Today I received an e-mail from Miles Taylor (Defiance.org) entitled "Trump's 'anti-fraud' crusade is a ruse to prosecute foes. Which is illegal."

Before you read the e-mail (below), I suggest you read a related article dated August 12, 2026 written by Taylor entitled "Trump plans $1 billion extreme home makeover. When he's gone, we'll undo all of it." where he explains how the Trump administration has been moving large sums of money into accounts that are exempt from ordinary federal disclosure rules in order to help fund his White House Ballroom project.

Here's the full text of the e-mail:

The administration is reorienting the government to go after "fraudsters." Most are just enemies of the president.

MILES TAYLOR

AUG 20

The Trump administration has built a massive anti-fraud task force that is being puppeteered directly from the White House. And its real mission has almost nothing to do with saving taxpayers money.

The New York Times revealed a few days ago that the Justice Department's newest fraud target is a weathered white food truck in Santa Ana, California, that sells ice cream and produce. On the surface, it was a weird case. Of all the suspects DOJ could go after, why spend valuable federal prosecutorial and investigative resources on a food truck? Why not leave that to the local authorities?

When it came out which agents did the investigating, the picture started to make more sense. The evidence was amassed by ICE — an agency already on a quest to validate Donald Trump's claim that immigrants are stealing from Americans — and its agents evidently decided to focus finite resources on a tiny business in an immigrant heavy community outside of Los Angeles… in a state the White House has begun targeting aggressively… where DOJ also appears to have its governor, Gavin Newsom, under investigation.

The goal was not to take down serious criminals. It was storytelling. Trump says his enemies are grifters. Accordingly, he's reorienting the federal government to prove — whether they're governors or immigrants — that his political and societal opponents are rotten right down to the food trucks from which they sell.

The giveaway is that, as DOJ is building these types of cases, it's simultaneously abandoning major white-collar prosecutions. Corporate investigations (which can uncover billions in theft and billions in restitution for victims) have fallen to their lowest level in decades. In fact, the Times found that the volume of such cases is literally thousands below the Biden administration and far below Trump's own first term. Meanwhile, the president has been pardoning wealthy executives and dropping cases left and right against friendly corporations.

So no, the Trump administration is not hunting fraud. It's hunting down its enemies with anything it can find. "Fraud" just happens to be the easiest label to apply.

Minnesota is a potent example. Late last year, welfare fraud was used as the thinly veiled pretext for the Trump administration to launch a massive immigration crackdown (and political shakedown) in a state led by Democrat Tim Walz, who challenged Trump for the White House in 2024. Thousands of ICE and CBP agents flooded into Minnesota to address a problem that — if the reasons were genuine — should have required not more than a few dozen accountants. It certainly didn't need gun-toting agents. While Trump was forced into retreat, his team first tried to coerce state leaders to forfeit their voter rolls, which critics pointed out had precisely nothing to do with the original fraud claims. Of course it didn't; from the start, the whole exercise was about political leverage.

Then DOJ sought to investigate Governor Tim Walz for allegedly impeding the president's crackdown. That was halted by a federal judge, who saw through the effort as a crude mechanism of political retaliation, ruling that it appeared meant to "coerce Minnesota officials… [and] to harass and retaliate against them" for resisting Trump's invasion of the state.

So what did the White House do? They went back to the fraud claims! Knowing they were likely to lose, they shifted tacks and referred Governor Walz and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to the Justice Department for another criminal investigation, before the judge even struck down the first one. The second referral was based on the allegations regarding misuse of welfare funds by immigrant groups in the state. MAGA Republicans have now used that scandal halted as a cudgel to undercut Democrats in the midterm elections. The "fraud" doesn't actually matter to them. The retribution does.

To understand what Trump's task force is actually meant for, just look at how it's being managed. The DOJ's new fraud division doesn't report to some expert in criminal investigations. It reports directly to Vice President JD Vance, an arrangement without precedent, especially since it effectively circumvents the Attorney General himself. Apparently, catching crooked food truck vendors requires the second-highest official in the land. And Vance has been very busy with this mission. In June, he personally made the criminal referral against Walz. Asked where the "war on fraud" goes next, Vance answered : California. (Surely it's just a coincidence that they're going after the blue state led by the man Trump most fears will try to succeed him.)

The true nature of Trump's "anti-fraud" plans came into view last year, as the White House pursued retribution against New York Attorney General Letitia James, the woman who won a nine-figure civil fraud judgment against Trump. In September, the president publicly demanded on social media that "JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!" Weeks later, his hastily installed prosecutor in Virginia (a former White House aide who had never prosecuted a case) indicted James for alleged "mortgage fraud."

The theory in that case rested on an allegation that James lied on housing paperwork to save herself a few thousand dollars over several years. Clearly, this is the type of sweeping "theft" that will help America pay down the nation's $40 trillion debt (at least a quarter of which has been amassed on Trump's watch.) Unsurprisingly, the whole process was so sloppy that a federal judge threw out the case. Then ordinary citizens did something extraordinary: grand juries refused to re-indict James. Twice. They clearly did not see the sweeping criminal scheme that the president saw.

Nevertheless, Trump's DOJ decided that mortgage fraud was still the easy button for quickly spinning up an investigation into a rival. Senator Adam Schiff got the same treatment, a mortgage-fraud referral ginned up by Trump's housing regulator that stalled for lack of evidence (and which has now boomeranged so badly that a federal grand jury is investigating the investigators who cooked it up). Meanwhile, the administration continues to pursue Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who is fighting off the same unproven charges, deployed not to recover a nickel for taxpayers but to hand Trump control of the central bank.

"Fraud" has become the administration's codeword for "revenge." The term is a respectable-sounding wrapper for criminalizing the political opposition. And now that Trump's team has systematized the plan with a task force — making the issue a top priority for all U.S. attorneys in the country — we will see more and more cases brought, like the recent cases against left-leaning nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.

If anyone on the political right doubts Trump's motivations, they need only apply a simple test. Has his administration been faithful to the cost-saving mission? A White House genuinely obsessed with protecting taxpayer dollars would not be spending nearly a billion of those dollars (much of it raided from other agencies) to gild the White House and build a ballroom, or just as much to retrofit a luxury jet from Qatar. You cannot loot the treasury with one hand and call yourself its guardian with the other. Well, you can, I guess. But the word for that is also "fraud."

So here's what we do about it, friends. We make sure that we preserve everything. When power changes hands, which it eventually will, we will seek all the documents, including every criminal referral memo, target list, email between the White House and the task force, hand-written notes from the vice president's fraud meetings, and so on. All of it will be subpoenaed and reviewed, whether by a new Congress next year or a new Justice Department after that.

And guess what? They can't shred it all on the way out the door, because they've trapped themselves. If they want their prosecutions to survive, there must be evidence, discovery, and a chain of custody. The records must exist somewhere, or the cases go away. I suspect that when investigators finally follow that paper trail, it will lead exactly where the Letitia James and Adam Schiff cases already point — back to the White House — and to proof of the deliberate weaponization of the American government against its own citizens.

That's when the real fraud trials will begin.