April 3 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Friday said Vice President JD Vance will focus on investigating fraud in Democratic-run states in his new role as “fraud czar.”
“His focus will be ‘EVERYWHERE,’ but primarily in those Blue States,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, singling out California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine and New York.
Trump said “raids have already started” in Los Angeles, where on Thursday federal prosecutors announced that eight people had been charged in separate cases for trying to defraud the health care system out of $50 million.
Prosecutors said those cases were pursued in coordination with Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Vance touted the arrests on a social media post on Thursday, saying the “task force isn’t wasting any time cracking down on fraud.”
Trump signed an executive order last month launching a national task force led by Vance aimed at proving the president’s claims that federal funds intended for social-welfare programs are being stolen in some states.
(Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto and Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Michelle Nichols)
