Tag: taxes

Georgian National Charged for Conspiracy to Launder Proceeds of $1.3 Billion Health Care Fraud Scheme

A Georgian national has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Boston for allegedly conspiring to launder the proceeds of a $1.3 billion health care fraud scheme while he was illegally in the United States.

Erekle Gugava, 33, a Georgian national, was indicted on one count of money laundering conspiracy. Gugava fled the United States in July 2025, after the alleged conduct.

According to court documents, Gugava was a money launderer for the foreign-based organization that spearheaded the largest health care fraud case ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice, dubbed Operation Gold Rush. The organization, based in Russia and elsewhere, orchestrated a multi-billion-dollar health care fraud and money laundering scheme to target, exploit and steal from Medicare and other health insurers.

As alleged in the charging documents, Gugava purportedly owned ND Medical Solutions, LLC (ND Medical), a durable medical equipment company located in Pennsylvania, between February 2025 and July 2025. During the limited five-month span of Gugava’s purported ownership, ND Medical submitted at least $1.3 billion in fraudulent DME claims to Medicare, private health insurance companies that contracted to provide Medicare supplemental insurance policies, private employer-sponsored plans and union health plans. These insurers paid ND Medical approximately $6.5 million.

As part of the scheme, Gugava allegedly facilitated the deposit and transfer of fraud proceeds. Among other things, he allegedly opened several bank accounts in the name of ND Medical – for which he was the sole signatory – and deposited checks from Medicare Supplemental Insurers and other health insurers into the ND Medical bank accounts. The funds were then ultimately transferred to various overseas bank accounts for the benefit of the organization.

As alleged in charging documents, the fraudulent claims relied, in part, on the stolen identities of citizens from Massachusetts, across New England, and throughout the United States to justify the fraudulent billings. Many of these individuals, including elderly and disabled Americans, reported their concerns to Medicare and its contractors after receiving explanation of benefit forms that reflected them purportedly receiving DME that they did not in fact receive, that was purportedly prescribed by doctors whom they had never visited and purportedly delivered from ND Medical—a DME company with which they were unfamiliar.

As further alleged, the organization exploited the United States’ financial system by depositing insurance reimbursement checks from the fraud. The health care fraud proceeds were particularly susceptible to laundering because they originated from legitimate sources. Medicare and established private insurance carriers, giving the funds the initial appearance of legitimacy.

Keep reading

FBI’s fifth Most Wanted Fraudster captured after alleged SNAP scam suspect arrested in India

The FBI’s Most Wanted Fraudsters initiative notched its fifth arrest in just three months after authorities in India arrested Manjit Singh Bedi Friday, and the bureau is working to return the alleged SNAP benefits fraud suspect to the United States, Fox News Digital has learned.

The FBI worked with Indian authorities to secure Bedi’s arrest and is actively working to return him to the U.S. to face charges, according to the bureau. 

Bedi’s arrest is the fifth through the FBI’s Most Wanted Fraudsters initiative, which targets fugitives accused of major financial crimes.

Launched in June, the initiative has led to the arrests of five fugitives whom the FBI says are collectively accused of more than $2 billion in alleged fraud after spending nearly 4,000 combined days on the run.

FBI officials say the latest arrest underscores the bureau’s effort to pursue alleged fraudsters who fled overseas in an attempt to evade prosecution.

“Five Most Wanted Fraudsters captured in just three months is a historic success for this initiative,” FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News Digital.

“The days of taking advantage of American taxpayers without consequence are over.”

Federal investigators allege Bedi defrauded the U.S. government out of at least $600,000 through a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fraud scheme between March 2024 and June 2025, while operating an Asian grocery store in Tacoma, Washington.

Keep reading

City Worker Using Public Works Truck Appears to Install Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar’s Campaign Sign

Video provided to Breitbart News appears to show a City of Escobares worker installing campaign signs for Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) in Starr County with a marked Public Works truck in the foreground, raising questions about the use of municipal resources for political activity.

The footage shows a worker installing Cuellar campaign signs next to the marked city vehicle.

Neither the City of Escobares nor Cuellar’s campaign responded to Breitbart News’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Texas law prohibits municipal employees from knowingly using public funds or other city resources to distribute political advertising. The Texas Ethics Commission states that public resources include government equipment as well as employees’ paid work time. A violation of Election Code §255.003 is a Class A misdemeanor.

