The complaint, filed in the Central District of California, alleges violation of the federal False Claims Act, according to the DOJ.

The organization contracts with California’s Department of Health Care Services to provide services to residents of San Bernardino and Riverside counties under state’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal.

“Today’s lawsuit against IEHP shows our steadfast commitment to hold accountable insurers that brazenly compromise the Medicaid system,” Acting United States Attorney Bill Essayli said. “We will take every measure to restore integrity and accountability to the Medicaid system and ensure that patient care – not financial gain – is the primary focus of our health care system.”

IEHP attorney calls allegations “misguided” and “galling”

IEHP representatives denied wrongdoing.

“IEHP strongly disagrees with the DOJ allegations and is prepared to defend our efforts through the appropriate legal process,” the organization said in a written statement..

Attorney Winston Chan of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, who represents the company, said the complaint was unfounded.

“Through this misguided civil legal dispute, the federal government is trying to contest Medi-Cal health benefits paid out a decade ago and that were previously disclosed to and approved by regulators, with full transparency,” he said. “The allegations are a brazen attempt at revisionist history that is not only wrong as to the facts and law, but also particularly galling in light of the federal government’s wider attacks on state Medicaid funding.”

The attorney also pointed out that the state of California did not join the federal government as a plaintiff in the case.

“Conspicuously absent from the lawsuit… is any allegation whatsoever that Inland Empire Health Plan or its personnel retained any of the funds in question or that providers serving the neediest Californians did not actually receive every dollar awarded to them,” according to Chan. “We look forward to taking this case to court and exposing the mistaken assumptions, flawed reasoning, and false conjecture that is rife throughout the allegations, and ensuring that our client is not distracted from its not-for-profit mission to heal and inspire its 1.5 million underserved members in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.”

What does the lawsuit against IEHP allege?

The federal lawsuit contends that IEHP submitted false statement to Medi-Cal and knowingly retaining overpayments, according to a DOJ statement.

Following an expansion of Medi-Cal in 2014, the first three years of the program were fully funded by the federal government, prosecutors said.

Under its contract with state officials, if IEHP did not spend at least 85% of the funds on “allowed medical expenses,” the health plan was required to repay the state the difference between 85% of the funding and actual expenditures. The state was then required to pay those funds back to the federal government.

According to the DOJ statement, “IEHP developed schemes to misuse surplus Medi-Cal Expansion funding, falling into two broad categories: (1) sham incentive programs and (2) an extra-contractual retroactive rate increase.”

Prosecutors allege the organization misspent funds for “impermissible purposes,” including administrative expenses and “simply giving away federal funding in exchange for no value in return.”

“The complaint further alleges that IEHP was motivated by a desire to conserve its other funding, thus enriching itself,” the statement said. “IEHP officials “deceived the state” through false statements, “which it knew would be relayed to the federal government—about the nature, timing, and purpose of its payments to providers.”

The complaint accuses IEHP of “wrongfully retain at least $320 million in federal funding that it should have returned.”

The services provided by Medicaid and Medical are vital, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brenna Jenny said.”

“Today’s complaint demonstrates our continued commitment to protect the integrity of the Medicaid program, and the taxpayer dollars that support it, from health insurers that knowingly seek to divert program funds for their own financial benefit.”

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In an unsigned memorandum, the department declared that there was no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced deceased convicted sexual predator, maintained a client list or that he blackmailed prominent individuals for various misdeeds. The memorandum also declared that Epstein committed suicide.

Most Americans saw this news (if they saw it at all) and barely raised an eyebrow. The Epstein story was part of the past; he died in 2019. But it detonated like a bomb in the MAGA universe. Pro-Trump influencers with vast audiences couldn’t believe what they were reading.

After all, they’d been told for years that there was an Epstein client list. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, told Fox News in February that the client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” (She later claimed that she was referring to the Epstein case file, not a specific client list.)

In October 2024, JD Vance, then a candidate for vice president, said, “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing.”

Before he was Trump’s director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel told Glenn Beck, a right-wing radio host, that the F.B.I. had Epstein’s “black book” and that it was “under direct control of the director of the F.B.I.” In 2023, Patel told Benny Johnson, a MAGA podcaster, that members of Congress should “put on your big-boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.”

In September 2024, Dan Bongino, now the deputy director of the F.B.I., told his listeners, “Folks, the Epstein client list is a huge deal” that would “rock the Democrat Party.”

