☕️ SANDALLESS ☙ Saturday, May 23, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Media smears Gabbard on her way out; the DOJ drops a $90M Medicaid hammer on Minnesota; Colbert's finale loses to COPS reruns; Kennedy's latest PREP Act declaration is opposite of bot claims; more.
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Time for the weekend edition roundup: Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation from DNI and the media’s ghoulish smear campaign hijacking her husband’s cancer diagnosis — plus the strategic “change-agent handoff” to career intel hand Aaron Lukas; DOJ’s spectacular takedown in Minnesota where 15 defendants got indicted in $90M of Medicaid fraud schemes (one fled in flip-flops out of a 4th-story window, carrying his other sandal); the Stephen Colbert Late Show finale flopping with 6.74M viewers — losing to COPS reruns and pulling barely an eighth of Johnny Carson’s farewell; and a careful walk-through of Secretary Kennedy’s targeted hantavirus PREP Act declaration that bot-fueled MAHA panic completely misread — it’s one Japanese antiviral pill, one cruise ship outbreak, voluntary use only, 10 weeks, and that’s it.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Tulsi Gabbard is out at DNI for the worst conceivable reason. The Wall Street Journal paid her the unintentional compliment of smearing her in its headline, which means she was effective: “Intelligence Chief Tulsi Gabbard’s Resignation Caps a Tumultuous Tenure.” Hey WSJ dummies— Tulsi wasn’t hired to keep the peace; she was hired to kick the tables over.
In a short but graceful resignation letter, Tulsi Gabbard explained that her husband, Abraham, was diagnosed with “rare bone cancer,” and she is prioritizing her ailing husband over a thankless and demanding DNI job. That’s it. But corporate media, drunk on its low trust levels and never missing a chance to enhance a tragedy, saddled up a possé to hang her in the headlines.
Before I continue: We pray for Tulsi, her husband, and his family, and for miraculous healing as they navigate the wreckage of a mysterious and inexplicable pandemic of rare cancers. Hopefully, Abraham has access to out-of-the-box thinking.
President Trump praised her and wished the couple well. “Unfortunately, after having done a great job, Tulsi Gabbard will be leaving the Administration on June 30th,” the President began. “Tulsi has done an incredible job, and we will miss her.”
Corporate media dove into the Charlie Kirk effect. Ghoulish trad-media reporters took the opportunity of Gabbard’s personal tragedy to deploy the standard resignation template: She was fired for crossing President Trump. They couldn’t bring themselves to simply report “DNI resigns to care for gravely ill spouse; President thanks her and says she did a great job.” Instead, they used the occasion of a cancer diagnosis as a news hook to recycle every grievance, rumor, and secondhand gripe they could dredge up from sources too timid to attach their names.
As ever, they don’t have a single scrap of evidence. All the stories were sourced on cowardly anonymous gripers and gossipers: “several officials,” “people familiar,” “current and former intelligence officials,” etc., with no way for readers to test credibility, motives, or even whether the sources even exist as described.
Meanwhile, the one person whose view of her performance actually matters —the President— goes on record in exactly the opposite tone you’d expect if he thought she’d failed him or had demanded her resignation. Trump isn’t shy; when he’s mad at someone, we hear about it in all caps.
To be clear: this is a man who once live-tweeted his own Secretary of State’s firing before the Secretary of State even knew about it. Subtlety is not a known feature of the Trump communications suite.
The media should be ashamed of themselves. We really don’t hate them nearly enough, and we still trust them too much.
🔥 If we do want to look for something operating behind the scenes, Tulsi’s resignation follows a now-familiar template: the change-agent handoff. Similar to how Pam Bondi resigned to make way for assistant AG Todd Blanche (Trump’s former personal lawyer who could have never been confirmed), President Trump announced that Aaron Lukas, Tulsi’s principal deputy, will become acting DNI.
Lukas has been serving as principal deputy DNI since 2025. Unlike Tulsi, who lacked any prior intelligence background, he is a career intel hand, an ex‑CIA chief of station, and the ODNI’s chief of staff during Trump’s first term. It is nearly certain that Lukas was the muscular arm and architect behind Tulsi’s reforms.
In other words, since Tulsi came to ODNI, lacking experience but having broad objectives, to cut headcount, depoliticize, de-DEI, declassify, kill the censorship complex, the natural division of labor would have been: Tulsi set the direction, and Lukas designed and enforced the plans.
So what I see —once again— is Tulsi Gabbard as the change agent. Gabbard was the visible disruptor, sent in to swing a wrecking ball at an intelligence bureaucracy that had spent years dabbling in censorship, narrative‑policing, and political espionage. Fixing that, especially the firings, made everyone hate her.
