MSNBC broke the bombshell story: before the 2024 election, undercover FBI agents handed a paper bag with $50,000 cash to Tom Homan. They heard that Homan was soliciting bribes. The meeting was filmed.
The investigation of Homan for corrupt activities was quashed by Trump’s Department of Justice, presumably with the full knowledge of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar,accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.
The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January,according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.
It’s unclear what reasons FBI and Justice Department officials gave for shutting down the investigation. But a Trump Justice Department appointee called the case a “deep state” probe in early 2025 and no further investigative steps were taken, the sources say.
On Sept. 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene at a meeting spot in Texas, Homan accepted $50,000 in bills, according to an internal summary of the case and sources.
The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case. The U.S. Attorney’s office in the Western District of Texas, working with the FBI, asked the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section to join its ongoing probe “into the Border Czar and former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan and others based on evidence of payment from FBI undercover agents in exchange for facilitating future contracts related to border enforcement.”
Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement early in Trump’s first term, openly claimed during the 2024 campaign that he would play a prominent role in carrying out Trump’s promised mass deportations.
Asked for comment about MSNBC’s exclusive reporting, the White House, the Justice Department and the FBI dismissed the investigation as politically motivated and baseless.
Michelle H. Davis writes a blog called “Lone Star Left,” where she chronicles the usually corrupt politics of Texas. In this post, she eviscerates Governor Abbott, who loves to brag about the economic success of his state. She calls him out for ignoring the people who are nott part of the state’s prosperity.
She writes:
Today, our feckless leader gave a State-of-the-State Address at the Baylor Club in Waco. Now, if you didn’t know, the Baylor Club is a prestigious private social club nestled within McLane Stadium, offering floor-to-ceiling panoramic views of the stadium, downtown Waco, and the Brazos River.
While many Texans are choosing between groceries and insulin, Abbott delivers big promises from an elite club perched over McLane Stadium. That should tell you all you need to know.
It was about an hour long, so I watched it for you. Below, I’ve broken down everything he said and what he conveniently left out.
He began the speech by bragging about having dinner with Governor Glenn Youngkin and then told him that Texas’ budget for building roads was $146 billion. He claimed Youngkin dropped his spoon, saying it was bigger than Virginia’s entire budget. He went on to say that Texas had the “largest road building fund in America.”
It’s only partly true. According to TXDOT’s 10-year plan, we have allocated about $101.6 billion for projects and $45 billion for maintenance. But this road-building bonanza feels stupid without high-speed trains. Seriously, what are we doing?
Trains would alleviate traffic, carbon emissions, congestion, and get us from Dallas to Houston in just 90 minutes. It’s faster and greener than driving, but we’re investing all our money in roads?
Modern marvel, or not, no one likes this shit:
But Republicans do it all for the fossil fuel industry.
And that’s the optics, right there. While Abbott spoke from his panoramic perch, over half of Waco’s Black children struggle to make ends meet. This is the story of what Texas has become under Republican control.
It wouldn’t be a boastful Abbott speech if he didn’t brag about Texas’ economy.
They wine and dine behind glass walls and chandeliers, as Abbott brags to the wealthy. The Baylor Club is a fortress of privilege where the powerful toast each other on gold plates, high above the city streets.
Down below, children go to bed hungry, their bellies gnawing at them while Abbott gloats about GDP. Senior citizens, the same ones who built this state with their hands and backs, are being taxed out of their homes, cast onto the streets, the newest members of the unsheltered community.
How could you hear that and not burn with anger?…
Then, Abbott told the biggest, most monstrous lie of them all.
I had to clip this 30-second video for you to see it. Otherwise, you might not believe a whopper this big.
Abbott claimed that since the 2021 storm (Uri), they have bolstered the Texas electric grid, and it has remained perfect. He went on to say that since 2021, no Texan has lost power due to a deficiency in the grid.
This is flat-out false. This is such a fucking stupid lie, do I even need to fact-check it?
Ask the 2.3 million CenterPoint customers in Houston who lost power for over a week after Hurricane Beryl in July 2024. Or the nearly 1 million Texans left in the dark by the Houston derecho just two months earlier in May 2024. Families sweltered in the heat, elderly neighbors died waiting for oxygen refills, and Abbott wants to call that a “perfect” grid?