These quotations are a small fraction of the right-wing discourse about Epstein. During the Trump era, references to Epstein have been ubiquitous in MAGA circles. And the statement “Epstein didn’t kill himself” was so popular that it leaked out into the wider American culture.

The Epstein story mattered so much in MAGA circles because it was a key element in their indictment of America’s so-called ruling class. Trump’s appeal to the Republican base isn’t just rooted in his supporters’ extraordinary affection for the man; it’s also rooted in their almost indescribably dark view of the American government.

Why are they so keen to burn it all down? Well, if you believe your government is populated by people so depraved that they’d participate in and cover up the systematic sexual abuse of children, then you wouldn’t just want them out of office; you’d want them prosecuted, imprisoned and maybe even executed. And you’d want all the power you’d need to make that happen.

And if you believe that the ruling elites would abuse children, then they’d certainly be the kind of people who’d gin up a Russia hoax or try to steal an election in 2020. People who are that terrible are capable of anything. And if you wonder why MAGA turned on the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice, well, it’s not just about the Russia investigation or the F.B.I. search of Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago. MAGA America also believed the F.B.I. was protecting pedophiles to preserve the status quo.

On the right, the Epstein story became the thinking man’s version of the QAnon conspiracy theory — the idea that American society was led by a gang of cannibalistic pedophiles. Whereas QAnon was rooted in the imaginary revelations of a shadowy figure who claimed Q security clearance, at least the Epstein story was rooted in some very grim, very real facts.

Epstein was a monstrous and grotesque sexual predator. Along with his convicted confederate, Ghislaine Maxwell, he systematically groomed and sexually abused (and enabled the sexual abuse of) hundreds and hundreds of young women and girls.

He was also one of the most well-connected people in the world. A host of powerful people attended his parties and rode on his jet.

Oddly enough — considering MAGA’s obsession with Epstein — one of his most powerful friends was Trump. They flew together, they partied together, and in 2002, Trump told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.” But Trump also made this ominous observation, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” After Maxwell’s arrest, Trump said: “I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly.”

This was the man that MAGA trusted to fully expose Epstein and all his misdeeds?

Make no mistake: MAGA is very angry. After the Department of Justice released its memo, MAGA influencers exploded. Tucker Carlson was furious. “The whole thing that this tape shows that he didn’t kill himself is, like, a joke, but worse than that, it’s a joke that we all get,” he said. “I feel like we’re at a dangerous point now.”

Alex Jones said the Trump administration was now “part of the cover-up.” On X, Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote, “RELEASE THE EPSTEIN CLIENT LIST!!!!”

This moment is significant for another reason: It allows us to peer into the future of MAGA and see its potential crackup. After Trump is gone, this movement could tear itself apart. Its very existence is premised on a series of fantastical assertions about America and American government.

This means that MAGA influencers are constantly deceiving themselves, one another and the right-wing public. It’s an ecosystem that operates in a constant state of crisis and grievance, and MAGA supporters are so convinced that the worst possible stories are real that they’ll turn on anyone not named Donald Trump who dares to tell them the truth — or who deviates in the slightest bit from the stories they tell themselves.

Once Trump leaves office, there will be no one left to end the internal arguments and direct everyone to fall in line. If the Democrats have a problem of too many purity tests, Republicans will soon experience the consequences of putting together a coalition that may have too few. In red America, you can believe anything so long as you support Trump.

Remove that man, and only the grievances remain, and many of MAGA’s grievances are against other Republicans. The G.O.P. coalition contains pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine factions, internationalists and isolationists, normie Republicans and wild conspiracy theorists.

Republican ideological diversity is its temporary strength. It could build a tent big enough to win very close to a majority of the popular vote. But by pulling a critical mass of disgruntled Americans into one party, Republicans have created a culture of constant conflict, and those conflicts are often rooted in completely false beliefs about American life.

Those internal conflicts are fully underway. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported on Friday that “it’s hard to overstate the infighting” in MAGA over the Epstein case. Also on Friday, Axios reported that Bongino took the day off work after clashing with Bondi at the White House, and CNN is reporting that he’s considering resigning from the F.B.I. In fact, we can see a consensus hardening against Bondi: “She’s the culprit. She’s the one who pulled the bait and switch. She told us that the list was on her desk.”

