The Minnesota Day Care Fraud Story: Trump Says Fraud is a Big Problem When Black People Do It

Dean Baker

January 6, 2026

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Photo by Gautam Arora

At this point in his second term, Donald Trump has probably pardoned more fraudsters than all prior presidents combined. The list of people Trump pardoned, who were either convicted or plead guilty to fraud charges, is extensive. Clearly, fraud is something that is not a concern for the guy sitting in the White House.

The story of fraud in Medicaid and other government programs in Minnesota is also not really news. It was investigated years ago under Biden and has already resulted in more than 60 people pleading guilty or being convicted.

And Trump has been just fine with public sector fraud in the past. The largest single biggest rip-off in U.S. history occurred under the Paycheck Protection Program created during the pandemic in Trump’s first term. The Inspector General of the Small Business Administration (SBA) estimated that there may have been as much as $200 billion in fraudulent payments in the program, which was administered by the SBA.

Hannibal Ware, the Inspector General who uncovered the fraud, who is Black, was fired by Donald Trump at the start of his second term. Linda McMahon, the head of the SBA under Trump, who is white, was picked by Trump to head the Department of Education in his current term.

The reality is that there will always be some fraud in major government programs, just like there is fraud in the private sector. The old-timers here will remember Enron and Worldcom and more recently all the  fraud in the financial industry that fueled the housing bubble, whose collapse gave us the Great Recession and financial crisis.

When there is big money to be stolen, people will be there to steal it, and that applies to both the public and private sector. We will likely have some great fraud stories when the AI bubble collapses. To paraphrase Warren Buffet’s great line: when the tide goes out, we find who was swimming naked.

The question that people need to be asking about the Minneapolis fraud is why the Trump administration is yelling about it now? There is an obvious answer: Jeffrey Epstein.

The files are proving to be an even bigger morass for Trump that anyone could have imagined. He clearly was closely tied to the child sex trafficker for decades. That would be a bad enough story in any case, but it is made worse by the fact that the Epstein child sex trafficking ring has been a major theme for the right-wing influencers for years.

They have been pushing stories that had Bill and Hillary Clinton and various other Democratic luminaries at the center of it. Now, it turns out that their hero was Epstein friend Number One. We may never know whether or not Trump did anything illegal in his associations with Epstein, but it’s clear his ties were long and extensive.

And the Justice Department effort to conceal the Trump-Epstein connection is drowning in incompetence, starting with Attorney General Bondi’s famous claim last February that she had the Epstein files sitting on her desk. Now that we know that there are more than a million documents in the Epstein files, Bondi’s claim doesn’t seem very credible.

Trump’s full-court press to block Congress from mandating the release of the file also didn’t help. Nor did the ridiculous and inconsistent efforts at redacting Trump’s name and face from the files.

So, when things are going bad, Trump goes for the racism card. And in this case, he even gets to pick on immigrant Blacks. From the Trump perspective, it doesn’t get better than that.

When people hear about Minnesota Medicaid or childcare fraud they should be thinking about the Epstein files. This is what the story is about. The fraud stories are old news and already well-reported and were being investigated by Biden’s Justice Department.

What needs to be reported now is why Trump is so desperate to push such blatant racism. It looks bad even from a Trumpian perspective.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

The Moral Bankruptcy of the West Can No Longer Be Ignored

Hamza Shehryar

January 6, 2026

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Image by Getty and Unsplash+.

After months of thinly veiled threats, disregard for international law, and the brutal murder of fishermen in the Caribbean Sea, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have achieved what they set out to do – what many on the Left had been warning about for months. On January 3, the US bombed sites across Venezuela and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro in a special operation, killing at least 40 Venezuelans in the process. As repulsive as the imperialist kidnapping of the leader of a sovereign nation is, it is not surprising.

Throughout the 20th century, the US carried out coups across Latin America, driven by an unrelenting desire to siphon off resources to feed the belly of the beast. Among the many examples of US-backed right-wing coups are the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, which ushered in 17 years of tyranny under the US-backed Pinochet dictatorship, during which tens of thousands were tortured and disappeared. Or the overthrow of João Goulart in Brazil in 1964, leading to 21 years of military rule. Or Argentina in 1976; El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. In fact, throw a dart at a map of Latin America, and chances are you’ll hit a country that US-backed missiles have struck in a successful bid for regime change within the last century.

What is unique this time, though, is the openness with which the recipient of the oh-so-coveted FIFA Peace Prize has flaunted his violation of international law and overthrow of a foreign leader. There has been no serious attempt to cloak this act in the language of liberation, though stenographers in corporate media and useful idiots masquerading as political analysts have eagerly taken on that role themselves. Trump has openly stated that the invasion of Venezuela – which, depending on developments in the coming days and weeks, could see the oil-rich Bolivarian Republic succumb to US military occupation (as Trump himself implied), the illegitimate rule of the far-right Zionist María Corina Machado, or descend into civil war – is about accessing Venezuela’s vast resources. These include the largest proven oil reserves in the world, accounting for roughly 17 per cent of global reserves.

