☕️ KINGDOM OF FRAUD ☙ Saturday, April 4, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Iran shoots down an F-15E. Vance becomes Fraud Czar. 221 fake hospices gone in 10 weeks. Maine panics. NYT can't spell NATO. Trump's Easter message silences the critics. More.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! It’s time for the Weekend Edition. It is also Holy Saturday, the quiet in-between while Jesus Christ laid in the tomb and the Christian movement appeared to have died before it really got started. Tomorrow’s the Really Big Day. Meanwhile, your roundup includes: an American airman missing behind enemy lines, a new Fraud Czar named on Truth Social (Somalia beware!), the largest Medicare takedown in California history, and the New York Times accidentally proves Trump’s NATO point in a hilarious self-own.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING — IRAN WAR UPDATE ⛑️

Early Friday morning, CBS News reported, “Downed F-15E and Missing Crew Member Raise Stakes in Iran War.” An F-15E Strike Eagle— the first American warplane lost to enemy fire since the campaign began— was shot down over the mountainous southwestern corner of Iran, near the Iraqi border. The two-person crew ejected. U.S. special forces quickly recovered one of the airmen. The second crew member is still missing, somewhere inside Iran, as of this morning.

The media triumphantly framed it as a challenge to the Administration’s week-long narrative of total American air supremacy. Iran— despite having most of its air force grounded, its navy scattered across the Persian Gulf’s sea bed, and its missile sites rebuilt-and-destroyed so many times they’ve probably started using pre-printed insurance forms— apparently retained enough functioning air defense to knock down one of our jets.

Iran could have had a talking point. But they just can’t help themselves. Iran’s state media falsely claimed they’d shot down an F-35— a stealth fighter worth $100 million and three times the headlines. The actual wreckage turned out to be an F-15E. Psyop ruined. They didn’t even know what they shot down.

Separately, an A-10 Warthog also went down in the Persian Gulf yesterday —pilot safely rescued, cause unspecified— and a rescue helicopter was struck during the search-and-rescue operation.

When reporters asked whether any of this would affect peace negotiations, the Commander-in-Chief said, “No. Not at all. It’s war.” Six words; that’s it. Not ‘we strongly condemn.’ Not ‘we are monitoring the situation with grave concern.’ Not fifteen minutes of practiced empathy followed by the same policy. Just … it’s war. That’s the full statement.

And then he went on Truth Social and posted, in all-caps: “WE CAN EASILY OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE. IT WOULD BE A ‘GUSHER’ FOR THE WORLD???” Followed shortly by: “KEEP THE OIL, ANYONE?”

Two things stood out. First: “we can easily open the Hormuz Strait.” That was aimed at the Europeans. They are left to wonder why Trump isn’t opening the Strait, if we can do it so easily. The implied subtext was, we don’t want to. Second, the follow-up, to make sure the Iranians got the point: we can keep the oil. Trump knows full well that is a progressive trigger— no blood for oil!

Iran’s entire defensive strategy is to grimly hold on and outwait President Trump, to defeat him with the politics and the price of gas at the pump. In other words, Iran is relying on its most powerful remaining ally— the Western corporate media establishment. Iran has no navy, no air force, no leadership. Their only remaining weapon is the CNN chyron and the gas station sign. Their most effective general right now is a New York Times opinion columnist.

Trump’s counter-strategy is: I don’t care about the politics. We’re going to bomb you back to the Stone Age. Make a deal.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Yesterday I showed you how the ActBlue scandal has roared back to life, and how Todd Blanche took control of Main Justice— with ideal timing for the midterm elections. Here’s a second dot to connect. Also yesterday, the Guardian reported, “Trump announces ‘fraud’ crackdown in Democratic states as arrests begin in California.” Note the language. Arrests begin. Everybody expects something big to follow.

On Friday morning, the President posted one of the most entertaining Truth Social announcements of Trump 2.0— and that is a genuinely competitive category. He declared:

The Guardian’s article confirmed that the LA raids had already started. Federal agents in Los Angeles arrested suspects in a $50 million healthcare and hospice fraud operation even before Trump’s announcement went up.

There is much to admire here, aesthetically. “Somalia beware!” may be the most delightful parenthetical in the history of presidential Truth Social posts. Six syllables that encapsulate the entire ten-year Minneapolis welfare fraud saga.

