Trump Team’s “Anti-Fraud” Announcement Gets Derailed With One Question

The Trump administration’s big anti-fraud announcement in Minnesota didn’t go as planned Friday.

First of all, Vice President JD Vance canceled his appearance at the event in St. Cloud without giving a reason—leaving other Trump officials to stand in front of a giant banner reading “The Vice President’s Fraud Task Force,” with the vice president nowhere in sight.

But things only went south from there. Shortly after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a federal crackdown in the state, with coordinated searches and a $25 million whistleblower incentive program, a reporter pointed out that the Trump administration has an issue of its own: The Department of Homeland Security paid $495 million for a prison in Appleton, Minnesota, in August, despite its owner, CoreCivic, Inc., offering it to the state for just $75 million last year. Bessent didn’t want to answer that question.

“Uh, yeah, I don’t know anything about that, what we are here to do is prosecute criminal fraud and any question like that that deflects away from it I think is a waste of our time, thanks,” Bessent said.

Minnesota TV station KARE 11 reported on the massive overpayment Thursday, citing records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission confirming the $420 million price difference. It’s the largest real estate purchase in Minnesota history, and it’s a 34-year-old vacant prison that’s been closed for 16 years.

“It’s unexplainable!” Minnesota Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell told KARE 11 when he was asked about the sale.

“Obviously, I was stunned given the reality of the offer that had been made to us just a little over a year prior to that,” Schnell said. “I still can’t figure it out.”

That purchase price doesn’t include any necessary improvements the government will have to make on the facility, which will likely be numerous considering it has been defunct for 16 years and is located in a small town about a three hour drive from Minneapolis and St. Paul. The company in question, CoreCivic, has profited immensely from Trump’s mass deportation policies, and donated $500,000 to President Trump and Vance’s inauguration. But don’t expect that to be the subject of a big federal fraud investigation.

Republican Senator Roger Marshall, who is in the middle of a tight reelection campaign, was sued Friday for allegedly charging illegal interest rates to his patients in his former career as a doctor.

Marshall’s former patient Meischa Zimmerman filed the class-action lawsuit Thursday in Kansas state court against both Marshall and his former medical practice on behalf of herself and several other patients. Last month, The New York Times broke the story that Marshall sued hundreds of his patients for medical debts in rural Barton County, Kansas, where many residents live in poverty and don’t have health insurance.

Zimmerman, an obstetrics patient of Marshall’s in 2009, said the practice sued her over a $3,596 bill for the delivery of her child, plus an 18 percent annual interest rate. According to the court filing, debt collection efforts linked to the usurious debt led to her arrest on three separate occasions.

Under Kansas law, doctors and other businesses can only charge 15 percent interest rates, with some exceptions allowing higher rates if they specify them in a preexisting contract. Marshall and his practice, Heartland Regional OBGYN, charged an 18 percent rate to his patients, mostly mothers from low-income, uninsured, or underinsured backgrounds. The lawsuit calls those rates illegal, and part of a “callous and predatory” debt-collection scheme.

The revelations over Marshall’s past have helped put his seat in play in normally solidly Republican Kansas. That has led to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance jetting off to Kansas to campaign for him, but it hasn’t gone so well: Marshall’s Democratic challenger, pastor Adam Hamilton, has a slight advantage in recent polling.

This lawsuit is not going to help. Hamilton has called out Marshall’s high interest rates and propensity to sue his patients for as little as $101, saying in a debate last month that “there are 2,000 verses in the Bible that speak to caring for the poor. This is not happening under this man.”

The news of Marshall being sued just days before Election Day on Tuesday will ensure that his medical practice will be in the news through the weekend. It’ll pile on the fact that another damaging story broke about him earlier this week: He made a suspiciously timed pharmaceutical stock purchase when he was a congressional representative on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee eight years ago. Come Tuesday, voters in Kansas might have an easy decision to make.

A Texas grand jury indicted an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on Friday for intentionally running a man over with his vehicle earlier this month.

Officer Mario Alberto Morales is facing a charge of assault with a deadly weapon after running over Miguel Parra Hernandez, who was on foot, with a black unmarked SUV. Hernandez broke his leg and also injured his hip and ankle, according to his family. He is currently undergoing rehab in ICE custody, and Morales was placed on administrative leave.

Hernandez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was driving to his construction job when immigration agents tried to pull him over. Hernandez and another passenger fled from the vehicle. According to street camera and body cam footage, Morales then turned his vehicle and accelerated over Hernandez. Hernandez can be heard screaming “You ran over me,” while Morales replies, “You got hit with the car, bro.” ICE backed Morales’s version of events, saying in an official statement that Hernandez “ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck.”

ICE still maintains that story, saying that Morales’s indictment “is nothing more than a political stunt by Houston sanctuary politicians.” It also argues that the local government doesn’t have jurisdiction to try and investigate Morales in the first place, a claim Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare says is “false.”

“An ICE badge does not give you free rein to injure, kill, or violate the constitutional rights of anyone,” Teare said.

