Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has “8,000 fraud matters underway,” and it is working with the recently launched anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance.
Blanche outlined the DOJ’s efforts and its coordination with the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud at a press conference on Tuesday.
“The Department of Justice is holding criminals accountable for stealing over half a billion dollars from taxpayers, and across our U.S. Attorney’s offices all over this country, we currently have over 8,000 fraud matters underway,” Blanche said.
“Unfortunately, as you’ve heard a lot about recently, because it’s true, these cases represent a fraction of the fraud ripping off our country every day,” he added.
“Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, this department, working closely with the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, is supercharging efforts to take down every fraudster and bring them to justice,” Blanche continued.
Blanche also highlighted DOJ efforts this week in major fraud cases.
“For example, just this week, and it’s only Tuesday, a criminal defendant was sentenced, and the department obtained two additional guilty pleas in matters totaling over half a billion dollars in health care and COVID fraud,” he said.
“If you think about that, just since yesterday, we had a guilty plea in a $160 million health care enrollment fraud scheme and a sentencing in a $100 million COVID-19 fraud and a guilty plea in a $160 million health care fraud scheme as well,” he added.
The anti-fraud task force has already delivered results cracking down on fraud since its establishment on March 16. Since March 25, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has suspended 221 hospice and home health providers in California over suspicions of fraud, as Fox News reported.
“We expect this number to grow much, much higher in the coming weeks,” said a senior Trump official.
The DOJ has already commenced arrests and executed search warrants in connection with suspected Los Angeles hospice and healthcare fraud.
Vance detailed steps to reinstate anti-fraud protections and pursue a whole-of-government approach to tackling fraud at the first task force roundtable late last month.
“A lot of the anti-fraud protections that existed in our government for a very long time were actually turned off by the Biden administration. So we think fraud has been a problem for a long time,” Vance said. “It became a massive, massive problem under the Biden administration.”
“We’re gonna do a number of things. First of all, we’re gonna turn back on those anti-fraud protections, so that all these cabinet officials are looking at what’s going on and focusing on it,” he added, going on to highlight the whole-of-government approach the task force is taking.
“The second thing is that we’re going to take a whole government approach. So much of what’s going to make the anti-fraud task force work is we’re communicating across different departments,” he said.
“So when Bobby Kennedy is talking to Scott Bessent about things that he’s seeing in Medicare and Medicaid, when Scott [Bessent] is seeing things at Treasury, when Brooke [Rollins] is seeing things at agriculture, when Scott [Turner] is seeing things at Housing and Urban Development, what we’re going to actually do is force the bureaucracy to take this seriously and work together as political principals to make sure that we stop allowing fraudsters to steal the American people’s money,” Vance continued.
Vance notably swore in Colin McDonald last Wednesday as the assistant attorney general for fraud enforcement.
Read the full article here