Speaker 1 (00:00):
[inaudible 00:00:02].
JD Vance (00:04):
Good. Thank you all for being here. Please take a seat. Okay. So, what we're going to do is make some introductory remarks from me, from Andrew Ferguson, and from Stephen Miller and then we'll kick out the press and have the real conversation. But first let me say thanks to all of you for being here. Very gratified and proud of the fact that we have 15 different state AG offices represented here today who are focused on helping us in combating fraud all over our government and very brief here about what we're trying to do here.
(00:45)
So, one of the things we've realized in combating fraud is that the resources of the federal government, while vast, can be supplemented and aided by a lot of the people who know the best what's happening in their states, which is the attorney's general representative here today. And they have a lot of legal resources. They have a lot of prosecutorial resources and of course, they have the desire to prevent fraud as much as we do. And so, I appreciate these leaders for being here because we're going to work together, state and federal government to try to combat fraud. I'm particularly gratified here that this is not a partisan effort.
(01:15)
I believe we have a couple of representatives from the attorney generals in Connecticut and Oregon. And as I've said repeatedly, this should not be a partisan effort. Everybody should care about fraud. Everybody should care about rooting out fraud. Everybody should care about saving the American taxpayer's money. And importantly, everybody should care about actually protecting the programs that only work and are only properly funded if the money funding those programs isn't being stolen by fraudsters. So, let me just recap for the benefit of our friends of the media. In just two months, we exposed billions of dollars in benefits that had been stolen from the American people.
(01:54)
We referred over $22 billion in fraudulent small business loans back to the treasury for collection. We deferred more than $1.3 billion in fraudulent Medicaid reimbursements that were coming from various states, particularly California. We put a six-month hold on enrollments for new hospice and home healthcare providers because so many of the newer hospice providers were not actually providing hospice services, but were just focused on fraud. So, we're going to cut that out for a little bit and try to get to a place where we can actually certify that the people providing hospice services are actually providing those very necessary and important services.
(02:29)
We recover taxpayer funds from the $135 billion stolen after the floodgates were open in the immediate aftermath of COVID. We have found $6.3 billion in suspected fraudulent government contracts, which were mostly awarded during the last administration and that has stopped. And finally, we blocked $60 million in student aid fraud that should have gone to young people trying to get an education, but instead were going to fraudsters. And I think the theme here of the anti-fraud task force up to this point has really been that we're protecting two classes of victims here. We're protecting the American taxpayers who shouldn't have their money stolen by fraudsters.
(03:06)
And of course, we're protecting the people who need these services. Fraud is not a victimless crime. This is not somebody gets to make some money for violating the law and otherwise, it's not a big deal. This is people who rely on critical services, students who rely on student loan services, sick people who rely on hospice care. A number of small businesses who rely on the availability of these loans so that they can grow their business and hire people. All of these people, all of our fellow Americans have been taken advantage by fraudsters and the task force is here to stop it.
(03:39)
So, without further ado, let me kick it over to Andrew Ferguson who's going to talk a little bit about how we're going to work with these state attorneys general and it's attorneys general, right? Not attorney generals. It's very counterintuitive. We got to change this. Maybe the group here together, we got enough of a critical mass of attorneys generals to change it, but Andrew, attorneys general, I'm never going to be able to get that right and the media, of course, is going to make fun of me for it. Andrew, over to you. Thank you.
Andrew Ferguson (04:05):
Thank you, Mr. Vice President and welcome to all the state attorneys general. I'm very grateful you've traveled all this way to discuss one of the most pressing problems this nation confronts. When I was Solicitor General of Virginia, I served alongside many of you and fought against the Biden administration to protect our border, our religious liberty, and our right to keep and bear arms. And today, we're here to talk about another problem that we need to partner with you to fight that the Obama administration and Biden administration made much worse, which is widespread fraud against our benefits programs. Our benefits programs and our whole society was designed for a high trust people.
