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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 Love
The strange campaign to secure a pardon for a guy who pleaded guilty to health care fraud.
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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.”
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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 “