Trump himself isn’t immune from attack. As part of his divorce from the MAGA movement, Elon Musk has claimed that Trump and his longtime ally Steve Bannon are in the Epstein files. “How,” Musk posted on Tuesday, “can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”

By Saturday evening, Trump had enough. He posted a long screed on Truth Social that declared his support for Bondi — he said she was doing a “FANTASTIC JOB!” — and then bizarrely claimed that the Epstein files were written by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration.” In a pointed reference to Patel, he said that the F.B.I. should be focused on investigating “Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, the Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting thugs and criminals,” rather than “spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein.”

Judging from the early response online, MAGA is not satisfied. The usually faithful Benny Johnson was shaken. “By admitting that the Epstein Files are real,” he said, “and that you’ve read them, and you don’t like their contents, and they were written by your enemies, it doesn’t make the most compelling case as far as I’m concerned. Holy moly.”

The Epstein case remains a bit of a black box to most Americans. We still don’t know all the details of Epstein’s relationships with the rich and powerful, and in the absence of knowledge, wild allegations spread unhindered by hard facts.

This much we do know: Some of MAGA’s most trusted voices — including Patel, Bondi, Bongino and Trump himself — are suddenly telling their movement: Move along, there’s nothing to see here. But MAGA does not want to hear what they have to say.

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A new program created by California’s consumer protection agency aims to provide free, personalized help for Golden State borrowers struggling to navigate the complex, byzantine student loan system.

The Student Loan Empowerment Network is designed to provide financial coaching and assistance for borrowers, including help securing income-based repayment plans and federal student loan forgiveness for those working in public service jobs.

“The student loan system is fraught with systemic issues that make it practically difficult, if not impossible, for people to get the rights and benefits they’re supposed to be entitled to under the law,” said Suzanne Martindale, the senior deputy commissioner for consumer financial protection at the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.

Martindale said in many cases, borrowers might be eligible for some form of loan relief, but don’t know how to access it because “the information hasn’t been clear, because the goalposts keep changing, because the loan servicers can’t seem to give you an accurate answer.”

“People need somewhere to go to get accurate, fair information, working with someone who cares about their best financial interests,” Martindale said.

Borrowers who want help from the program can fill out an intake form at studentloanhelp.dfpi.ca.gov or call (888) 774-2227.

Borrowers will be connected with a financial counseling agency or legal aid agency. In Los Angeles, those include Public Counsel, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and the Koreatown Youth & Community Center.

The program will offer a mix of webinars and financial coaching sessions. Some borrowers with “very complex legal issues” may require one-on-one help, including those who have older private loans from defunct issuers, or have been in default on their loans, Martindale said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2022-2023 budget set aside $7.25 million for the student loan assistance and education program and $2.25 million for a statewide marketing campaign.

The organizations working on the loan program will be required to track the number of people who switch to income-based payment plans, document their employment for public service loan forgiveness and have their loans discharged, Martindale said.

Helping Californians reduce their loan burdens using publicly available programs can have a major economic benefit for the state, she said. She said she hopes the program becomes a permanent fixture in the state, although the looming shortfall makes that less certain.

After the pandemic-era freeze on student debt expired last year, about 40% of borrowers with federal student loans missed their first monthly payment last fall, according to federal data.

Borrowers who are delinquent on their federal loans won’t be reported to credit bureaus until Sept. 30 of this year, but in the meantime, interest continues to accrue.

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Last month the Democrat unveiled his budget for the next fiscal year, admitting that ‘difficult decisions’ are needed to address the state’s deficit – including a 1.6 percent reduction in the state’s Department of Justice’s overall funding.

The proposed budget includes a $97 million cut to trial court operations, $10 million to the Department of Justice’s Division of Law Enforcement and over $80 million to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, as reported by Fox News.

Newsom’s plan comes as major national stores and local businesses in California say they continue to face rampant theft. Videos of large-scale thefts, in which groups of individuals brazenly rush into stores and take goods in plain sight, have often gone viral.

Crime data shows the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles saw a steady increase in shoplifting between 2021 and 2022. Across the state, shoplifting rates rose during the same time period but were still lower than the pre-pandemic levels in 2019, while commercial burglaries and robberies have become more prevalent in urban counties.

Meanwhile homelessness jumped 6 percent to more than 180,000 people in California last year, federal data show. And since 2013, the numbers have exploded by 53 percent with the state accounting for a third of America’s entire homeless population.

The state’s criminal justice record which saw the number of violent crimes jump by 27 percent between 2013 and 2022, and pickpocketing more than double.

