Alleged fraud schemes plaguing Minnesota’s social services systems have elevated scrutiny surrounding childcare centers. 

But fraud can be challenging to identify for states – especially when agencies are using outdated systems that make it difficult to spot trends and red flags that could point to potential fraud, according to Chris Bennett, the CEO and founder of a Wonderschool, a platform that provides technology support to child care providers and states. 

‘When you have all this data living in different place, it’s really difficult for a state to identify where there is risk and where there is fraud,’ Bennett recently told Fox News Digital during an interview. ‘Additionally, a lot of states are using pen and paper still to collect information. So it makes it really difficult for an administrator and the administrator’s team to go through all of that and make sure that they’re keeping up with things on a regular basis.’

Streamlining systems is key to identifying any atypical trends in billing behavior and attendance data that could point to fraud, Bennett said.

‘The best practice is moving to a modern system, moving to a system where all of the data is in one place and it’s all connected,’ Bennett said. ‘So you can use that to identify risk, flag unusual patterns early, and then have humans go and investigate. Oversight should support child care providers, not punish them.’ 

To help do this, Bennett spearheaded Wonderschool Oversight in January – building upon Wonderschool’s existing partnerships with states including Florida, Michigan and Illinois – that aims to centralize state agencies’ program data to evaluate enrollment, attendance, billing and licensing information in the same place. 

Having this information in one spot allows for Wonderschool Oversight to flag unusual patterns that could require human review, Bennett said.

‘For example, we can analyze daily attendance data to flag cases where billed attendance exceeds recorded attendance,’ Bennett said. ‘We review billing behavior for anomalies — such as sudden spikes in billing corrections — which can indicate potential issues. Or, in another example, we compare reported attendance against licensed capacity, age-band limits, and required staffing ratios to surface possible regulatory or safety violations.’ 

Childcare fraud has come under a microscope after right-wing influencer Nick Shirley shared a video in December detailing alleged fraud involving Minnesota childcare and learning centers. 

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced in January that it would put a hold on access to some federal childcare and family assistance funding for five states – including Minnesota – due to ‘serious concerns about widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars in state-administered programs.’ 

Days later, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from halting the funding freeze for at least two weeks. Fox News Digital reached out to HHS for comment. 

That’s not the only alleged fraud scheme the state is facing. Lawmakers have spearheaded investigations into Minnesota’s alleged ‘Feeding Our Future’ $250 million fraud scheme that allegedly targeted a children’s nutrition program the Department of Agriculture funded and that Minnesota oversaw during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At least 77 people have been charged in that scheme, which took advantage of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to waive certain Federal Child Nutrition Program requirements.

Likewise, another alleged fraud scheme in the state stems from the Housing Stability Services Program, which allegedly offered Medicaid coverage for housing stabilization services in an attempt to help those with disabilities, mental illnesses and substance-use disorders receive housing.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who criss-crossed the country last year on a ‘Fight Oligarchy’ tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., spent over $550,000 in 2025 on private jet travel for himself using campaign funds, a Fox News Digital review of Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings found.

The majority of the spending came in the first two quarters, which cover up until July. That is also when Sanders and AOC had the majority of their tour stops across the country. 

In April, between stops on the tour, Fox News Digital exclusively obtained a photo of Sanders boarding a luxury Bombardier Challenger private jet at the Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California. The source also indicated that they had spotted the New York congresswoman boarding the private jet as well. 

The pair were subsequently also seen in footage obtained by Fox News Digital exiting the plane in Sacramento later that evening, near where the self-identified Democratic socialists hosted a second rally in one day.  

The Bombardier Challenger private jet the pair flew on was operated by Ventura Air Services, which touts ‘one of the widest cabins of any business jet available today’ and provides ‘superior cabin comfort for its passengers.’ According to their website, the private jet can cost up to $15,000 an hour.

In 2025, according to Sanders’ FEC filings, he spent at least $354,000 in campaign funds to pay for private jet services through Ventura Jets. The other private jet companies Sanders spent campaign funds on included N-Jet and Cirrus Aviation Services. 

According to N-Jet’s website, the company pieds itself on their ‘personal touch,’ adding that customers will ‘arrive in style with your luxury, comfort, and safety always top of mind.’

