WASHINGTON. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he has asked Vice President JD Vance to focus his “complete and total attention” on what he called massive corruption and crime in Democrat-run cities and states, and he declared that the United States does not need a deal with Iran because, he wrote, “we’ve got their money” and “we’ve got their Strait.”
Trump made the remarks in a Truth Social post at 8:07 a.m. Eastern time. He named Minnesota, California and Illinois as “poorly run, corrupt disasters” and claimed that billions of dollars are stolen in such states each and every month. He offered no examples, documents or figures to support that claim, and he did not explain how stopping the alleged theft would balance the federal budget, as he also claimed it would.
The full post read:
“I have asked Vice President Vance to focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S. The Blue States, such as Minnesota, California, