Better in their words…

Mar-a-Lago disclosures pin modern political wreckage on Biden’s DOJ; Congress passes big bills again; 70s environmental laws revamped; GOP hits Obamacare roots; Minnesota welfare fraud explodes.

Source: MINNESOTA BLUES ☙ Sunday, December 21, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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This week, the Wall Street Journal ran a quiet story with an understated headline: “Behind the Mar-a-Lago Raid.” The sub-headline was slightlymore informative: “New emails show the FBI was pressured by the Biden Justice Department.” The story itself was explosive, adding the final layer of explanation to one of the most destructive decisions in the early Biden term.

On August 8th, 2022, as a hot, muggy dawn broke in South Florida over the historic Mar-a-Lago estate, over 30 DOJ and FBI agents swarmed the 45th president’s personal residence in a surprise raid. The effect on the nation could be compared to a near-fatal heart attack. It shattered all norms and customs, twisted the law into a pretzel, and was unlike anything that had come before. It marked the beginning of a campaign of political lawfare and dirty tricks that would make an African warlord blush with envy.

Much has been written about the raid, including here at C&C, and one supposes that future historians will have even more to say about it. Historically, we remain in the ‘hot takes’ phase, with unanswered questions covering the raid like hungry deer ticks.

This week, the Senate resolved one of those open mysteries: the devilish conundrum of how could this happen? How did all the checks and balances fail? Newly released documents from the Senate Judiciary Committee this week show the answer: it was not, in fact, an out-of-control FBI. It was the Democrats, by and through Merrick “Grandma” Garland’s Department of Justice.

“In missives spanning the summer of 2022,” the Journal explained, “FBI officials expressed alarm and forcefully pushed back against a DOJ-driven search warrant and raid. The FBI highlighted legal and evidentiary weaknesses, noted offers of cooperation, and proposed numerous better avenues” like “negotiating to return any classified documents.”

Not only that, but the FBI repeatedly advised the DOJ, in writing, that there was no probable cause to support a legal search. A June 1st, 2022, FBI Washington field office summary noted that “very little has been developed related to who might be culpable for mishandling documents.” It expressed “concerns that the information is single source, has not been corroborated, and may be dated.”

One mid-July FBI email expressed frustration that “we haven’t generated any new facts,” but still the DOJ was churning out “draft after draft after draft” of a warrant.

In other words, FBI officials —even in the hyper-partisan Washington field office— did everything they probably should have done. But “the DOJ ignored or overruled it all, drooling over a prosecution.” An August 4th email from one special agent complained that DOJ counsel Donald Toscas refused to consider warnings about the proposed raid— “frankly, he doesn’t give a damn about the optics.” A DOJ first contact, the agent predicted, “will not go well.”

It’s impossible to overstate how profoundly the Mar-a-Lago raid —now revealed to have had so little predicate that even DC office FBI agents fought against it— affected the country, the DOJ, and the FBI. How many DC field office agents have been fired, or transferred to plum assignments like Southwest Indian reservation cold case desks? How much public trust in the nation’s law enforcement agencies has been squandered?

How much of a mandate for change did the Mar-a-Lago raid provide President Trump? Just to pick a tiny and remote example, would Wisconsin Judge and TDS victim Hannah Dugin now be facing five years in prison, if reason had prevailed in the summer of 2022?

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Congress has woken up from a long nap, had its coffee, and is rolling up its sleeves. On top of the two great anti-transgender bills, it also passed two major legislative packages this week. Politico reported the first one under the headline, “House passes major GOP-led permitting overhaul after late drama.” The ‘drama,’ which I will not mention further, had to do with windmills.

Politico described the bill, called the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act, as ‘bipartisan,’ because Republicans actually picked up 11 Democrats in the vote. In practical terms, it heavily amends the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which protects the nation’s environment by making builders prove their big projects are safe for all the little creatures that squirm and squiggle in the ground and in the water, especially activist lawyers, and generally ensures that nothing important can be built at all.

Technically speaking, NEPA requires years of ‘environmental reviews’ to approve energy, infrastructure, and multifamily housing (apartments) projects. NEPA allows environmental activists sue to stop development for up to ten years if they can find box turtle lurking nearby. Other countries aren’t dumb enough to impose these rules, which is why it is possible to easily build a steel mill in the Brazilian rainforest, but virtually impossible to build it in the Arizona desert, and fantastically expensive even if so.

The new bill doesn’t delete environmental protections. It would just tighten statutes of limitations, shorten challenge periods, and reduce the overall number of projects eligible for NEPA review. But that is a huge improvement. If the SPEED Act passes the Senate, it will cut through rolls of red tape, defang the environmental lawfare industry, and unleash big projects in an exuberant way we haven’t seen in the entire postwar period.

