President Donald Trump has nominated a federal prosecutor to a newly created role of fraud investigator after the Trump Administration urged the Justice Department to investigate fraud in Democrat-led states.
If confirmed by the Senate, Colin McDonald would lead a new DOJ unit as “first ever Assistant Attorney General for National FRAUD Enforcement,” Trump announced. The position would be directly supervised by the White House instead of the Justice Department, which has raised questions around the potential politicization of law enforcement investigations. The role will “have nationwide jurisdiction over the issue of fraud,” Vice President J.D. Vance said earlier this month.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Vance’s communications director William Martin appeared to embrace a nickname for McDonald’s role, quoting on X a laudatory New York Post headline: “Trump’s fraud czar pick is ‘fearless’ prosecutor Colin McDonald.”
“Colin McDonald is a very Smart, Tough, and Highly Respected AMERICA FIRST Federal Prosecutor who has successfully delivered Justice in some of the most difficult and high stakes cases our Country has ever seen,” Trump said in a Wednesday post on Truth Social. “Together, we will END THE FRAUD, and RESTORE INTEGRITY to our Federal Programs. Congratulations Colin — STOP THE SCAMS!”
The move comes after the DOJ under Trump has opened new investigations into alleged widespread fraud in social-service programs in Minnesota, with the President accusing Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of running a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.” At the same time, the Trump Administration has used fraud allegations to defend their aggressive immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, which has resulted in the killing of two Americans by federal agents.
Here’s what to know about McDonald and the new fraud unit.
Who is Colin McDonald?
McDonald currently serves as Associate Deputy Attorney General at the Justice Department under Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. In a post on X, Blanche called McDonald “a rockstar, who was instrumental in our team’s mission of Making America Safe Again.”
McDonald has also worked for more than a decade as a federal prosecutor, according to his LinkedIn profile. Among his high-profile cases, McDonald prosecuted former Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha, his wife and city prosecutor Katherine Kealoha, as well as two police officers, in a public corruption scandal in Hawaii. The Kealohas were convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice after they used their positions to frame and falsely arrest a family member in order to conceal their own theft of $148,000 from an elderly relative.
Former Southern California U.S. Attorney Robert Brewer, who previously supervised McDonald, reportedly said, “I assigned him to a very difficult public corruption case in Hawaii that seriously needed his organizational and legal skills. As expected, he was invaluable in resolving the case in a most favorable way.”
Why is Trump focused on fraud?
Fraud has become a common attack line during Trump’s second term, despite the President’s own record of being found liable for civil fraud in a New York case in 2024, criminally convicted on separate charges of falsifying business records, and pardoning several high-profile figures convicted of financial wrongdoing.
Proven or not, the Trump Administration has used allegations of fraud as the basis for penalizing Democrat-led states.
Earlier this month, the Trump Administration withheld $10 billion in child care and social services funding from five Democrat-led states—California, Illinois, New York, Colorado, and Minnesota—citing allegations of widespread social services fraud. The President said without providing details in a Jan. 6 Truth Social post that California was being investigated for fraud, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom denied.
“Donald Trump is a deranged, habitual liar whose relationship with reality ended years ago,” Newsom’s office told ABC News, adding that California has prevented an estimated $125 billion in attempted fraud through identity verification and other administrative checks, and “protected taxpayers from the exact kind of scam artists Trump celebrates, excuses, and pardons.”
Minnesota has been the focal point of many of Trump’s attacks. Repeatedly using language against Somalis that is widely seen as racist, Trump has claimed that “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State” and are defrauding Americans of billions of dollars through public benefit programs. (To date, the largest proven fraud cases involving Somali defendants involve hundreds of millions of dollars, not billions.)
In 2021, federal law enforcement began probing alleged fraud in the Feeding Our Future nonprofit in Minnesota. Prosecutors under the Joe Biden Administration charged 70 people in cases involving roughly $250 million of fraud tied to COVID-era meal reimbursements. Additional defendants were charged in that case and other Minnesota fraud investigations during the Trump Administration, bringing the total across both Administrations to 98. As of December, more than 60 defendants in fraud cases were convicted, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, which includes those convicted during the Biden Administration. Last year, Walz ordered audits, paused payments to more than a dozen “high-risk” programs, and created a statewide anti-fraud task force.
But after a viral video in late December claimed to expose billions of dollars in fraud and widespread abuse of daycare and other assistance programs, the DOJ launched new investigations into the alleged fraud.
“We’re cracking down on more than $19 billion in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits,” Trump said at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. “Can you believe that? Somalia—they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. And we say these are low-IQ people. How did they go into Minnesota and steal all that money?”
The President has also repeatedly accused Rep. Ilhan Omar (D, Minn.), who is a Somali refugee, of covering up welfare fraud as well as of personally being a scammer. Trump has never provided evidence for his claims against Minnesotan officials. Omar was attacked in public on Tuesday when a man sprayed an unknown liquid on her; the congresswoman said Trump’s “hateful rhetoric” has fueled threats and political violence towards her.
The Trump Administration has also characterized Walz’s decision not to seek reelection as evidence of the Governor’s complicity in alleged fraudulent activity in the state.
Trump has used welfare fraud allegations to justify the Administration’s intensifying crackdown on immigration in the state and moved to end deportation protections for Somalis. And as federal agents’ use of force has increasingly come under scrutiny, the President has sought to redirect attention to those allegations.
But the Administration’s immigration enforcement and fraud claims increasingly appear to be part of a broader political strategy aimed at shaping the 2026 midterms. A Minnesota judge questioned the motivation behind the government’s crackdown after Bondi sent a letter to Walz with conditions for reducing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement operations in the state, including demanding federal access to the state’s voter rolls. The Justice Department also launched a probe into Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey over their public statements criticizing the presence of ICE in the state.
How does the new position work?
Presidents have historically observed a convention of institutional separation from the Justice Department, intended to shield criminal investigations from political influence—but Trump appears to have abandoned that as he has publicly urged the DOJ to investigate several of his perceived political adversaries on allegations of mortgage fraud, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D, Calif.) and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
The new position blurs that line even more. Vance said earlier this month that the official would bypass the Justice Department and answer instead to him and Trump—a reconfiguration that has raised questions about the unit’s prosecutorial independence.
The Trump Administration said that the new unit will focus on alleged fraud in federally funded programs.
“My Administration has uncovered Fraud schemes in States like Minnesota and California, where these thieves have stolen Hundreds of Billions of Taxpayer Dollars,” Trump said in his Wednesday post.
“This is the person who is going to make sure that we stop defrauding the American people,” Vance said at the White House earlier this month.
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