The Brief | California Lost $180 Billion to Fraud — And the FBI Came A'Knockn
Plus: Three illegal immigrants charged with murder in one Virginia county, Trump fires Bondi hours after she rode with him to SCOTUS, and abortion quietly moved online while no one was watching.
Happy Good Friday!
Can I tell you something that genuinely surprised me when I first moved to the States?
Growing up in Puerto Rico, Good Friday was a day off. Full stop. You did not go to work. You did not go to school. The island observes it as an official holiday, and when I was 18, I was not complaining. A day off was a day off; I wasn’t asking too many questions.
Then I moved to the mainland, and my first Good Friday here, I showed up to work... and everyone else did too. I was floored. What do you mean, this isn’t a holiday? I can’t sleep in?
If I’m being honest, at 18 and even into my early twenties, Good Friday was mostly just a welcome break to me. I knew what it meant in a general sense, but I wasn’t sitting with the weight of it.
Today is different. Today I recognize that Good Friday isn’t a holiday, it’s a holy day. We remember the cross, and what it cost. Some may view it as the darkest day on the Christian calendar, and also the most necessary. No resurrection without it. It is Good Friday.
Now, on to the news
Did you get to join Rachel and me yesterday for our first live episode of Rivera and Reeves? It was so fun to have friends join us and even help us break news during the episode!
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In today’s Brief:
California’s fraud problem just got the FBI-SWAT-at-dawn treatment, and the numbers make your eyes water — $180 billion and counting
Three illegal immigrants have been charged with murder in one Virginia county in one month, and the governor just revoked ICE cooperation
Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi — reportedly on the car ride to the Supreme Court — and her replacement is his former personal lawyer
Artemis II is on its way to the Moon with the first space plumber.
Abortion quietly moved online: telehealth mifepristone shipments to ban states jumped 26%, and red states are racing to criminalize the mailman
SCOTUS looked deeply unimpressed with Trump’s birthright citizenship arguments, and the DHS shutdown just hit Day 48
California: The Kingdom of Fraud Gets a Wake-Up Call
If you thought the Minnesota welfare fraud scandal was bad, California said “hold my kombucha.”
Early Thursday morning, FBI SWAT teams raided homes across Southern California, arresting eight people in “Operation Never Say Die,” a hospice fraud takedown targeting operators who stole more than $50 million from Medicare. Among the arrested: a married couple who ran a hospice with a 97% survival rate among supposedly terminal patients. That’s not a hospice that’s a California relaxation retreat.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of CMS, was literally at the scene of the arrest. Vice President JD Vance’s anti-fraud task force has now suspended 221 hospice and healthcare providers in LA alone.
But the hospice arrests are just the tip of the iceberg. A bombshell City Journal investigation by Chris Rufo estimates California has lost $180 billion to fraud across unemployment insurance, Medi-Cal, homelessness programs, and food stamps under Newsom’s watch. A separate CAL DOGE report puts the five-year exposure at $425 billion. Ghost hospices billing from abandoned storefronts. Rappers are literally making music videos bragging about scamming EDD. Newsom’s own former chief of staff charged with siphoning campaign and COVID recovery funds.
The House Oversight Committee has launched its own probe, demanding records from Newsom by April 6. First Minnesota. Now California. Noticing a pattern with which party controls the states where billions vanish?
Three Murders, One County, One Month — And the Governor Revoked ICE Cooperation
This one’s hard to read, but you need to.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, three illegal immigrants have been charged with separate murders in a single month. The latest: a Guatemalan national charged with beating his three-month-old daughter to death. Legacy media called him a “Virginia dad.” DHS confirmed he crossed illegally in 2023.
In the second case, a progressive DA had been warned about one of the suspects before he allegedly killed a mother. The prosecutor’s office offered a five-year plea deal on a murder charge — five years for taking a life.
Meanwhile, Governor Spanberger revoked a previous executive order that had allowed cooperation with ICE. The timing is, let’s say, suboptimal.
Three dead. Three suspects who shouldn’t have been here. A governor who made cooperation with immigration enforcement harder. Elections have consequences. So do executive orders.
