Tag: new york

New York’s Boom In Home Health Aides Is Just Another Medicaid Racket

Not long ago, I wrote in The Federalist about “labor unions’ racket,” as it relates to corruption within one Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local. But the “racket” doesn’t end there. It extends to the people who finance it: federal taxpayers like you and me.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Consider the following quote:

I’m telling you right now, when you look on TikTok and you see ads of young people saying, “Guess what, you can make $37 an hour by sitting home with your Grandma. You know, here’s how you sign up,” it has become a racket.

The speaker is none other than New York’s Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul, describing her own state’s Medicaid program. And the reason why she has suddenly changed her rhetoric and refuses to fix the problem has much to do with the union corruption I wrote about recently.

Union Dues Skimming

As with most things in politics, keen observers should follow the money. The New York Post recently criticized Hochul for reneging on her plan to attack the “racket” she described last year, with the Post alleging that she “switch[ed] sides with an eye on her re-election run” in 2026. 

The outlet explained that “the health care worker unions — above all, 1199[SEIU] — are a ginormous lobbying power.” The push to expand home health workers, including family members giving care, which Hochul previously criticized as a “racket,” has “morphed into a mass unionization drive,” as the Post noted.

Explosion of New Aides

That “mass unionization drive” comes as home health jobs within New York state have soared. The Empire Center, a conservative think tank, reviewed the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From 2023 to 2024, home health employment grew by 57,000 jobs in New York alone. That’s a 10 percent increase in home health employment within one year, with New York accounting for one-fifth of all the new home health aides nationwide.

On both an absolute and relative basis, the data reveals New York’s absurdly high number of home health aides. The Empire State has more than three times as many home health aides (623,000) as fast food workers (183,810), and more than four times as many aides as waiters and waitresses (140,890). On a relative basis, New York has by far the most home health aides per 1,000 senior citizens, more than twice as many as the national average and 24 percent higher than the next-highest state, California.

As one observer told Newsweek last year, the home health aide program started with good intentions by “allow[ing] family members and friends to get paid for providing home health assistance to loved ones using Medicaid and Medicare dollars. The problem is now you have individuals taking advantage of a pretty liberal, open-ended process for determining who qualifies.” 

Keep reading

Letitia James Breaks Silence on Mortgage Fraud Scandal Following TGP and White Collar Fraud Report — Dismisses Evidence as ‘Baseless’

New York Attorney General Letitia James is finally responding after explosive allegations surfaced accusing her of mortgage fraud related to her Brooklyn property. But instead of addressing the facts, she’s lashing out at critics — including President Donald Trump — and portraying herself as the victim of a “right-wing revenge tour.”

On Tuesday night, the Trump Administration criminally referred New York State Attorney General Letitia James to the Department of Justice over accusations of mortgage fraud.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) accused Letitia James of falsifying records, citing a 5-unit property in New York she claimed was only four units in order to get a more favorable loan.

FHFA Director William Pulte said in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi that James appears to have falsified records to meet certain lending requirements and receive favorable loan terms.

In an interview Thursday night on NY1’s Inside City Hall, James was asked point-blank about a criminal referral alleging she misrepresented her home’s occupancy classification on mortgage documents — a potential felony offense that would land any other New Yorker behind bars.

Of course, James deflected questions about the mortgage issue, insisting she won’t “litigate this case in a camera.”

Instead, she pivoted to her office’s $454 million judgment against Trump for allegedly ‘inflating asset values’—a case currently under appeal.

Keep reading

Trump Admin Orders Halt to Offshore Wind Project Near New York

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said on April 16 that he had ordered a halt to the construction of a major wind project off the coast of New York “until further review.”

Burgum, posting to the social platform X on Wednesday, said he had consulted with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to direct the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to “halt all construction activities” on Equinor’s Empire Wind project. The Biden administration approved the project in 2023, with construction beginning last year.

