———————————————————
TrumpRx hits 800 drugs and 80% of all scrips; Bhutanese Medicaid fraud blooms in Ohio; CIA gold-bar officer invents entire fake spy program; Senate Dems kill FISA to spite Pulte pick– dots connect.
JUN 6READ IN APP
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! What a Weekend Edition roundup I have for you today: how TrumpRx grew to 800 discounted drugs covering four out of five of all American prescriptions, while the media guarded the affordability narrative like monks guarding a relic — in total silence; how Ohio’s Bhutanese community is challenging Minnesota’s Somalians for the Medicaid fraud crown in a tournament absolutely nobody asked for, and why the actual cure might have been invented by church ladies centuries ago; how a CIA officer allegedly dreamed up a fake doomsday spy program to finance a literal dragon’s hoard — 303 gold bars, $2 million in cash, and 35 luxury watches, presumably so he’d always know precisely when his pension was due; how Senate Democrats got so upset about Bill Pulte that they raised the drawbridge on their own beloved FISA spy powers, which now expire next Friday; and how Trump just handed Pulte a battering ram, pointed him at ODNI’s gates, and suggested he release everything about 2020 on his way through. Major dot connecting.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
💊💊💊
Yesterday, Fox News reported, “Trump expands TrumpRx prescription drug discount program to more than 800 medications.” The President announced the latest expansion of his new direct-to-consumer drug website on Truth Social, saying “TrumpRx.gov is adding another 160 Prescription Drugs, at highly discounted prices, for a new total of over 800 of the most commonly-used Prescription Drugs.” This announcement was received by the corporate media in the manner of a tree falling in a forest where no reporters were assigned to listen.
Obviously, the prescription drug revolution will not be televised.
While the media occupied itself diligently covering the Iranian World Cup soccer team’s unfortunate visa problems: TrumpRx.gov added 160 new drugs, such that the online marketplace can now fill four out of five of all prescriptions. Not specialty drugs for obscure conditions. Not narrow experimental treatments. Eighty percent of everything. So far, the website has saved patients over $400 million, proving that a lot of folks are already using it. It channels the radical concept that Americans shouldn’t pay more for the same drug than people in Paris, Tokyo, Dubai, or outer space, for that matter.
The site offers eye-watering discounts on prescription drugs of 400%, 500%, and even 600% percent on some drugs, and the program is still expanding. This threatens Democrats and corporate media for several reasons. First, while TrumpRx is currently only marginally better than other cash-pay drug-coupon options, if it continues to grow, it could radically transform the traditional insurance industry, especially the so-called “Obamacare model.”
Second, the optics are horrible for Democrats. It counters their dumb “affordability” narrative. And seniors, who consume the most drugs, are a powerful voting group. The last thing Democrats need —especially right before the midterms— is for older Americans to feel like Trump’s branded drug website is actually working forthem. So Dems’ best strategy is to ignore it.
The few Democrats who do engage sneer that the nascent TrumpRx site is little better than other existing drug coupon options like GoodRx, and that some people —mostly union members— who enjoy “diamond-tier” Obamacare plans without annual deductibles, often see negligible co-pays for almost all drugs, especially when generics are available. So, Democrats argue, TrumpRx offers them nothing.
But TrumpRx is finally starting to lap even the top Obamacare plans as it rounds the corner. Its inventory increasingly includes popular drugs that either lack generic options or simply aren’t covered under Obamacare-style insurance, like fertility drugs or Ozempic-style GLP-1s taken for weight loss instead of diabetes management. Assuming things continue on this trajectory —and there is no reason to think they won’t— at some point, doctors will start advising their patients to first check TrumpRx.
If this works, it could slay an Obamacare-created class of drug middlemen called “Pharmacy Benefit Managers” (PBMs), which have wildly distorted American healthcare markets, led to sky-high insurance and drug costs, and earned 1000% profits for big insurance— all thanks to a law passed without a single Republican vote, and ironically called the “Affordable Care Act.”
Embrace affordability.
🔥🔥🔥
Somalians now face unexpected competition for the top spot as national champions in Medicare fraud. Yesterday, local Ohio affiliate ABC-6 reported, “Bhutanese community responds to claims of Medicaid fraud in Ohio” I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was a “Bhutanese community” in Ohio.
The Bhutanese who settled in Ohio are largely ethnic Nepalis, a people called the Lhotshampa —say that three times fast— who were driven out of southern Bhutan in the early 1990s and spent years enduring refugee camps in eastern Nepal. Starting around 2008, the United States agreed to resettle scores of them, and agencies initially scattered Bhutanese families into many different cities.