Artemis II is on its way to the Moon
NASA launched four astronauts, Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Orion completed its translunar injection burn, officially leaving Earth orbit and heading for the Moon. The crew will fly within 5,000 miles of the lunar surface on April 6 before splashing down in the Pacific on April 10. It's the first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years. Minor hiccup: they had to troubleshoot the toilet. Some things never change, not even in space.
Also, can someone explain to me why I got emotional watching this interview?
Trump Fires Bondi — Hours After She Rode With Him to the Supreme Court
Wednesday was supposed to be Pam Bondi’s power moment. She accompanied President Trump to the Supreme Court, the first sitting president in history to attend oral arguments. Reports indicate she may have been informed she was being fired on the car ride over.
By Thursday, it was official: Trump ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi, ending a tenure defined by the Epstein files debacle, failed prosecutions of Comey and Letitia James, and mounting frustration from the White House.
Deputy AG Todd Blanche — Trump’s former personal lawyer — is now Acting AG and wasted no time stepping into the role.
Trump is reportedly considering EPA chief Lee Zeldin as her permanent replacement. Bondi said she’ll spend the next month transitioning out before moving to “an important private sector role.”
This is the second cabinet secretary Trump has fired in recent weeks, after ousting DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in March. There have been rumors that DNI Tulsi Gabbard could be next, but White House communications director Steven Cheung tells RCP that Trump has "full confidence" in DNI Tulsi Gabbard and his national security team. So, it appears she is safe for now, but the only thing that is sure is that Trump can change his mind.
Abortion Quietly Moved Online — And Red States Are Playing Catch-Up
While everyone was watching cabinet firings and courtroom drama, abortion shifted underneath us.
Telehealth and mail-order mifepristone shipments to states with abortion bans jumped 26% in 2025. Roughly 91,000 women in ban states received abortion pills through the mail, up from 72,000 the year before. Cross-state travel for abortions dropped. Overall abortion numbers held steady at around 1.1 million. The procedure didn’t disappear after Dobbs. It just moved to the mailbox.
South Dakota already made shipping the pills a felony. Mississippi’s version is on the governor’s desk. Iowa advanced a bill requiring in-person dispensing. At the federal level, GOP senators are demanding the FDA act on what they call illegal pill sales — but the agency still hasn’t completed its long-promised safety review.
Here’s the tension: pro-life states won the legal war with Dobbs, but the enforcement battle is a different animal. You can ban a clinic. You can’t easily ban a FedEx envelope. And until Washington figures out whether the FDA or the states control what gets mailed where, this will keep being the quiet front line of the abortion debate.
Quick Rundown
SCOTUS looks ready to block Trump’s birthright citizenship order. Chief Justice Roberts called the government’s arguments “very quirky” and delivered the line of the day: “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.” Barrett called it “puzzling,” Kavanaugh questioned the relevance of foreign countries’ rules, and even the government’s own precedent backfired. A decision is expected by late June. Trump posted on his way out: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”
The DHS shutdown hits Day 48 — during an active war with Iran. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill to fund most of DHS except ICE and Border Patrol. The House is on recess until April 13. The plan is to fund ICE separately through reconciliation, bypassing the filibuster. Over 500 TSA workers quit or called out sick. Airport wait lines exceeded four hours. Johnson called the Senate bill a “joke” five days ago. Now he’s signing off on it. Washington in a nutshell.
ActBlue may have misled Congress about vetting foreign donations. Its own former law firm, Covington & Burling, warned in internal memos that ActBlue’s letter to Congress was potentially misleading, and flagged the risk of criminal prosecution. Donors through Apple Pay, PayPal, or Venmo were never asked for passport info. Multiple senior officials resigned. The DOJ investigation is still ongoing.
Trump signed an executive order to limit mail-in voting. The order directs USPS to deliver ballots only to voters on a DHS-compiled citizen list. Democrats filed lawsuits within hours. Legal experts on both sides agree this one’s dead on arrival; courts struck down a similar order last year. The president has zero constitutional authority over election procedures. But the signal matters more than the substance.
Let’s Talk About It
Be honest, three murders by illegal immigrants in one county in one month, and the governor made it harder to cooperate with ICE. At what point does ideology have a body count?
A hospice with a 97% survival rate. What are we even doing, California? Wrong answers only.
Drop your takes in the comments. I’ll see you Monday.
The Brief publishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Forward to someone who needs to understand what’s actually happening.