Welcome back to False Flag! The feud between Candace Owens and Laura Loomer has somehow heated up even more in the time since I wrote about it last week, with Loomer dropping more details on Owens’s husband’s drunk-driving crash. In response, Owens accused Loomer and her fiancé of illegally accessing a vehicle-registration database to prove Owens’s family owns the car in question, a charge Loomer denies. Former Daily Wire CEO and Owens nemesis Jeremy Boreing entered the fray on his podcast Tuesday, saying that Owens’s wealthy husband’s DUI arrest has been an open secret in conservative circles for years. That prompted Owens to put out a late-night livestream on X, accusing the Daily Wire of trying to get her British husband deported. Owens added that she and fellow former Daily Wire host Brett Cooper went through bruising arbitrations with founder Ben Shapiro and the company after they quit, with Owens saying it was now time to release her documents in the previously closed case. Sounds good to me! Heck, I even have a tips line where you can send ’em, Candace! But that’s for another day. Today, we’ve got a story that comes from my usual source of inspiration: seeing something online and thinking, “Hmm, that’s weird.” Are you intrigued? You should be. Sign up for Bulwark+! Do it today and get fourteen days FREE to try it out: –Will MAGA Influencers Find a Medicare Fraudster They LoveThe strange campaign to secure a pardon for a guy who pleaded guilty to health care fraud.
WITH DONALD TRUMP INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR, and with fewer woke Democratic initiatives to bemoan, right-wing media figures have united around a cause seemingly every faction of their audiences can get behind: targeting minority communities for alleged fraud. Twenty-four-year-old MAGA influencer Nick Shirley became a star doing this early this year when he posted videos of himself visiting Somali-American daycares in Minnesota. In January, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Oz visited Los Angeles to do his own fraud hunt. Vice President JD Vance has embraced the title of fraud czar even as the rest of his portfolio appears to have narrowed. And just this week, the Daily Wire published a multi-part investigation of home-care fraud. Yet at the same time as this fraud focus has grown nearly monomaniacal, MAGA influencers have rallied behind a fraudster of their own. In what appears to be a coordinated effort on X, MAGA influencers as varied as a pro-Trump rapper and a Gateway Pundit editor are calling for leniency for Utah businessman Andrew McCubbins, arguing that his conviction for looting $89 million in Medicare money isn’t really that big of a deal, all things considered. McCubbins is the former head of a Utah company that was found to have ordered unnecessary genetic testing, with nurses and doctors bribed to request the tests for patients. There isn’t a question about his guilt. In September 2020, he pleaded guilty to three charges, including conspiracy to defraud Medicare. He agreed to hand over his multi-million-dollar Utah house as part of a forfeiture, and even testified about the details of the scheme in a co-conspirator’s trial. But he also happens to have financially supported a couple of projects dear to MAGA’s heart. McCubbins was an executive producer of Sound of Freedom, the runaway 2023 hit conservative movie about human trafficking, and participated in the undercover operations carried out by the now-embattled group that movie was based on. With McCubbins’s sentencing on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud Medicare looming later this month, conservative influencers have launched a months-long—and what appears to be coordinated—effort to win him a pardon, or at least to get the Justice Department to drop the case.¹ “The math on this case just doesn’t add up,” pro-Trump rapper Forgiato Blow, who calls himself “Trump’s nephew,” wrote on X on May 1. Blow tagged Justice Department official Ed Martin, addressing the U.S. pardon attorney as “My nxgga” (sic). Blow is known for songs like “I Stand With ICE” and for wearing a blinged-out Trump head on a chain, rather than his sober analysis of criminal justice cases. But he wasn’t the only unexpected MAGA-ite who suddenly was intrigued by the McCubbins case. “Sound of Freedom showed the grit needed to save kids,” wrote Ada Lluch, a pro-Trump influencer in Spain. “Andrew McCubbins was a key operative on those missions. It is crazy that a case from the last administration is still active against him.” You know what else is crazy? Everything in this newsletter. Don’t miss an issue. Join Bulwark+ today and get fourteen days FREE. Influencer Erik Finman, who was positioned as a sort of Trumpworld wunderkind a few years ago after selling a “Freedom Phone” to Trump supporters, has recently become one of McCubbins’s most frequent boosters on X. Citing Trump’s pardon of drug-trafficking former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, Finman claimed that it was time for McCubbins to get his own pardon. “The Honduran president caught helping cartels move 500 tons of cocaine into America was recently pardoned,” Finman wrote on X. “Okay. Meanwhile this man who went into the field rescuing 100+ children from trafficking rings is staring down real prison time.” Other influencers—from the founder of “Gays Against Groomers” to the pro-Trump “Bluesky Libs” X account—have also gotten on board.