This is the second year in a row the nation’s most populous state is facing a multibillion-dollar shortfall. State revenues have continued to fall amid increasing inflation and a slowdown in the state’s usually robust technology industry.

Officially, Newsom said the state’s deficit is $27.6 billion. But really, it’s closer to $45 billion when including previous spending reductions that Newsom and the state Legislature agreed to in March.

Including reductions in public education spending, which Newsom has not included, the deficit would be even billions of dollars more, according to recent analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

A spokesperson for Newsom told Fox News in a statement: ‘The budget proposes numerous ways to make government more efficient and reduce costs for taxpayers, including cuts on inmate spending.

‘Since Governor Newsom took office in 2019, the state has made record investments in law enforcement, including $1.1 billion to tackle crime, support police, and hold criminals accountable.’

So far, Newsom has not gutted some of his splashiest policy advancements, including free kindergarten for all 4-year-olds and free health insurance for all low-income adults regardless of their immigration status.

But as Friday’s proposal showed, Newsom is willing to chip away at some of those promises to balance the budget.

While Newsom has not taken away health insurance from anyone, he proposed the state stop paying for health care workers to care for some 14,000 disabled immigrants in their home. That would save the state $94.7 million. While he hasn’t pulled back the state’s commitment to expanded kindergarten, he proposed eliminating $550 million that would have helped school districts build the facilities they need to teach all of those extra students.

After promising to pay for child care for another 146,000 children from low-income families, Newsom on Friday proposed pausing that expansion at 119,000. And after promising to boost how much money doctor’s get to treat Medicaid patients, Newsom on Friday proposed canceling $6.7 billion that had been set aside to do that.

In total, Newsom is proposing $32.8 billion in cuts over two years, including eliminating 10,000 unfilled state jobs and an 8 percent cut to state operations — including things like eliminating landlines. He promised there would be no layoffs, furloughs or salary cuts for the state’s more than 221,000 state workers.

The size of the deficit is important as it will shape the national perspectives of Newsom, who is a top surrogate for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign and who is widely believed to harbor presidential aspirations of his own.

Newsom has spent much of his time in office basking in the glow of historic budget surpluses that allowed him to greatly expand state spending. But back-to-back budget deficits — with more on the horizon — are testing California’s commitment to those increases.

Newsom had enjoyed unprecedented surplus budgets of more than $100 billion throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. But the past two years have saddled him with a pair of multibillion-dollar deficits, a less-welcome position for a governor seen as a potential future Democratic presidential candidate.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California’s new attorney general on Tuesday promised an increased focus on hate crimes, saying there is “a state of crisis” because of increases in attacks on Asian Americans since the coronavirus entered the U.S. after originating in China.

Rob Bonta announced a new Racial Justice Bureau within his California Department of Justice and said he will hold a virtual meeting with the mayors of the state’s 13 largest cities later this month to discuss hate crime.

About half of hate crimes go unreported, they are difficult to prosecute because the law requires something to show they are driven by racial or other discrimination, and they affect many races, religions and sexual orientations, he said.

But “make no mistake, right now we’re in a full on state of crisis, a full on state of emergency, when it comes to hate violence against the Asian-Pacific Islander community,” he said.

Last week, two Asian American women were stabbed in an unprovoked attack in San Francisco, and a Los Angeles County jail inmate was charged with hate crimes after he knocked down and repeatedly punched a jail employee who is Asian American.

Bonta, a Democrat, is the first Filipino American to hold the state’s top law enforcement post, and used his first news conference since taking office April 23 to highlight the problem. Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed the former Assemblyman to replace Xavier Becerra, who became the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary.

He said the new bureau will initially include six attorneys and a supervising deputy attorney general within the department’s Civil Rights Enforcement Section.

Aside from addressing hate crimes, the bureau will focus on other existing racial and social justice issues before his agency, including white supremacy, racial bias in policing, encouraging diverse college campuses, and the state’s new task force to study reparations for African Americans.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Drugmaker Purdue Pharma, the company behind the powerful prescription painkiller OxyContin that experts say helped touch off an opioid epidemic, will plead guilty to federal criminal charges as part of a settlement of more than $8 billion, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.

The deal does not release any of the company’s executives or owners — members of the wealthy Sackler family — from criminal liability, and a criminal investigation is ongoing. Family members said they acted “ethically and lawfully,” but some state attorneys general said the agreement fails to hold the Sacklers accountable.