What he’s really doing is splitting hairs. ERCOT didn’t order rolling blackouts in those disasters. The distribution system collapsed. In other words, the wires and poles failed instead of the generators. But tell that to the family sitting in the dark with spoiled food and no air conditioning. To everyday Texans, it doesn’t matter whether it’s ERCOT or CenterPoint. The lights are off, the fridge is warm, and the Governor is lying.
This isn’t a story of resilience. It’s a story of deregulation, neglect, and profit over people.
Abbott claimed the Legislature made a “generational investment” in water.
Voters will decide in November whether or not we make that investment, which will not be nearly enough money to cover the extent of Texas’ water problems, but it’s a start.
Abbott claimed that they prioritized small businesses with the new “DOGE law.” A spin if there ever was one. It’s a new bureaucratic agency added to the Governor’s office, which will look for “ways to make regulations more effective, streamline the regulatory process, reduce department costs, and increase public access to regulatory information.”
If you followed along with Lone Star Left during the weeks where we watched the Texas budget hearings, you may remember that every Texas agency is running on outdated computer systems (if they aren’t still using paper), they are all understaffed, they are in buildings that are falling apart, and most government employees aren’t even making a livable wage.
Republicans have already run every inch of this state into the ground, and the idea that they are going to use a new government agency to run it into the ground even further is ludicrous.
Running our state agencies in such an inefficient, broken-down way doesn’t save money. It raises costs. Outdated systems, paper records, and skeleton crews result in Texans waiting longer for services, errors piling up, and agencies paying more in overtime and contract work to keep the lights on.
Republicans are really bad at governing.
The human toll is brutal. Employment turnover in some state agencies runs as high as 50%. Think about that, half the workforce gone, year after year. When you’re constantly training new people instead of keeping experienced staff, services collapse. And nowhere is this clearer than in our Health and Human Services agencies.
These are the people who process Medicaid applications, SNAP benefits, and health services for children and seniors. Understaffed offices and burned-out employees mean months-long backlogs. Families in crisis are told to wait for food assistance. Elderly Texans often lack home health care due to a shortage of caseworkers. Disabled children get lost in the system while Abbott’s donors laugh from the Baylor Club balcony.
This is intentional sabotage. Republicans have hollowed out the very agencies that keep Texans alive. Then they use the dysfunction as an excuse to privatize more, deregulate more, and funnel more contracts to their cronies. The suffering of everyday Texans is the plan.
Governor Abbott said the Texas Legislature fully funded public schools.
But when your audience is a bunch of wealthy CEOs who paid $2,000 a plate to get in to hear you speak, lies like that don’t matter. Surely all of those CEOs are sending their kids to private school, on the taxpayer’s dime, with the shiny new vouchers Mr. Let-Them-Eat-Cake got for all his wealthy donors.
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to vote this motherfucker out.
Every year he lies a little bigger, every year he sells us out a little deeper, and every year the gap between those sipping cocktails at the Baylor Club and those wondering how to feed their kids grows wider.
The truth is, the wealth inequality in Texas right now is more drastic than the wealth inequality in France shortly before their revolution. You know what happened then.
And I’ll leave you with this, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”
So let’s be ready. Let’s be angry. And let’s be organized. Because November 2026 is coming, and it’s time to flip this state.
When I heard that MAGA firebrand Charlie Kirk had been shot and killed at a campus rally in Utah, I got a familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had a visceral memory of the day that President John F. Kennedy was killed, the day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, the day that Bobby Kennedy was killed.
I loved them. I didn’t love or admire Charlie Kirk. I never agreed with anything he said.
But I despise political violence. I am sorry for his family.
We are supposed to be a nation that protects dissent, protest, and diverse opinions. If speaking against the grain makes you a target of assassins, our country is in deep trouble.
It seems obvious to me that our country needs gun control. But it’s equally obvious that the Supreme Court and the GOP have made almost any kind of gun control impossible. Just this week, a court in Florida struck down a ban on open-carry of guns. The judges said that it was a violation of the Second Amendment to forbid people to carry their gun openly.
We are all targets.
Children in school, people in malls and at concerts will continue to die because of the current insane interpretation of the Second Amendment. Guns are currently the leading cause of death for children and teens. Learning how to react to a murderer is now a rite of passage in school–every kind of school.
The right claims that it’s devoted to the “right to life.” But that’s not true. The right to life is secondary to the right to carry a gun.
