Eduardo Bacci, The Investigative Journal
Federal prosecutors pushed forward on multiple high-dollar fraud, national security, and public integrity cases over the past week, with the Justice Department’s newly empaneled National Fraud Enforcement Division (NFED) posting what records describe as its largest weekly output to date. The spread of cases — from a more than $500 million health-care and COVID-19 prosecution package to an economic espionage conviction and a court-authorized takedown of a Russian military cyber operation — offers a snapshot of where federal enforcement resources are concentrated in the second Trump term. The following digest covers seven notable actions drawn from DOJ press releases, US Attorney announcements, and court filings, with links to the primary records in every case.
1. Justice Department prosecutes “half-billion dollars” in health-care and COVID-19 fraud
The Justice Department on April 14 announced a package of cases totaling more than $500 million in alleged health-care and pandemic-relief fraud, anchored by a guilty plea from A-Plus Staffing Financial LLC (APSF) for defrauding the federally subsidized Affordable Care Act enrollment program. According to court documents and the DOJ release, APSF admitted to submitting false income representations for thousands of consumers — many of them homeless, unemployed, or struggling with substance use — in order to enroll them in fully subsidized ACA plans and collect commissions and bonuses. APSF agreed to plead guilty to one count of major fraud against the United States and pay $27.6 million in restitution.
Records indicate APSF used “street marketers” who targeted homeless shelters, bus stops, and drug-treatment clinics, sometimes offering cash or gift cards in exchange for enrollments. Filings suggest these consumers were often unaware they had been enrolled in, or switched between, ACA plans. Prosecutors said the scheme ran from February 2021 through September 2022. The resolution follows a related $135 million civil False Claims Act settlement with National Partnership of Insurance Brokers and its former subsidiary — a case that originated in a whistleblower qui tam complaint in the Middle District of Florida.
The same announcement included a guilty plea from Candies Goode-McCoy, a tax preparer accused of participating in a scheme that caused the IRS to pay out approximately $33 million in fraudulent refunds. Goode-McCoy personally collected more than $1.3 million in refund proceeds, with the plea agreement requiring more than $26 million in IRS restitution, per DOJ records.
2. Aetna to pay $117.7 million to resolve Medicare Advantage False Claims Act case
In one of the largest civil health-care settlements of the month, Aetna Inc. agreed to pay $117.7 million to resolve allegations under the False Claims Act that it submitted inaccurate patient diagnosis data to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to inflate risk-adjustment payments on its Medicare Advantage plans. The government alleged Aetna failed to withdraw the inaccurate data and falsely certified the information as accurate. Filings indicate the matter originated with a whistleblower qui tam action, United States ex rel. Mary Melette Thomas v. Aetna Inc., filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The whistleblower — a former Aetna risk-adjustment coding auditor — will receive approximately $2 million as her share of the recovery.
Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Civil Division said the government pays private insurers more than $530 billion a year to administer Medicare Advantage, a core reason federal authorities continue to police risk-adjustment practices. Aetna has not admitted liability; the civil settlement resolves claims only. The case illustrates the Civil Division’s continued focus on MA-plan audits, which have produced several nine-figure settlements over the past two fiscal years.
3. Fiber-laser expert convicted of economic espionage in Western District of New York
A federal jury in Rochester convicted Ji Wang, 63, of Painted Post, N.Y., on two counts of economic espionage, one count of theft of trade secrets, and related attempt charges after a multi-week trial, according to the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs. Prosecutors alleged Wang stole sensitive fiber-laser technology developed by Corning, Inc. and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had jointly invested heavily in the research. Economic espionage carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison; sentencing was scheduled for April 15 before U.S. District Judge Frank P. Geraci, Jr.
The conviction adds to a growing docket of Western District cases involving alleged trade-secret transfers to Chinese state-linked entities. FBI Counterintelligence Division Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky called the verdict a warning to those who “steal U.S. innovation for our enemies.” The case sits within a broader Justice Department focus on safeguarding high-performance computing, AI, and advanced-manufacturing technologies — a priority reflected in the March unsealing of charges against three defendants accused of diverting U.S.-assembled AI servers to China.
4. Former Army employee charged under the Espionage Act for leaking classified defense information
The FBI on April 8 arrested Courtney Williams, a former U.S. Army employee assigned to a Special Military Unit who held a Top Secret clearance, charging her under the Espionage Act with communicating national defense information to a media outlet, according to the Justice Department. The indictment is one of the first Espionage Act prosecutions of a media source in the second Trump administration, and records suggest the underlying disclosures relate to reporting on alleged misconduct at Fort Bragg.