Over time, they remigrated and condensed. They followed their relatives and friends to Ohio, since the insular ‘Bhutan community’ did not integrate well into American society. That second migration helped coalesce a series of smaller clusters into one of the country’s largest Bhutanese communities, with shops, temples, and grocery stores transforming Ohio’s (and especially Columbus’) traditional American landscape into something closer to a third-world hellhole.
Needless to say, under Biden’s porous border period, waves of additional Bhutanese joined their countrymen in flyover country.
On Wednesday, the House Task Force on Medicare Fraud issued a press release linking Somalians in Minnesota to the Bhutanese in Ohio. “It’s the same people,” Luke Rosiak, a Daily Wire reporter, testified. “They all have relatives in both places, and they move back and forth.”
“There’s thousands of people involved,” Rosiak continued. “I would say the majority of Bhutanese people are either on Medicaid and home healthcare, or are providingMedicaid home healthcare services.” It’s not just in Ohio; it’s wherever Bhutanese have resettled. “I think Bhutanese people are systematically using Medicaid, not only in Ohio, but also in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, New York, and in other states where they perceive that they will pay the family member and pay for non-nursing services. And those are the two big vulnerabilities.”
To be sure, we lack evidence that everySomalian or Bhutanese refugee is a fraudster. But avoiding unfair over-generalizing does not require abandoning useful generalizations. There is an easy explanation for why certain ethnic groups are more prone to fraud.
Some of these groups fled perfectly awful places in the world where, literally in order to survive, they had to do things every single day that first-worlders would consider deeply immoral. That is the state of life in these primitive, conflict-torn regions. Skills in gaming government systems, like International aid programs, can be the difference between a family’s living or dying. Lying, especially to the government, is seen as a moral good when the majority government is controlled by an ethnic enemy.
For all we know, these folks may have strong interpersonal values of honesty. But they grew up swimming in cultures where institutional fraud is a primary survival characteristic. That kind of modus vivendiisn’t easy to shake. It’s a way of thinking, of being. We can understand it, but we can also seek to contain it, or flat keep it out of our naive communities, which are unprepared to deal with waves of groups that become predatory as soon as they’re plopped into gullible high-trust societies like Columbus, Ohio.
To be fair, refugees from low-trust origin states aren’t the only offenders. Plenty of native Americans have been convicted and jailed for Medicare fraud. And there’s an even bigger problem. That bigger problem is that local officials (usually Democrats) and the local ethnic “community” appear to tolerate, if not encourage, the fraud.
In other words, our public charity layer is actually a low‑oversight, high‑moral‑hazard environment. It invites exactly this sort of gamesmanship, and that invitation is being enthusiastically extended to anyone who can learn to read the rules or hire someone to read the rules for them. Like NGO activists, liberal white women, and entrepreneurial conmen. But I repeat myself.
🔥 I fear that criminalization and even more technocratic tweaking at the margins, however helpful and gratifying, can never actually address the root causes. Not so long ago, the government was not the primary provider of American charity. That duty belonged to local churches and mutual aid societies.
The desire to root out the church in the name of secular “separation of church and state” did not solve the dependency problem. It led to swelling ranks of shiftless indolents dependent on taxpayer largesse. Every few years, after some ‘welfare queen’ scandal or other, it gets pruned by reform efforts, only to be re-engineered and continue to grow.
Look, government charity is inherentlyinefficient. Programs like SNAP and Medicaid waivers redistribute hundreds of millions of tax dollars through complex rules, multiple intermediaries, and distant agencies; every layer adds more people with their hands in the till, from administrators to NGO contractors to shell providers.
Oversight is mostly paper and algorithms —claims reviews, occasional audits, electronic visits and verifications— rather than human beings who actually know the family, the patient, and the neighborhood. That’s a fundamentally different model from that of a pastor or deacon who lives in the community and has personally witnessed a particular situation for years.
In today’s environment, fraud isn’t an anomaly. It’s an emergent property: whenever incentives are strong and detection is weak, opportunistic actors —both native and foreign— fill the cracks in the system to overflowing. This week’s House Oversight hearing was one more confirmation that this is now baked into the system.
Traditional church‑based or mutual‑aid charity relied on high levels of information and close social proximity. The people dispensing help usually knew the recipients’ personal histories, families, and habits; if they started showing up with suspicious stories, givers noticed quickly.
Proximity also created informal discipline. If people abused the system, they risked not just losing aid but losing standing in their social world. Fraud carried a reputational cost that today’s anonymous, card‑swipe welfare programs lack.
