JD Vance Revealed What Biden’s DOJ Said When Someone Stole a Million Dollars From Taxpayers

May 18, 2026 Cat2, The Media
Zack Frank via shutterstock

Janet Mills called the federal fraud investigation into her state a "political attack."

Then auditors found that 100 percent of the MaineCare autism claims they examined had problems.

Now JD Vance is standing in Bangor telling Maine exactly who let this happen.

Biden's DOJ Had a Price Tag for Your Money

Vance didn't dance around it.

Standing at Bangor International Airport on Thursday, he told the crowd exactly how Biden's Department of Justice handled cases where Americans were getting robbed blind.

"Let's say a person defrauded all of you for a million bucks," he said. "To many of our Department of Justice leaders under the Biden administration, they said that was too low level to actually go after."

A million dollars of your money – stolen – and the Biden DOJ called it too small to bother with.

Vance made sure the crowd understood what that meant in practice: "How many of you would like the federal government to hand you $1 million? Well, there are fraudsters out there who are getting $1 million of your money and the government wasn't even paying attention to it."

This wasn't a bureaucratic oversight. It was a policy decision.

While Biden's DOJ looked the other way, fraud rings ran coordinated operations across every state in the country.

A 2025 GAO analysis found that nearly half of everyone convicted of pandemic-era fraud had conspiracy charges – not lone opportunists, but organized networks that understood exactly how unguarded the money was.

Mills Talked Tough While the Numbers Told a Different Story

Vance placed the Maine-specific blame squarely on Governor Janet Mills and Joe Biden.

Mills has been loud about her innocence.

When CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz sent her a 33-question letter about MaineCare fraud in February, she called it a "political attack" and accused Trump of using fraud allegations as a "pretense to send weaponized federal agents into states led by Democrats."

Then federal auditors released their findings.

They found at least $45.6 million in improper MaineCare payments for autism services in 2023 alone. Dr. Oz's assessment was blunt: "One hundred percent of the claims examined had problems."

Not some. Not most. Every single one.

The Maine Wire documented what was happening on the ground – multiple home health agencies collected millions in MaineCare payments from the same Portland addresses, with no staff visible when reporters showed up.

One agency CEO collected more than a million dollars in Medicaid payments and disappeared without facing criminal charges.

Mills publicly fought the federal investigation while her own administration quietly froze enrollment in four of MaineCare's most-defrauded programs in April – saying nothing publicly until the move was reported.

Defiant in public. Scrambling in private.

The Clock Is Running Out

Vance celebrated two things in Bangor on Thursday – Biden's departure from office and the end of Mills's term.

They spent four years building a DOJ that ignored million-dollar thefts, installed governors who dismissed fraud investigations as partisan warfare, and called anyone who raised alarms a conspiracy theorist.

Now there's a task force. Now there are federal audits.

Now a Vice President is in Bangor naming names.

The fraudsters who walked free under Biden are learning the threshold just changed.

And the Democrats who set it are learning that voters have long memories.

Sources:

  • Ben Whedon, "Vance describes Biden DOJ's lax attitude toward 'low level fraud,'" Just the News, May 14, 2026.
  • U.S. GAO, "Fraud Risk in Federal Programs: Continuing Threat from Organized Groups Since COVID-19," GAO, July 2025.
  • Steve Robinson, "After Attacking Trump and Oz, Maine's Mills Quietly Cracks Down on Medicaid Fraud Free-for-All," The Maine Wire, April 2, 2026.
  • Steve Robinson, "Exclusive: Janet Mills' Attempt to Delay Trump's Medicaid Fraud Investigation Rejected," The Maine Wire, February 27, 2026.
  • WGME Staff, "Vice President Vance addresses alleged fraud in Maine during stop in Bangor," WGME, May 14, 2026.