Free Republic

Progressive 'Squad' member Rep. Cori Bush is continuing to dish out cash to her security guard husband despite a federal probe into her alleged misuse of campaign funds for security purposes. Her most recent Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing reveals her campaign paid her husband Cortney Merritts - who works as her personal security guard - $15,000 in the first quarter of 2024. That brings the total amount she has paid him to over $135,000. Bush has regularly paid Merritts $5,000 a month since January 2022, her filings indicate.

Former left-wing congresswoman Cori Bush’s husband was charged on Thursday with defrauding the federal government to illegally collect tens of thousands of dollars in loans under COVID-era small business relief programs. Cortney Merritts, who secretly married Bush in 2023, falsified details about his purported businesses in order to obtain more than $20,000 in loans from the Small Business Administration in 2020 and 2021 under the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program, the Department of Justice said in a statement. Bush represented St. Louis before suffering a primary loss last year that she blamed on the Jews. She...

Small Business Administration (SBA) Administrator Kelly Loeffler said Thursday night that her agency has suspended “6,900 Minnesota borrowers” over suspected fraudulent activity regarding COVID-era lending programs. Loeffler said the SBA over the last week reviewed “thousands” of potentially “fraudulent” Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) payouts that were approved in Minnesota. “Today, our agency took action to suspend 6,900 Minnesota borrowers amid suspected fraudulent activity. In total, these borrowers were approved for 7,900 PPP and EIDL loans worth approximately $400M,” Loeffler said on social platform X. She said the implicated individuals would be banned from all...

Five of the 10 Somali daycare centers that were visited by Nick Shirley in his viral exposé on alleged fraud in Minnesota were also meal sites for the fraud-laden "Feeding Our Future" organization. The case surrounding fraud with "Feeding Our Future" has seen over 90 people charged and at least 60 people have been convicted. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, half of the 10 daycare facilities that were visited by Shirley were also connected to Feeding Our Future as "meal sites." Altogether, the five daycare businesses got nearly $5 million from Feeding Our Future between 2018 and 2021. The...

A company owned by Tim Mynett, the multimillionaire husband of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), failed to pay its fair share of taxes in 2021, according to a tax lien obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Mynett's company, EStreetCo, accumulated nearly $206,000 in unpaid income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes in 2021, the IRS charged in a tax lien filed against the company in Sonoma County, Calif., in January 2023. Omar, who introduced legislation in February to "make corporations pay their fair share," was married to Mynett when the IRS says the company failed to pay its taxes. In her...

If the Somali fraudsters produced a Netflix special, the title would be “C.R.E.A.M.: Cash Rules Everything Around Minnesota.” And the center of this fraudulent universe might very well be Ilhan Omar. Once a woman with negative net worth is now listed as a multimillionaire in Congress. How coincidental that this multi‑billion‑dollar fraud scandal detonated in her own district. Back in 2019, Omar’s financial disclosure looked like the starter pack of a millennial fresh outta college: more debt than dollars. Fast forward to 2024, and her household reports a combined net worth between $6 million and $30 million — a 3,500...

MINNEAPOLIS — Last year, with the federal government making available huge new sums of money for programs to feed needy children during the pandemic, a nonprofit organization called Advance Youth Athletic Development set up what it described as an enormous child care operation in northeast Minneapolis that could prepare 5,000 dinners each weeknight. Based on the group’s claims, the State of Minnesota channeled $3.2 million of the federal food aid to the program. But on a subzero morning in January, the F.B.I. carried out a series of predawn raids around the region. It revealed a sprawling investigation into Advance Youth...

Years before Minnesota welfare fraud captured the nation’s attention, a Somali-American leader of one massive scheme expanded his assets beyond the North Star State, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, a Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen, used some of his ill-gotten gains to buy property throughout the Twin Cities and Kentucky before the DOJ prosecuted him for using the nonprofit Feeding Our Future to defraud the government of $300 million in COVID-19 relief meant for hungry children, leading to a 28-year prison sentence in August. There are at least 1,687 people of Somali descent living in Kentucky....

United States District Judge Nancy E. Brasel sentenced Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, age 36, to 28 years in prison followed by three years of supervised release for his role in a $300 million fraud scheme that exploited a federally program to feed hungry kids during the COVID-19 pandemic. Farah helped orchestrate the largest known COVID-19 fraud scheme called Feeding Our Future in Minnesota. Farah and his co-defendants stole more than $47 million by claiming to serve 18 million meals to kids at more than 30 food distribution sites. Farah was also ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $47,920,514. He's...

Donnie Allen allegedly shot and killed 27-year-old Benjamin McComas at a Cleveland light rail station around 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 14, according to Fox 8. Allen was charged with aggravated murder and arraigned on a $1 million bond. Court records reviewed by Fox News Digital show Allen was charged with drug possession, breaking and entering, vandalism, obstructing official business and possessing criminal tools in relation to a separate incident at a Cleveland light rail station on Dec. 4. His bond was initially set at $15,000, which was later lowered by Judge Joy Kennedy to $5,000 on Dec. 8. In that...