The deaths of scores of children and the blood of Charlie Kirk stain the hands of the Supreme Court majority, which strikes down any effort to control access to guns, to require gun-owners to keep their weapons locked away, and to make gun safety a priority rather than a violation of the Second Amendment.
I don’t expect this love affair with deadly weapons will end in my lifetime. I hope it ends someday. Many people will needlessly die before then.
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic published an article that explained why Trump is a laughing stock among other world leaders. The recent meeting of the leaders of China, Russia, North Korea, and India was convened to celebrate the victory over Japan in 1945. Trump was not invited. He proceeded to write whiny complaints on social media about being left out.
They laugh at him. They saw how Putin played Trump like a violin when they met in Alaska. The meeting was supposedly about Putin agreeing to a ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump rolled out a red carpet for Putin. Waited for him, clapped his hands in excitement as Putin approached. At the meeting’s end, Putin spoke first, which is not customary. Then he departed, skipping a lunch that Trump planned in his honor.
Putin made a fool of Trump.
The next night, Russia bombsrded Kyiv with an unprecedented number of drones and missiles, aimed at civilian targets.
Putin and the others know that Pete Hegseth is an empty suit. Trump busies himself redecorating the White House and its grounds. Trump is not a serious man. He can be ignored.
The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect.
Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.) The American president was not invited: After all, what role did the United States play in defeating Japan and liberating Eurasia? Instead, Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.
In the world of science and medicine, vaccines have been one of the greatest achievements in history. Many diseases that afflicted humanity have been eradicated, thanks to vaccines.
When I was a child, my family worried about measles, mumps, chickenpox, and worst of all, polio. Now it’s rare to hear of anyone getting those diseases, although measles is making a comeback among unvaccinated children.
Only a crackpot would oppose vaccines whose safety and effectiveness have been demonstrated for decades.
We have at least two crackpots trying to discourage vaccinations. One is the nation’s top public health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a long record as a vaccine opponent.
Make no mistake. This is dangerous. This encourages the spread of deadly diseases among children.
Florida plans to become the first state to end all vaccine mandates, including for schoolchildren, rejecting a practice that public health experts have credited for decades with limiting the spread of infectious diseases.
Patricia Mazzini of The New York Times reported:
Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, made the announcement on Wednesday alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican. Mr. DeSantis rose to national prominence during the coronavirus pandemic, and over time he has espoused increasingly anti-vaccine views.
“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body?” Dr. Ladapo, a vocal denigrator of vaccines, said to applause during an event on Wednesday in Valrico, Fla., near Tampa. “Your body is a gift from God.”
He added that the administration would be “working to end” all vaccine mandates. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Dr. Ladapo said.
Dr. Ladapo has faced repeated criticism from others in his field for his stances on public health. He allowed parents to choose whether to send unvaccinated children to school during a measles outbreak in Weston, Fla., in 2024, rejecting longstanding, evidence-based public health guidelines. The misinformation he spread about Covid vaccines prompted a public rebuke from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2023.
It is unclear what the process of undoing the state’s longstanding vaccine mandates might look like. Dr. Ladapo said the Florida Department of Health, the agency he oversees, would do away with rules promulgating vaccine mandates. State lawmakers “are going to have to make decisions” as well, Dr. Ladapo said. “That’s how this becomes possible.”
All 50 states have at least some vaccination requirements for children entering school, though all allow for medical exemptions, and most allow exemptions for religious or personal reasons. The number of students receiving exemptions has been increasing in recent years, and immunization rates have been falling, according to KFF, a health policy research group.
Mr. DeSantis, who appointed Dr. Ladapo as surgeon general in 2021, also announced the creation of a commission to align Florida with goals laid out by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services and a vocal vaccine skeptic. The commission will be headed by Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife.
If Florida follows through on this nutty policy, the law should ban access to vaccines to the children of state officials who endorse this policy. No hypocrisy!
The Network for Public Education Action sent out the following alert. Please use the form to send a letter to your members of Congress.
Dear Friend of Public Schools.
They said they wouldn’t cut Title I. They lied.
Majority House leaders just dropped their FY26 education bill, slashing $12.1 billion (15%) in K-12 funding for public education. It guts the very programs that keep our public schools running — while boosting charter start-up/expansion to $500,000,000.
