As previously reported, numerous times by The Drill Down, the U.S. COVID pandemic relief programs were rife with fraud —”historic fraud” according to Inspector General Larry D. Turner.
$750 million in relief checks went to convicted criminals; billions of dollars were taken by scammers from the COVID-19 Relief Fund; and billionaire celebrities took advantage of Payment Protection Plan loans while flying around in private jets.
Turner said in a statement that pandemic relief funds were hit by “historical levels of fraud,” with more than 1000 individuals already charged for making fraudulent claims.
So why has President Biden just tapped an official who oversaw these “historical levels of fraud” to replace Labor Secretary Marty Walsh?
Her name is Julie Su —she is the current Deputy Labor Secretary and formerly of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency.
“It is my honor to nominate Julie Su to be our country’s next Secretary of Labor,” Biden said in a statement. “Over several decades, Julie has led the largest state labor department in the nation, cracked down on wage theft, fought to protect trafficked workers, increased the minimum wage, created good-paying, high-quality jobs, and established and enforced workplace safety standards.”
But Ms. Su may not have been the best candidate for President Biden to select.
According to The Daily Wire, “She previously received criticism for indirectly overseeing the California Employment Development Department as one-tenth of the $114 billion in pandemic relief claims handled by the agency involved fraudulent activity. An additional 17% of the benefit payments were made to accounts that were frozen for an investigation; the total amount of fraud could have therefore surpassed $31 billion, according to a January 2021 report from the San Francisco Chronicle.”
“There is no sugarcoating the reality,” Su told reporters at the time. “California has not had sufficient security measures in place to prevent this level of fraud, and criminals took advantage of the situation.”
Su ultimately threw Trump and the federal government under the bus to save face; she claimed they didn’t provide adequate guidance —and that was the reason she failed.
“It should be no surprise that EDD [Employment Development Department] was overwhelmed, just like the rest of the nation’s unemployment agencies,” she said at the time. “And we now know that as millions of Californians applied for help, international and national criminal rings were at work behind the scenes working relentlessly to steal unemployment benefits using sophisticated methods of identity theft.”
And for this, she earns a promotion.