A juror was dismissed Monday after reporting that a woman dropped a bag of $120,000 in cash at her home and offered her more money if she would vote to acquit seven people charged with stealing more than $40 million from a program meant to feed children during the pandemic. These seven are the first of 70 defendants expected to go to trial in a conspiracy that cost taxpayers $250 million. Eighteen others have pleaded guilty, and authorities said they recovered about $50 million in one of the nation’s largest pandemic-related fraud cases. Prosecutors say just a fraction of the...

Madison is among several blue cities and states that used taxpayer-funded Covid aid for programs for illegal immigrants. A Wisconsin lawmaker is demanding answers from the city of Madison in the wake of a report showing the leftist enclave doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal Covid relief funds to illegal immigrants. “The decision to use pandemic relief money to assist illegal immigrants at the expense of Wisconsinites reveals the out of touch priorities of Madison politicians,” Republican state Sen. Duey Stroebel said Thursday in a statement. His office has filed an open records request “to investigate the...

Beverly pizza-shop owner who got $680,000 in federal Covid-19 relief funds based on applications with inflated employee counts, then used the money to jump from pizza making to alpaca farming, was sentenced to two years in federal prison this week for his wooly fabrications, the US Attorney's office announced. Dana McIntyre, 59, who remained at the farm he bought in Grafton, VT even after his scheme was uncovered and the money he had not already spent on buying land, fences and alpacas seized, was also ordered to pay a total of $679,156 in restitution and forfeiture, the US Attorney's office...

OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the Titan submersible disaster, was forgiven of its $450,000 Paycheck Protection Program loan, according to the ProPublica PPP Loan Database. OceanGate builds submersibles for tourism and research, but its inherently risky business model raises questions, and led to the tragic deaths of five people in the ocean in June. Its liability waiver for sub tourism mentioned the possibility of death three times on the first page alone. Now, some are accusing the company of cutting corners. James Cameron, the renowned Titanic explorer and director of the 1997 movie, said, "I was very suspect of the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than $200 billion may have been stolen from two large COVID-19 relief initiatives, according to new estimates from a federal watchdog investigating federally funded programs that helped small businesses survive the worst public health crisis in more than a hundred years. The numbers issued Tuesday by the U.S. Small Business Administration inspector general are much greater than the office’s previous projections and underscore how vulnerable the Paycheck Protection and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs were to fraudsters, particularly during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Biden administration this spring plans to end the national emergency declarations that started with the COVID-19 pandemic, but agency watchdogs are still uncovering the full scope of fraud that stems from $5 trillion in pandemic spending. Agency inspectors general have already flagged tens of billions of dollars in suspected fraud, and efforts are underway to recover some improper payments. But watchdogs on the front lines of these investigations say it will take a while before they understand the full extent of pandemic spending fraud. Pandemic Response Accountability Committee Chairman Michael Horowitz, who is also the Justice Department inspector general,...

WASHINGTON — There’s no Republican plan, let alone a bill, to resolve the debt ceiling problem. But some GOP lawmakers are floating one idea to include in a package: rescinding approved but unspent Covid relief funds. Taking back the unused pandemic response money “certainly could” be in a debt ceiling measure to avert default, Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., the chair of the powerful Rules Committee, said. “I would hope we look at that,” Cole said. “It’s something that ought to be on the table.” Rep Mike Kelly, R-Pa., who sits on the Ways and Means Committee that oversees taxes and...

Americans are paying a hell of a lot for Joe Biden's spend-a-thon, in the form of inflation, which, at last glance, was costing American workers upwards of $5,000 in extra cash a year.Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman used to say, and sure enough, inflation started getting bad when a Democrat Congress passed and Joe Biden signed off on, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which was passed to supposedly help America recover from COVID.Fox News's Tyler Olson did the job mainstream corporate journalists wouldn't do by checking up on how that...

When politicians in Washington D.C. planned to infuse the economy with trillions of dollars in Wuhan coronavirus "relief funds," fiscal conservatives warned about the inevitability of widespread fraud and abuse. Once again, they were correct. A new report from the Associated Press shows "pandemic relief" money, earned by hard working taxpayers, was used for over-the-top vacations, parties and other completely unrelated expenditures. "Thanks to a sudden $140 million cash infusion, officials in Broward County, Florida, recently broke ground on a high-end hotel that will have views of the Atlantic Ocean and an 11,000-square-foot spa," the Associated Press Reports. "In New...

Boston marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev was ordered by a federal court to turn over the $1,400 in coronavirus relief funds he received, along with other money sent to him, to his victims as restitution. SNIP But so far, he has paid only $2,203, court documents reveal. Tsarnaev has $3,885.06 in his inmate account, funds that came from the COVID-19 relief check he received on June 22, 2021, as well as deposits from individuals and groups, including the Officer of Federal Defenders in New York. ​ Federal prosecutors say Tsarnaev ​has splurged on “gifts,” “support,” and “books” to his siblings —...