🔥 Next, Healthcare Dive covered the second bill in a story headlined, “House passes Republican health bill without ACA subsidy extension.” All the media focused on was that the bill did not extend Obamacare “subsidies” —a progressive euphemism for massive direct payments to insurance companies— which ensured certain high-end individual policies would remain affordable by bribing insurers. (These expiring subsidies are what fuels much of the recent “affordability” narrative.)

Instead, the Republican bill would provide for: “sending the subsidy money directly to Americans” in their health savings accounts, making employer-sponsored insurance easier, setting up new ways for small businesses to band together into associations for group negotiating, and expanding eligibility for catastrophic plans to everyone, instead of limiting these plans to under-30s and people with hardship exemptions.

That latter tweak is a potential game-changer. Obama essentially outlawed cheap catastrophic coverage, which is essentially bare-bones health insurance with very high deductibles, which only come into play when a serious health problem arises, rather than funding day-to-day medical care. If the bill passes, starting in 2027, catastrophic plans will no longer be illegal.

The Senate bill summary projected that catastrophic policies could sell for as little as $1,000-$1,500 per year. The implications are huge. First, healthy young and working-age people who typically need little coverage anyway can get perfectly satisfactory coverage for worst-case scenarios without breaking the bank. Second, all healthy folks, even older ones, are likely to quickly move out of Obamacare’s “unaffordability” pools into these much cheaper plans, accelerating Obamacare’s death on the vine.

Several years ago, the Childers family went bare —no insurance— since “affordable care” became totally unaffordable for our family of five. As a cash payer, I can assure you that we usually pay much less for medical services than insured people must co-pay for the exact same procedures. For one example, an MRI might cost us $150, whereas an Obamacare person has to cough up $500+ in co-pay. Similarly, what we pay for generic drugs is often less than the insurance co-pay amount. Last year, for example, we paid our concierge provider $7 for a course of antibiotics for one of the kids— cheaper than a peppermint mocha. That’s without insurance.

In other words, when you account for co-pays and annual deductibles, a lot of people with Obamacare policies don’t really enjoy any actual benefit apart from catastrophic protection anyway. It’s a massive shell game.

DR. OFFICE: That will be $463 for your checkup today.

PATIENT: But I have insurance!

DR. OFFICE: You haven’t met your $5,000 deductible, sorry. And here’s your prescription, which will be $82 in co-pay.

PATIENT: Thanks a lot. So affordable.

The Obamacare catastrophe won’t be fixed by one bill. But it is extremely encouraging that, based on this week’s activity, the House seems to be back in business. Speaker Johnson has promised a “surge” in legislative work starting immediately after the holidays. That’s good, because to cement in the Trump Agenda, they have a lot of work to do.

From this week’s frenzied docket, it looks like they might be getting a head start.

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This week, the Wall Street Journal ran an astonishing op-ed titled simply, “The Biggest Fraud in Welfare.” This kind of analysis is the inevitable fallout from the recent welfare scandals in Minnesota, California, and every other blue state in the country, which are showing the kinds of money management skills usually attributed to chronic Powerball players and people who describe weekend Las Vegas trips as “investments.”

“Something is profoundly wrong with the U.S. welfare system,” the authors wrote, probably understating the problem, “one far deeper and more dangerous than the shocking fraud in Minnesota that has been making headlines.”

Annual federal welfare spending now accounts for an eye-watering $1.4 trillion. That’s about a third of the overall budget; the actual problem is even worse. The authors pointed out that, with that kind of money, you could just cut out the middlemen and send all 19.8 million “poor” Americans $70,000 each, every single year.

It would be even more shocking if you used a more realistic figure. “If the government simply gave every poor family in America enough money to raise its income above the official poverty level,” the article explained, “it would cost only $240 billion. That would reduce the annual deficit by two-thirds.”

In horrifying detail, the article tallied up the various benefits, showing how a single parent of two school-age kids can earn only $11,000 a year at an undemanding part-time job, but still qualify for benefits of $53,128, raising the single parent’s effective income to $64,128. “Meanwhile,” they continued drily, “the welfare family would be eligible for another 90 smaller federal benefits and sundry state and local welfare programs.”

That’s without even trying that hard. Hardworking Somalis have even figured out how to earn millions in the American welfare game.

If you count welfare payments as income, most welfare recipients are actually living solidly in the middle class. Without working. This has produced the entirely predictable effect of disincentivizing effort. “Unsurprisingly,” the authors wrote, “in the last 50 years, the percentage of working-age persons in the bottom 20% of income who in fact work has fallen from 68% to 36%.”