Texas Ethics Commission Advisory Opinion No. 550 further addresses the use of government resources for campaign activity, stating that using “government resources for an individual public servant’s private campaign purposes would be a misuse.”

The footage comes as members of Cuellar’s family have separately faced scrutiny over alleged uses of government resources and taxpayer-funded public positions.

NRCC spokesman Christian Martinez told Breitbart News, “Self-serving Henry Cuellar has never viewed government as public service. To him, public office is the Cuellar family business, government workers are campaign staff, and taxpayers are the suckers footing the bill. Corruption is not a scandal to the Cuellars. It is their business model,” Martinez said.

Cuellar’s brother, Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar (D), is under federal indictment alongside Assistant Chief Deputy Alejandro Gutierrez in an alleged scheme to misappropriate county resources between 2020 and 2022. Prosecutors allege Cuellar, Gutierrez, and former Assistant Chief Deputy Ricardo Rodriguez used sheriff’s office employees, equipment, and supplies to operate Disinfect Pro Master, a private disinfecting business formed in April 2020 that had no employees or supplies of its own.

Court documents say the company secured a $500,000 contract with the United Independent School District and operated almost entirely with county personnel and resources, with Cuellar, Gutierrez, and Rodriguez each receiving approximately $175,000. Federal authorities searched Cuellar’s office and the school district office in June 2023 in connection with the investigation. Rodriguez later pleaded guilty, while Cuellar and Gutierrez face up to 10 years in prison if convicted; Martin Cuellar also faces a money laundering charge carrying an additional potential 10-year sentence.

Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, were indicted in May 2024 on charges alleging they accepted nearly $600,000 in bribes from an energy company controlled by the government of Azerbaijan and a bank based in Mexico City. Prosecutors alleged the payments were laundered through sham consulting contracts and that Cuellar used his position in Congress to advance the interests of the two foreign entities, including by influencing U.S. foreign policy and pressuring executive branch officials.

The indictment came more than two years after federal agents searched Cuellar’s home in Laredo, Texas in connection with an investigation involving Azerbaijan. Cuellar denied wrongdoing, saying that he and his wife were innocent and that everything he had done in Congress was intended to serve South Texas.

A separate Breitbart News report on the indictment stated that prosecutors alleged Henry and Imelda Cuellar accepted at least $598,000 from the Azerbaijan-controlled oil company and Mexican bank between December 2014 and November 2021. The indictment alleged that Imelda Cuellar performed little or no legitimate work under consulting arrangements used to funnel the payments and that Henry Cuellar agreed in return to take official actions benefiting the foreign entities, including influencing legislation and U.S. policy toward Azerbaijan and federal financial regulation affecting the Mexican bank.

The Cuellars each faced 14 counts ranging from bribery and conspiracy to money laundering and acting as an agent of a foreign principal. Cuellar maintained that he and his wife were innocent, said he had sought legal guidance before acting, and said prosecutors declined a request from his legal team to discuss their side of the case.

Cuellar’s campaign also spent a substantial share of its funds on legal services during the 2024 cycle. Of nearly $1.6 million in campaign funds spent, roughly $784,900 went to legal services, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records cited by Breitbart News. FEC records showed nearly $690,000 in payments to Clifford Chance LLP, which was reportedly representing Cuellar, more than $46,900 to Perkins Coie LLP, and additional payments to Mololamken LLP.

Keep reading

Trump Admin Drafts Policy to Let Married Stay-at-Home Parents Collect Child-Care Aid Instead of Paying Strangers to Raise Their Kids

The Trump administration is drafting a Health and Human Services policy that would, for the first time, let a married parent who stays home with the children collect federal child-care money that Washington has spent thirty years routing almost exclusively to day-care centers.

The New York Times, citing people familiar with the talks and a draft document, reports the change is a priority for Vice President JD Vance and would tap the Child Care and Development Fund, the 1990s program built to help low-income parents pay for care so they could work or go to school.

Typical aid runs about $9,000 per child a year.

Under the draft, a married couple in certain income brackets could use that assistance for “parent-based childcare,” meaning one spouse stays home while the other works at least 35 hours a week.

“The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children, one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families,” the NYT reports.

No new act of Congress is required for this change.