@BoSnerdley called it the Willie Sutton approach: you go where the money is. The money is in the blue states. The money is in the $9 trillion progressive welfare state that has been treating federal transfers like a punch bowl at an unsupervised fraternity party: bottomless, free for the taking, with nobody checking ID.

What makes the “Fraud Czar” designation especially interesting —beyond the extraordinarily satisfying Somalia beware!— is its structural elegance. It’s not a commission. It’s not a task force. It’s not a ‘working group’ empowered to study and recommend future best practices.

It’s a high-octane demolition machine with a named champion: the Vice President of the United States, who is personally accountable for a specific outcome, named on Truth Social in all-caps. JD’s entire future political career will now be defined by the measure of his anti-fraud success. (No pressure, JD.)

A Fox-11 Los Angeles headline, yesterday:

Kingdom of Fraud! The DOJ initiative is called “Operation Never Say Die,” which is funny on several levels. Don’t miss this: “The administration,” Fox reported, “is currently investigating whether state officials or insiders facilitated these schemes through ‘malpractice or malfeasance.’”

Bill Essayli, the Acting US Attorney who led Operation Never Say Die, said, “I call Gavin Newsom the ‘King of Fraud’ because he reigns over more fraud than we’ve seen in the history of the United States.”

Yesterday, Dr. Oz told Fox’s Brett Baier that CMS/Medicaid has also launched a massive anti-fraud campaign. Smells like coordination. “In the prior four years,” Oz said, “the governor of California had shut down four hospices. We just shut down seven in one night.”

CLIP: Dr. Oz explains massive anti-fraud initiative already underway (8:15).

That’s just seven in one day. “I’ve got news for you today, Brett — let’s make it clear to everybody — just in the last 10 weeks, we’ve already shut down 221 hospices in Los Angeles.” They are just getting started. “We believe that there are 1,800 hospices in California,” Oz explained. “We’re going to be able to shut down, we hope, approximately half of them.”

How many of the remaining ones can survive under increased oversight remains to be seen.

So, in ten weeks, CMS has quietly pulled the plugs on 221 fake hospice outfits in Los Angeles alone— compared to only four canceled by Gavin Newsom in all of California over the last four years. And CMS plans to audit every single hospice in California by the end of the year.

Dr. Oz in ten weeks accomplished what Newsom couldn’t manage in an entire gubernatorial term. Though, to be fair, Newsom was busy running for president.

🔥 The first remarkable political insight is that Trump is reclaiming the healthcare issue for Republicans. For decades, Democrats campaigned by terrorizing seniors, claiming “Republicans want to take away your Medicare and push grandma over the cliff!”

But now, the roles have swapped. Democrats are defending a system rife with fraud while Republicans are trying to fix it.

Behold the new framing. Dr. Oz correctly explained, “This is critical. If these corrupt fraudsters are willing to steal your money, they will steal your health. They’ll steal your life.” In other words, the fraudsters are stealing money that should be used to care for vulnerable senior citizens. “Hospice owners are willing to throw away the benefits that these older folks should have — and they die because they don’t realize they’ve been tricked into signing up on hospice they never wanted.”

Seniors should be scared of Somali pirates.

The system teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, but President Trump is rescuing it. “The president saved Medicaid,” Dr. Oz explained. “The president came into office with a proposed additional expenditure of $5.4 trillion in Medicaid alone. We were becoming a big health care system with a small country attached.”

Remember— anything that can’t continue forever won’t. “If we don’t take care of these beautiful programs,” Oz said, “the crown jewels of our social incentive program, they will implode under the weight of the corruption that’s now being pushed on them.”

Dr. Oz is overseeing a sea-change in how CMS views fraud. “I found out that of the referrals we were getting, we were only acting on about a third. If you only act on a third of what detectives are telling you is fraud, you’re throwing away a lot of good intel, but also the detectives stop referring cases because they don’t think you’re serious.”

Those days are over. “I told my team I want 100% of their referrals acted on,” Dr. Oz promised.

🔥 Now let’s consider how the triple threat of Fraud Czar JD Vance’s Task Force, CMS’s war on fraud, and DOJ roundups like Operation Never Say Die might affect midterm politics. If you believe that fraudsters skew heavily Democratic, and that some not insubstantial amount of the money finds its way back into Democratic campaign coffers (one way or another), then big problems loom.

