each of the charges carries a maximum potential sentence of 20 years in federal prison. McIntyre is the...

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability holds its first hearing of the 118th Congress to investigate rampant waste of taxpayer dollars in Covid pandemic relief programs.

At this point, taking the scientific establishment seriously has become a difficult thing to do. It’s clear that many of them have been co-opted by people more interested in pushing a political perspective through the veneer of science than actually following it. It only makes one want to further distance oneself from these institutions when calling them wrong about something very obvious is labeled as “misinformation” and used to censor and silence you. But moreover, the people in charge of “the science” are increasingly proven to be corrupt and/or wildly incompetent. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky certainly isn’t doing herself any...

The plummeting fortunes of the Democrat Party have rendered many progressives apoplectic. They don’t understand why the Biden-Harris regime policies aren’t working or why the Democrat majority on Capitol Hill can’t get anything passed. They see their polling numbers and most are beside themselves, masked and terrified of what’s to come. But some are still fighting. When backed into a corner, Democrats have a tendency to go to extremes to try to maintain power. The latest move by Health and Human Services appears to be the opening volley in a desperate move to salvage the fortunes of the party ahead...

[H/T Ymani Cricket] 10:07 PM · Aug 22, 2021·Twitter for iPhone Twitter: Watch the video.. it sounds unbelievable & scary.. Why does a pharmaceutical company have “seizure of our military bases” in its contracts??🤔 https://t.co/YblruRn5rs" / TwitterTranscript of Video Clip (spoken with Australian accent): “I can’t believe what I’ve just seen and I will share the news report, but it’s gone some way to explaining why our government seems terrorized and under some kind of tyranny with regards to the way they are behaving during this pandemic. Apparently it’s these appalling Pfizer contracts, which state very clearly that unless you...

I went to review Covid data from covidtracking.com. They stopped recording (or reporting) data as of March 7. Not sure why. As of that date 28,756,489 (38.5%) had tested positive for Covid while 74,582,825 tested negative. That was a total of 103,339,314 tests administered total or roughly one test for every 3 Americans. So what percent of all of USA (tested and untested) have been infected with Covid as of July 21? Based on those trends, it seems that 30% to 45% of the population has been infected already. Yet, the only thing we hear the media talk about is...

...The Batavia Police Department in upstate New York on Tuesday joined hundreds of local law enforcement agencies in asking both potential victims and concerned residents to report allegations of unemployment benefit fraud directly to the state's Department of Labor. Police in Avon Lake, Ohio, in Whitman, Massachusetts, and in Evanston, Illinois, say frustrated taxpayers have called or even shown up at the station holding 1099-G tax forms which show someone is fraudulently reporting income in their name. ..