Vice President JD Vance joins “FOX & Friends” to provide an update on ongoing U.S.-Iran nuclear talks in Switzerland. Full transcript of Vance’s interview with co-hosts Griff Jenkins, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and Charlie Hurt below.

KAYLEIGH MCENANY, FOX NEWS HOST:  It’s Saturday in America, I’m Kayleigh McEnany. For months we’ve covered rampant fraud plaguing American cities and the most common response we hear from you, the audience is that you want action. We hear you and now we have answers.   In moments, my exclusive interview with Vice President JD Vance who is leading the White House anti-fraud task force. I asked him point-blank. What is the federal government doing to hold these fraudsters accountable? I also asked how they plan to stop American taxpayer dollars your money from flowing overseas to terrorists.   Now as of today, the DOJ has secured multiple arrests across California and Minnesota. The task force also identified nearly $ 6.3 billion in suspected fraudulent government contracts and found 186,000 dead people who received SNAP benefits. But before the White House created this task force, it was independent journalists like Nick Shirley exposing the fraud in Minnesota. Now, that was across various programs within the state’s Medicaid autism daycare services in the grand total of fraud is estimated to be as high as $ 19 billion.   And DHS sources tell Saturday in America that nearly $ 700 million was flown out of Minneapolis heading to Somalia over in Ohio. It’s more of the same a new audit revealing millions of dollars have been wasted on the state’s home health care industry. And get this, Fox went to two buildings that housed more than five dozen home health care businesses between them and similar to Minnesota DHS sources tell us that $ 136 million flew from Columbus to Somalia once again since 2023.   Now to put that into perspective, major airports like JFK and Dallas Fort Worth only reported $ 3 million to $ 4 million dollars in bulk cash transfers per year. Saturday in America also unearthed an auditor report showing that Governor Gavin Newsom was warned of hospice fraud years ago and a whistleblower report sounding the alarm to Governor Tim Walz that taxpayer money was being funneled to terrorism.   Our team had the opportunity to take our original reporting straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue directly to the White House task force to eliminate fraud. Now, my exclusive interview with Vice President JD Vance.   (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)   MCENANY:  Vice President JD Vance, thank you so much for being here today.   JD VANCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:  Of course.   MCENANY:  Based on some state expert estimates we have seen, going back to 2019 the California State Medi-Cal program alone could have cost taxpayers a $ 146 billion with a B in fraud.   VANCE:  Yes.   MCENANY:  That’s an extraordinary number. Could this be that one program one state a trillion dollar fraud epidemic in the country?   VANCE:  I mean, we don’t really know how bad the fraud problem is because until Donald Trump became president nobody actually took a serious look at it. It could be hundreds of billions of dollars, it could be a trillion dollars. What we do know is that a lot of Americans are being taken advantage of and whatever the scale is it’s big enough to really matter.   And I think to make a significant hit, meaning American taxpayers could be paying less taxes. We could be saving more money. And I always try to remind people of this, Kayleigh. There really are two costs and two victims. One is taxpayers getting fleeced whether it’s a hundred billion or a trillion dollars, that’s a lot of money. But it’s also there are these programs that people in my family that I have benefited from that are meant to provide food to low-income kids are meant to ensure that if you can’t afford a doctor you can still have access to medical care. Those programs are going to be destroyed by the fraudsters.   So we’re trying to protect American taxpayers. We’re also trying to ensure that these critical programs are there for the American people. I think we’re going to save a lot of money, but also do a lot of good.   MCENANY:  Yes, you could save a trillion dollars. We’ll see. The one thing I hear from viewers from voters is action. They want action. And they look at something like Minnesota where the largest Medicaid fraudsters were prosecuted. One of those Medicaid fraudsters said, “We got a party, bro” and a text message in a piece of evidence.   That guy was let out on bond. They believe he’s currently in Kenya. His co-defendant said, “Next pay period, bro, I will bill 50k.” The judge just let him out with no jail time on a plea deal. What do you do with blue states like this?   VANCE:  Well, we just have to prosecute as much as we can and we have to accept that, yes, there are going to be some blue states that fight us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do our job. And for every person that slips through the cracks because of a crooked judge, we’re going to get 10 people who actually go to prison or suffer real consequences for it and we’re also saving the American people a lot of money.   