None of these figures account for welfare fraud, or for people who can work but choose not to because playing the benefits game is easier and less time-consuming than working. Presumably, if the number of workers could be increased back to 68%, fewer people would need welfare to begin with. That estimated $240 billion of direct welfare transfer payments might even be much lower.

The authors —Cato and American Enterprise Institute economists— suggested that we start treating benefits as income for means-testing purposes. Currently, that hypothetical person making $11,000 is still classified as ‘poor’— even though they enjoy at least another $70,000 in “benefits” transferred from other taxpayers. Tallying their true income, at least, would force the various governments to be honest about how much welfare people are getting, and we could maybe cut them off at a point short of taking cruises and buying bitcoin.

🔥 What the authors didn’t say, but I will, is that the system cannot possibly be this broken on accident. We need to put the politicians and their friends who are enabling this shattered system through a thorough proctological exam. Headline from CBS, late this week:

“Minnesota has become a magnet for fraud,” US Attorney Joe Thompson told reporters, “so much so that we have developed a fraud tourism industry – people coming to our state purely to exploit and defraud its programs.” Thompson soberly added, “This is a deeply unsettling reality that all Minnesotans should understand.”

Fraud tourists! It’s a new category of luxury travel, invented by progressives.

Hilariously, just ten days ago, the Minnesota Star Tribune ran a “no evidence” headline that aged very, very badly:

US Attorney Thompson leads the federal investigation into the swelling Minnesota scandal. As he continues digging into the case, Thompson finds more and more evidence of pervasive welfare fraud. “When I look at the claims data and the providers, I see more red flags than legitimate providers.” In a recent news conference this week, Thompson said countless companies were created to provide zero services— while pocketing federal funds for international travel, luxury vehicles, and lavish lifestyles.

“The magnitude cannot be overstated,” Thompson told reporters. “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s staggering, industrial-scale fraud.”

🔥 This week’s press conference announced five new cases. Some of the fraudsters don’t even live in Minnesota, but are operating the scams from other states or countries. Two Philadelphia men, for instance, siphoned millions meant for housing folks with disabilities and drug addictions, without ever having visited the state. Another defendant submitted $1.4 million in fraudulent claims, and then used federal funds to buy cryptocurrency, Thompson said.

They didn’t catch him. Officials say the enterprising Somali pirate fled the country after receiving a subpoena.

Thompson said that at least $9 billion was fraudulent. For context, Somalia’s 2025 gross domestic product is estimated at only $12.94 billion. So.

When reporters asked who is to blame, Mr. Thompson replied —in a paroxysm of understatement— that Minnesota “has not done a good job of minding these programs.” You don’t say.

🔥 Here’s the thing. In a fraud scenario this pervasive and institutionalized, attention must necessarily shift from the bad actors to the bad officials who allowed it to happen over the last seven years. It is not nearly enough to assume they were merely negligent. The likelihood that officials personally profited from the fraud is so high in this case that it must be investigated.

But, even if it were purely negligence, and not intentional mismanagement, what does that say about the quality of people running Minnesota’s state government? Utter incompetence, at scale? Letting shell companies provide “zero services” while billing billions for luxury travel, crypto, and international tourism is not a subtle error; it shows that core controls, audits, and basic verification simply were not functioning at all.

It’s kind of like auditing a hospital and discovering that all the doctors were from the same corrupt African country, with no medical degrees, and all the patients were their relatives cycling in and out with fake names. You might have a few questions for the hospital administrator.

Similarly, even as the scale of the Minnesota fraud is difficult to fathom, it is also difficult to believe that no one in Minnesota’s state government could have detected the serious warning signs. Either people who did see the problems were ignored or overruled, or Minnesota has a culture so lax that obvious red flags never even made the fraud meter’s needle budge. When a state spends $18 billion on “high risk” services and a federal prosecutor can plausibly say “half or more” may be fraudulent, the issue is not a lack of theoretical tools; it is a breakdown of basic curiosity and accountability.

This scandal is likely in its early phases. The storm is still expanding.

On any reasonable historical reading, this is already one of the largest state welfare fraud fiascos on record, and it is being uncovered in the same era as the largest national health-care fraud takedown in DOJ history (which involved $14.6 billion across fifty states).

We are watching a hurricane of disclosure. It is nothing less than a condemnation of all technocratic, centralized Democrat social welfare policies. Undoubtedly, Democrats will double down. They’ll continue claiming these institutional levels of fraud merely represent a “handful of bad actors,” demanding ever higher levels of evidence, and insisting the real fraud is denying the lived experiences of people billing Medicaid from Mogadishu.

The Reckoning™ is getting closer than ever. Just wait for next year.

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you, as always, for your critically important continuing support for the C&C mission. Enjoy today’s terrific post and swing back in the morning tomorrow, as we head into the holidays with more essential news and comedic commentary.

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