Lukas is the next‑phase change agent: a 20‑year CIA veteran and former ODNI chief of staff who already knows where every lever is, where the bodies are buried, and who can translate Gabbard’s broad mandate —cut the fat, de‑weaponize, declassify— into durable structural changes from inside the machine, but without the Phase One baggage.
Trump’s announcement that Tulsi’s own principal deputy will now serve as acting DNI hardly looks like any repudiation of her agenda. Instead, it seems precisely like the next phase of the same project, now led by a trusted insider who can finish the work she started. In short— the opposite of the media’s fake narrative.
We thank Tulsi for her selfless service and wish her and her husband the very best.
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Speaking of next phases, the War on Fraud had a very good Thursday. Yesterday, CBS reported, “DOJ brings charges against 15 in $90 million Minnesota Medicaid fraud schemes.”
The day began with the DOJ’s announcement that Aimee Bock, 45, the director of Feeding Our Future, which stole $242 million in pandemic-era ‘charitable relief’ money, was sentenced to 41.5 years in prison. At some point, if this kind of thing continues, people might start getting the idea that the whole pandemic was a scam. But I digress.
For what it’s worth, the 66 people now convicted in the Feeding Our Future scheme spent their haul on luxury cars, waterfront properties, and lavish vacations— which is, I suppose, one way to run a children’s nutrition nonprofit.
The DOJ then announced 15 more high-profile indictments, in combined frauds alleged to total $90 million. One of the indictees fled, dramatically leaping out of a fourth-story window —in flip-flops!— and hobbling away under the unblinking eyes of security cameras, carrying one of his sandals in a very humiliating fashion.
His name, which I am not making up, is Muhammad Omar. FBI Director Patel posted the security footage of Omar limping away from the scene and asked the public to help find him. The FBI nabbed him inside of two hours, presumably due to his new mobility disability, for which I am sure he will be billing the federal government soon. (Note to future fraudsters: a fourth-floor balcony exit strategy works better when you can actually fly.)
The charges involve seven different state-managed Medicaid programs that have been “systematically pilfered by fraudsters who treated Minnesota-run programs as their personal piggy bank,” explained Colin McDonald, the assistant attorney general for the new national fraud enforcement division.
McDonald, who allowed himself a little literary license and obviously has a flair for the dramatic, warned future defendants: “Eat, drink, and be merry today, because your days of frolicking and freedom are numbered.”
The cases all follow a certain pattern, officials said, in which the suspects billed the state for fake programs and services they never provided. They would then spend the money on real estate, cars, jewelry, vacations, and other luxuries.
The signs of fraud were everywhere if anyone wanted to look. One autism program saw reimbursements of just $600,000 in 2018, and skyrocketed to $400 million in 2026— a stunning 667-fold increase in seven years— truly explosive growth that, to be clear, is not normally how quickly legitimate autism therapy programs grow.
HHS Secretary Kennedy, who attended the announcement, said the charges represented “the largest autism fraud bust in American history,” and is part of “the most aggressive anti-fraud effort in modern American history.”
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” confirmed Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Dr. Oz was also on hand as CMS Director. If you had told me five years ago that the TV doctor would one day be standing at a federal podium announcing Medicaid fraud busts, I would have asked you to please stop talking to me.
In the autism scam, Minnesota parents —largely from the Somali community— were paid kickbacks up to $1,500 per child to enroll their kids in federally-funded autism programs. Two defendants, Shamso Ahmed Hassan and Hanaan Mursal Yusuf, ran a $46.6 million scheme: they diagnosed healthy children with autism, paid parents to bring their kids by the ‘office,’ and then billed for services never provided— depriving other kids who actually needed help of care they never received.
Another home-healthcare program for seniors and the mentally ill was described as being designed to have “low barriers to entry and minimal records requirements for reimbursement that combined to make the Program susceptible to fraud.” A different defendant, Ahmed Othman Kadar, was charged with defrauding a program for disabled individuals living independently. One of his ‘clients’ —a man who required around-the-clock care— was found dead, unattended, the day before Kadar’s company billed Medicaid for providing him services, apparently posthumously.
In other words, the state of Minnesota built a swimming pool, filled it with taxpayer money, and left a small sign in the grass nearby that said “Please Do Not Steal This Money.” It’s shocking that it didn’t work.
🔥 All but three of the new defendants are Minnesotans. The three exceptions were all Pennsylvia residents who came to Minnesota to get in on the fraud, which the DOJ calls “fraud tourism.” Fraud tourism is like regular tourism, except instead of visiting the Mall of America, you visit the Medicaid billing portal, and instead of a souvenir t-shirt, you take home a federal indictment.
