Vice President JD Vance traveled to Maine on Thursday to campaign for a Republican congressional candidate and expand the Trump administration’s campaign to root out fraud schemes across the country.
Vance appeared alongside former Gov. Paul LePage, who is seeking election in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, in Bangor, where he picked up on themes he put down at a press conference on Wednesday.
“Because I love this state, I can say I am heartbroken by what has happened to the fraud that’s being perpetrated on the taxpayers of this state,” he told the crowd. “Outside of Minnesota and California, which are probably No. 1 and No. 2, if they’re the gold medalist and the silver medalist — I heard somebody shout out ‘New York’ — maybe New York is the bronze medalist. But let me be honest, maybe Maine is the bronze medalist.”
Vance said the reason for this was that Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) was refusing to cooperate with the federal government on the crackdown.
“If you look at the fraud that has happened in this state, if you look at the illegal immigrant communities who have taken benefits that ought to, by right, go to the people in this room,” he said. “What you have in Maine is a festering problem where people have been taken advantage of, and they’ve been stolen from, and your government hasn’t done anything about it.”
Vance accused Mills and former President Joe Biden of taking Maine “from a state that did not have a serious fraud problem to one where I can honestly say it’s one of the worst states in the union.”
On Wednesday, Vance and the members of President Donald Trump’s anti-fraud task force announced new steps to pressure states to cooperate with the federal government to root out fraud.
The task force sent letters to each state Medicaid program, pressing them to cooperate with the Trump administration or lose federal funding for “Medicaid Fraud Control units.”
“Our goal here is not to do that. We don’t want to turn off any money. What we want to do is ensure that people are taking fraud seriously. We want to protect Medicaid. We want to protect Medicare, but we can’t do that if the states that are administering those programs are allowing those programs to be fleeced by fraudsters,” he said at the time. “So we encourage — whether it’s California in New York or Maryland or Ohio — we encourage people to work with us. We want to help you use technology and other tools to get rid of the fraud, to get to the root of the fraud.”
VANCE PUSHES STATES TO ROOT OUT MEDICAID FRAUD OR RISK LOSING
You can watch Vance’s comments in full below.