But now, thanks to grasping politicians manipulating our charitable impulses, America has baked a rotten social lasagna. Layers of interlocking statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions “protect” welfare recipients’ “entitlements” to “benefits.” And increasingly, cheesy politicians facilitate the fraud by intentionally loosening oversight, turning a blind eye in exchange for votes from blocs of “communities” who reward elected patrons.
Every time we try to tighten rules to control abuse, all it takes to justify re-expandingaccess and reducing accountability is one or two sob stories about how deserving applicants found the rules too burdensome, vindictive, or complicated to navigate. It’s a vicious pendulum swinging between the extremes of welfare reform and inevitable enlargement.
And so we get Ohio. A Medicaid waiver architecture so complex that even basic oversight (like noticing 94 companies billing $66 million out of one half‑abandoned building) took decades, viral social media influence, and a House Oversight task force to surface.
The Trump Administration is admirably trying to reheat the spoiled lasagna by doing the things it can control: increasing the cost of fraud and shining a spotlight on the abuses, which creates the political potential for the latest round of reform. I hope it works.
But, paradoxically, the one thing we don’t need is more rules and regulations. Granted, sufficiently significant reform might provide short-term relief for a few years or even a generation. But eventually, bad actors will learn new techniques for gaming the system, while honest folks will find it much harder to qualify for help, and the whole spoiled lasagna will become bigger and even more poisonous and expensive.
It might be too late to get the government out of the charity business. But I would argue that we need reinvention rather than reform. What do you think might work? Let me know in the comments.
🔥🔥🔥
Speaking of fraud stories, yesterday, the Washington Post reported an astonishing update to the CIA gold bars story, in an article headlined, “CIA officer accused of stealing gold allegedly created fake ‘black box’ spy program.” The unanswered questions remain unsettled, but now we have even more outrageous and inexplicable detail. Which is just as remarkable a story as the underlying fraud. Just wait till you see how three big dots connect with each other.
I already reported about (former) senior CIA official David J. Rush, who was arrested last month after FBI agents raided his house and found 303 gold bars worth roughly $40 million, $2 million in cash, and, as a bonus peculiar detail, 35 luxury watches. But the new details are incredible. According to the Post, agent Rush allegedly created a fake, ultra-classified intelligence program — a so-called “special access program,” or SAP — and then used it as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal purposes.
He didn’t just requisition the gold. He invented an entire fake spy program.
Here’s how the scheme allegedly worked: an SAP is the intelligence world’s version of a black op— so secret that even officials with the highest security clearances can’t access it without specific authorization. Rush allegedly “read in” two colleagues to his fictional program, effectively making them unwitting accomplices and preventing them from comparing notes with anyone else. He then persuaded one of them to transfer millions of dollars to the fake program through a fraudulent government contract. As one person familiar with the investigation told the Post, with laudable brevity: “He made up a contract.”
The fake operation, it turns out, was designated as “continuity of government” operations — hyper-top-secret plans to keep the federal government running after a nuclear war, cometary impact, or similar planetary-scale catastrophe. Rush apparently used this outrageous cover story to persuade an unnamed defense contractor to buy large amounts of gold. For the government. For continuity purposes. Which Rush then kept in his basement. Good times.
The prosecutor called Rush a “master manipulator” —weird for a spook, no?— who “lied to colleagues” about basic facts of his background and “lied to neighbors” about working as a Navy pilot. An FBI investigation found no record of Rush ever attending Clemson University or Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the two schools he claimed on his original CIA job application. There is no evidence he was ever a Navy pilot. At best, he was a mechanic.
Former CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos described the agency’s usual hiring process as “a full-on colonoscopy”— and yet Rush somehow sailed right through it, raising even more unanswered questions, like what on Earth??
The judge ordered Rush to remain in jail pending trial, finding he had the skills, “means, and motive” to flee.
🔥 But here is the most remarkable fact in the entire story: we are hearing about it at all. Normally, a corrupt spook stealing $40 million in gold bars through a fake classified program would be quietly resolved internally. The secretive Intelligence Community abhors embarrassing headlines. They like things buried under national security classifications, in classified basements, handled only by people with clearances, and resolved in sealed proceedings.
Yet this time, it’s front-page news in the Washington Post.
The FBI and CIA have had a famously hostile relationship since the CIA’s founding in 1947 — a rivalry rooted in turf, loyalty, and fundamentally different cultures (cops vs. spooks). J. Edgar Hoover actively opposed the creation of the CIA, and the two agencies spent decades withholding information from each other. One book on the subject is literally titled Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA(1994).
