Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday that the Justice Department would create a high-ranking position with broad authority to investigate fraud across the country that would be “run out of the White House” and answer directly to himself and President Trump.
The assertion by Mr. Vance that he and Mr. Trump intended to exercise direct supervision over a senior Justice Department official was one of the administration’s most brazen efforts to date to toss out the traditional boundaries that have long existed between the White House and investigations conducted by federal law enforcement.
The announcement came at a news conference that was primarily held to defend the shooting this week of a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis by a federal immigration agent. During the event, the vice president said that the Justice Department was in the process of establishing a new assistant attorney general post that would have nationwide authority to investigate fraud offenses.
The Justice Department already has a senior official, known as the fraud section chief, who oversees national fraud prosecutions. While Mr. Vance specified only that the person occupying the newly established job would go after “people who are defrauding the United States,” he said its creation had stemmed from recent allegations in Minnesota of fraud in the day care industry, which, he insisted without offering evidence, was also taking place in other states like Ohio and California.
He also appeared to conflate the allegations about day care fraud with unfounded claims that the woman who was slain in Minnesota, Renee Nicole Good, had been part of a left-wing “network” of activists dedicated to going after immigration officials.
The new Justice Department position would not only investigate fraud, Mr. Vance said, but also look into “financing networks and the domestic terrorism networks that legitimate this violence, that fund this violence and then of course engage in the violence.”
The vice president’s assertion that federal law enforcement would scrutinize left-wing groups for purported violence was in keeping with a memo issued in December by Attorney General Pam Bondi vowing to crack down on supposed “domestic terrorists” who opposed “immigration enforcement.” The memo offered a remarkably expansive definition of domestic terrorists that included anyone who held “extreme views” about “mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anticapitalism or anti-Christianity.”
After Mr. Vance’s announcement, Ms. Bondi posted a message on social media, saying that the Justice Department, under his and Mr. Trump’s leadership, stood ready “to continue prosecuting fraudsters, unraveling structures that permit fraud, and holding bad actors accountable.”
Ms. Bondi also warned protesters in places like Minnesota not to “test our resolve,” saying that while First Amendment activities were protected by the Constitution, people who “cross that red line” would “be arrested and prosecuted.”
Beyond the belligerent language used by Mr. Vance, the most surprising part of his announcement was that the new Justice Department position would, as he put it, “be part of a very broad interagency” effort “being led from the president of the United States on down.”
The insistence that Mr. Trump would have direct control over the department’s new fraud czar was the latest striking break from norms established after the Watergate scandal of the 1970s that introduced distance between the White House and the decisions made by senior federal prosecutors.
The move to create a new senior fraud position inside the Justice Department came less than a year after Mr. Trump issued an executive order pausing all of the department’s investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that governs fraud investigations into bribery by U.S. businesses overseas. By June, the administration had closed about half of its open foreign bribery inquiries, but it planned to initiate prosecutions to more narrowly focus on misconduct that hurt the country’s capacity to compete with foreign companies.
The Justice Department has also made significant cuts to its unit that focuses on another type of fraud: corruption by public officials.
Mr. Vance said on Thursday that the White House was expected to nominate someone to take the new position in the next few days. The nominee, he said, would then have to be confirmed by the Senate.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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