The interior secretary accused the former administration of “rush[ing] through its approval without sufficient analysis.” He did not provide further details on potential faults identified.

“On day one, [President Donald Trump] called for comprehensive reviews of federal wind projects and wind leasing, and at Interior, we are doing our part to make sure these instructions are followed,” Burgum wrote in a follow-up post.

The Interior Department did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Equinor, a Norway-based company, was supported by President Joe Biden in his efforts to expand renewable energy projects.

Keep reading

NEW EVIDENCE AGAINST NY AG: Letitia James’s Fishy Virginia Foreclosure Purchase in Martinsville Warrants Separate Investigation

New York Attorney General Letitia James’s mortgage fraud problems just got even bigger, and may now include the possible breaking of campaign disclosure laws.

Questions are now being raised about a foreclosure sale in December 2008 that involved James as a purchaser. Documents show her name appearing on the “Final Foreclosure Accounting” for the purchase of a single-family home at 21 Peters Street in Martinsville, Virginia.

Two other names appear on the same document as additional purchasers, Johnsie Finney and Philip Finney. Interestingly, James’s first named is misspelled as “Letitua.” One has to wonder whether this misspelling was intended to make the transaction harder to track. At the time, James was serving on the New York City Council.

Letitia James purchased the 21 Peters Street property with the Finneys at a foreclosure auction sale where full payment was required immediately. The Finneys had been the previous owners of 21 Peters Street, and it was their mortgage that had been foreclosed on by Wells Fargo Bank.

Keep reading

NY AG Letitia James Caught in a Potential Fraud Case of Her Own

New York Attorney General Letitia James is now facing questions surrounding a real estate transaction she executed in August 2023—just weeks before she filed a high-profile civil fraud lawsuit against President Donald Trump.

The document in question, a Specific Power of Attorney signed by James, is raising legal concerns about whether she may have misrepresented her intent to establish a principal residence in Virginia, potentially impacting her eligibility to hold office in New York or exposing her to legal liability.

The issue was flagged by Sam E. Antar, a former certified public accountant and convicted fraudster who now works in forensic accounting.

Antar gained notoriety in the 1980s for his role as the CFO of Crazy Eddie, a now-defunct electronics retailer involved in one of the largest financial fraud cases of the decade.

After a plea deal, Antar turned his efforts toward uncovering white-collar crime.

In a recent post on his website White Collar Fraud, Antar published documents tied to James’s real estate transaction in Norfolk, Virginia.

Keep reading

Audit: Cuomo Spent $453M On 247,343 Medical Devices For COVID… State Used Only 3

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the Covid crisis wasn’t just a health catastrophe, but a financial one too, according to a damning new audit report released Friday. The state government poured $453 million into building an enormous stockpile of medical equipment — and only used 0.000012% of it. 

According to state comptroller Tom DiNapoli, New York bought a staggering 247,343 medical devices, but only wound up using a laughable three pieces of equipment out of the vast horde. Worse, the waste was only compounded by the state’s utter neglect of its fiduciary duties to taxpayers. Rather than finding buyers for the once-valuable assets, bureaucrats have been content to let the equipment age and decay in warehouses. As if the erosion of the stockpiles weren’t bad enough, New York is also wasting money on storage costs. 

“New York state bought hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of medical equipment at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, including ventilators and x-ray machines, that now sits unused in storage facilities across the state, missing recommended maintenance and costing taxpayers storage expenses,” said Napoli’s office. Of the equipment that requires ongoing maintenance, auditors found that 90% of it is past due, with no process or contract in place to handle that need. Failure to keep up with maintenance risks voiding manufacturer warranties, and also rendering the equipment unusable in an emergency. 

 “It was completely understandable that we did a lot of panic buying in the moment. But then to throw all this stuff in a warehouse and neglect and ignore it — it’s compounding the mistake,” Bill Hammond of the Empire Center think tank told Politico. Four years ago, the Department of Health created a “Medical Stockpile Steering Committee” to determine how much of the equipment should be retained. The group said 51,140, but there was no plan for the other 200,000 devices. The DOH couldn’t produce any documentation about how the committee reached its conclusions.  

