Aug. 29 (UPI) – A Republican congressman on Tuesday sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland with not easy answers about the alleged embezzlement of billions of COVID-19 relief funds.
“The Department of Justice has seized more than $1. 4 billion from the COVID-19 relief budget stolen by criminals and has charged more than 3,000 defendants with crimes in federal districts across the country,” Garland said last week.
“In January 2023, the federal government spent approximately $4. 6 trillion on relief systems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This equates to more than you spent through the federal government in total in each fiscal year before 2020. This great expansion in government spending caused inflation and drove government to unprecedented levels,” Wenstrup, R-Ohio, wrote in his letter.
Wenstrup said some of the fraud came from abroad.
“Some of those fraudulent actors were founded outside the United States and may simply involve foreign criminal organizations. Estimates mean that at least part of the entire stolen COVID-19 relief budget went to Russian, Chinese and Nigerian criminals,” Wenstrup said.
Westrup demanded “all documents and communications related to measures or estimates of the loss of the COVID relief program budget due to fraud committed through foreign actors and criminal organizations. “