Maybe Trump’s Fraud Czar Should Be Looking at Florida

‘A Sophisticated Scheme to Fund Political Activities’

As part of President Trump’s pretextual war on fraud, he anointed Vice President JD Vance as his “fraud czar” to, essentially, find creative ways to withhold federal funding from blue states and cities. This is being done under the guise of cracking down on amorphous and sprawling fraud in how states’ spend federal funding that is dispersed for programs like Medicaid and Medicare.

Vance made it clear this spring that no one — not even red states! — is safe from the administration’s watchful eye.

“Now, we have red states and blue states that go after fraud aggressively. But we also unfortunately have some states — mostly blue states, unfortunately — that do not take Medicaid fraud very seriously,” Vance said in May when announcing the Trump administration would withhold $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California because it was, apparently, not taking its rife fraud problem seriously enough.

No one really believed that Vance would actually target red states, even when the words came out of his mouth earlier this year. The Trump administration used claims of rampant fraud, and the frantic rumors spread by right-wing influencers online that animated it, as an excuse for invading Minneapolis, Minnesota with federal immigration forces earlier this year. And Vance continues to use his platform as supposed “fraud czar” to withhold federal funding from states that do not support the president politically.

It’s a pellucid retribution scheme. But this week brought news of some actual Medicaid fraud in Florida.

A state grand jury in Tallahassee found that GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration “misappropriated” taxpayer dollars when it funneled $10 million from a Medicaid settlement into a non-profit fundraising group tied to Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis, called the Hope Florida Foundation. The grand jury found the diverted funding to be “part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities,” according to CBS News Miami, which obtained a copy of the sealed grand jury report. More details from CBS News:

The grand jury report said the money, which was supposed to be used to provide health insurance for poor children, was instead hastily passed through multiple organizations before eventually landing in the bank accounts of two political action committees and the Republican Party of Florida. Those funds were then used in 2024 to defeat Amendment 3, the citizen initiative to legalize marijuana in Florida.

“Despite our finding that the money was misappropriated, we find insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally,” the report concluded. “Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida… or had any memory of who made it.”

“We recognize that this would be an impediment to criminal prosecution,” the report noted. “While we can’t prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again.”

The grand jury identified Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL), who was the Florida attorney general at the time, and James Uthmeier, the current attorney general and former chief of staff for DeSantis, as being involved in the flurry of activity that surrounded the transfer of funds.

You can get more details from CBS here but the broader point still stands — if the Trump administration actually cared about fraud both in social safety net programs and other uses of taxpayer dollars, red states would be just as closely scrutinized. But Vance’s work was never really about rooting out fraud.

Data Center Showdown in Texas?

President Trump heads to Dallas, Texas in a few weeks to deliver the keynote address at the Republican Party’s bizarre midterms convention there, with Trump set to stump for Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senate bid. As an extreme MAGA candidate with lots of messy personal life drama, the two are essentially in lockstep on most issues, except a pretty major one that I wrote about a bit earlier this week.

In response to widespread bipartisan backlash to the development of data centers across the country, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) recently announced that he was placing a pause on the ability for new data center projects to be connected to the state’s power grid; Paxton backed him on the matter. While Abbott has openly courted tech company’s who want to construct new data centers in his state, he made the announcement in response to mounting backlash from constituents who are worried about rising power costs linked to the projects.

Trump — who signed an executive order that would expedite data center construction nationwide — called Abbott’s decision “a mistake.”

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous,” Trump said last week. “And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it.”

As Trump heads to the state to campaign for Paxton, but mostly brag about his record ahead of the midterms, it’ll be interesting to see how both sides manage the policy rift on an issue uniquely despised by Americans across the political spectrum.

‘Poetry Is Not Sexual Misconduct’

Rep. Chuck Edward’s (R-NC) defense of himself in a six-page letter to colleagues this week ahead of an expected censure vote on the House Ethics Committee’s sexual harassment findings is nearly as cringe as the allegations themselves.

“An affectionate friendship is not a sexual proposition. A gift is not sexual misconduct. A compliment is not sexual misconduct. Poetry is not sexual misconduct. Socializing with a colleague is not sexual misconduct. Caring deeply about someone with whom you have worked and come to know for years is not sexual misconduct,” Edwards wrote in the letter obtained by Politico.

Read More From TPM Today

Khaya Himmelman checks in on how Democratic governors are responding to the recent Supreme Court decision that opened the door for the Trump admin to move forward with the president’s executive order seeking to control who can vote and who can receive a ballot in this week’s edition of The Franchise: Dem Guvs Renew Vow to Fight for States’ Right to Administer Their Elections in Wake Of SCOTUS Mail-in Voting Decision

“The most prominent throughline that has emerged in the 2026 Georgia Senate race is that one candidate, Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), seems to be virtually surrounded by fringe figures,” writes Layla A. Jones on the latest revelations of Collins’ ties to racists: The Many Extremists in Mike Collins’ Orbit Have Come to Define His Campaign

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