GOP-led panel targets ‘widespread fraud’ in federal COVID-19 aid
WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Wednesday began their promised aggressive oversight of the Biden administration, focusing on what watchdogs described as “indications of widespread fraud” in federal coronavirus aid programs initiated under former President Donald Trump.
Over 1,000 people have pleaded guilty or have been convicted on federal charges of defrauding myriad COVID-19 relief programs established by Congress in the early days of the pandemic. More than 600 other people and entities face federal fraud charges.
But that’s just the start, according to investigators who testified as the House Oversight and Accountability Committee held its first hearing in the new Congress on fraud and waste in federal pandemic spending. Congress approved about $4.6 trillion in spending from six coronavirus relief laws, beginning in March 2020, when Trump was in the White House and including the $1.9 trillion package that Democrats passed in the first months of the Biden presidency.
“We owe it to the American people to get to the bottom of the greatest theft of American taxpayer dollars in history,” said Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the committee chairman.
Gene Dodaro, head of the Government Accountability Office, told lawmakers that it will be some time before the full extent of fraud is known. The inspector general for the Small Business Administration has more than 500 ongoing investigations involving loan programs designed to help businesses meet operating expenses during the pandemic. The Labor Department’s internal watchdog continues to open at least 100 unemployment insurance fraud investigations each week.
Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general who chairs the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told lawmakers that the amount of fraud and misspent funds is “in the tens of billions of dollars.”
White House spokesman Ian Sams issued a statement after the hearing saying that President Joe Biden has empowered inspectors general to monitor COVID19 relief programs, secured money to strengthen anti-fraud measures and appointed a chief pandemic prosecutor.
Haiti assassination: Four key suspects in the killing of Haiti’s president appeared for the first time in U.S. federal court Wednesday to face accusations that they plotted and participated in his assassination.
Haitian Americans James Solages, Joseph Vincent and Christian Emmanuel Sanon and Colombian citizen German Rivera Garcia appeared calm as they entered a federal court in Miami wearing prisoner uniforms with their hands and ankles shackled.
Solages, 37, Vincent, 57, and Rivera Garcia, 44, were among the first arrested after Jovenel Moise was shot 12 times at his private home near the capital of Port-auPrince on July 7, 2021. All three are accused of conspiring to commit murder or kidnapping outside the U.S. and providing material support and resources resulting in death.
Sanon, a pastor, doctor and failed businessman, 54, is charged with conspiring to smuggle goods from the United States and causing export information not to be filed, as well as with smuggling goods from the United
States and providing unlawful export information.
Mass transit shooting: A man “randomly” brandishing a firearm shot three people, killing one, in a Wednesday morning rampage in the nation’s capital.
The shooter is in police custody and has not been publicly identified.
The violence began shortly after 9 a.m. when the man began brandishing a weapon and confronting passengers on a city bus in the southeast area of the city. The man pursued one of the passengers off the bus and shot them in the leg, Metropolitan Police Department Executive Assistant Chief Ashan Benedict said.
The man then went down the escalator of a nearby Metro stop, confronted someone and shot that person in the leg. Both victims were recovering in local hospitals.
The armed man then went to the train platform and began confronting a woman
there. A Metro employee tried to intervene and was killed by a gunshot. The identity of the slain worker has not been released.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reaffirmed Wednesday that Turkey won’t allow Sweden to join NATO as long as the Scandinavian country permits protests desecrating Islam’s holy book to take place.
Turkey, which had been holding off approving Sweden and Finland’s membership in the alliance, has been infuriated by a series of separate demonstrations in Stockholm. In one case a solitary anti-Islam activist burned the Quran outside the Turkish Embassy, while in an unconnected protest an effigy of Erdogan was hanged.
“Sweden, don’t even bother! As long as you allow my holy book, the Quran, to be burned and torn, and you do so together with your security forces, we will not say ‘yes’ to your entry into
NATO accession:
NATO,” Erdogan said in a speech.
Before that, Ankara had been pressing Sweden and Finland to crack down on exiled members of Kurdish and other groups it sees as terrorists.
Authorities in Western Australia on Wednesday recovered a tiny but dangerous radioactive capsule that fell off a truck while being transported along a highway in January.
Officials said the pea-sized capsule was found south of Newman on the Great Northern Highway. It was detected by a search vehicle in which special equipment picked up radiation emitting from the capsule.
The capsule contains the Cesium-137 ceramic source, used in radiation gauges, which emits dangerous amounts of radiation, equivalent of receiving 10 X-rays in an hour.
It may cause skin burns and prolonged exposure could cause cancer.
Radioactive capsule:
Winter’s wrath continues: A deadly storm system lashed a large swath of the southern U.S. with bands of sleet and snow for a third day on Wednesday, grounding an additional 2,200 flights and making already treacherous driving conditions worse.
Watches and warnings were issued from western Texas through Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, and into Tennessee and Mississippi.
Several rounds of mixed precipitation, including freezing rain and sleet, were in store for many areas throughout the day, forecasters said.
By late Wednesday morning, 2,200 U.S. flights had been canceled, including three-quarters of the flights at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and more than two-thirds at Dallas Love Field, according to the flight tracking service FlightAware.com.
Flights were also canceled at other airports, including in San Antonio and the Texas capital of Austin.