Ponder these questions. How many local, state, and federal officials on the left will be forced to retreat into defense mode instead of launching into campaign mode? How many must now be quiet little mice trying to stay out of the Task Force’s crosshairs? How much untracked money —the mother’s milk of politics— will be cut off and unavailable to the DNC?

We have already seen how the fraud flows through entire communities that are also political constituencies. The Minnesota meal fraud alone was $250M+, running through Somali community organizations that are also Democrat voter registration and turnout operations. Shutting down the fraud pipeline doesn’t just stop the money, it disrupts the infrastructure that doubles as political organizing.

Fraud money is cash-intensive by design. It doesn’t flow through ActBlue. It flows through community organizations, shell nonprofits, and so-called “outreach” programs that also happen to run voter drives. When Treasury starts flagging suspicious transactions and FinCEN is paying whistleblowers, that’s not just traditional law enforcement— it’s now military reconnaissance on the swampy informal economy that funds local Democratic politics in exactly the districts they need for midterm turnout.

Leftists have gamed the system for decades. Let me show you how the welfare-politics-fraud pipeline works.

🔥 A few years ago, Maine Governor Janet Mills awarded no-bid contracts to Gateway Community Services, a Somalian NGO that allegedly provided “community health outreach workers” to help Mainers (Mainiacs?) ‘navigate’ the state’s public health programs. Ostensibly, Gateway enrolled migrants in Medicaid and —required by the Clinton-Era National Voter Registration Act— also helpfully registered them to vote. As Democrats.

Headline from Gateway Pundit, January:

Whistleblowers alleged that Gateway Community Services’s Lewiston office served as a “headquarters” for the Community Organizing Alliance, which was tied to the Maine People’s Alliance— a far-left political group. It was all funded by Maine taxpayers, through Governor Mills’ no-bid contracts.

But that’s not all. The same NGO then also systematically defrauded Medicaid for millions. The organization also took donated funds meant for victims of the Lewiston mass shooting. Recently, its CEO fled to Somalia with money from a $700,000 PPP “loan.” Just yesterday, a connected billing company was ordered to repay $600,000+.

And Governor Mills is trying to block the federal investigation. Maine Wire, February 27th:

After a federal audit of Maine’s autism program in January, Dr. Oz bluntly noted, “one hundred percent of the claims examined had problems, and most troubling of all, Maine had never conducted a statewide review of its autism program.” The Wire reported, “top Mills allies have expressed fear over what outside investigations might turn up.” They should be afraid.

This week, the story took another bizarre turn, as Maine seems to be quietly throwing in the towel. Effective April 13, 2026 —only ten days hence— Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services will freeze new provider enrollment in four of MaineCare’s most heavily scrutinized programs. Maine Wire, two days ago:

In other words, they are now closing the barn doors after the horses have run down the hill, across the field, and into traffic. It is an admission against interest.

Now let’s summarize the story arc. Just looking at the one example — Gateway Community Services— you have a Somalian NGO getting no-bid contract awards from the state to politically organize for Democrats while enriching itself with fraudulent Medicare claims and PPP loans.

Meanwhile, Maine’s highest political office ran interference for them. Tell me you don’t believe money was flowing back to Maine’s Democrats. (But if so, don’t make me laugh too hard.)

Now, that happy era of easy money is all over. Dr. Oz is ratcheting up the pressure. The DOJ is coming right behind. The Task Force is talking about Maine. How many other Gateway Community Services will soon be forced to shut down, and how many of their CEOs will flee back to Somalia? How might that loss of community organizing affect Democrat turnout and registrations for the 2026 midterms?

We’re watching all three legs of the Democrats’ fundraising stool be sawn off: USAID, ActBlue, and charity/NGO fraud. Follow the money. The Democrats could be looking not just at a fundraising gap, but at a financial extinction event that would make the dinosaurs nod sympathetically.

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Let’s check in on the sneering intellectual titans over at The New York Times, a newspaper that arrogantly calls itself the official “Paper of Record,” which means it records things, much in the same way seismographs record earthquakes, except seismographs are occasionally accurate. The New York Post pounced, running a hilarious story about the Times’ latest gaffe, headlined “New York Times mocked for bungling meaning of NATO: ‘How embarrassing and sad.’”

