A fraud case was announced today by the US Attorney’s Office in New York that amounted to a whopping $66 MILLION in stolen funds.

Six people were ultimately busted for the scheme, now being prosecuted on several counts for their misdeeds.

NOTE: We should state these are only charges at this time and no finding of criminal liability has been reached, yet.

One person in particular — a USDA employee — is among the six.

Arlasa Davis’ LinkedIn Profile indicates she has worked as a Program Specialist at the US Department of Agriculture for more than 38 years.

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But in 2019, Arlasa presumably decided her government income wasn’t going to cut it.

Along with the other five defendants, she is being accused of conspiring to steal a ton of money by abusing her position in the USDA.

Ironically, the “program” that Arlasa worked on as a “specialist” was the division of the USDA responsible for identifying fraud and abuse of the SNAP programs!

You have to wonder if seeing all the tricks being fielded by criminals over all those years led up to her assuming that “she” could pull it off just like they could.

It’s a shame when someone feels so entitled that they justify taking SOMEONE ELSE’S MONEY.  Allegedly.

President Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture went on Fox  News this morning, warning that this sting was only the tip of the iceberg on rooting out fraud.

She shared this clip, emphasizing how focused the Trump Administration is on stopping this sort of thing from happening:

Here’s the full screen version of that video for convenience:

When was the last time a President made good on his promises to THIS DEGREE?

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I definitely haven’t experienced it in my lifetime, and that includes the Reagan years!  (I was a toddler, but still.)

Just imagine — if DOGE had been around, or if there had been any sort of EXECUTIVE OVERSIGHT in past Administrations, this sort of thing wouldn’t have been allowed to happen.

It wouldn’t have even been POSSIBLE with DOGE on the hunt!

The US Attorney who is bringing the case emphasized that this was a shot across the bow for those scamming the government, and American tax payers, promising accountability according to Fox News:

A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employee and five others are under arrest as of Friday morning, after allegedly misappropriating tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer food stamp funds.

The defendants — Michael Kehoe, Mohamad Nawafleh, Omar Alrawashdeh, Gamal Obaid, Emad Alrawashdeh and Arlasa Davis — are accused of “conspiracy to steal government funds and to misappropriate U.S. Department of Agriculture benefits,” according to a press release.

“This fraud was made possible when USDA employee Arlasa Davis betrayed the public trust by selling confidential government information to the very criminals she was supposed to catch. Their actions undermined a program that vulnerable New Yorkers depend on for basic nutrition,” U.S. Attorney Perry Carbone said in the media release.

“These charges should be a reminder that those who exploit anti-poverty programs for personal gain will be held accountable for their crimes,” Carbone expanded.

I have seen it reported that DOGE was at the core of rooting out this particular case, and I don’t doubt it.

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I haven’t seen that reported in a way that I can independently confirm it, but this post in particular by a well known account seems to give DOGE the credit:

Whether the scam was discovered by DOGE or sprang from some other investigative body, I stand by what I said.

There is no chance that this degree of theft goes on for this long if anything resembling DOGE is active in the federal government.

The press release on the DOJ website singled out Arlasa and her position in the USDA as “critical to the scheme” in it’s summary of the case:

Critical to the scheme was ARLASA DAVIS, a longtime USDA employee who worked within the very division of the USDA responsible for identifying SNAP fraud.  DAVIS abused her privileged access to federal systems to sell hundreds of EBT license numbers enabling over $36 million in fraudulent SNAP redemptions at unauthorized stores.  DAVIS photographed handwritten lists of license numbers intended for qualifying stores with her personal cellphone and funneled them to an intermediary who sold them to co-conspirators, including NAWAFLEH, OMAR ALRAWASHDEH, EMAD ALRAWASHDEH, and OBAID, who then used those license numbers to fraudulently obtain EBT terminals for stores that were not authorized by the USDA to process SNAP transactions.  In return, DAVIS received substantial bribes that were disguised in communications as, among other things, “birthday gifts” and “flowers.”

My understanding is that the $36 million that Arlasa was directly responsible for was more than half of the total haul these criminals made off this scheme.

I should say, rather, it was half of the total amount they STOLE from American taxpayers.

Thankfully, the possible punishment for these crimes is far more than a slap on the wrist, as reported by Newsmax:

An employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been charged with involvement in a $66 million fraud scheme that targeted the government’s SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) program.

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Government investigators said the “sprawling fraud and bribery scheme” involved an intricate and detailed process of getting access to government accounts to illegally initiate food assistance transactions and then capture the payments. A government release on the case describes it as “one of the largest food stamp frauds in U.S. history.”

Davis is accused of using her secure access to Electronic Benefit Card (EBT) data stored in government computers to sell hundreds of EBT license numbers that enabled “fraudulent SNAP redemptions.” The others in the scheme “used those license numbers to fraudulently obtain EBT terminals for stores that were not authorized by the USDA to process SNAP transactions.”

All the defendants are faced with several theft and misappropriation of funds charges, with potential maximum sentences on some as long as 20 years. The case is being prosecuted through the DOJ’s Southern District of New York. (Emphasis added.)

A 20 year sentence would certainly not be going to far as a punishment for stealing $66 million of American’s money.

But even though this may be one of the “largest” fraud cases prosecuted “in history”, don’t get lulled in to thinking that there’s not more.

When the Secretary of Agriculture said this was just the beginning of cleaning up the fraud, she wasn’t kidding.

Check out this clip from barely over a month ago from a Fox News segment detailing just how much fraud DOGE had uncovered in the previous weeks:

That report listed a SINGLE CASE with someone scamming the government out of $41K.

Just imagine how many “single cases” there are like that, and how much that adds up to?

The larger cases in that video total out to an enormous $382 MILLION dollars of theft!

Excuse me, but tell me again we don’t have a spending problem!?  That degree of corruption doesn’t just tell me that we have x-amount of corruption.

It tells me that we have FAR TO MUCH SPENDING OVERALL for THAT much money to be stolen, and not be noticed just on account of it’s sheer size.

Those are hard facts to look at, because what it takes to come back from a system allowing that much fraud is staggering.

I can only imagine how much work actually went in to investigating that one case with just those six individuals.

Thank God for the work of DOGE.

Thank God for US Attorney’s willing to prosecute these cases again.

And thank God for a President who has INSTITUTIONALIZED the radical concept that CORRUPTION isn’t acceptable within the American government!

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
 

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