Tag: taxes

Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan wears hijab in solidarity with Somalis as feds probe multibillion-dollar fraud scandal

Minnesota’s lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan donned a hijab to express solidarity with Somalis in a local TV appearance amid federal and congressional investigations into fraudsters in their refugee community who bilked taxpayers out of as much as $9 billion.

“I am incredibly clear that the Somali community is part of the fabric of the state of Minnesota,” Flanagan said at Karmel Mall in Minneapolis alongside local officials in a video released by Somali TV of Minnesota on Thursday.

“I am here shopping today and just encourage other folks to show up, support our Somali businesses, support our immigrant neighbors, and I know that things are scary right now,” added Flanagan, a Catholic, while wearing the Islamic head covering.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), also a Catholic, fired back in a statement about Flanagan’s appearance that “anyone with common sense sees right through this stunt.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey also held a news conference Tuesday denouncing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities — including at Karmel, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents reportedly detained four on Monday.

The US Treasury Department and a powerful House committee are currently probing Somali-linked organizations and other nonprofits in the state accused of defrauding taxpayers out of around half of the $18 billion in federal funding provided to Minnesota since 2018.

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Minn.’s Somali social-services scammers may have stolen $9 billion — nearly Somalia’s entire economy

A staggering $9 billion may have been stolen in Minnesota’s sprawling social-services scam orchestrated mainly by members of its Somali community — a figure nearly equivalent to the entire economy of Somalia.

The enormous new estimate is a nearly nine-fold increase from the swiped $1 billion previously suspected, according to federal prosecutors.

It also accounts for roughly half of the $18 billion in total federal funds provided to the Minnesota-run services since 2018, the feds said — as Democratic Gov. Tim Walz continues to take heat for his handling of the debacle.

By comparison to the $9 billion figure, Somalia’s entire GDP was under $12 billion last year, according to the World Bank.

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The Apocalyptic Shortage That Never Happened: Democrats’ Tariff Doomsday Narrative Imploded  

Remember earlier this year when President Trump was locked in a tit-for-tat trade war with China? Then, a broad coalition of Democrats, corporate media outlets, mainstream economists, and left-leaning think tanks warned that higher tariffs would spark pandemic-era supply-chain chaos and trigger price spikes for consumers. Two quarters later, those dire predictions have yet to materialize.

MSM propagandists sounded the apocalypse alarm:

  • March: KOMO News: ‘It’s worse than COVID’: Point Roberts seeks state aid amid US-Canada tariff crisis
  • April: NBC News: Product shortages and empty store shelves loom with falling shipments from China
  • April: Fortune: Tariffs threaten a pharmaceuticals shortage, as 95% of ibuprofen comes from China
  • April: CNBC: The trade war’s wave of retail shortages will hit U.S. consumers in stages.
  • April: Axios: How Trump tariffs could cause a global recession
  • April: Vox: America may be headed for this rare type of economic crisis
  • April: CNN: Trump took the US economy to the brink of a crisis in just 100 days
  • May: The Guardian: Trump’s tariffs: ‘It feels like Covid 2.0. So many things are getting disrupted’
  • May: Business Insider: The worst is yet to come: Trump’s tariffs could mean even higher prices and empty shelves within weeks

Democratic Party and MSM’s supply-chain apocalypse alarm peaked in mid-April, then resurfaced in a smaller echo wave by August, according to Bloomberg data tracking mainstream media headline counts for the term “tariff.”

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Almost 150,000 children were living in jobless households this Christmas as number of homes without an income hits 11-year high

Almost 150,000 more children spent Christmas in a home without an income this year after the number of jobless households hit an 11-year high under Labour, official figures show.

There were 1.52 million youngsters living in a house where not a single adult family member is employed as of September, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.

Last year, 1.37 million children were in a workless household in October to December 2024, meaning an extra 146,000 children spent Christmas in a home without an income this year.

The figures also reveal that the number of children in workless households is at its highest level for 11 years. The last time there were more children in a house where no adult family member is employed was in October to December 2014, when the total was 1.54 million.

The Conservatives blamed the rise on Labour’s £25billion raid on employer National Insurance contributions and minimum wage hikes, which have driven up the cost of taking on workers.

They claim that with firms scaling back and jobs disappearing, more families are being pushed out of the workforce entirely, leaving children to bear the consequences.

Helen Whately, Tory spokesman on work and pensions, said: ‘Too many parents are being priced out of work by Labour’s Jobs Tax and Unemployment Rights Bill.

‘It’s a tough Christmas for people who have been made redundant and can’t find new work, and for those still in jobs seeing their taxes go up to pay for more benefits. Labour is offering more and more handouts to people on benefits, making welfare the rational choice rather than work.

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Somali fraud scheme exposes billions siphoned from US, one state set to crack down

The Somali immigrant fraud scandal in Minnesota has put an uncomfortable spotlight on foreign remittance payments schemes that siphon billions of dollars a year from America to overseas. Although national attention has been focused on Minnesota, another state is poised to launch a crackdown.