Heading into the pandemic, the state had 4,800 pieces of equipment on standby, but now has a quarter million items five years after Covid-19 entered the country. The inventory includes CPAP/BiPAP machines, ventilators, oxygen tanks, pulse oximeters, oxygen concentrators and infusion pumps In addition to the money wasted on the equipment itself, Cuomo’s administration also paid McKinsey & Company consultants more than $5 million to advise them how much stuff to buy.

In the understatement of the year, Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi told the New York Post that McKinsey overestimated the need. “You can Monday-morning quarterback now, but then we were looking to save lives and doing nothing wasn’t an option.” Alas, Cuomo’s record on “saving lives” is arguably worse than the emerging picture of his financial mismanagement of the pandemic. His administration was widely condemned for ordering nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients who were discharging from hospitals, then accused of deliberately understating the number of long-term-care-resident deaths that followed. 

Keep reading

DOGE Finds 3 States Are Responsible For Over Half Of All Unemployment Fraud

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has identified California, New York, and Massachusetts as the primary states responsible for over half of the fraudulent unemployment claims in the United States since 2020. According to DOGE’s findings, these three Democrat-led states accounted for $305 million out of the $382 million in improper claim payments.

DOGE’s survey revealed numerous fraudulent claims made by individuals with improbable ages , including those listed as over 115 years old, between one and five years old, and even with birthdates that have not yet occurred. These fraudulent claims amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, with $254 million claimed by children aged one to five and $69 million by individuals with future birthdates.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer emphasized the department’s commitment to recovering these funds, stating, “We will catch these thieves and keep working to root out egregious fraud.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk , who is spearheading the DOGE effort, highlighted the absurdity of the situation, noting that tax dollars were being used to pay fraudulent claims for “fake people born in the future.”

Keep reading

Revealed: NY Attorney General Letitia James Declares Virginia Home Her ‘Principal Residence’

Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, has built her career on exposing deception. But a quiet real estate transaction in Norfolk, Virginia—carried out just weeks before the Trump fraud trial she championed—now raises serious questions about her own compliance with New York law.

A declaration buried in legal filings states her intent to make a Virginia house her principal residence:

“I HEREBY DECLARE that I intend to occupy this property as my principal residence.”

Those words appear in black and white in a Specific Power of Attorney, signed by James and filed in Norfolk on August 17, 2023, authorizing her relative Shamice Thompson-Hairston to act on her behalf in a transaction that included the declaration. They were not written by a lawyer acting on James’ behalf. They were her words. Her intent. Her signature.

This signed power of attorney is a smoking gun on its own, completely separate from how the mortgage might be interpreted. It stands as a clear declaration of intent from a sitting New York Attorney General to establish principal residency in another state.

While joint ownership arrangements sometimes involve owners with different primary residences, this case is different. The declaration in the power of attorney specifically states James’s intention to make the property her principal residence, and the mortgage requires both borrowers to establish residency. This raises questions about whether such a declaration was made primarily to secure preferential mortgage terms.

Importantly, this is not an isolated incident—discrepancies in James’s mortgage filings appear to follow a longer-term pattern, raising broader questions about disclosure consistency.

If James never intended to make the Norfolk property her principal residence despite signing a document explicitly stating that intention, the declaration may constitute misrepresentation under federal fraud statutes. This would be particularly problematic for someone who has prosecuted others for similar misrepresentations in property matters.

And this declaration came at a remarkable moment. Because on October 2—less than seven weeks later—James would take to the courtroom steps in Manhattan to announce the start of her landmark civil fraud case against Donald Trump. The trial would span months and dominate headlines. James would be in New York nearly every day.