What they’re cutting:
Title I:–27% slashed — funding that provides targeted education services like remedial reading to students with maximum impact in high-poverty schools in cities and rural communities.
English Language Acquisition Grants: Gone.
Title II-A (teacher training & support): Eliminated.
“Despite outsized investment, America’s public schools continue to fail children and families.” That’s what they think of your neighborhood school.
Why this matters
Cuts of this magnitude will crowd classrooms, strip student supports, widen inequities, and push more schools into crisis — especially in rural and high-need communities.
Do these two things now
1) Email your Representative:
Use our action link to send a pre-written message in 15 seconds: Send your email now.
2) Call your Representative:
Find your member’s phone number here. Below is a script you can use right now: “Hello, I’m a constituent from [Representative’s name] district. I’m calling to urge the Representative to oppose the House education funding bill that cuts Title I by 27% and reduces K12 funding by 15%. These cuts will harm students and teachers in our district. Please vote NO and support full funding for public schools — not half-a-billion in funding for charter expansion while our classrooms are being cut. Thank you.”
Now spread the word
Forward this alert to friends, family, and colleagues.
Do not wait. Congress is back today (September 2). Let’s flood their inboxes and phone lines. The House’s education funding bill is a betrayal of America’s children.
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Nine former directors of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control wrote a joint opinion piece for The New York Times. These are men and women devoted to public health who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. They agree that what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing to the Department of Health and Human Services is outrageous and dangerous.
They write:
We have each had the honor and privilege of serving as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, either in a permanent or an acting capacity, dating back to 1977. Collectively, we spent more than 100 years working at the C.D.C., the world’s pre-eminent public health agency. We served under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations — every president from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump — alongside thousands of dedicated staff members who shared our commitment to saving lives and improving health.
What the health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.
Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused onunproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.
We are worried about the wide-ranging impact that all these decisions will have on America’s health security. Residents of rural communities and people with disabilities will have even more limited access to health care. Families with low incomes who rely most heavily on community health clinics and support from state and local health departments will have fewer resources available to them. Children risk losing access to lifesaving vaccines because of the cost.
This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.
Concerned about RFK Jr.’s assault on vaccines, I called my local CVS pharmacist a few days ago to schedule every vaccine for which I was eligible. I got the flu vaccine and the RSV vaccine.
I asked for the COVID-19 vaccine, but was told that the latest version would not be available until mid-October. I’m in the eligible group (over 65), but no vaccine yet. When I got home, I learned that the vaccine is not available in certain states, including New York. I worry that RFK Jr. may decide to cancel the vaccine altogether.
In the United States, public health has long depended on institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). For decades—through Republican and Democratic administrations alike—these agencies functioned under a shared goal: protecting Americans’ health through science, research, and expertise.
But in recent years, that foundation has begun to crack. The appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), an outspoken anti-vaccine activist with no medical training, to lead HHS has brought that crisis into sharp focus. His presence in the nation’s top public health office signals a seismic shift—one where politics trumps science, conspiracy theories replace research, and ideology threatens lives.
The Erosion of Trust in Science
During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than one million Americans died, while public health officials faced harassment, death threats, and relentless political attacks. Former CDC Director Anthony Fauci, who spent his career working to save lives, became a target of right-wing media and extremist groups.
Instead of rallying around experts, leaders like Donald Trump and his allies downplayed the severity of the pandemic, promoted misinformation about masks and vaccines, and openly mocked scientists. This politicization of science directly fueled vaccine hesitancy, prolonging the crisis and causing unnecessary deaths.
Now, five years after the peak of the pandemic, the United States faces a resurgence of diseases once thought to be under control—measles, polio, and other preventable illnesses—precisely because vaccination rates have dropped.
RFK Jr.: Conspiracies Over Credentials
RFK Jr.’s position is especially alarming given his history of promoting anti-vaccine propagandaand debunked eugenics myths. He has falsely claimed that autism and other health conditions are caused by vaccines and even suggested that COVID-19 was “targeted to spare Jews and Black people”—a statement widely condemned as antisemitic and racist.
Despite his lack of medical training, Kennedy insists he can “diagnose” children by sight, attributing health challenges to supposed “mitochondrial issues visible in their faces.” Licensed physicians, including those trained at Harvard and Mayo Clinic, have dismissed such claims as pseudoscience.