The institutional default has always been for the CIA to handle its own internal problems quietly, and for the FBI to stay in its own lane.
That said, the FBI has, occasionally, gone after CIA officers— but almost exclusively in two narrow categories: espionage (selling secrets to China or Russia) and unauthorized disclosures (unauthorizedleaks to reporters). A financial fraud prosecution on this public scale is essentially unprecedented. It’s a historical first.
The Aldrich Ames case (1994) is perhaps the most instructive parallel. The CIA knew something was wrong for years —assets were being burned, people were dying— but resisted letting the FBI investigate one of their own. When the FBI finally got in, it was because the evidence became impossible to ignore. The institutional lesson from Ames was supposed to be: the CIA cannot police itself. That lesson apparently did not fully take.
The fact that the Rush case is now described and publicly prosecuted rather than being quietly buried is the most remarkable detail of all.
🔥 The WaPo’s several articles breaking this appalling story rely entirely on anonymous sources, described only as “people familiar with the criminal investigation” and “former U.S. officials.” There has been zero explanation of how the story came to WaPo, no mention of a whistleblower, no reference to a congressional referral, and no indication that the CIA or DOJ proactively disclosed anything.
Yesterday’s article was bylined by threenational security reporters (Warren Strobel, Ellen Nakashima, and Katie Mettler), which suggests a significant source effort, but the mechanics of how it surfaced have never been revealed. Which speaks volumes.
The other telling detail was that the article noted that NBC News first reported that the CIA had put several officials on administrative leave— meaning NBC had its own separate pipeline on this story, even before WaPo added the “fake SAP” layer. Two major outlets, each with independent sourcing on the same internal CIA scandal, neither of which was given the story officially, suggest a concerted effort inside the government to make this information public.
Obviously, this is an “official” leak.
So: Is this intentional disclosure meant to create political permission for massive intelligence reforms? A Hegelian dialectic, to manufacture the crisis, then offer the solution? Or is the IC simply so out of control that the white hats struck a blow at the deep state, by leaking a perfectly absurd example of institutional corruption?
Obviously, we are having a rare encounter with the spooky world of shadows and disinformation. So we don’t know.
The Post noted that “several of the people familiar with the case said the very government secrecy designed to protect valuable intelligence can be used to hide misconduct.” Duh. One “former top intelligence official” put it even more starkly: agencies use “financial tradecraft” to move around large amounts of money (and gold, apparently) without attracting adversary attention— and the problem, he said, is that “neither do we” know where the money goes.
Obviously, that is a remarkable admission to hand to a reporter. Someone wanted it all over social media.
🔥 Whatever the reason, the timing is impeccable, because the Senate is currently having a conniption fit over the Intelligence Community. The Hill reported early yesterday morning: “Senate Democrats block extension of spy powers to protest Trump’s choice of Pulte for DNI.” They really don’t want Bill Pulte at ODNI.
In a stunning move, every single Senate Democrat (except John Fetterman) plus seven Republican senators voted against advancing the extension of the nation’s enhanced surveillance authorities under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The powers expire on June 12— next Friday. The stated excuse? They are protesting President Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence.
Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) said Democrats couldn’t simply stand by and vote to authorize enhanced surveillance powers when Pulte “doesn’t even meet the basic qualifications of the law to be director of national intelligence” and has “a history of taking and weaponizing confidential information.”
Senator Adam Schiff (D-Ca.) said Pulte “has demonstrated in his current position (at Fannie/Freddie) a willingness to weaponize whatever information he can get access to.” Just consider the irony for a moment— Adam Schiff, the man who spent four years selectively leaking classified intelligence committee proceedings about Russiagate to any camera he could find, now lecturing gullible reporters about weaponizing confidential information.
If it weren’t for double standards … well, you know.
🔥 But let’s take the Democrats’ argument seriously for a moment. They claim Pulte is dangerously unqualified for intelligence. If that’s true, he should be haplessly ineffective — a mere plaything for the career intelligence professionals who have “six ways from Sunday” at getting back at anyone who crosses them, as Chuck Schumer once helpfully explained.
An incompetent outsider in the DNI chair should be a gift to the IC, not a threat to it. So why the panic?
Here is the 4D chess angle: would it actually be bad if FISA 702 were suspended? Trump has every reason in the world to hate FISA— it was the legal vehicle used to surveil his 2016 campaign. If FISA goes dark, it will have gone dark because Democrats killed it to protest his DNI pick.