Keep reading

New York jury awards US$1.68 billion to women who accused writer and director Toback of sexual abuse

A New York jury on Wednesday awarded US$1.68 billion in damages to 40 women who accused writer and director James Toback of sexual abuse and other crimes over a span of 35 years, according to lawyers representing the plaintiffs.

The decision stems from a lawsuit filed in Manhattan in 2022 after New York state instituted a one-year window for people to file lawsuits over sexual assault claims even if they took place decades ago.

It marks one of the largest jury awards since the advent of the #MeToo movement, as well as in New York state history, said attorney Brad Beckworth, of the law firm Nix Patterson LLP, in an interview. The plaintiffs, he said, believe such a large verdict will send a message to powerful individuals “who don’t treat women appropriately.”

The court had not yet released documentation of the verdict as of Wednesday night. Beckworth said the verdict included $280 million in compensatory damages and $1.4 billion for punitive damages to the plaintiffs.

“This verdict is about justice,” Beckworth said in a statement. “But more importantly, It’s about taking power back from the abusers — and their and enablers — and returning it to those he tried to control and silence.”

Beckworth said the abuse took place between 1979 and 2014.

Toback was nominated for an Oscar for writing 1991’s “Bugsy,” and his career in Hollywood has spanned more than 40 years. Accusations that he engaged in years of sexual abuse surfaced in late 2017 as the #MeToo movement gained attention. They were first reported by the Los Angeles Times.

In 2018, Los Angeles prosecutors said the statutes of limitations had expired in five cases they reviewed, and declined to bring criminal charges against Toback.

The plaintiffs then filed a lawsuit in New York a few days after the state’s Adult Survivors Act went into effect. The lawyers said they discovered a pattern of Toback attempting to lure young women on the streets of New York into meeting him by falsely promising roles in his films and then subjecting them to sexual acts, threats and psychological coercion.

Mary Monahan, a lead plaintiff in the case, called the jury award “validation” for her and the other women.

“For decades, I carried this trauma in silence, and today, a jury believed me. Believed us. That changes everything,” she said in a statement. “This verdict is more than a number — it’s a declaration. We are not disposable. We are not liars. We are not collateral damage in someone else’s power trip. The world knows now what we’ve always known: what he did was real.”

Keep reading

Radical Pro-Abortion Extremist Who Savagely Attacked Brave Pro-Life Activist in Harlem Has Been Identified

We now know the name of the disgusting pro-abortion extremist who assaulted a courageous pro-life activist in Harlem on Friday.

The New York Post reported a short time ago that Brianna J. Rivers of the Bronx came forward and admitted she was the one who attacked Savannah Craven Anteo, fearless reporter for the pro-life advocacy group Live Action.

Rivers offered a non-apology for her cruel actions in a Facebook post today, blaming Craven for the attack and portraying herself as the victim.

“To Savannah, I sincerely apologize but cannot sit around and allow you to continue pushing this one-sided narrative. I understand hands being put on someone is never the answer, but throwing rocks and hiding hands is worse,” she wrote.

“She knows the truth and needs to release the footage in its entirety,” Rivers added. “Savannah is a professional antagonist, not a ‘reporter,’ and the truth will be told.”

Rivers, of course, provided NO evidence she was harmed in any way.

Rivers then accused Craven Anteo of defamation while proclaiming how respectful she usually is.

“I will not allow my image to be defamed by this woman’s actions. Anyone who knows me knows how respectful I am; I don’t even litter; there’s no way you believe I’m punching people for disagreeing with my POV,” Rivers claimed.

Police authorities told The Post that Craven Antao reported the incident to them and said that she admitted to “provoking” Rivers. As of Saturday afternoon, Rivers has not been arrested.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported pro-life activist Craven Antao was viciously attacked in broad daylight by an unhinged pro-abortion radical simply for speaking out in defense of the unborn.

Savannah was on the streets of Harlem conducting peaceful interviews with New Yorkers for a video project titled “What Does Planned Parenthood Do? Perception vs. Reality?” when the attack occurred.

Keep reading