The DOJ noted that the Housing Stabilization Services program — designed to help homeless people find housing — grew from a projected $2.6 million annually to over $104 million in 2024, at which point Minnesota just pulled the plug and shut it down. Nothing says “program working as intended” like having to cancel them due to pervasive theft.
Minnesota’s problems are just getting started. “We are adding strike force prosecutors to our Midwest health care strike force team,” added McDonald. “That will put additional prosecutors on the ground here in Minnesota to work for the American people.” The DOJ’s press release explained, “the exposure of widespread fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid program illustrates the insufficient nature of state enforcement alone, and the necessity of a whole-of-government approach.”
Translation: Minnesota had years to fix this. They didn’t. The feds are now moving in with a whole new department, 15 new prosecutors, and a local strike force, and U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen put it plainly: “We have more fraud prosecutors and law enforcement officers on the task than ever before. Stay tuned.”
The New York Times and WaPo ignored the fraud story, preferring instead to run multiple smear stories about Tulsi’s resignation. My working hypothesis is that they are terrified by the implications. Specifically, the implication that years of “compassionate” blue-state social welfare spending were, in significant part, a self-service buffet for organized crime. That story tends to complicate the narrative. So it simply doesn’t exist.
Except here!
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The reviews are in on the most important cultural event of the week, and by that I obviously mean the final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. In what I can only imagine must have been a joke of its own, CNN reported, “Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ finale sets a weeknight ratings record.” The first clue is they had to qualify the record as “weeknight.” Just wait, and prepare to laugh.
CNN explained that Colbert’s grande finale show —featuring Paul McCartney singing “Hello Goodbye” (or it might have been Hillary Clinton, it’s getting hard to tell them apart), a parade of annoying ‘A-list’ celebrities, and an animated wormhole literally sucking the host into oblivion— drew 6.74 million viewers.
CNN called it “a ratings record with some caveats.” For perspective, David Letterman’s 2015 farewell drew 13.76 million. Johnny Carson’s legendary 1992 finale pulled 55 million. The M*A*S*H finale in 1983 drew 105.9 million. COPS reruns on AMC garnered 7.3 million eyeballs. So, a ten-year-old show about chasing shirtless suspects through Florida parking lots at night outperformed the most self-important man in late-night TV.
Liberals love comparing Colbert to Johnny Carson. But Colbert only managed to attract roughly one-eighth of Carson’s farewell audience, which coincidentally is also the two men’s comparative humor ratio. And don’t even get me started on Colbert’s shameless vaccine hucksterism, including the most contemptible clip ever aired in human history.
President Trump, who has never been accused of subtlety, posted on Truth Social: “Stephen Colbert’s firing from CBS was the ‘Beginning of the End’ for untalented, nasty, highly overpaid, not funny, and very poorly rated Late Night Television Hosts. Others, of even less talent, to soon follow. May they all Rest in Peace!” He also reposted somebody’s AI video showing the President throwing Colbert in the trash can.
This will be a radical concept to some people, but if there is any political influence related to Colbert’s cancellation, it almost certainly has more to do with Paramount’s new ownership than whatever Trump is posting on Truth Social, especially anything he might have said recently. Colbert’s cancellation was announced last July. (CBS just had to let his latest contract run out.)
Vanity Fair, in a grotesquely fawning farewell story, mistakenly thinking it was praising Colbert, said, “His preference was to rely on his gut rather than knowledge.” Apart from the obvious issue raised by Colbert’s curling his lip at ‘knowledge,’ the bigger problem with that is: nobody wants to see what comes out of Stephen Colbert’s guts.
Last year, after CBS settled a lawsuit with Trump for $16 million, Colbert sneeringly called it a “big, fat bribe.” (An example of not relying on knowledge.) Criticizing your boss is one of those bold moves that either results in an immediate pink slip or reassignment to the Nome, Alaska division.
Whatever the reason, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, Late Night with Stephen Colbert is dead. Ding, dong!. RIP (2015-2026).
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It’s time to defuse another MAHA fracture narrative. Yesterday, Secretary Kennedy, apparently a glutton for punishment, tweeted that he’d signed a targeted PREP Act declaration for hantavirus treatment, and parts of the MAHA-verse exploded like a spark in a gunpowder locker. Here’s Kennedy’s admittedly bold tweet:
MAHA’s enemies instantly sprang to work, using their bot accounts to convince MAHA people that Kennedy had, once again, betrayed the movement he started. He’s launching another legally protected pandemic! The false narrative quickly gained momentum, and given the setup, you can imagine the furious knee-jerk reactions, if you haven’t already seen some of them.
