President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice just got a leader to oversee its newly created unit to prosecute fraud, and it so happens he’s from California, which has been making headlines for its alleged fraud cases.
The US Senate on Tuesday confirmed Colin McDonald, an associate deputy general at the Justice Department, 52 to 47 to be in charge of the DOJ’s new fraud division.
The division is part of a broader attempt by the Trump administration to declare “war on fraud” that was exposed in Minnesota and could also appear in California.
“Similar schemes are now surfacing within California’s hospice system, where some providers are overbilling Medicare by millions of dollars and foreigners have reportedly obtained hospice licenses,” Chairman James Comer (R) of the House Oversight Committee told the Post.
Hospice fraud may be an area where McDonald may start looking into, as Comer claimed that California Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Democrats failed to act on red flags raised by audits and media reports. The Oversight Committee is now requesting communications and documents from Newsom’s office regarding the fraud.
McDonald could end up working closely with Vice President JD Vance, who called the prosecutor “a great choice” and a “key asset in the War on Fraud.” Vance was announced earlier in March as the chair of the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.
“Colin will have nationwide jurisdiction at the Justice Department to prosecute the bad guys,” the vice president told the New York Post.
McDonald, described by Trump as a “very Smart, Tough, and Highly Respected AMERICA FIRST Federal Prosecutor,” went to San Diego Christian College and graduated from the California Western School of Law, according to his LinkedIn. He served as a law clerk at the US District Court for the Southern District of California before serving for more than a decade as an assistant US Attorney in the Southern District.
McDonald has some notable experience prosecuting fraud, particularly in 2020 with the conviction of Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha and his city-prosecutor wife Katherine Kealoha. The two abused their roles to arrest their own uncle — claiming he stole their mailbox — to discredit him and conceal their own theft of $148,000.
He’ll have his hands full in California, which is under fire for reports of hospice fraud. Figures like conservative Youtuber Nick Shirley and outlets like CBS News have visited dense clusters of hospice providers packed into tight areas, sometimes with multiple companies tied to a single address.
Some of the providers allegedly are enrolling ineligible patients or billing the government for non-existent care.
Other types of fraud in California may be investigated, such as similar concerns with childcare providers or tax fraud in political campaigns.
Newsom has mostly dismissed such highlighted instances of fraud, particularly around hospice care, as political theater. In a Tuesday press release titled “news you won’t see on Fox News,” his office claimed the state revoked 280 hospice licenses with 300 more providers under investigation.
“California takes fraud extremely seriously and has zero tolerance for the abuse of public programs – especially those as sensitive as end-of-life care,” Newsom said in a statement.
