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Colin McDonald’s Latest Fraud Fraud
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One of my latest Xitter hobbies is to try to counter-flood the flood of propaganda Trump’s fraudulent Fraud Task Force puts out.
As I’ve laid out, this is a three-fold effort:
- Todd Blanche has shifted resources away from fighting white collar crime, including fraud, into investigating far smaller fraud in government programs, effectively defunding bigger white collar prosecutions to fund an effort targeting poorer, browner people.
- Based on mere allegations, Trump is defunding government services generally, focusing on Blue states.
- The whole thing is a non-stop propaganda campaign demonizing brown people or immigrants, which plays out against a background of Trump stealing iconic buildings and landmarks in DC and demanding kickbacks from corporations and foreign countries.
Probably as part of a midterms campaign strategy (or possibly as a result of Aakash Singh’s promotion to PADAG), all the boys involved in this fraudulent Fraud Task Force have stepped up their flood of propaganda.
It’s rather insane against the background of DOJ’s appeal of the ruling prohibiting from immunizing Trump’s tax crimes, the the news about Don Jr’s wedding, and Trump’s frantic efforts to steal the Kennedy Center.
And amid this flood of propaganda, the propagandists keep invoking really ridiculous examples of fraud — like the time several people paid upwards of $94 an hour spent their time boasting about a SNAP fraud case charging just $277 of fraud.
Yesterday, Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald — also paid $94 an hour — kept tweeting and tweeting about fraud that was far less spectacular than Trump’s hour by hour attempt to steal the Kennedy Center — like this announcement of card-skimming charges from Northern Alabama US Attorney Phillip Williams Jr (the announcement included his picture).
From the announcement, you might think these charges were recent and reflected a great deal of gains, particularly given the way both McDonald and Williams talked about the billion dollars Americans lose to card-skimming each year.
But when you read through the complaint, indictment, and docket, you see that:
- The news here is the arraignment, which in some places takes place shortly before trial; the pair were arrested back in March, indicted in June, and one of them was actually arraigned in August.
- About half of the skimmers — which targeted stores like Dollar General — had been found by the stores.
- The amounts of “bulk cash” that Feds found when they arrested the perpetrators were modest: $8,215 seized from a car and $10,215, possibly from a home (though that is likely duplicative).
- Thus far, their Romanian status has not been charged (though the woman was turned back at the Mexico border in 2018).
- Any tie to SNAP may be secondary.
It’s definitely useful detective work, work that requires Fed involvement (in this case, Secret Service), and this prosecution may lead to a larger network. But it is not a billion dollars. It is, at most $18,430.
McDonald and Williams have wildly oversold the import of this.
And in the background, as they were boasting about their $18,430 bust, Donald Trump was spending his day not resolving the Iran War nor spiking petroleum prices — which have caused Americans to spend $100 billion more because of Trump’s illegal war — but instead trying to find some way to close or steal the Kennedy Center, effectively robbing taxpayers of the $250 million appropriated to renovate it, the $100 million lost after he slapped his name on it, and potentially even the $691 million in assets of the Center, to say nothing of the damage that Trump’s tantrum has done to neighborhood businesses.
“The Kennedy Center is in many ways the anchor of the community,” says Jim Malec, an advisory neighborhood commissioner whose district includes the Foggy Bottom and West End neighborhoods. Malec has heard with alarm plans to close the venue — and threats from the administration that it might be demolished if Trump’s plans for it are blocked. “The amount of resources that would be lost with a closure or, God forbid, something crazier would just be catastrophic.”
There is no universe in which those card-skimmers in Missisippi and Alabama should be a greater focus of the guy, McDonald, whose sole job is to hunt down fraud, because Trump’s crimes are not only doing far more damage, but they’re doing all that damage in plain sight, just down the road from where McDonald is sitting, spending his days fraudulently claiming $18,430 is a billion dollars.
The time for accountability has arrived!! McDonald tweeted some more, drawing his $94/an hour salary paid by struggling taxpayers to tweet tweet tweet.
And the way you start that accountability is to treat McDonald’s charade for what it is: part of the con.
Update: In yet more proof that Colin McDonald is a fraud, here he is chumming up with a suspect in a $10M theft of Medicaid funds for political gain.
To have any credibility at all, McDonald would need to be subpoenaing Moody, not RTing her.
Update: More hobbying.
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