Sanders, who has been a vocal supporter of the Green New Deal, the aggressive climate change policy targeting carbon emissions and fossil fuel production, and has called climate change an ‘existential threat’ to the world, was pressed about his private jet use last year, prompting him to tell Fox News’ ‘Special Report’ host Bret Baier that ‘that’s the only way to get around.’

‘You run a campaign, and you do three or four or five rallies in a week. [It is] the only way you can get around to talk to 30,000 people. You think I’m gonna be sitting on a waiting line at United…while 30, 000 people are waiting?’ Sanders said.

‘That’s the only way to get around. No apologies for that. That’s what campaign travel is about. We’ve done it in the past. We’re gonna do it in future.’

Sanders has a long history of using private jets on the campaign trail. During his failed 2020 presidential campaign, the Sanders campaign spent over $1.9 million on private jets, including Apollo Jets and the Advanced Aviation Team, a Virginia-based private jet company.

Private jets have faced the ire of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow climate activists. According to the 2021 Transport and Environment report, private jets are up to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes.

‘For real, how many private jets do these CEOs need? It is insatiable. It is unacceptable,’ Ocasio-Cortez said in 2023, in one example of the New York congresswoman herself railing against private jets. 

Fox News Digital reached out to Sanders’ office and his campaign for comment on the spending but did not receive a response in time for publication.

‘You don’t expect a socialist to fly commercial do you?’ quipped conservative political communications consultant Matt Gorman. ‘There’s no bigger hypocrite than the liberal who chastises us for eating meat and using gas stoves, yet flies in private jets.’ 

In addition to Sanders’ hefty private jet spending that came during his tour with AOC, the New York Democratic socialist also spent big sums of campaign dollars at luxury and ’boutique’ hotels in states where the pair held their ‘Fight Oligarchy’ Tour. 

For example, AOC’s campaign paidThe Leo Kent Hotel, a boutique high-rise in Tucson, $3,165.76, around the time of a ‘Fight Oligarchy’ rally that was held there, according to an FEC filing from April 25. In 2025, AOC also spent thousands at luxury hotels like the Asher Adams Hotel in Salt Lake City, the Hotel Vermont in Burlington, The Langham-Huntington hotel in Pasadena, Calif., Hotel El Convento in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the Lansdowne Resort & Spa in rural Virginia, and more. 

Fox News Digital asked representatives for AOC if the congresswoman felt like she needed to explain her more than $53,000 in campaign spending on upscale hotels across the country in 2025, but did not receive a response.

Fox News Digital’s Cameron Cawthorne, Andrew Mark Miller and Deirdre Heavey (formerly) contributed to this report.

Nicki Minaj, who has recently been a vocal critic of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, accused him in a new interview of trying to be like President Donald Trump, referring to recent social media posts of the governor’s that emulate the president’s frank style.

‘With Newscum, it’s the fact that with everything you said, but then having the audacity to be playing on Twitter, obsessed with Trump, trying to be Trump, trying to be funny when it’s not and then wanting to roll around in the mud with female rappers or whomever and completely missing the plot,’ Minaj told Katie Miller on her podcast this week.

Many of Minaj’s online attacks have been over the governor’s support of transgender children.

‘Imagine being the guy running on wanting to see trans kids,’ Minaj wrote on social media late last year. ‘Not even a trans ADULT would run on that. Normal adults wake up & think they want to see HEALTHY, SAFE, HAPPY kids. Not Gav. The Gav Nots. GavOUT. Send in the next guy, I’m bored.’

She suggested to Miller that Newsom would be better off not trying to compete with Trump.

‘But President Trump is already the president, get it?’ she said as if speaking directly to Newsom. ‘He’s already done it twice. He’s won. Good. OK. Meanwhile, you are embarking on what — a journey that will end up being a big huge failure for him.’

The ‘Tukoh Taka’ singer said the governor still doesn’t ‘seem to grasp the fact that these jokes that you’re making are only funny to your assistant, you know, the weirdo little guy that calls Black women stupid h— and stuff.’

Newsom’s assistant responded to one of Minaj’s slams on social media last year by posting a picture of a Nicki Minaj T-shirt in the trash. He captioned the image: ‘Stupid H–,’ a reference to her 2012 song of the same name.