Recently, the Times decided to do some hard-hitting journalism regarding President Trump and his feelings about NATO. Now, for those of you who did not attend an elite Ivy League journalism school, NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was formed after World War II by countries on both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean to stop the Soviet Union from taking over Europe and forcing everyone to wait in line for beets.

But in its infinite wisdom, the Times ran a humiliating headline in its actual, physical, printed-on-dead-trees, impossible-to-retcon edition that clumsily referred to NATO as the “North American Treaty Organization.” Self own.

Unintentionally, it was actually a brilliant geopolitical insight. For decades, we thought we were allied with places like Britain, France, and Germany. But it turns out, according to the Times, our primary military alliance is actually with Canada and Mexico. This makes total sense when you think about it. If that sneaky rascal Vladimir Putin ever tries to invade Saskatchewan, he must face the full wrath of the United States military, plus several heavily armed mounted moose deployed by the Canadians. (Mooses? Meece? Who knows.)

NATO was founded on April 4, 1949. Happy 77th birthday, NATO. The Times got you a misspelled card.

Naturally, social media reacted to this blunder with the kind of gentle, understanding forgiveness that the internet is famous for. Haha, just kidding! People mocked the Times remorselessly, pointing out that, for a publication constantly lecturing everybody else about misinformation, their storied editors seem to have a rather tenuous grasp on common acronyms.

Since it couldn’t stealth-edit a print-edition headline, the Times tweeted a bland correction, noting that NATO is, in fact, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and not a localized pact to defend Quebec’s strategic maple reserves.

But you have to wonder: how many editors, proofreaders, and highly paid executives looked at that headline and thought, “Ah, yes, the North American Treaty Organization. That sounds right. Send it to the printer!”

It’s like that annoying guy in a bar who stands up and begins, “I wrote my thesis on transatlantic security alliances, and I think it’s time someone explained to the American president exactly what the North American Treaty Organization does—”, and then somebody in the back yells, “ATLANTIC!”, and then everybody laughs and tells the guy to sit back down.

But beyond the sheer, glorious irony of elitist analysts lecturing us on an organization they can’t even name correctly, there is a deeper, more delicious irony here.

Consider the context. The Times was writing an article to warn us all about the grave danger of Donald Trump wanting to yank the United States out of Europe. And how did they illustrate this insightful point? By accidentally renaming the entire alliance to suggest it only involves North America.

They literally proved the President’s point for him. Trump has been arguing for years that Europe needs to handle its own backyard and that America shouldn’t be the world’s primary piggy bank for continental defense. The Times set out to write a piece saying, “No, Trump is wrong, we must stay deeply entangled in Europe forever!” And then their headline editors inadvertently hit send on the exact foreign policy Trump is advocating: a North American-only alliance.

It’s almost as if the people who spend their days telling us how to think don’t actually know very much, but their subconscious minds are finally starting to agree with the Bad Orange Man. But hey, what do I know? I’m just a coffee-drinking lawyer, not an international military strategist.

Next, I’m waiting for the Times to inform us that NASA stands for the North American Space Association. America first!

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Finally, enjoy President Trump’s encouraging and uplifting Easter Message:

CLIP: President Trump’s Oval Office Easter address (1:47).

“I’m proud to join with Christians across the country and around the world to celebrate the most glorious miracle in all of time — the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” the President said from the Resolute Desk. “Happy Easter to all. May God bless you. May God bless the United States of America.”

In a minor miracle, the corporate media didn’t immediately run furious complaints about the separation of Church and State. Even though President Trump unapologetically said, “to be a great nation, you must have religion, and you must have God.” And even though he correctly called the Resurrection “the most glorious miracle in all of time.”

Corporate media’s silence was the most optimistic sign of all this Easter season. They must have realized that complaining about an unapologetically Christian Easter address is a losing issue. We sure have come a long way since 2020, when churches were shuttered on Easter, and since 2024, when Biden declared Easter to be the “Transgender Day of Visibility.”

A nation heals. Let us remember the real message of Easter— renewal, resurrection, and the hope of eternal life.

Have a wonderful weekend and a joyful Easter Sunday! C&C will be closed tomorrow to observe the holiday. So let’s all meet back here on Monday, to compare notes and enjoy an all-new roundup of essential news and commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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