The Five cohost Joey Jones defended Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund by pretending this is just what politicians do before launching into a screed demonizing “illegal” immigrants.
They can’t defend the indefensible, so this is the sort of nonsense they spew instead. Here’s the back and forth between Jones and Jessica Tarlov during a discussion about the sentence of Feeding Our Future founder Aimee Bock, who was found guilty of fraud in Minnesota, where the rest of the wingnuts on the panel were trying to pretend Democrats are the ones that don’t care about fraud.
TARLOV: I’m a big fan of rooting out fraud — I think it should happen. I did notice that Aimee Bock is not Somalian, and I was assured that it was the Somalis who were committing all the fraud.
GUTFELD: Those are her people — they worked with her.
TARLOV: I understand. I’m just noting how this was framed.
GUTFELD: All you see is color.
TARLOV: When you make blanket statements—
JONES: How do you know she’s not Somalian?
TARLOV: Joey, don’t push me on this.
The clip we didn’t show — and I think this relates to what Dana was talking about — is the reporter asking McDonald, the DOJ official, “President Trump has granted clemency to numerous individuals who have stolen hundreds of millions in Medicaid funds. Can we expect these folks to be shown the same mercy?”
McDonald responded, “I’ll take a different question.” That’s because he has no good answer for why Donald Trump commuted the sentence of Philip Esformes, who stole $1.3 billion in Medicare and Medicaid funds, was sentenced to 20 years, and was released after just 14 months.
This is also why the GOP can’t get that reconciliation bill through — members are being sent home because they can’t defend the 1776 slush fund.
The fraud story Americans are actually focused on right now is the actions Donald Trump is taking that use taxpayer dollars to let people off the hook — whether for prior Medicaid fraud or to pay off January 6th defendants. And again, I believe anyone who commits fraud should go to jail, but the hypocrisy is glaring. The DOJ couldn’t even say unequivocally that no one who commits this kind of fraud should be shown mercy — not those being prosecuted now, and not those who were pardoned before.
JONES: What’s interesting is the selective outrage. People who treat January 6th as an unprecedented insurrection were largely silent when local precincts, courthouses, and entire neighborhoods were burning during the summer of 2020. The argument then was that those were oppressed people expressing their grievances. So when violence hits a local municipality or a state, it’s understandable — but when it reaches the Capitol and can be pinned on Trump, suddenly it’s the worst thing imaginable.
I think the same inconsistency applies to fraud. The fraud we’re discussing — whether in Minnesota, California, or elsewhere — happens in virtually every state, including Republican ones. Any time the government mandates a program and attaches money to it, someone will exploit it. I say go after all of it — every solar farm tax credit scheme, every government-funded program being gamed.
I agree that Trump granting favors is a bad look, and I don’t like it. But there isn’t a politician alive who hasn’t done something similar, which is why I tend to be critical of politicians across the board.
What concerns me more is the fraud happening in my own community — undocumented workers claiming excessive dependents to avoid taxes, then disappearing when the IRS catches up and returning the following year under a new identity. That happens by the hundreds of thousands in Northwest Georgia alone, to say nothing of the healthcare and learning center fraud where people actually die.
Try going to a public health department in an area overwhelmed by undocumented immigrants — you often can’t get seen, because those resources are consumed by people accessing free care. All the municipal services we fund with local taxes get stretched to the breaking point. That’s fraud too, and we should go after every bit of it.
