"Taxpayers in Maine have been bilked out of millions of dollars from the state's Medicaid program, according to a whistleblower who in an interview with NewsNation likened the case to a burgeoning scandal in Minnesota, where people in the Somali community are accused of defrauding taxpayers of $1 billion meant for social services. 

"The whistleblower, Christopher Bernardini, describes himself as a former 'billing guru' of Gateway Community Services -- a health services contractor that he says defrauded Maine's Medicaid program./Bernardini worked for Gateway from May 2018 until April 2025 as a program coordinator.

"Bernardini alleges that Gateway oversaw a system in which false records were filed about client visits. He alleges an electronic monitoring system designed to track movements was manipulated to make it seem like field staff were visiting low income and disabled clients, when in reality they did not come within miles of the clients' homes.

"They then charged taxpayers for providing services that were never performed, according to Bernardini."

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"On the campaign trail, Vice President JD Vance repeatedly chastised the Biden administration for allegedly losing track of some 320,000 minors who had crossed the border unaccompanied. 'Our government, under the policies of Kamala Harris, has lost thousands of innocent children to sex trafficking, to drug trafficking, to human trafficking,' Vance said.

"One year later, the fate of most of those children remains unknown. While the Trump administration has all but stopped the crush of migrants that occurred during Biden's term, neither the government nor the nonprofits that were largely responsible for resettling this vulnerable population of unaccompanied minors have been able to tell RealClearInvestigations where they are living.

"Experts say it's likely that the overwhelming majority of unaccompanied minors remain off the grid because their parents, guardians, and caregivers do not want to draw the attention of immigration authorities. But they also acknowledge the likelihood that some of the migrant minors have been picked up by human traffickers and forced into exploitative labor and sexual roles -- a criminal trend that's on the rise in the U.S."

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"The inspector general responsible for scrutinizing U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan has detailed the billions of dollars wasted by the U.S. government during the 20-year war in the country and concluded that the arsenal of U.S.-provided military weaponry that was left behind now forms the 'core' of the Taliban's own military machine.

"A massive number of U.S.-made and U.S.-supplied weapons and military facilities were left behind in Afghanistan as a result of President Joe Biden's troop withdrawal announcement in April 2021, which resulted in the dissolution of the Afghan military, a chaotic U.S. evacuation, and a Taliban takeover in August 2021.

"The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) issued its 'final forensic audit report' this week more than four years after the U.S. withdrawal and evacuation from the country, concluding that 'these U.S. taxpayer-funded equipment, weapons, and facilities have formed the core of the Taliban security apparatus.' SIGAR said in its final report that it will close its doors at the end of January 2026 as a result of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2025."

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"President Donald Trump unveiled plans Wednesday to slash the strict Biden-era fuel efficiency standards that he has long lambasted as an 'EV mandate.'

"'We are officially terminating Joe Biden's ridiculously burdensome -- horrible, actually -- CAFE standards that imposed expensive restrictions,' Trump told reporters at the Oval Office, using the acronym for Corporate Average Fuel Economy.

"He was joined by the CEOs of major American automakers Ford and Stellantis, who praised the president's decision to drastically loosen regulations on gas-powered vehicles.

"Under former President Joe Biden, CAFE standards were significantly tightened to require automakers to increase the fuel efficiency of passenger cars and light trucks to 50 miles per gallon by 2031."

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"The Biden Administration okayed Special Counsel Jack Smith's subpoenaing congressional phone records knowing the subpoenas were unconstitutional, emails released last week revealed. That same trove of documents also established the illegality of the nondisclosure orders issued by the courts to prevent the telecommunication providers from alerted the members of Congress of the unconstitutional seizure of their toll records.

"Last week, as the nation turned its attention ahead to travel and turkey, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released another two dozen documents related to the Arctic Frost investigation into President Donald Trump and Special Counsel Jack Smith's subpoenaing of congressional phone records. A May 17, 2023 email from the Biden Administration's Department of Justice to Smith's team proves explosive, with the Public Integrity Section 'concur[ring] in the subpoenas for toll records for the identified Members of Congress.'

"This email may represent the first public evidence that the Biden Administration's DOJ knew the special counsel's office planned to subpoena congressional Republicans. But the scandal is even greater because in 'concurring' in Smith's use of subpoenas to target communications of members of Congress, the DOJ's Public Integrity Section expressly acknowledged the unconstitutionality of the proposed course of action."

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"New York state has released nearly 7,000 known illegal migrant criminals without notifying ICE since President Trump took office -- including killers, sexual predators and a maniac booted from the US eight times who attacked an Ithaca cop with a machete, The Post has learned.

"The rap sheets behind the rogue's gallery include 29 homicides, thousands of assaults and hundreds of burglaries, robberies, drug offenses, weapons offenses and sexual predatory offenses, the Department of Homeland Security revealed Monday.

"All of them were protected by state and local sanctuary laws that dramatically restrict how local authorities can communicate with ICE, DHS says."

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"The New Venture Fund (NVF), a behemoth left-wing dark money charity, wired $2.3 million last year to the law firm that dozens of Democratic prosecutors have contracted to spearhead high-stakes climate litigation against oil companies, according to its latest tax filings. At the same time, it bankrolled a group that advises judges on how to handle those cases.

"The NVF's support for the San Francisco-based Sher Edling isn't new -- in fact, it has funneled nearly $11 million to the firm through a nondescript fund it has fiscally sponsored since 2021. In its latest tax filings, however, the NVF also reported donating $1.3 million to the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), a D.C.-based legal nonprofit that trains judges on how to handle the very type of litigation Sher Edling is pursuing on behalf of Democratic states and cities.

"It's the first time the NVF has contributed to the ELI and it signals the latest escalation in the fund's efforts to target the oil industry through the judicial system. It also raises ethics questions about whether the fund is attempting to stack the deck by funding both the lawyers leading the cases -- which are aimed at bankrupting America's largest oil companies -- and trainings that could sway judges to side with those lawyers."

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"Wishing you and yours a safe and Happy Thanksgiving!"

"Democrats released a video last Tuesday purporting to support U.S. service members and intelligence officers who would defy illegal orders, but some of those Democrats have also made thinly-veiled threats that U.S. troops and spies will be in legal jeopardy if they don't defy such alleged orders.

"The half dozen Democrats from the House and Senate -- five of them veterans of the U.S. military and one a former CIA analyst -- released a video that argued that 'you must refuse illegal orders' and professed to servicemembers that 'we have your back.

"But a number of the Democrats in the video have strongly implied that troops who don't disobey orders that the Democrats believe to be illegal could face criminal prosecution, with the Democrats conjuring warnings tied to prior prosecutions of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, of U.S. Marines in the film A Few Good Men, of troops stationed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and of soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam, implying current U.S. troops could face the same fate."

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"California is facing a perfect storm in finances, with a crippling deficit and a declining tax base. Now, a study of IRS data by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation found that California is losing a taxpayer roughly every minute, as states like Florida, Texas, and North Carolina attract new residents due to lower taxes and higher standards of living.

"In comparison, Florida gains a new taxpayer every 2 minutes and 9 seconds while Texas gains one every 2 minutes and 53 seconds.

"The result has been a bonanza for Florida, which is now collecting $4 billion more per year for its budget."

Read the entire article here.