Trump Grants Clemency to Executive Who Led $205M Medicare Fraud Scheme — as GOP Says They’re Eliminating “Fraud”

President Donald Trump has quietly commuted the sentence of a Florida health care executive convicted of leading a Medicare fraud scheme to pilfer $205 million from the program through false means — even as the GOP claims that their massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs are aimed at weeding out “waste, fraud and abuse.”

Last Wednesday, Trump granted clemency to two dozen people, including Lawrence Duran, who was convicted in 2011 for defrauding Medicare and money laundering, among other charges. Duran, who owned a mental health care company with seven locations across Florida , and his girlfriend received $87 million from the scheme.

As the Miami Herald points out, this was, at the time, the largest therapy-related Medicare fraud scheme in history, with hundreds