MAGA's fraud fighters are quietly backing a fraudster

President Donald Trump and his supporters are focusing on alleged fraud cases, from accusations against Minnesotan Somali-American daycares to supposed home-care fraud and Medicaid/Medicare fraud. Yet as one conservative commentator pointed out, these same Trump supporters are singing a very different tune when it comes to one of their own.

“In what appears to be a coordinated effort on X, MAGA influencers as varied as a pro-Trump rapper and a Gateway Pundit editor are calling for leniency for Utah businessman Andrew McCubbins, arguing that his conviction for looting $89 million in Medicare money isn’t really that big of a deal, all things considered,” The Bulwark’s Will Sommer wrote on Thursday. “McCubbins is the former head of a Utah company that was found to have ordered unnecessary genetic testing, with nurses and doctors bribed to request the tests for patients.”

Sommer added that McCubbins pled guilty to all three charges in September 2020, had to forfeit his multi-million-dollar Utah house and testified at a co-conspirator’s trial about his crimes. Yet McCubbins also financially supported projects near and dear to MAGA hearts, most notably by executive producing the 2023 film “Sound of Freedom,” which promoted the QAnon conspiracy theories of alleged serial sexual abuser Tim Ballard and reportedly grossed almost $20 million in ticket sales by conservatives buying thousands of unused tickets. For these reasons, McCubbins is widely admired in MAGA circles regardless of his criminal background.

“With McCubbins’s sentencing on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud Medicare looming later this month, conservative influencers have launched a months-long—and what appears to be coordinated—effort to win him a pardon, or at least to get the Justice Department to drop the case,” Sommer wrote. These include the pro-Trump rapper Forgatio Blow, who calls himself “Trump’s nephew,” who wrote that “the math on this case just doesn’t add up and addressing the U.S. pardon attorney as “My nxgga” (sic). Blow has previously described himself as “the Donald Trump of rap.”

“In the music industry, everyone loved me, but nobody wanted to support me on a big record label,” Blow said in 2022. “Or everybody wants to support me and be my friend when they need something from me. I felt like that was like Trump—before he was president, everybody loved him… Said he’s going to be the president and they said, ‘No way.’ And then what happened? He became the president. That’s like me and music. I said I was going to make it through, you know, being a white rapper.”

A pro-Trump influencer in Spain cited McCubbins’ involvement in Ballard’s group that he and his supporters claim rescued children, although others have described it as a scam for allegedly exaggerating and/or fabricating claims and ignoring Ballard’s own alleged serial sexual misconduct.

“Sound of Freedom showed the grit needed to save kids,” Ada Lluch, the pro-Trump influencer in Spain, claimed. “Andrew McCubbins was a key operative on those missions. It is crazy that a case from the last administration is still active against him.”

Sommer had a different interpretation besides the desire to free McCubbins.

“One thing that is striking about the push to obtain a pardon for McCubbins is the uncomfortable racial double standard it suggests: After all, the right-wing anti-fraud campaign this year has largely focused on minority and immigrant communities whose populations include many people dependent on government support for services and funding, like those Somali-American daycare providers in Minnesota,” Sommer wrote. “For right-wingers to push for leniency for a well-connected white guy who confessed to white-collar fraud has an odor of hypocrisy.”

McCubbins, Ballard and others also have not condemned Trump for his decades-long and close friendship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who allegedly facilitated Trump sexually assaulting a 13-year-old in the 1980s.