Here are just three examples:
As a reminder for anyone who missed the last few posts: the MV Hondius is a small, Dutch-flagged expedition cruise ship that left Argentina on April 1st, carrying 147 people from 23 countries. Before the buffet ran out of bratwurst, 11 passengers and crew had contracted ‘Andes’ hantavirus— the only strain of hantavirus known to spread person-to-person (after ‘prolonged contact’). Three elderly passengers died. The U.S. returned 18 passengers two weeks ago for observation. There is currently no FDA-approved vaccine or treatment for the disease.
Granted, there is virtually no threat to anyone who didn’t take the cruise or have prolonged contact with a cruiser. So the only people who could possibly benefit from a PREP Act declaration, which facilitates use of unapproved medical treatments by limiting liability, is that small group. Keep that in mind.
MAHA is like a passionate Latin lover. Like a Latin lover, it gets passionately angry at the drop of a pin without bothering to ask for an explanation. Thus, nobody bothered to actually read the PREP Act declaration Kennedy signed before they tweeted how it was “betrayal of the worst kind” and called Kennedy “controlled opposition.”
Well, I read it. And here is the link so you can read it for yourself. Don’t just take my word for it.
Let’s cruise through a few important facts that nobody bothered to notice:
Kennedy’s PREP Declaration is extremely narrow and targeted. This is not a broad PREP Act shield for all Andes virus countermeasures, vaccines, treatments, or general research.
In fact, it only covers one specific drug: favipiravir— an existing broad-spectrum antiviral originally approved in Japan for influenza in 2014, which has shown promise against hantavirus strains in lab studies.
It is not an mRNA product. It is not even a vaccine. It is a pill, which has been used experimentally for influenza, Ebola, and covid. The UK also flew in supplies from Japan as a precautionary measure for its own exposed passengers. It is, in other words, the most boring possible drug Kennedy could have chosen.
It is strictly limited to this specific outbreak response. In other words, any liability protections apply only to the voluntary administration of favipiravir —in other words, only for people who want it— and it still only applies to:
People possibly exposed during the recent M/V Hondius cruise ship outbreak, or
Their close contacts. That’s it.
The declaration has a very short duration: It is effective from May 2nd through July 18th (roughly 2.5 months), plus an extra month to dispose of stockpiles.
There was zero mention of vaccines (mRNA, DNA, or otherwise), ventilators, broad Andes virus countermeasures, or anything beyond favipiravir in this cruise-ship context.
Again, the declaration is bound to this one incident/response to the MV Hondius breakout, one specific named drug that is not a vaccine, and the only mandate is that it must be voluntary— and nothing more. In other words, the entire declaration covers one drug, one outbreak, one ship’s worth of passengers and their close contacts, on a voluntary basis, for about ten weeks.
It is literally the opposite of the totally open-ended Covid PREP Act declaration. If we’d had a declaration like this during covid, everything would probably have been fine.
People are going to call me a sellout for writing this. But, look. Nobody hates the PREP Act more than I do. I am literally suing the federal government over it right now. (And I have gotten further than anyone else has, so far.) I want to end the PREP Act, or at minimum, require meaningful compensation for injuries.
And I am just as frustrated as anyone that Kennedy hasn’t yet reversed the covid PREP Act declaration yet. I had hoped he’d do it on day one. But here’s the thing: that particular complaint is not new.
So, please. Come on. He issued a PREP Act declaration for a Japanese pill that he presumably thinks might help a handful of people trapped in this limited outbreak; an outbreak that (so far as I know) nobody is calling fake. Would it make a difference if the Hondius passengers now in quarantine said they wanted it? How is this any kind of “betrayal?” To whom? Of what? I’m open to hearing the argument, but I just don’t see it.
There is a different betrayal, though. Whoever ginned up this fake narrative and fueled all the hot takes is the one betraying MAHA. They are trying to fracture the MAGA/MAHA coalition. They are the betraying traitors.
Everyone who overreacted and posted too quickly before reading the actual declaration, please also post an apology to Secretary Kennedy, in full or in part. That will help the rest of us figure out who all the untrustworthy folks are.
In the meantime, if you see any one-shoed Somalians limping your way, you should probably call the hotline. See you soon.
Have a wonderful weekend! Come back Monday morning for even more enlightening essential news and energizing caffeinated commentary.
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America will lament the loss of Gabbard...she was a warrior with a pure heart!
I am looking forward to phase two of the fraud indictments, the part where all the defendants testify that government officials, including Tm Walz, were in on the action through laundered kickbacks. There simply is no other explanation for how this fraud was allowed to occur at such a scale for such a long period of time. Politicians had nothing to gain by allowing this scam unless they were in on the action. Period.