Missouri State Treasurer Vivek Malek told Just the News he is teaming up with the state legislature to impose new requirements that remittance payment businesses ensure that customers are lawfully in the United States before they can send money to foreign countries, and he hopes other states will follow suit.

Cutting off incentives for illegal immigrants

“Missouri is stepping up by cutting off one of the biggest remaining incentives for illegal immigration, which is unverified foreign money transfers, because the economy is something that drives everybody to come to the United States,” Malek said in a wide-ranging interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast this week. 

Malek said his research found that more than $200 billion leaves the United States annually through remittances, with Mexico alone receiving over $52 billion. Some sizable portion of that involves illegal immigrants, most of whom crossed the border during the Biden years.

“It has been found that at least $4.4 billion in remittances sent to Mexico have been tied to cartel money laundering through small wire transfers,” he said. “Cartels don’t sneak money across the border or throw the bag across the border. They wire it. And if we are serious about crushing cartels, we have to shut down their financial arteries.”

Malek, a lawful U.S. immigrant who worked 16 years to become a U.S. citizen, ran last year for the state treasurer’s job on a promise he would help President Donald Trump end the scourge of illegal immigration. Part of that effort includes stopping illegal immigrants from sending money overseas that they earned in the U.S. without paying taxes, he said.

“I’m making this distinction very clear: legal versus illegal immigration. I am all for legal immigration. I am not for illegal immigration. And what we saw is the diversity of the last four years, during the Biden administration, the floodgates were open on the southern border,” he explained.

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, in conjunction with the House Committee on Homeland Security, reports that over 1.7 million known “gotaways” — illegal immigrants who have evaded Border Patrol — are now living in the interior of the United States without documentation and without having undergone any vetting by immigration officials. 

“We did not know who entered, who came, and then these people are working here. They undercut the paychecks of American citizens, and then we are just left with a bill on our hands, and then, without paying any taxes. This money is going out of the country [but] we do not know to where,” Malek added.

Just the News first reported in August 2024 that on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s watch, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were defrauded from social safety net programs intended to feed the hungry or help families with autistic children, with the perpetrators often being Somali immigrants in that state.

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Trump’s big, bad battleship will fail

President Trump announced on December 22 that the Navy would build a new Trump-class of “battleships.” The new ships will dwarf existing surface combatant ships. The first of these planned ships, the expected USS Defiant, would be more than three times the size of an existing Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

Predictably, a major selling point for the new ships is that they will be packed full of all the latest technology. These massive new battleships will be armed with the most sophisticated guns and missiles, to include hypersonics and eventually nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The ships will also be festooned with lasers and will incorporate the latest AI technology.

If you think you have heard this story before, you would be right. This will be the fourth time this century that the national security establishment has attempted to build a new surface combatant ship for the Navy. For those of you who may not be keeping score, the previous three attempts have been horrendous failures.

Just to refresh everyone’s memory, the Navy already attempted to build a modern version of the battleship in the early 2000’s. That was the Zumwalt-class destroyer program. Navy leaders wanted to build 32 such ships that would be armed with a futuristic gun system to support Marine amphibious assaults. The gun could never be built in a cost effective way so it was cancelled. That left the ship without a clear mission and the entire program was stopped after only three ships had been built. Each of those ships still don’t have a clear mission and now exist as $8 billion anchors around the Navy’s neck.

Less than a month before the president announced this latest shipbuilding program, the Secretary of the Navy cancelled the Constellation-class frigate program after Navy leaders sunk nearly $9 billion into it and before a single hull had been commissioned. That announcement was shocking because the Constellation frigates were intended to be a low risk replacement for the earlier, failed Littoral Combat Ship program.

The Littoral Combat Ships were supposed to be the Navy’s workhorse ships that would hunt mines and submarines, fight other surface ships, and provide security for the rest of the fleet. They were originally to employ a complicated modular design that would see each ship have mission systems swapped out in port to give them the specialized capabilities for their next deployment. The scheme failed spectacularly when modules didn’t work and cost soared. The ships also proved to be quite fractious and suffered several embarrassing mechanical breakdowns. Several Littoral Combat Ships had to be rescued at sea and towed back to port.

The Littoral Combat Ship program was expected to help the Navy increase the size of the fleet because each ship was supposed to cost a mere $220 million when the program began in 2002. By the time Navy officials gave up on the program 15 years later, the cost of each hull had grown to over $600 million.

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Former Madera County worker arrested in CalFresh benefits theft case

55-year-old Leticia Mariscal, a former benefits eligibility worker in Madera County, has been arrested on charges of stealing over $40,000 in CalFresh benefits.

Investigators said she used the identities of more than 15 individuals, including the elderly and deceased.

U.S. Attorney Eric Grant announced her arrest, saying she allegedly accessed county databases from December 2020 to April 2025 to carry out the scheme.

She reportedly approved benefits for these individuals, printed EBT cards in their names, and used the funds herself.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, with assistance from the Madera County District Attorney’s Office, conducted the investigation.