The company will plead guilty to three counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and violating federal anti-kickback laws, the officials said, and the agreement will be detailed in a bankruptcy court filing in federal court.

The Sacklers will lose all control over their company, a move already in the works, and Purdue will become a public benefit company, meaning it will be governed by a trust that has to balance the trust’s interests against those of the American public and public health, officials said.

The settlement is the highest-profile display yet of the federal government seeking to hold a major drugmaker responsible for an opioid addiction and overdose crisis linked to more than 470,000 deaths in the country since 2000.

It comes less than two weeks before a presidential election where the opioid epidemic has taken a political back seat to the coronavirus pandemic and other issues, and gives President Donald Trump’s administration an example of action on the addiction crisis, which he promised early on in his term.

Ed Bisch, who lost his 18-year-old son to an overdose nearly 20 years ago, said he wants to see people associated with Purdue prosecuted and was glad the Sackler family wasn’t granted immunity.

He blames the company and Sacklers for thousands for deaths. “If it was sold for severe pain only from the beginning, none of this would have happened,” said Bisch, who now lives in Westampton, New Jersey. “But they got greedy.”

Brooke Feldman, a 39-year-old Philadelphia resident who is in recovery from opioid use disorder and is a social worker, said she is glad to see Purdue admit wrongdoing. She said the company had acted for years as “a drug cartel.”

Democratic attorneys general criticized the agreement as a “mere mirage” of justice for victims.

“The federal government had the power here to put the Sacklers in jail, and they didn’t,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “Instead, they took fines and penalties that Purdue likely will never fully pay.”

But members of the Sackler family, once listed as one of the nation’s wealthiest by Forbes magazine, said they had acted “ethically and lawfully” and that company documents required under the settlement to be made public will show that.

“Purdue deeply regrets and accepts responsibility for the misconduct detailed by the Department of Justice in the agreed statement of facts,” Steve Miller, who became chairman of the company’s board in 2018, said in a statement. No members of the Sackler family remain on that board, though they still own the company.

Family members, in a statement, expressed “deep compassion for people who suffer from opioid addiction and abuse and hope the proposal will be implemented as swiftly as possible to help address their critical needs.”

As part of the resolution, Purdue is admitting that it impeded the Drug Enforcement Administration by falsely representing that it had maintained an effective program to avoid drug diversion and by reporting misleading information to the agency to boost the company’s manufacturing quotas, the officials said.

Purdue is also admitting to violating federal anti-kickback laws by paying doctors, through a speaking program, to induce them to write more prescriptions for the company’s opioids and for using electronic health records software to influence the prescription of pain medication, according to the officials.

Purdue will make a direct payment to the government of $225 million, which is part of a larger $2 billion criminal forfeiture. In addition to that forfeiture, Purdue also faces a $3.54 billion criminal fine, though that money probably will not be fully collected because it will be taken through a bankruptcy, which includes a large number of other creditors, including thousands of state and local governments. Purdue will also agree to $2.8 billion in damages to resolve its civil liability.

Part of the money from the settlement would go to aid in medication-assisted treatment and other drug programs to combat the opioid epidemic. That part of the arrangement echoes the plan the company is pushing in bankruptcy court and which about half the states oppose.

As part of the plea deal, the company admits it violated federal law and “knowingly and intentionally conspired and agreed with others to aid and abet” the dispensing of medication from doctors “without a legitimate medical purpose and outside the usual course of professional practice,” according to the plea agreement.

While some state attorneys general opposed the prospect of Purdue becoming a public benefit company, the lead lawyers representing 2,800 local governments in lawsuits against Purdue and other drugmakers, distributors and pharmacies put out a statement supporting the principle but saying more work needs to be done.

The Sackler family has already pledged to hand over the company itself plus at least $3 billion to resolve thousands of suits against the Stamford, Connecticut-based drugmaker. The company declared bankruptcy as a way to work out that plan, which could be worth $10 billion to $12 billion over time. In their statement, family members said that is “more than double all Purdue profits the Sackler family retained since the introduction of OxyContin.”

“Both the company and the shareholders are paying a very steep price for what occurred here,” Deputy U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said Wednesday.

While there are conflicting views of whether it’s enough, it’s clear the Sacklers’ reputation has taken a hit.

Until recently, the Sackler name was on museum galleries and educational programs around the world because of gifts from family members. But under pressure from activists, institutions from the Louvre in Paris to Tufts University in Massachusetts have dissociated themselves from the family in the last few years.

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