“The oil companies are gonna go in, they’re gonna spend money and then we’re gonna take back the oil that frankly we should’ve taken back a long time ago,” Trump said following Maduro’s kidnapping. “A lot of money is coming out of the ground. We’re gonna get reimbursed for all of that. We’re gonna get reimbursed for everything that we spend.”

There is no longer even the façade of democracy or liberation. Only imperialism in its most naked, hypocritical form.

Like the coup itself, this moment should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the rapid erosion of international law and the collapse of any meaningful “rules-based order” as a result of the Zionist apartheid state of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, backed by the US empire. So, the refusal to even gesture toward a humanitarian justification for this illegal, destabilising act in Venezuela is merely the latest confirmation of a pattern many have been shouting about for over two years: what is being done in Palestine is laying the groundwork for what will be done everywhere else.

Sultan Barakat, professor of public policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, put it succinctly in an interview with Al Jazeera: “This [Maduro’s kidnapping] is probably a nail in the coffin of any international agreement. The very principle of state sovereignty has now been dismantled,” he said. “[This is] in line with some of the operations that Israel has undertaken in Lebanon and Iran jointly with the United States. They are now moving the bar much, much higher than what we are used to – and far beyond international norms and international law.”

The permission structure has fundamentally changed. Its most recent manifestation is the imperialist overthrow of a sovereign leader inconvenient to US capital. Two decades ago, this required the fabrication of weapons of mass destruction. No longer. The US government can now carry out coups at will, with no scrutiny or consequence. It may do so in Cuba or Iran next. Eventually, this unaccountable tyranny will reach everyone, including those within the US itself. The greed of the ruling elite knows no bounds.

Especially dismaying, amid the chaos of recent days, has been the response of the US’s Western allies, particularly the European Union, which has uncritically embraced this unjustifiable act. It is now abundantly clear that the EU has chosen to contort itself entirely to appease the US and “Daddy” Trump, tethering itself to the sinking ship of the American empire – whether by backing Trump’s economic war with China, committing to militarism, facilitating genocide in Gaza, or now endorsing the overthrow of sovereign leaders. For an entity that prides itself even more than the US on the veneer of liberalism and international law, its refusal to offer even the mildest criticism is telling.

Rather than condemn or distance herself from the illegal actions of a rogue state, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas responded to Maduro’s kidnapping by stating: “The EU has repeatedly said that Mr Maduro lacks legitimacy and has defended a peaceful transition.”

Emmanuel Macron, France’s deeply unpopular president – who has repeatedly violated democratic norms by refusing to allow the Left to nominate a prime minister despite the Nouveau Front Populaire winning the most seats in the snap legislative elections he called in 2024 – went even further. “The Venezuelan people are today rid of Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship and can only rejoice. By seizing power and trampling on fundamental freedoms, Nicolás Maduro gravely undermined the dignity of his own people.” He then added, seemingly oblivious to his own conduct since 2024: “The upcoming transition must be peaceful, democratic, and respectful of the will of the Venezuelan people.” Not even a token reference to international law. The hypocrisy is staggering.

The same is true across Europe and among the US’s regional allies, from Keir Starmer to Giorgia Meloni; from Javier Milei to Daniel Noboa. What has been laid bare is not just a shift in the enactment of American imperialism but also the complete demolition of even its rhetorical boundaries. The US and its allies will depose, ravage, and kill with impunity. They will collaborate with war criminals, authoritarian leaders and dictatorships when convenient, and will overthrow “unsuitable” governments when desirable, too. They will sanction Russia for invading Ukraine, then celebrate the US for doing the same in Venezuela.

Omar El-Akkad’s searing words in his excellent book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This cut through the hypocrisy of this so-called Western rules-based order: “To preserve the values of the civilised world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewellery, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilised world might win.”

For anyone who truly believes all peoples and nations are equal, the moral bankruptcy of the West has been utterly exposed. If there was any doubt before, it is now undeniable. The neo-colonial division of the world into haves and have-nots can no longer be rationalised or ignored. The Left, and all people of conscience, must respond accordingly. If the international Left is serious about building a future in which the Global Majority can live with dignity and equality, it must categorically reject the status quo of Western intervention and supremacy.

Che Guevara famously said that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. Western imperialism has none – not for the proletariat within its borders, and certainly not for those beyond them. So we must centre a politics rooted in care and solidarity: movements that recognise the wretched of the earth, as Fanon described, as worthy of dignity and respect; as agents of their own futures; as human beings who deserve far more than destabilisation and exploitation by Western leaders in service of the profits of the corporations they are beholden to.

Hamza Shehryar is a writer and journalist. He covers film, culture, and global politics.