The Times reported, as if it were a negative, “The policy change would effectively create a government incentive for parents to stay home with their children, an idea embraced as part of a broader conservative effort to advance policies that promote more mothers staying at home.”

A federal program that will pay a stranger to raise a child and will not pay a mother or father to do it is not neutral.

Keep reading

The Ukraine Money Pit — Estonia’s €70 Million Scandal

Estonia’s Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur has resigned after a €70 million ammunition deal intended to supply Ukraine blew up into a procurement scandal. Estonia agreed to purchase artillery shells from Datasel, an Italian-registered company owned by India’s Neco Defense Munitions, despite the companies having no established history of selling artillery shells. Millions were paid in advance, deliveries ran into problems, Estonia terminated the contracts, and the dispute has now gone to arbitration. This is what happens when government declares everything an emergency and suddenly the normal rules surrounding public money become inconvenient.

Pevkur says he did not negotiate the contracts and had not even read them. His explanation was rather revealing: “The defence minister does not conduct contract negotiations. The defence minister does not count socks and ammunition.” He said his responsibility was making the fundamental political decision to support Ukraine. He nevertheless resigned because the National Audit Office’s findings raised the question of political responsibility. At least somebody in government still remembers what that phrase means.

The scandal goes directly to the problem with Europe’s entire approach to Ukraine. The politicians declare that Ukraine must be supported at any cost, and once you use those words, cost ceases to matter. Due diligence becomes something bureaucrats complain takes too long. Money must be spent immediately because politicians tell everyone that Europe itself will fall if another artillery shell does not reach Ukraine yesterday.

Estonian officials have essentially admitted that extraordinary risks were accepted because of the urgency surrounding Ukraine. One official told reporters that they knew these procurements involved “greater risks than usual” but believed those risks were justified by what was at stake. There is the entire problem in one sentence. When government decides that the political objective is important enough to justify greater financial risk, taxpayers become the insurance policy when something goes wrong.

Keep reading

This Red State Is Betting It Can Abolish Its Income Tax

The data center debate isn’t going so well for the builders, as Americans far and wide seriously oppose the construction of new data centers near where they live. One state, however, thinks it can incentivize residents. 

Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (R) has unveiled seven principles aligned with 2025 legislation to reduce and eventually eliminate state income tax. Under the plan, West Virginia would set aside 50% of its revenue from approved hyperscale data center projects towards the elimination of the state personal income tax – though let’s be clear: the poor, rural residents they’ll be building the DCs next to don’t pay income tax – so no benefit to them. Middle class voters (and up), however, will have all sorts of reasons to support the move. 

“Today, as the world stands on the cusp of a new digital and economic frontier, West Virginia is stepping forward once again to lead, not by repeating the mistakes of other states, but by implementing a proactive, 20-year development strategy on our terms,” Morrisey said in a statement obtained by Fox News. 

The second listed “principle” in Morrisey’s plan says all West Virginians should benefit from data center projects approved through Charleston’s “High Impact Data Center Designation (HIDC)” process and the revenue they generate. The process was established under a separate 2025 state law.

Morrisey’s plan includes “direct tax relief for citizens,” with none of the HIDC revenue entering the state general fund.

“By law, 50 percent of project revenue is dedicated directly to reducing and ultimately eliminating the State Personal Income Tax,” reads the plan. 

Keep reading

The High Cost Of The Automated Flock-Camera Surveillance State

Flock cameras, and the online surveillance network behind them, offer many ways for law enforcement officials, and other government bureaucrats, to abuse their access to information about the personal lives of the taxpayers. 

For example, a Kentucky police officer has been caught using the surveillance network to stalk women. Another officer in Massachusetts has been accused of using Flock cameras to track her ex-girlfriend. A police officer in Indianapolis was using Flock camera data to track his own wife and friends, checking up on them “3,759 times over a 10-month period – an average of about 12 lookups per day.”

These are just some of the ones who have been caught or accused of abusing Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), the most well known of which operate under the “Flock” brand. It’s impossible to say how many other taxpayer-funded offenders are out there using the surveillance state to serve their particular personal grudges, perversions, and agendas. 

In other cases, Kansas police used the surveillance system to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the department, while a Colorado police officer wrongfully accused a woman of theft based on a Flock hit and then refused to look at evidence proving her innocence. A mother and her children were held at gunpoint because ALPR cameras wrongly flagged their car as stolen. The cases in which police use incorrect Flock data to abuse the innocent are myriad, and researchers are just now starting to document the known cases.  