Morales is only the second ICE officer to face any legal consequences for their actions since the beginning of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. ICE officer Christian Castro was charged with four counts of assault for shooting Venezuelan immigrant Julio Sosa-Celis in Minnesota in January.

With just days until the midterm elections, moderate Democrats are still finding ways to undermine Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi criticized El-Sayed on a recent episode of the On Brand podcast. Host Donny Deutsch claimed El-Sayed had made “concerning” comments opposing the existence of a Jewish state. “That’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

“No, it’s more than concerning. It’s wrong,” Pelosi said. “It’s wrong, and it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States. This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress.”

Since launching his campaign, El-Sayed, who is Muslim, has been bombarded by baseless claims of antisemitism. The Democrat has stated that he opposes any state’s right to be organized around an ethnic or religious group, and has been clear that his issue is with the Israeli government, not Jewish people. “An ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally,” he said during one interview on ABC News.

But Pelosi appeared more interested in defending Israel than a Democrat on the eve of an important election. (Her spokesperson said Friday that she was urging people to support El-Sayed.)

Representative Haley Stevens, whom El-Sayed defeated in the Democratic primary, also took an eleventh-hour shot at her party’s only hope to keep control of the state’s Senate seat. Stevens issued a statement Friday suggesting that her support for El-Sayed was contingent on whether he condemned a political advertisement that was not even produced by his campaign.

The video was made by Rebellion PAC, a left-wing fundraising group led by Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks—who Stevens wants everyone to know is also “Hasan Piker’s uncle.” The video, which originally aired in February 2024, blamed the rising price of groceries on America’s continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“Why does Mike Rogers care so much about what Israelis want, and so little about what you want?” the ad asks, claiming that pro-Israel PACs had poured $228,808 into Rogers’s campaign.

Stevens said she had agreed to appear at an event with El-Sayed and Representative Jim Clyburn, expecting that El-Sayed would formally condemn the ad. “A disclaimer is not condemnation, and everyone in my community knows the difference,” Stevens said in the statement.

But that wasn’t all she was expecting. Stevens called for El-Sayed to apologize for his own statements tying Israel to Michiganders’ affordability crisis, though it wasn’t immediately clear that he actually had made any such claims. She also asked him to take down another campaign advertisement that included a clip of Tucker Carlson, among a montage of right-wing media figures.

Again, with Stevens, we see Democrats placing continued support for Israel before the success of their own party and their own constituents. Is it any wonder that Stevens lost?

A federal judge on Friday announced the appointment of a special master to investigate whether Trump officials repeatedly lied to her about the president’s attempted takeover of the East Potomac Park golf course in Washington, D.C. The investigation will begin in a matter of days.

In court Friday, a Justice Department lawyer tried to play dumb about what’s going on in the park, what Trump has publicly said about the park, and how the administration has flouted court orders. When U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes asked the lawyer if he “made any false statements of material fact that you’d like to correct,” the attorney said “not to my knowledge,” drawing Reyes’s ire.

The lawyer claimed that he was new to the case, saying, “We have lots of binders.” Reyes tried to remedy the situation by calling an Interior Department official and asking them the same question, only to get the same answer: “Not to my knowledge.” When Reyes asked if the official’s boss, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, was involved in the park project, the official asked, “What do you mean by ‘involved?’” This prompted Reyes to pull out a dictionary to read the definition of “involved.”

The official then said that Burgum was aware of the renovation project, but wasn’t involved, to which Reyes noted that he toured the golf course. “He doesn’t have a body double, does he?” Reyes quipped.

After Reyes asked when the Department of Interior became aware of plans to close the park on November 15, the official seemed ignorant, prompting Reyes to ask if she needed to look up “plan” in the dictionary.

Reyes noted that Trump wrote on Truth Social October 18 that the park was closing on November 15, and that the DOJ “swore up and down” the next day that park wasn’t closing then, only to later change its story and confirm the November 15 closure date. At that point, assistant Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the number three person at the DOJ, intervened and tried to halt the questioning of the Interior Department official.

“It sounds like you don’t want him to answer a very straightforward question,” Reyes said, before allowing the official to step away. Woodward then started answering Reyes’s questions, saying that the closure plan was “noticed” on October 28. He tried to claim that Trump’s post said the park “should” be closed, only for Reyes to correct him and point out that Trump wrote “will be” closed.

The hearing didn’t get any better from there, as Woodward attempted to explain away Trump’s posts by claiming there were no plans to close the golf course, questioning whether those words constitute “plans” or “orders.” Woodward went as far as to try to claim “executive privilege” over Trump’s social media posts, frustrating Reyes, who said, “That’s quite an extraordinary view of executive privilege.”

The entire hearing continued on in this absurdity, with the DOJ letting slip that a new seawall at the park would cost between $150 million and a whopping $400 million. Trump administration lawyers became noticeably cagey about questions regarding the renovation’s costs after that.

Trump is insisting on this project despite court orders and the law, and openly admits he’s ignoring Reyes’s rulings. Friday’s drama in court is an indication that Trump’s lawyers can’t come up with believable justifications for his haphazard decisions.