(04:45)
American people rightly expect that their fellow citizens will deal with them and with the government honestly and fairly. That's why for up until the last decade or so, shelves in our grocery stores and our pharmacies were open and readily accessible. We weren't accustomed to seeing security guards outside of banks or jewelry stores. We didn't have to worry about organized retail theft or industrial scale scammers of the type you all protect your citizens from every day, nor did we have to worry about paradical fraudsters rating our benefits program. But sadly, that is no longer true.
(05:17)
It's become clear that huge groups of people in this country are taking advantage of our longstanding culture of trust to enrich themselves at the expense of the American people. I think a brief example would be illustrative. Just this weekend, I was shopping at a big home improvement store to buy a drill to do some home improvement, and I had to hit a call button and wait 15 minutes for a sales associate to come unlock a steel cage and a steel padlock to get access to a drill. It's why deodorant is now locked behind plastic windows at pharmacies. It's why security guards are seen at every store in America.
(05:52)
The social trust is evaporated and people are taking advantage of it and the same is true with our federal benefits programs. Huge segments of the population have decided to take advantage of this generosity and trust of American citizens through deception and fraud and billions and billions of dollars each year, leave our programs into the hands of pirates, fraudsters, scammers, and gangs who treat American generosity as little more than a get quick rich scheme. We shouldn't have to live this way. American people are right to long for a period where we could trust each other, but while we are living this way, the government must act now to protect American citizens and their social programs.
(06:34)
That is why President Trump has focused on this issue and that is why the President selected the Vice President of the United States, a man who sits atop the rest of the government to coordinate the entire federal government's efforts to stop fraud in all of our benefits programs. And that requires us to do two things. First, we have to build protections within the programs to make sure taxpayer dollars don't enter the hands of fraudsters. That's what the task force under the vice president's leadership has been doing for months. With our agency partners, we've uncovered tens of billions of dollars in fraud and prevented billions from going out the door into the pockets of fraudsters.
(07:09)
For agencies that had robust anti-fraud systems that the Biden administration turned off, the task force and the agencies have turned them back on and prevented billions of dollars from leaving the agencies. And for the agencies that didn't have those systems, the task force has come alongside them and harnessed the power of American AI innovation to build automated systems to keep that money in the agency. It saves thousands of man-hours every year and billions of dollars that otherwise would exit the agencies and enter the hands of fraudsters.
(07:38)
But the second thing we must do, and the reason we've brought you all here is that we must restore deterrence by finding, prosecuting, and punishing fraudsters. Unless fraudsters believe that there will be consequences attached with attacking America's benefits programs, they will keep doing it. Our fraud detection systems will stop much of it but cannot stop at all. The only way to defeat the fraudsters is by making sure that they know, every single one of them that if they try to commit fraud, they will be pursued, arrested, prosecuted, and jailed.
(08:10)
And that is why the Department of Justice has created the brand new National Fraud Enforcement Division to coordinate the federal government's anti-fraud law enforcement efforts along with the task force and the Homeland Security Council. And this is where you come in. The federal government wants to partner with all of you to combat this fraud. All of you controlled your state Medicaid fraud control units. All of your Medicaid fraud control unit lawyers on the front line of the war against fraud.
(08:37)
It is extremely important that they be effective, ready to fight as much fraud as they can, and that's why HHS will be conducting a thorough review of all of your Medicaid fraud control units to ensure that the nearly half billion dollars that the American taxpayers give you every year to fight fraud will be used to fight as much fraud as possible. Now, in a moment, the head of the fraud division, Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald will explain all of the ways that state AGs and DOJ can partner to coordinate and cooperate and put as many fraudsters in jail as possible. But before I close, I just want to remind all of us why this really matters. This isn't just about restoring social trust in America.
(09:18)
This is about saving these programs so that your constituents who have paid for them can actually use them when they need them. Fraud is bleeding these programs dry. We've seen countless of examples in this task force of Americans trying to use their benefits, benefits they've been paying for for decades, only to find out that some fraudster has stolen those benefits and they're not available to them anymore. Just last week, the Department of Justice under Assistant Attorney General McDonald's leadership indicted 15 fraudsters in Minnesota. There, the fraud had gotten so bad that a major program designed to protect Americans from homelessness, including veterans, had to be shut down.
