Honestly, is it really such a big deal if you inject children with saline and hawk fake vaccine cards to net yourself cash and destroy COVID-19 vaccines? At least according to this administration, that is totes cool. So Attorney General Pam Bondi just threw out charges against Utah plastic surgeon Michael Kirk Moore, making sure no pesky prosecutors can further hurt this champion of medical freedom.
Bondi admitted that her zeal to free Moore came about at the behest of Georgia GOP House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yes, the lady who believes in chemtrails and that the government is manipulating the weather. Oh, and also Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been banging this drum for a while, saying in April that Moore should get “a medal for his courage.”
Dropping the charges against Moore is actually a twofer, combining the administration’s desire to reward anti-COVID vaccine conspiracy theorists with their desire to show that if Republicans do it, it’s never fraud. That latter view is pretty necessary in a world where the president himself has a history of grifting, fraud, and felonies and continues to sell access to the presidency.
From May 2021 to September 2022, according to the now-obsolete charges from 2023, Moore destroyed at least $28,000 worth of COVID-19 vaccines given to him by the government. Instead, he sold at least 1,937 fake vaccination cards and, if parents asked nicely, he’d shoot their kids full of saline so the children would believe they’d been vaccinated.
No matter how you want to slice it, Moore’s actions defrauded the government. He took $28,000 worth of government property, destroyed it, and profited off that destruction. This should be a slam-dunk prosecution for an administration that let Elon Musk and the bigoted moppets of the pretend Department of Government Efficiency trash the government in search of fraud, but we all know how fake that ultimately was.
This is, of course, not the first time the administration has rewarded fraudulent behavior. In April, Trump pardoned Michele Fiore, a Nevada Republican state lawmaker who skimmed money from donations intended for a memorial for a slain police officer to use for things like plastic surgery. Or how about the pardon of Scott Jenkins, a Virginia sheriff who took bribes from people who wanted to have their charges dropped, naming them deputy sheriffs despite them not having any actual law enforcement experience.
Yes, when it comes to letting right-wingers get away with crimes, the administration won’t even pretend to back the blue.
But all of these folks are small-time fraudsters compared to crypto bro Justin Sun, who was facing a massive fraud prosecution, including market manipulation. Sun invested $30 million into World Liberty Financial, which is controlled by the Trump family. Sun is continuing to spend big, saying he’ll drop another $100 million on Trump’s dumb meme coin. Those actions don’t just help insulate Sun from prosecution—they also help steer money directly to Trump.
When you have a president who engages in massive fraud and doesn’t believe in conflicts of interest, when you have an attorney general in thrall to Trump, and when you have a pardons attorney who sees his role as threatening the past administration, you have an entire administration primed to excuse and reward actual criminals, even small-timers like Moore. Expect Bondi to continue wiping out prosecutions for whatever petty GOP criminal comes her way so that she can keep sending the message that IOKIYAR.