Treasury Department Investigating Ron DeSantis' Migrant Flights

The United States Treasury Department has announced that they are investigating Ron DeSantis' migrant flights from Texas to Martha's Vineyard, and they believe the governor may have illegally used COVID funds to pay for the scheme. This could be a similar situation to what Texas governor Greg Abbott did with COVID funds and migrant transports, but Abbott used a loophole in the law to avoid committing a crime. If DeSantis wasn't as crafty, he could be in serious trouble, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The Inspector General's office at the United States Treasury Department sent a letter to Democrats in the Senate recently, specifically to Ed Markey, um, to let 'em know, uh, that, uh, uh, they've gone ahead and they've opened up an investigation, right? They, they've got some things that they've seen that they think might be a violation of the laws that directed covid relief funds to all 50 states here in America. And the person who is the target of this investigation just so happens to be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and the thing the Treasury Department thinks may have happened, they don't know for sure. That's why there's an investigation. Nobody's been accused of anything yet. But the Inspector General up at the Treasury Department says, You know what? We have reason to believe that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have used covid relief funds to fund his little migrant flights from Texas to Martha's Vineyard, which if he did, of course, is a violation of the law that directed those covid funds to states.

Because you can't do that. That money was meant to prop up industries that were suffering because of Covid. That money was directed for cities, for districts, for schools, for small businesses to help struggling people. And trust me, as somebody who lived in Florida, we have a lot of struggling people still from Covid, but DeSantis didn't do that. DeSantis put the money in an account, in an account, by the way, that's been drawing interest. And so the state of Florida says, Ho, ho, ho, we didn't use Covid funds. We use the interest that we have drawn from the Covid funds. So ha ha, we have done nothing wrong.

It remains to be seen. Obviously, this is why the inspector general's looking into it, because even if you did use the interest, like what do you have it invested in that you've already pulled millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of interest to be able to pay for the program, right? Like that doesn't even seem possible. If it is, please let us know so we can follow your investment advice, because clearly y'all are pretty good with money. But I don't think that's what happened at all. And apparently neither does the Inspector general at the United States Treasury Department. Now we have seen something similar to this, right? We saw Texas Governor Greg Abbott, his state got the covid relief funds. They knew by the way, that they could not spend it to ship migrants out of Texas over to other parts of the country. So what Texas did was they exploited a loophole in the law, and they took money out of their regular state budget to put towards,

Uh, shipping migrants across the country. Then they used the covid relief funds to make up the shortfalls in the budget because they stole the money to ship the migrants out. They were allowed to do that. So they were very clever with it. DeSantis, I guess, thinks he's being clever with the whole interest thing, but the interest numbers simply don't make sense. But we'll wait and see. This of course, is not the only investigation taking place into Ron DeSantis actions. This one probably wouldn't carry any criminal penalties if something did, uh, uh, violate that covid relief law. But it's important to us down here in Florida to understand where the money came from. And of course, to remember that that money could have literally been spent doing anything else to help the struggling citizens in the state.