There are very few controls on how police can use the surveillance databases that underlie the data collection. Records have shown that police can put out a “Flock alert” to track a private vehicle without the vehicle owner or operator being the target of any legitimate investigation. 

Not surprisingly, government agencies appear highly motivated to set up these cameras and use them prolifically. As of this week, there are more than 110,000 confirmed Flock cameras installed in the United States. The company itself states a plan for more than 120,000 cameras. That’s just the flock-branded cameras. At least 135,000 ALPR cameras, overall, have been independently documented in the US. All of these are funded by the taxpayers of course, and are installed with the enthusiastic support of government law enforcement agencies. This has all happened in just a few years. 

Naturally, much of it being funded by federal dollars. These spy camera programs receive funds from a variety of federal grant programs via the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA. None of this is surprising. Since 9/11 “local” police has relied heavily on federal dollars for equipment and other types of spending. “Support your local police” rarely has any meaning anymore. Most police agencies are adjuncts of the federal government, and most willingly share their surveillance data with federal agencies. The potential for abuse is immense since the license-plate data is open to countless users who have access to the network nationwide. The Governor of Utah, for instance, recently noted that 10 Flock cameras in a single county of Utah were searched more than 5 million times “between February 2022 and July 2026, with the vast majority of those searches (nearly 97%) coming from police agencies outside of Utah, from 45 states.” 

Many people wrongly think that these are just ordinary surveillance cameras that can be accessed piecemeal by actual humans. In reality, these are AI-assisted automated systems designed to provide easily-accessed tracking data on the movements of any American who drives a car on America’s streets. 

Tax-funded uniformed bureaucrats—i.e., “police officers”—have been “all in” on spying on Americans using taxpayers’ own hard-earned cash. Knowing that many citizens might object, police agencies have attempted to keep it all as secret as possible. This is how tens of thousands of cameras just suddenly seemed to appear in many American communities without a public vote or announcement. In at least some cases, police have used obviously deceptive methods to get their cameras. All at taxpayer expense. In Tennessee, the Mayor of Knox County, Mises Institute supporter Glenn Jacobs, found that police carefully staggered payments to ALPR corporations so that each payment fell under totals that would trigger review from elected officials. The police don’t just lie to the public. They lie to their own bosses in the elected government 

It’s all just a reminder that if government bureaucrats are given new tools for surveilling the public, those bureaucrats will certainly abuse those tools. 

Keep reading

Sulzbergers Keep Secret Archives at Taxpayer Expense While Denouncing Supreme Court for Doing the Same Thing

A highly hyped New York Times investigation—touted with the unusual label “Times Exclusive”—appeared this month under the headline “How the Supreme Court Locks Away Its Own History.” It complained that “many of the justices have valued confidentiality over transparency and chosen to postpone scrutiny of their work for years to come.”

“Some scholars question why papers should be sealed long after a justice has retired,” says the Times article, by Jodi Kantor, with research and reporting contributed by Julie Tate, Ann Marimow, and Adam Liptak. It quoted a legal historian at the University of California, Davis, Mary Ziegler, accusing the justices of engaging in “reputation management,” and, as Ziegler was paraphrased in the article, “protecting themselves from examination and second-guessing.”

Not disclosed in the Times article: that the papers of former Times publishers Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., donated to the New York Public Library in 2007, are closed to public access until 2035 and 2057, respectively, according to the finding aid to the collection.

Keep reading

Global Empire as Domestic Policy

While many mainstream commentators blanch at the characterization of the United States as an empire, the hard data show that it is today impossible to seriously dispute. The U.S. military operates between 750 and 800 bases around the world, located in around 80 foreign countries and territories. Because there is no fixed or standard definition of “base” for these purposes, there is no accepted number, and some estimates place the figure at closer to 900. The U.S. is also known to operate dozens of secret military bases and black sites, further complicating attempts to settle upon an exact and definitive number.