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Former Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman’s Murder Is Now Very Suspect After Uncovering the Massive Fraud in Tim Walz’s State

The murder of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband is very suspect since the massive scandal in Minnesota involving the state’s social programs was uncovered. 

It looks like Democrat Melissa Hortman knew she was in big trouble when she was the only Democrat to vote against Tim Walz’s healthcare for illegals bill in Minnesota. She cried as she shared her position and admitted to stepping outside the Democrat initiated corrupt fence. “It’s almost like she knew what would happen next.

The former Minnesota Representative was gunned down with her husband days later.  The DOJ reported the following after they arrested the alleged murderer of Minnesota’s former congresswoman.

Vance Boelter, 57, has been indicted on six federal charges in connection with the stalking and murders of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, the stalking and shooting of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette Hoffman, and the attempted shooting of their daughter Hope Hoffman, announced Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson.

“Vance Boelter planned and carried out a night of terror that shook Minnesota to its core,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson. “He carried out targeted political assassinations the likes of which have never been seen in Minnesota. We grieve with the Hortman family and continue to pray for the recovery of the Hoffmans. Today, a grand jury indicted Boelter with the most serious of federal charges for these heinous political assassinations. Let me be clear: Boelter will see justice.”

According to court documents, after extensive research and planning, Boelter embarked on a murderous rampage targeting Minnesota’s elected officials and their families. On June 14, 2025, the defendant disguised himself as a member of law enforcement and traveled to the homes of Democratic elected officials with the intent to intimidate and murder. Early that morning, the defendant traveled to the Hoffmans home in Champlin, Minnesota. By posing as a police officer, Boelter compelled the Hoffmans to answer their door. He then repeatedly shot Senator Hoffman and Yvette Hoffman and he attempted to shoot their daughter, Hope Hoffman.

The Gateway Pundit reported that the suspect in the shooting, Vance Luther Boelter, 57, was appointed by Walz in 2019 to serve on the Governor’s Workforce Development Board, and he also leads an international security firm.

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Sen. Rand Paul’s 2025 Festivus Report Cites Hundreds of Millions in Taxpayer Waste on Cruel Animal Experiments Exposed by White Coat Waste Project

In his annual Festivus tradition of airing grievances against government waste, Sen. Rand Paul has dropped his 2025 report, slamming billions in reckless spending – including hundreds of millions on barbaric animal tests uncovered by the watchdog group White Coat Waste Project (WCW).

For the seventh straight year, Paul’s report highlights WCW’s investigations into taxpayer-funded cruelty, from drugging beagles to risky gain-of-function research tied to China.

Paul pulls no punches in the report’s introduction: “White Coat Waste helped us uncover hundreds of millions of your hard-earned tax dollars funding labs, gain-of-function research, and brutal experiments on dogs, monkeys, and rats. That includes over $13.8 million on beagle experiments, $14,643,280 to make monkeys play a ‘Price Is Right’-inspired video game, and so much more.”

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FBI Raided Secret Service Agent’s Home in Tax Fraud Probe

The FBI recently raided the home of a Secret Service agent on Vice President JD Vance’s detail in an alleged tax and wire fraud case involving millions of dollars in donations and grants.

In the alleged scheme, the agent accepted donations to a charity that purports to help inner-city youth and victims of domestic violence but didn’t provide the services it reported to the IRS, according to several knowledgeable sources in the Secret Service community.

The raid, which took place on or around Dec. 8, was the culmination of more than a year of work by a joint FBI-IRS investigation that the Secret Service joined in recent months, the sources said. Federal investigators have interviewed more than a dozen Secret Service agents, some of whom contributed to the nonprofit at the center of the probe, which is run by an agent on Vance’s detail.

The Secret Service has placed the agent on unpaid administrative leave and suspended his security clearance, signs that the agency considers the potential crimes and misconduct extremely serious, even though the individual has not been arrested, according to sources familiar with the matter.

RealClearPolitics has reached out to the USSS and has been told a statement is forthcoming.

The alleged fraud could further bruise the Secret Service, which is facing retention problems as it struggles to regain its once elite reputation after two Trump assassination attempts last year. In addition to potential criminal prosecution, the Secret Service agent could face internal insider threat allegations for demonstrating poor judgment and possible criminal intent.

“This is bigger than the 2012 prostitution scandal because agents are trained to investigate tax and bank wire fraud – anyone involved knew what they were doing was illegal,” one source remarked.

In 2012, more than a dozen Secret Service agents and other personnel were placed on administrative leave, and several were eventually fired after their superiors discovered they had hired prostitutes during a trip to Colombia to prepare for then-President Obama’s visit to the Summit of the Americas.

The agent whose home was raided is listed as the founder and chairman of the charity’s board of directors on tax documents filed with the IRS.

The charity in question purports to provide laptops to young inner-city youth in its “Laptops for Hope Program” – at least some of which are laptops donated by the Secret Service because they are beyond their warranties, according to knowledgeable sources. Investigators, however, are looking into whether laptops discovered in the basement of the agent’s home were ever donated to the youth or whether there were plans to do so.

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