She claimed that ‘no one cares’ about Newsom’s rhetoric online, ‘and he’s making a fool out of himself like when he went all the way to another country to speak ill of the country and the president. We would never want someone like that to be our president. Americans are so big on loyalty and that just showed us all you do not have a loyal bone in your body and no one is going to vote for you.’

Newsom spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month, expressing his concerns that ‘freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech’ are all under attack because of the Trump administration.

‘They’re censoring historical facts, they’re rewriting history,’ he added, also claiming that the administration had canceled an earlier event the governor was supposed to speak at.

Minaj said Newsom failed to respond to her when she asked for his office’s help ‘on Twitter about swatting calls that were happening that were clearly a part of their extended smear campaign. And he completely ignored it, right? And next thing you know, he’s on there flapping his gums about female rap stuff and trying to get in women’s business. So I had to. I had to show him who’s boss on Twitter.’

Newsom has only responded to her tirade of social media attacks once.

In December, he posted a mashup of videos and images of Trump, including with Jeffrey Epstein, set to Meghan Thee Stallion’s Minaj diss track ‘HISS.’

Fox News Digital has reached out to Newsom’s office for comment.

A pro-life group is releasing a new report claiming abortions have continued to rise nationwide since 2020 because of a Biden administration FDA policy that allows abortion pills to be prescribed via telehealth and shipped by mail — a move the group says the Trump administration could reverse.

In a report obtained by Fox News Digital, the Restoration of America Foundation (ROAF) argues that a COVID-era FDA policy under former President Joe Biden is driving an estimated more than 500 mail-order chemical abortions per day, citing data from Guttmacher and WeCount.

The data also shows that chemical abortions now account for the majority of abortions, making up about 63% in 2023, a jump from 39% in 2017.

The report also estimates that there were roughly 170,000 additional abortions in 2024 than would have happened if the abortion rate had remained at 2019 levels.

‘Since hitting a low in 2017, the national abortion rate has seen a persistent and troubling climb,’ the report states. ‘In 2019, the last full year that abortion by mail was clearly illegal, there were an estimated 916,460 abortions. Using our estimate for 2024, the overall growth in abortion from 2019 to 2024 was 22 percent. Over the same window, the U.S. population grew by just 2.9 percent. Had the abortion rate remained steady from 2019, there would have been 171,103 fewer abortions in 2024.’

The findings show abortion-by-mail made up roughly one in four abortions in the U.S. in the first half of 2025.

WeCount data cited in the report also shows an estimated 244,590 do-it-yourself abortions were facilitated by telehealth in 2024, including more than 120,000 pills sent into states where abortion was restricted or banned after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade in 2022, giving the power to make abortion laws back to the states.

The Biden administration policy removed safety standards that required women to see a doctor to be prescribed mifepristone, allowing it to be prescribed through telehealth and sent by mail. The report argues that the FDA under Biden justified the change using limited studies and adverse-event data, despite most mandatory reporting requirements for mifepristone complications being removed in 2016 under the Obama administration. A research paper in 2021 additionally compared adverse-event data with Planned Parenthood data and concluded that the system is ‘inadequate’ to evaluate the safety of mifepristone abortions.

‘People are calling up and saying whatever they need to say to get the drug in the mail,’ ROAF CEO Doug Truax said in an interview with Fox News Digital. ‘The point that we’re making is that abortions are on the rise dramatically. 874,000 in 2023, up to 1.1 million in 2024. Then on this trajectory, by the time President Trump leaves office, it’d be about 1.4 million a year. And so it’s largely driven by the drugs going out in the mail.’

‘There’s about 150 women a day that are being seriously harmed by this drug,’ Truax continued. ‘So we need to get them to go see the doctor. The doctor needs to verify where they’re at with the pregnancy. Obviously, if it’s an ectopic pregnancy, it means they could take this drug, and they could die from it, which has happened. But there are all kinds of sepsis and rupturing and hemorrhaging and everything going on with this drug.’

‘So there are two angles to this. We’re very pro-life over here. We want to go to zero abortions in the country. But the other angle is that this is a women’s health issue. So we need to decrease the number of abortions, and we need to basically save women from being harmed by this,’ he added.

Truax also noted that states with higher populations are receiving the most abortion pills through the mail and that Democrat-led states have enacted shield laws preventing GOP-led states from taking legal action against providers.