The case is being prosecuted by the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section together with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Civil-liberties organizations, including Defending Rights and Dissent, have flagged the prosecution as a significant test of how aggressively the current Justice Department intends to pursue leakers tied to adversarial coverage of the military. An indictment is merely an allegation, and Williams is presumed innocent.
5. Justice Department and FBI disrupt Russian GRU router network
On April 7, the Justice Department and FBI announced a court-authorized technical operation to neutralize the U.S. portion of a network of small office/home office (SOHO) routers compromised by Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) — specifically Military Unit 26165, the group known to researchers as APT28 or the Sofacy Group. According to filings, the GRU unit used the hijacked devices as an infrastructure layer for global intelligence-collection operations. The operation did not involve criminal charges, but is the latest in a series of disruption actions taken under search-and-seizure warrants that target compromised devices rather than their owners.
Federal News Network reported the same week that two 2025 cyber-enforcement cases — one a False Claims Act settlement built around alleged DFARS-compliance misrepresentations, and the other a criminal indictment involving claimed FedRAMP misrepresentations by a DoD contractor — signal an expanding DOJ cyber-enforcement posture heading into 2026. Taken together, the router disruption and the cyber-contracting actions show the Department using both affirmative operations and civil-fraud tools to address federal-contract cybersecurity gaps.
6. Five more plead guilty in Minnesota Feeding Our Future case
In the District of Minnesota, the Justice Department on April 14 announced additional guilty pleas from five more defendants tied to the $250 million Feeding Our Future federal child-nutrition fraud scheme. Ikram Yusuf Mohamed, identified in filings as a leader of the scheme through her consulting role with Feeding Our Future, admitted opening multiple fictitious food sites under family members’ names and funneling more than $6.9 million in federal reimbursements through them. Her husband, Shakur Abdinur Abdisalam, pleaded guilty to operating a purported food site that falsely claimed to have served over one million meals between February and November 2021, collecting more than $1.5 million.
The defendants had been scheduled to proceed to trial on April 20 before U.S. District Judge Nancy E. Brasel. The pleas leave one remaining trial defendant and one additional change-of-plea hearing on the docket. The Feeding Our Future case remains the single largest pandemic-era nutrition-program fraud prosecution in the country and is central to the Justice Department’s newly created National Fraud Enforcement Division docket.
7. National Fraud Enforcement Division tallies $340 million in weekly actions
The NFED on April 17 announced weekly results totaling more than $340 million in attempted or realized fraud across dozens of federal districts. Among the week’s highlights: five defendants were arrested in Kentucky, Indiana, and Colorado on a $1.6 million COVID-19 relief scheme; a former California teacher pleaded guilty in the Southern District of California to laundering health-care fraud proceeds for a scheme that billed Medicare nearly $51 million; a federal grand jury in Maryland indicted a former Social Security Administration employee for allegedly diverting SSI disability payments totaling more than $116,000; and an Iowa farmer was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for a $1.7 million tax-fraud scheme.
NFED Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, confirmed by the Senate in late March, said the division’s mission is to “vigorously pursue those who steal taxpayer dollars.” The division was formally established by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on April 7 to consolidate fraud-enforcement responsibilities across the Criminal Division and United States Attorneys’ Offices — a structure analysts at Pillsbury Law have flagged as one of the most significant reorganizations of federal white-collar enforcement in decades.
Cases that warrant deeper investigation
Three threads from this week’s enforcement output merit closer TIJ reporting. First, the ACA-enrollment schemes — APSF and the National Partnership of Insurance Brokers matter — raise unresolved questions about how agent and broker commissions are policed at the federal level, and whether private-carrier oversight practices enabled street-level fraud against vulnerable consumers. Second, the Courtney Williams Espionage Act prosecution is a significant test case for how the Department intends to balance classified-information safeguards against press protections, and deserves careful docket tracking in the Eastern District of North Carolina. Third, the Feeding Our Future case continues to generate evidence of systemic weaknesses in state-administered federal nutrition programs — weaknesses the Administration’s new Task Force to Eliminate Fraud has explicitly flagged as a target.
A charge set forth in an indictment is merely an accusation and does not constitute proof of guilt. All defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.
Sources: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs, U.S. Attorneys’ press releases, U.S. District Court filings, FBI press releases, and reporting cited above.