AUSTRALIA

Confronting Genocide with Civil Disobedience

The Pine Gap Protests and Gaza

by Binoy Kampmark / January 6th, 2026

While the secret signals and surveillance facility at Pine Gap in Northern Australia, officially named the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) is billed as a joint affair between Australia and the United States, it is nothing of the sort. Just as offices direct the callow intern to make the coffee, Australian officials remain America’s permanent interns, helpful, certainly, but never powerful or given challenging roles. The contempt with which Australians are treated is shown by the level of secrecy that continues to enshroud one of the largest signals intelligence centres outside the United States.

It is this secrecy that does, from time to time, make its way into court. For this, we can thank those plucky protestors who have, over the years, sought to expose the role of the base in aiding US military operations against targets in any number of locations unbeknownst to the Australian parliament, and not even the Australian Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Two of those protestors, Carmen Escobar Robinson and Tommy Walker, brought attention to the base’s activities when they blocked Hatt Road, the main access route to Pine Gap in October 2023. On November 27, 2023, a second effort was made that temporarily prevented some 100 Pine Gap employees from entering the facility. Robinson and Walker were part of a group of 50 activists, an eclectic makeup of health workers, community members, and the Arrernte Traditional Owners, all steered by the social justice outfit Mparntwe for Falastin. The action had been enlivened by revelations from an ex-Pine Gap employee that intelligence from the base was finding its way to Israeli sources.

The revelations, published in Declassified Australia by Peter Cronau, came from David Rosenberg, a veteran of the US National Security Agency (NSA) who performed the role of “team leader of weapon signals analysis” at Pine Gap for 18 years till 2008. “Pine Gap facility,” he stated, “is monitoring the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas with all its resources, and gathering intelligence assessed to be useful to Israel”. Personnel at the base were tasked to gather such signals pertaining to Hamas’s command and control centres in Gaza. “Their aim would be to minimise casualties to non-combatants in achieving their objective of destroying Hamas,” given the proximity of such centres to civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. (This claim proved over time to be aspirational, given the staggering civilian death toll arising from Israeli strikes.)

Cronau had previous obtained evidence of the role played by Pine Gap in supplying geolocation data to the US military for targeting purposes from an NSA document from August 2012 entitled “Site Profile G”, stemming from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and first published in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation program Background Briefing in 2017. “RAINFALL [NSA’s designation for Pine Gap] detects, collects, records, processes, analyses and reports on PROFORMA signals collected from tasked target entities.”

These signals, writes Cronau, constitute “the communications data of radar and weapons systems collected in near-real time”. Pine Gap, “with its satellites so strategically positioned to monitor the Middle East region, along with its targeting and analysis capability” was bound to be valuable to Israel.

Robinson and Walker were subsequently charged with summary offences for the second action comprising loitering, causing a hazard on the road and blocking the use of a public road. On September 23, 2025, they pleaded “not guilty” to the charges, arguing that the obstruction had been staged to prevent “the offence of genocide in Palestine”.

In his ruling, Judge John McBride found the two protestors “exemplary citizens” in dedication to their cause despite finding them guilty of loitering. (The prosecution dropped the obstruction charges late in 2024.) “I conclude that the conduct of both defendants, deliberate as it was, cannot be accepted by this court as reasonable in justifying their intended commission of a criminal offence.”

The defence made by the duo’s lawyer John Lawrence resorted to the Northern Territory’s Criminal Code Act which stipulates that force – in this case a blockade – can be justified in certain circumstances, one of them being to “prevent the commission of an offence”. Robinson and Walker had committed their acts with intent “because it was their view, their belief, their understanding that what was going on in Pine Gap was an offence.” The Crown was unable to “prove beyond reasonable doubt” that the defendants “weren’t moving in order to prevent genocide.”

Professor Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute, an untiring student of Pine Gap’s cloaked activities, was called upon to give evidence on the facility’s role. This, argued the Crown prosecutor, Machiko Raheem, was not relevant to the defence of applying force to prevent genocide. But the court did hear her rather startling confession that a genocide was taking place. “A blind person can see that since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the UN Partition Plan in 1947 there has been a systematic annihilation of the Palestinian people.” This annihilation had “only recently [been] labelled […] genocide – which is consistent with human history as a whole. That’s not the issue in these proceedings.”

The judge agreed with the prosecutor that “actions taken in Gaza which constituted an offence of genocide” did not excuse the duo’s conduct. Both were given good behaviour bonds lasting six months and made to pay a court levy of A$150.

In remarks made to Guardian Australia, Robinson made the salient point that Australia, in the absence of transparency to parliament or the public, “is hardwired into the US military surveillance complex through Pine Gap. The Australian public should be very concerned… how many countries are we unofficially attacking? How many people is Pine Gap involved in killing in Palestine? Lebanon? Syria? Yemen? Iran?” Most Australian politicians, mutely, subserviently, persist in avoiding the matter. The errand boys and girls of the American empire remain an unquestioning bunch.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.