‘For instance, Texas, they don’t have abortion anymore, but they sure do,’ he said. ‘People think it’s down to zero. It’s not at all. It’s about where it was. So you have all these abortionists in, to name a few, Massachusetts and California. There’s dispensing organizations now around the country and around the globe that will mail these things out. They’re very active getting these abortion drugs into states that said, ‘we don’t want abortion here.”

The FDA continues to keep the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone suspended — a safety rule that had been in place for roughly 20 years before Biden’s FDA permanently removed it following a COVID-era suspension.

The policy was met with legal challenges under the previous administration, but the Supreme Court allowed it to remain in effect after ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled the FDA’s action under Biden was likely ‘arbitrary and capricious’ under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Truax said that the Trump administration has the authority to nix the policy, and urged the federal government to do so.

‘I think that from a political standpoint, they’d rather not talk about it. But our point is, from a political standpoint, it’s going to start hurting. Pro-life Americans are really grateful to the president for the Supreme Court that we have, they got Roe thrown out, as it should have been a long time ago. But there’s more work to be done. We’re grateful for defunding Planned Parenthood. That’s great for a year. But the bottom line is, if the number of abortions is actually going up and there’s a step you could take to stop it, we got to do that,’ he said.

‘There’s a massive number of pro-life Americans that are base supporters of the president who may say, ‘wait a minute, we’ve been in power for this entire time and the number of abortions keeps going up, and we could have stopped it,” he added.

Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and state officials have been calling on the Trump administration to take action.

Last summer, more than 20 attorneys general urged Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary to complete a safety review of mifepristone and consider reinstating safeguards or removing the drug from the market. Kennedy and Makary vowed to conduct a new review of the safety of the drug, but they have not released a timeline for the results.

‘President Trump, Secretary Kennedy, and Commissioner Makary already have the tools at their disposal to reverse the legally and scientifically dubious decisions of the Biden Administration’s FDA and to reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement. The Trump Administration must act swiftly to restore commonsense medical safeguards to the chemical abortion pill,’ the ROAF report says.

Venezuelan official Alex Saab, a former businessman and close ally of captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, was arrested in the Latin American country on Wednesday as part of a joint operation between the U.S. and Venezuela, according to a U.S. law enforcement official.

Saab, 54, who had previously been held in the U.S., is expected to be extradited to the U.S. in the coming days, the U.S. official told Reuters.

A lawyer for Saab, Luigi Giuliano, was cited in the Colombian newspaper El Espectador later on Wednesday, denying the arrest as ‘fake news.’ Journalists aligned with Venezuela’s government also made social media posts denying that Saab had been arrested.

Giuliano told Venezuelan news site TalCual that Saab may make an appearance to refute the arrest allegations himself but was consulting with the government about what had happened.

Venezuela’s top lawmaker, Jorge Rodríguez, did not confirm or deny the reports during a press conference, saying he had no information concerning the possible arrest.

This comes after the U.S. operation to attack Venezuela and arrest Maduro, and the Trump administration’s subsequent seizing of oil tankers from the country.

Saab’s arrest would suggest a new level of collaboration between U.S. and Venezuelan authorities under the government of interim President Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former deputy, who currently controls Venezuela’s law enforcement agencies and actions.

The U.S. official highlighted the significance of Rodriguez’s cooperation in the joint operation.

Raul Gorrin, the head of Venezuela’s Globovision TV network, was also arrested in the operation, the official said.

Saab, who was born in Colombia, was previously detained in the African nation of Cape Verde in 2020 and held in the U.S. for more than three years on bribery charges. He was eventually granted clemency in exchange for the release of Americans held in Venezuela.

Before he was granted clemency, U.S. officials had charged Saab with taking around $350 million out of Venezuela through the U.S. as part of a bribery scheme connected to Venezuela’s state-controlled exchange rate.

Saab denied the allegations and appealed to have the charges dismissed on grounds of diplomatic immunity. An appeals court had not ruled on Saab’s appeal by the time the prisoner swap went through.

When he returned to Venezuela at the end of 2023, Maduro praised Saab’s loyalty to the country’s socialist revolution and called him a national hero.

Maduro later appointed Saab as industry minister, a position he held until last month, when he was dismissed by Rodriguez following the arrest of the country’s former leader.

Reuters contributed to this report.