You know, one of the things I’ve learned as vice president, I think the president of course appreciated this from his first term is that you can have a rock-solid case, you can have a fraudster, you can have them dead to rights, you can have them literally in a text message confessing to the crime, —   MCENANY:  Yes.   VANCE:  — but sometimes you’re still going to have corrupt judges. I think it drives home the importance of getting better judges in the system, but also going after this stuff in a number of ways. So let me give you an example of this.   We knew this was a problem going into this. We recognized that some of the blue state judges would not allow us to go after fraud as aggressively. So, we’re coming up with a number of legal theories that will allow us, under the system that we have, to prosecute people for fraud in jurisdictions where they’re actually going to face justice.   And we’re working through that stuff right now, but we were aware this was going to be an issue. I promise we’re on top of it. Yes, there are some people who are going to slip through the cracks, but we’re going to get a lot of people, and that’s going to be, I think, the action the American people deserve and want to see.   MCENANY:  So, arrest (ph) at the federal level, we’ll be looking for that. When you look at this, it’s hard to keep up with. You see fraud in Medicaid, SNAP, child care, foreign student visas, student loans, COVID.   And then I just read in the Wall Street Journal, fraud related to a minute theater and music COVID tagline there that was worth $ 10 billion. How does the system allow this kind of rampant fraud?   VANCE:  Because no one ever looked at it. No one ever asked themselves, are the American people being fleeced? Nobody ever asked, for example, if you’re paying hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars to a Medicare provider, is that provider actually giving services to people?   Or let’s say you have somebody who’s claiming that they need help under Medicaid to provide care for an autistic child. Was anybody actually asking the question, do they have an autistic child? Do they even have a child at all who would need to benefit from these services?   So, the fact that nobody ever asked the question is a scandal, but it’s one of the things the President of the United States came in saying, we have to fix this, we have to change this, and we have started doing exactly that. If people ask me all the time, Kayleigh, is this a difficult job? Like, is it hard to find fraud?   And the unfortunate answer is no, it’s not. And there’s so much of it. There’s so much across so many different programs.   You mentioned a lot of them just in the lead up to the question. What I try to think of myself, when I think of goals is two years from now, I hope that it’s hard for us to find the fraud. That’s the ultimate measure of success because there is so much sitting on top that nobody’s really looked at.   We’ve changed that. We’ve got to keep on going after it.   MCENANY:  Our team at Saturday in America unearthed a publicly available 87-page document that was addressed to the governor of California in 2022, —   VANCE:  Yes.   MCENANY:  — who was Gavin Newsom. And it showed him a map of where to find hospice fraud. And his selling point of him taking action was a moratorium on hospice centers and the closing down of 287 centers over four years.   VANCE:  Yes.   MCENANY:  I heard you’ve closed down 800 hospice. How are you able to do in two months what he did a fourth of in four years?   VANCE:  By doing our jobs. Again, this is not rocket science. The fraud is right there for everybody to see. I’ll give you a crazy statistic.   We closed down 800 fraudulent hospice centers. Think about this. If you’re — if you’re running a business and the federal government closes down your main source of revenue, do you write a letter?   Do you make a phone call? Seven hundred eighty of those that we’ve closed down, we haven’t even heard a single thing from anybody. That’s how bad the fraud is.   They can’t even make an argument that they weren’t engaged in fraud. So, to the point that when we shut them down, they wouldn’t even pick up the phone and try to turn those services back on. We’ve just looked where nobody else has been looking, whether it’s Gavin Newsom or anybody else.   And by the way, Kayleigh, one of the things that we’re trying to take very seriously, we’re not going to prejudge the legal outcome, but when you tell me that, when I hear about a report that says to the governor, here’s all this fraud and he doesn’t do anything about it, I ask myself, was anybody engaged in criminal wrongdoing? Was anybody in his office engaged in criminal wrongdoing? Again, I’m not going to say yes, but I am going to promise the American people.   We’re going to look into that stuff. We’re going to investigate it and we’re going to take it seriously because if there was criminal wrongdoing, then people ought to go to prison for it.   MCENANY:  I understand the facts have to match the law.   VANCE:  Exactly.   MCENANY:  I understand you’re not the DOJ, but state level state official prosecutions. I mean, you’re taking this seriously that you will follow the facts here.   