(09:59)
It was so riddled with fraud it could not be maintained. Your constituents are American citizens paying for these programs. They expect these programs to be there when they need them and unless we stop the fraud, these programs will not be around in their current forum for your constituents to use when they hit hard times, just as they've wanted to make them available for their neighbors in the same circumstances. So, I encourage all of you, partner with us, partner with the department, partner with the task force, make your Medicaid fraud control units the elite fraud fighting forces that they are intended to be.
(10:34)
And with that, I'll turn it over to the Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller.
Stephen Miller (10:41):
Thank you. And thank you again to the vice president for leading this effort for helming this task force for bringing us all together here. I think you can all agree that this is the fastest in history that a government task force has traveled from creation to action. Your typical lead time is going to be a year of meetings before anything happens and that's if you're lucky. And within weeks of this task force being established, we've seen the largest ever slate of indictments, recovered funds, search warrants, raids, seizures, investigations, and new legal actions to stop, disrupt, and prevent fraud.
(11:21)
What we've learned, which is not surprising to those of us who've spent some time in this area is that fraud is every bit as bad as President Trump said it was and even worse. So, in other words, everything we've found either confirms our worst fears or exceeds them. That's the bad news. The good news is that the best team in government under the leadership of Vice President Advance has been assembled to deal with it. And of course, one of those men who you'll hear from a second is sitting to my right here, the associate attorney general for fraud enforcement, Colin McDonald. But before I yield the floor, I do want to just touch on one of the points that Andrew hit on his remarks.
(12:00)
All of the systems in our country, whether you're talking about voting, whether you're talking about entitlements, whether you're talking about welfare benefits, we're set up based on the honor system. They're set up based on the idea that you could trust the average person through their own morality to abide by the rules and comply with the law. And so, the way most welfare works in most states and most places is we take your word for it. If you fill out a piece of paper and you say, "Your kids are hungry," you are going to get food stamps. We don't check as a country if you even have kids. In fact, as basic as that. We don't even check if you even have children, you will just start getting the checks.
(12:40)
And so, what's happened to our country is we became a society, as we've seen with the Somali refugee problem in Minnesota, where you have a large number of people that are not following the honor system. They're not playing by the rules, they're not abiding by our laws. And the amount that has been fleeced from us is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. I believe based on what I've seen and what I've heard is that we could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the treasury went to individuals who were properly, lawfully, correctly eligible to receive them. And that ultimately is going to be what we have to do as a country.
(13:17)
In the meantime, because of the vice president's leadership, you are seeing the most muscular, robust, aggressive, dedicated, determined, and speedy effort to shut down criminal fraud that has not only ever occurred in the history of this country, but in any developed nation. So, thank you.
JD Vance (13:32):
Thanks, Stephen. Colin.
Colin McDonald (13:35):
Thank you, Mr. Vice President. 50 days ago today, 50 days ago today, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the creation of the National Fraud Enforcement Division at the Department of Justice. And today, 50 days later, the fraud division has announced 450, 450 major fraud events occurring across the country from charges to convictions to sentences. We are off to a rapid start to protect you, the American taxpayer, and ensure that your dollars stay where they belong and that is in your pocket. When an individual's money is stolen, that individual takes it personally and does everything they can to recover their money.
(14:20)
This task force under the vice president's leadership, we are here to take it personally every time someone decides to rob the United States of their money. We are here to take it personally when someone decides to take money from a program designed to give money, food, healthcare to the needy, the sick and the elderly. That is what the fraud division is here to do. It's to take it personally for you, the United States of America, when your money is stolen. In the last 50 days, our work includes the unprecedented charges against 15 defendants for Medicaid fraud schemes in Minnesota. It includes charges in a $650 million sober homes Medicaid fraud scheme in Arizona.
