by Frank Holmes, reporter
A new audit has proved that some of the top beneficiaries of the Biden administration are crooks—literally. President Joe Biden gave $1.3 billion in federal funds to prisoners, the administration has admitted.
Biden bragged last year about signing the “American Rescue Plan,” which gave $1,400 stimulus checks to the American people. Biden’s stimulus checks came after two rounds of stimulus from the previous administration… and Biden’s checks went to people behind bars, as well.
The 2013 Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, cashed in a check worth $1,400—and he was far from alone.
Biden sent checks to 1,138,000 prison inmates: 156,000 in federal custody and 982,000 in state penitentiaries. Of those, 163,000 recipients were serving life sentences in prison.
The convicts could get the money in the method of their choice: check, debit card or direct deposit.
The government doesn’t know how many death row inmates cashed in on Biden’s stimulus checks.
All in all, $1.3 billion — nearly 10 percent of the bill — went to people in the clink, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig confirmed in a letter to Congressman Don Bacon, R-Neb. The letter was later obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Biden’s convict bailout is even more scandalous than it sounds, because the Democrats actually rejected a Republican effort to make sure the checks didn’t go to jailbirds. A previous stimulus had been forced through Congress so fast that its officers missed the fact that prisoners could receive them, so they tried to close off that possibility for the ARP—and the Democrats voted them down.
“It’s disgusting, and Democrats who voted against the amendment should be ashamed,” said Bacon said. “It’s outrageous that those who inflicted pain on a family or community by committing a crime received a single dime from the government during the pandemic. If anything, the funds should have gone to the victims who would have been better served,” Bacon told The Washington Examiner.
Senator Bill Cassidy, R-La., offered an amendment that would ban prisoners from getting the stimulus checks. The Democrats rejected it, saying it was a ridiculous thing to worry about.
As a result, the IRS website admitted, “Individuals were not denied Economic Impact Payments solely because they were incarcerated.”
“Democrats had every opportunity to stop taxpayer dollars from going to convicted criminals. Instead, Democrats blocked a Republican amendment that would’ve prevented inmates from receiving stimulus payments and sent up to $1,400 checks to more than one million incarcerated criminals,” Mike Palicz of Americans for Tax Reform told The Daily Caller.
At least some Democrats bragged about payments going to people who shouldn’t have received them. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., bragged that she bagged checks for “huge amounts of undocumented people” in her district.
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said the payoffs prove the Democratic Party is “reckless” and “drunk with power.”
AOC and the Squad may be thrilled, but Republicans are fighting mad.
“I am sickened,” said Senator Rick Scott, R-Fla., who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “These criminals, who hail from all 50 states and impacted nearly every community, didn’t deserve a dime of stimulus money. Senate Democrats could have prevented this disaster from occurring but decided not to. It ought to infuriate every voter in America.”
Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she helped "huge amounts" of illegal immigrants get stimulus checks. pic.twitter.com/zzwaqP3jFg
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 17, 2022
Rewarding the guilty is just one of the bill’s worst features. Rep. Bacon told the Free Beacon that the massive spending bill, which passed as the economy was already recovering, had “sparked the worst inflation crisis in forty years.”
House Budget Committee Republican Leader Smith, R-Mo., made some especially shocking discoveries.
“A closer examination reveals this very same spending has left behind a massive trail of waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars, including billions’ worth of taxpayer-funded checks that went to prisoners as well as Japanese citizens living in Japan,” Smith said in a press release.
It doesn’t stop there.
“Reports further indicate that millions in taxpayer funds were sent to deceased individuals while millions of illegal immigrants may also have received funds under lax immigration enforcement,” Smith continued. “The American people and their representatives in Congress deserve a full and thorough accounting of where and to whom this money has gone, and what, if any, attempts the Biden White House has made to reclaim this money for the taxpayers.”
Smith introduced a resolution of inquiry requiring the Biden administration’s Treasury Department to turn over to Congress all the information about the money the “American Rescue Plan” sent to prisoners, as well as illegal immigrants, non-American citizens who live in other countries, and the dead.
Democratic governors also brag about adding ex-convicts to state voting rolls. Is this their way of courting a new group of Democratic voters?
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”