As for President Trump, he has repeatedlycalled for ending FISA, then always retreated after pushback. In 2018, Trump tweeted, “This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?”— and called for Congress to “KILL FISA.”
The White House later walked that back, insisting Trump supported reauthorization. That cycle repeated in 2024, with Trump calling to “KILL FISA” and House Republicans revolting— followed by Trump reversing himself and calling for a clean reauthorization.
Curiously, so far this week, Trump has not posted anything about Democrats killing FISA this time. Oddly quiet, no?
Ending FISA like this —making Democrats do it— is not a bad outcome for Trump. He gets the benefit (revenge!) and none of the blame. The Democrats appear to have walked across the rake. Again.
🔥 Now— the third dot. Ask yourself: whyare Senators really so worried? What exactly is Trump bringing the “inexperienced” Pulte in to do? Politico answered that question yesterday afternoon: “Trump says he asked Pulte to gut intelligence agency.” And now we begin to see the big picture.
According to Politico, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he wants Pulte to oversee massive staffing cuts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said.
Now, Trump also has reason to dislike the ODNI. Alert readers will recall that Tulsi Gabbard’s Russiagate disclosures showed that ODNI was the command-and-control hub for the operation that politically castrated —and almost took down— Trump 1.0.
The ODNI ran Russiagate. After Trump was elected, but before he assumed office, following a December 9, 2016, National Security Council Principals meeting —attended by Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Susan Rice, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and Avril Haines— DNI Clapper’s assistant emailed ODNI leaders. The email’s subject was, “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling.” It assigned them to create “an assessment per the President’s (Obama’s) request.”
A totally made-up assessment.
ODNI led the effort, with CIA, FBI, NSA, and DHS in supporting roles. With help from the Europeans, the CIA manufactured the underlying intelligence; the ODNI coordinated, suppressed contradictory findings, silenced internal dissenters, and published the false assessment. Then, the ODNI’s own Inspector General weaponized the whistleblower process to trigger Trump’s impeachment.
Yesterday, the Journal reported Trump ‘suggested’ that Bill Pulte prioritize firing staff who served during the Biden and Obama administrations. Trump also noted that having Pulte serve on an acting basis “gives you more power” to enact sweeping changes— no confirmation hearings, no Senate leverage, no slow-walking.
“Frankly, it might be good for him to shake it up before people come,” Trump casually explained. “Because, if he reduced the size, in conjunction with me, he can do a lot of the hard work, and we wouldn’t have to saddle somebody that goes in.” It’s just common sense.
It was more than common sense. President Trump described a change-agent wrecking ball. It is a strategic maneuver similar to what we have already seen this year, like with Trump’s recent appointment of Todd Blanche as acting Attorney General.
🔥 But there was also a buried lede. It was tucked away, at the very end of the Politico piece: Trump also said he wants Pulte to focus on releasing information related to the 2020 presidential election. “You may find out some things about the rigged elections,” Trump told reporters. When asked by the Journal what information he hopes Pulte will release, Trump replied, “I would say everything — he should look at everything and make a determination.”
Now let’s draw a line connecting these dots. We have the helpfully timed disclosure of an unsupervised CIA officer with fake credentials who ran a fake ultra-classified program for years, stole $40 million in gold, and lied about his entire background— and somehow passed every internal CIA security check.
That story is now —against all odds, thanks to multiple anonymous informants— headline news, not quietly buried inside the Orwellian IC apparatus. It opens the CIA up for major reform.
Senate Democrats were so panicked by Trump’s new acting DNI Bill Pulte, despite his inexperience, that they are willing to blow up their own beloved FISA spy powers, just to protest the pick— which, if it works, hands Trump the FISA expiration he probably wanted anyway. And Trump is suddenly on record saying Pulte’s job is to gut the agency, fire the Obama and Biden holdovers, and release everything about 2020’s stolen election.
The CIA is in institutional disgrace. The ODNI is on the chopping block. The IC is being dismantled from the outside, embarrassed from the inside, and accidentally defunded by the very Democrats who love it most. Whether this happy confluence of events was Trump’s genius or just dumb luck is irrelevant. Geniuses can often be unlucky. But luckyleaders change the course of history.
Either way: Alice, my dear, we’re all the way down the rabbit hole. Kudos to the Q crowd. I told you 2026 would be the Year of Action.
Have a wonderful weekend! Scramble back here on Monday morning, bright and early, for even more delicious, delightful, and spicy essential news and caffeine commentary.
———————————————————
Rose Rambles... 