Just as the number of military bases is disputed, experts have continued longstanding disagreements about how best to tally up total military spending. As the Peter G. Peterson Foundation observed earlier this year, “The United States continues to lead the world in defense spending by a wide margin. In 2025, defense spending by the United States accounted for 33 percent of all military expenditures by countries around the world,” with its nearly trillion-dollar outlay that year exceeding the combined spending of the other six biggest military spenders. This number is down from 2025’s value of nine to six largely because several other countries dramatically increased their military spending (Germany, for example, upped its spending by 24 percent). Breaking Defense reports, “The Pentagon is betting big on a $1.15 trillion discretionary budget request with a further $350 billion coming from the reconciliation process — together adding up to a historic $1.5 trillion defense budget.” The Trump administration’s discretionary funding request of $1.15 trillion marks the first time in history that a discretionary defense request has exceeded $1 trillion on its own. In the previous budget, for FY 2026, the total number hit the $1 trillion mark with a combination of  $848 billion in discretionary spending and $113.3 billion in mandatory reconciliation spending.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) notes that many “obvious examples of programs many would consider ‘military spending’” under commonsense definitions are not a part of the Pentagon budget, including spending for veteran benefits, the Coast Guard, and even nuclear weapons. Looking at five different methodologies, a POGO report published in June points out that all five share at least one conclusion: “Military spending in the United States has long been radically underestimated.” (Not unrelated to this slippery accounting is that fact that the Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in years, failing its eighth in a row at the end of last year.) This recent POGO report finds that “the true total military budget for the last fiscal year (FY 2025) was significantly higher than $1 trillion: It was likely between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion.” If we count interest payments associated with debts for military spending, then “the range is between $1.7 trillion and $2.3 trillion.”

We rarely consider the domestic political implications of Washington’s globe-spanning empire, yet government spending on war and empire functions as the de facto national industrial policy of the United States, largely determining which cutting-edge technologies receive the most investment, which companies will enjoy massive state-guaranteed markets, and which physical objects will be the focus of the country’s industrial production capacity. Through the military empire, the state becomes both the architect of and primary consumer for a huge industrial sector. And while it has grabbed more headlines this year due to the parlous speculative bubble surrounding AI, the political consequences of the connection between the global military empire and the private sector tech industry remain woefully under-discussed in the mainstream discourse. The federal government is funneling billions to AI companies willing to work directly with the military, overpowering objections from employees and the investor market.

Just this week it was reported that “Palantir’s Maven Smart System, an artificial intelligence-powered military platform, is now an official program of record for the Pentagon.” The executive and strategic leadership of major technology companies also increasingly connects and overlaps with the military and national security establishment, often through the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit and liaisons dedicated to recruiting talent and procuring products from the tech sector. As we have already witnessed for decades, cutting-edge technologies developed for the war and empire inevitably end up being deployed domestically against Americans inside the country. Now more than 50 years ago, the Senator Frank Church Committee showed that the intelligence agencies used programs originally designed for foreign surveillance to monitor Americans here at home without warrants. We still have not seriously reckoned with this connection between the policies and technologies of the empire and the ways our own government sees us and governs us.

Since classical antiquity, astute observers have understood that this kind of worldwide military empire is fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law, constitutional government, and even the thinnest definitions of democracy. The administration of such an empire demands secret and centralized forms of decision-making and thus necessarily precludes transparency, accountability, and popular sovereignty. Contemporary political language has managed to disguise what is patently a system of permanent war and empire in the terminology of a liberal and rules-based order of international law and free trade. We have consigned terms like imperialism and colonialism to the history books even as we continue these systems in different forms today. Even the liberal side of our mainstream discourse no longer seriously questions the political system of war and empire that actually governs the country. We will not understand the form of domestic politics we have in the U.S. today until we stop trying to separate it from the imperatives of empire.

Keep reading

Trump Will Demand Repayment From the EU Over Biden’s Massive Military Aid to Ukraine

Rather belatedly, but it will be demanded.

In the context of a social media burn against ‘SCUM’ journalists who are suggesting that the missile and ammo stockpiles would be dangerously low, President Donald J. Trump suggested that the European Union should repay the US for the untold billions that creepy Joe Biden’s administration sent to Ukraine.

Le Monde reported (translated from the French):

“Donald Trump on Thursday criticized his predecessor, Joe Biden, for providing Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars in aid and ammunition for free, believing that the Europeans should have borne the cost and announcing his intention to ask them for the money.

‘Hundreds of billions of dollars have been given for free to Ukraine and NATO, money that Europe would have paid if it had just been asked, but we will claim this money, even if it’s a little late!’ the US president wrote on Truth Social.”

Keep reading