VANCE:  A 100% in Minnesota and California and a number of other states where some of which we’ve gotten started, some of which we haven’t even gotten started yet. We are aggressively investigating. Let me give you just one statistic, something I’m very proud of, because I think it shows the pace of DOJ and the attorney general, Todd Blanche is working with us.   He’s doing a great job is normally it would take you discover the fraud of Minneapolis. It would take six months to go from that discovery to any kind of legal process. We serve 22 subpoenas two months after that fraud ring was discovered in Minneapolis at the federal level.   We’re investigating this stuff aggressively. Again, we’re not the Biden administration. We don’t pre-judge the outcome, but I guarantee unless something crazy is going on, I guarantee there’s going to be some criminal wrongdoing that we’re going to find because there’s so much wrongdoing.   Somebody had to know what they were doing.   MCENANY:  Staying once more on the topic of prosecutions. There’s also a 2019 report from the office of the inspector general in Minnesota. That is Tim Walz’s time.   And there’s a whistleblower report in there and the whistleblower said this, he was an investigator. He said, “It is a near certainty that at least a percentage of the fraud proceeds in Minnesota go overseas and are being siphoned off by one or more designated terrorist organizations. John Yoo who worked in the Bush DOJ told me that this should be given to the DOJ Counterterrorism and National Security Division. We need to know who transferred the money if was anyone aiding and abetting because that could be material support for terrorism.”   Is that the level of detail that you expect this administration?   VANCE:  Absolutely, but that’s a great idea. I haven’t heard that but we will immediately take that to the team because that should be a counterterrorism investigation. And this is — it drives home something that I’ve loved about working on this fraud task force is, yes, we’ve got a lot of resources and we’re working very hard on this. Some of the best stuff whether it’s it’s Nick Shirley or whether it’s you raising that with me, citizens have a role to play in this.   We’ve actually set up a fraud hotline where people can call in and suggest that maybe they’re seeing things that are not totally above board because to fix this problem, it’s so deep-seated. It’s so broad. We actually need everybody to raise this stuff.   We need citizen journalists. We need, you know, Fox News reporters. We need everybody to be asking ourselves the question. How do we root out this fraud? Because it’s hard to fathom. You pay your taxes and it goes to a terrorist when your country is trying to prevent those terrorists from killing your fellow Americans. It is shocking, but it’s the sort of thing that happens when the federal government turns a blind eye to this stuff.   MCENANY:  It’s stunning and to know about that since 2019. Has Governor Gavin Newsom contacted you to assist you?   VANCE:  I think the only contact we’ve had with Gavin Newsom so far as him telling us that we’re not allowed to stop the fraud or in fact trying to sue us to stop the fraud. So no, we have not had a positive relationship with Gavin Newsom on this. But, Kayleigh, I say this with all transparency. I would love for that to change. I would love it if Gavin Newsom had to come to Jesus moment and said, “You know what? I’m going to take this fraud issue seriously because we would work with him.”   We’ve said that to everybody. Democrat or Republican, we want to work with you to root out the fraud, but you’ve actually got to help us out. Let me give you another crazy example. Do you know, I didn’t know this until a couple of months ago, so no shame, that when your government gives out, let’s say $ 7 billion to California for food stamp benefits. It doesn’t know a single recipient of those food stamps. Not a one because it’s block granted to the states and then we trust the states that they’re going to police fraud themselves.   We have not gotten any help from Gavin Newsom or a number of other blue states when we’re trying to police to make sure that dead people don’t get SNAP benefits to make sure that these food benefits go to low-income kids, that’s what they’re there for, not to fraudsters. We’d love to have that cooperation, but so far, not yet.   MCENANY:  And final question, has Tim Walz contacted you?   VANCE:  No, Tim Walz has not contacted me.   MCENANY:  OK.   VANCE:  He — I did say see that he took credit when we did 22, those 22 subpoenas that I mentioned that the investigations that we’re doing —   MCENANY:  Yes.   VANCE:  — for the anti-fraud stuff in Minneapolis. Tim Walz did take credit for it, even though Tim Walz has not helped us at all. We’ve gotten some cooperation from local authorities, but from the governor’s office we really haven’t gotten that cooperation again. We’d love to have it. This is so much easier when we work whether it’s a blue or red state when we have the governor’s cooperating with us and we do have that in some places. It goes a lot quicker but we’re going to go after fraud regardless if people are helping us or not.   MCENANY:  Easier when it’s bipartisan.   VANCE:  Exactly.   MCENANY:  It makes sense. Thank you.

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