Yet under the Trump administration, this man now wields control over Medicare, Medicaid, the CDC, NIH, and national vaccine policy—institutions responsible for the health of over 330 million Americans.
The Resignations and Walkouts
The consequences are already unfolding. After Kennedy moved to push out CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez—a Trump appointee who nonetheless refused to abandon science—top scientists and health officials resigned in protest. Dr. Dimitri Daskalakis, a respected infectious disease expert, wrote in his resignation letter that serving under Kennedy was “untenable” because HHS leadership was no longer guided by science.
Soon after, CDC staff staged mass walkouts, warning the public that American lives are being endangered by unqualified leadership. These resignations leave critical gaps at the very moment the nation faces rising COVID variants, climate-driven disease risks, and growing vaccine hesitancy.
Cuts That Will Cost Lives
Beyond personnel, the Trump–Kennedy administration has overseen massive funding cuts:
$500 million slashed from vaccine research
$1 trillion cut to Medicaid, threatening to shutter rural hospitals and nursing homes
Reductions in NIH research funding
Cuts to foreign aid and peacekeeping operations, destabilizing global health security
These moves directly undermine America’s preparedness for the next pandemic. As climate change accelerates, experts warn that new infectious diseases are almost inevitable. Yet instead of strengthening systems, leaders are dismantling them.
The Bigger Picture: A Pro-Death Movement
This moment cannot be seen in isolation. It reflects a broader “pro-death” political movement that prizes ideology over evidence, power over public health, and partisan gain over human life. Whether it was Trump pushing “herd immunity” at the expense of vulnerable Americans, or Kennedy advancing conspiracy theories that endanger children, the pattern is clear: science is under attack.
The result? Americans are less safe, less protected, and less prepared for the crises ahead.
Why This Matters Now
The rise of unqualified, conspiracy-driven figures like RFK Jr. at the helm of America’s most critical health institutions is not just political theater—it is a direct threat to public safety. The decisions made today about vaccines, research funding, and disease response will determine whether millions live or die in the years ahead.
Public trust in science and medicine must be restored. That means demanding qualified leaders, protecting the integrity of institutions like the CDC and NIH, and pushing back against those who seek to weaponize public health for political gain.
Because as history has shown—from pandemics to polio eradication—science saves lives. Conspiracies cost them.
Forget the economy. Forget inflation. Forget the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. What really animates the sick and sorry Trump administration is medical care for transgender youth. Now, there is an issue that involves the peace and prosperity of the nation–NOT!
My view: it’s none of my business. Issues like abortion and trans rights should be decided among patients, families, and doctors. Not by politicians. Not by me.
The Justice Department is harassing providers of care for young people who are transgender and demanding their personal data.
The Justice Department is demanding that hospitals turn over a wide range of sensitive information related to medical care for young transgender patients, including billing documents, communication with drug manufacturers and data such as patient dates of birth, Social Security numbers and addresses, according to a copy of a subpoena made public in a court filing this week.
The June subpoena to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia requests emails, Zoom recordings, “every writing or record of whatever type” doctors have made, voicemails and text messages on encrypted platforms dating to January 2020 — before hormone therapy, puberty blockers and gender transition surgery had been banned anywhere in the United States.
About half of states have since passed laws prohibiting all or most gender treatment of minors. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a Tennessee ban did not violate the Constitution.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said last month that the Justice Department had issued more than 20 subpoenas seeking to hold “medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology” accountable. It is highly unusual for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to announce such legal activity. Bondi did not identify who received the subpoenas, what information the government sought or what potential law violations it is investigating.
According to seven people familiar with the subpoenas, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution, the subpoenas targeted care for patients younger than 19 and went to providers in states that still allow gender care for minors, as well as states where it has been banned. The subpoena, as well as public statements by Bondi’s chief of staff, indicate the federal government is attempting to build cases against medical providers that allege they may have violated civil and criminal statutes while providing care that was legal in their states.
Jacob T. Elberg, a former federal prosecutor specializing in health care fraud, said Bondi’s statement suggests the government “is using its investigative powers to target medical providers based on a disagreement about medical treatment rather than violations of the law.”
Elberg, now a law professor at the Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law at Seton Hall University, said that the subpoena itself is not wildly broad for a health-care-fraud case. But he noted that under a federal privacy law, the Justice Department must show that any information it demands on patient identities is relevant to a legitimate law enforcement probe.