(15:06)
It includes a guilty plea in a $270 million Medicaid fraud scheme in California. Those are just a few of the successes of the fraud division and the Department of Justice in the last 50 days and we're only getting started. This is just the beginning of our fight against fraud and that's where these partners come into play because we need your help. Our division is called the National Fraud Enforcement Division for a reason. It's not the Washington DC Fraud Task Force. It's the National Fraud Enforcement Division because the fraud problem is national and our state partnerships are critical to solving the fraud crisis in our country.
(15:48)
So, I'm going to give three things that our state partners here can do right now today. Number one, we heard about the Medicaid fraud control units. Re-energize and fully mobilize, fully maximize your state's Medicaid fraud control units. When we're done, we want to rename those into the Making Fraud Completely Unprofitable unit, MFCU. These units are your states and really the country's first line of defense against Medicaid fraud. How many active investigations do they have? How many are ready to be charged? If partnered up with DOJ, how many could be charged in the next 90 days? Under your leadership, the MFCU units can flourish. Second, join the DOJ's newly launched special attorneys program.
(16:39)
This program has unlocked $300 million to combat fraud, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and crimes committed by aliens in your state. This grant program will pay for you to send attorneys to join the fraud division or your local US attorney's office. In addition to paying the full cost of prosecutors you send the DOJ, you can receive a 20% premium to boost your justice system staffing and capacity. Third, and this is critical, bring your state's investigators and data to the table. For us to bring a case, we need documents, we need witnesses. Bring your documents and bring your witnesses to the table. Don't run with your ball and go home. Come to the table and solve this problem with us.
(17:28)
Your state's data, including Medicaid payment and claims records and the expertise of your investigators are essential to uncovering fraud. We've developed a successful playbook for exploiting this kind of data to prosecute fraudsters. Next week, we'll be on the road to announce a partnership with a state that is leading the way in advancing coordination efforts with the fraud division. The state AG and the MFCU unit are taking aggressive action against fraud.
(17:57)
The state auditor, the state AG and county prosecutors will be participating in our special attorney program and the state treasurer and Secretary of State are joining a statewide benefits fraud task force comprised of federal and state partners, which will be chaired by the US Attorney's Office. And we invite you all to join us in similar efforts. It is our mission to combat fraud no matter how big, no matter how small, no matter how hard, hold criminals accountable, protect victims of crime and restore trust in our government. Come join us in the nationwide fight against fraud. We are ready to partner with you.
JD Vance (18:37):
Thank you, Colin. And let me just leave one final thought here before we dismiss the press and get down to the business of the meeting. So, as Andrew very ably pointed out, these are not victimless crimes. Sometimes, the most vulnerable people in our community are the ones who suffer when we don't take fraud seriously. One of the cases that was part of Colin's series of indictments last week in Minnesota stood out to me and I think highlights how particularly egregious some of these fraudsters can be. And it's a man who is supposed to be providing services to allow elderly people to live full and independent lives.
(19:14)
And what happened instead is that the man who was supposed to provide these services reimbursed by the Medicaid program was providing nothing, no services, no help, no check-ins and the very man, the vulnerable elderly man that he was supposed to be protecting and looking after was reimbursed by the taxpayer in order to do exactly that, that man died. And one day before he died, after months of being neglected by the caretaker who was getting reimbursed by the American people, one day before he died, he submitted his final reimbursement for services he never provided for a man he never cared for and that man lived his final moments on this earth neglected while a fraudster got rich by providing services that he never actually provided.
(20:05)
That's what we're trying to stop, ladies and gentlemen. That's what we have to fight back against. It's a shame that anything like that happens. But if it does happen, the only way to protect those people and the only way to protect the American taxpayer is to ensure that the fraudsters go to prison and that they stop this ridiculous scam on the American people. So, with that, I'm looking forward to the meeting. Thank you, press. We're going to talk in private now. Take care guys. [inaudible 00:20:30]. Bye you all. Thank you. [inaudible 00:20:43].