Just announced! We’re thrilled to welcome these chatty friends to the stage for Bulwark Live: LA.Join Tim, Sarah, and Sam for this one-night live show at The Novo on May 21. Grab your seats today.ONE THING THAT IS STRIKING about the push to obtain a pardon for McCubbins is the uncomfortable racial double standard it suggests: After all, the right-wing anti-fraud campaign this year has largely focused on minority and immigrant communities whose populations include many people dependent on government support for services and funding, like those Somali-American daycare providers in Minnesota.² For right-wingers to push for leniency for a well-connected white guy who confessed to white-collar fraud has an odor of hypocrisy. The McCubbins campaign is also striking because, outside of the posts from these conservative influencers, there is no broader groundswell on the right or anywhere else to free McCubbins. I couldn’t find any articles, podcasts, videos, or anything else suggesting there’s a real base of support for a McCubbins pardon, even among the conservative commentariat. Yet for weeks, a coterie of pro-Trump activists have been pushing for it—often with similar language, tagging Martin or another Justice Department official, like acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. The campaign appears to have stepped up this month, as McCubbins’s long-delayed sentencing approaches on May 20. Despite McCubbins’s guilty plea, the well-connected influencers backing him have argued that he’s somehow the victim of a deep-state frame-up. Finman has even described the prosecution as a “Biden-era case,” despite the fact that McCubbins pleaded guilty during the first Trump administration. None of the influencers trying to help McCubbins avoid jail time responded to my requests for comment about whether someone is coordinating this effort, if so who, and whether or not that person or entity is paying them. But the similarities in the posts are striking. For example, many of them quote-tweeted a January post by Gateway Pundit blogger Ben Kew calling for McCubbins to receive a presidential pardon. The MAGA influencers will also seemingly tie any—and I mean any—news event to the Free McCubbins cause. A week after counterterrorism chief Joe Kent quit the administration over the Iran war, MAGA influencer Joey Mannarino struggled to turn Kent’s resignation into a demand that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi step in to save McCubbins. “One guy quits and gets a media tour,” he tweeted. “The other saved kids and got a federal case. The system tells you everything about its priorities by who it rewards and who it punishes.” If McCubbins’s family or legal team are behind this effort, I have to admit, it’s actually a pretty good idea! Despite the administration’s claims to be stamping out fraud, Trump has pardoned or commuted sentences for several people who ripped off Medicare and other government programs for hundreds of millions of dollars. The Justice Department, meanwhile, has repeatedly dropped cases against white-collar criminals and the politically connected. McCubbins must be hoping a few positive tweets aimed at the DOJ can get him some of that action. That said, some of these efforts are pretty ham-handed, even by the anything-goes standards of right-wing-media X accounts. After actor Chuck Norris died in March, Kew strained to somehow make the martial artist’s death about McCubbins. “A true man of action,” Kew wrote of Norris. “Not enough of them in this world. Andrew McCubbins is a man of action as well.”
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It’s not clear why McCubbins’s sentencing has taken this long. In 2023, he told Business Insider it was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. His cooperation against at least one other defendant in the case could have also pushed back the sentencing.
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Speaking of uncomfortable, how about the optics of Dr. Oz, perhaps the most famous Turkish-American alive and the highest-ranking Turkish-American official in the U.S. government, focusing his anti-fraud efforts on the Armenian-American community in Los Angeles. Given the longstanding and intense Turkish-Armenian enmity, it raises awkward questions. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletters or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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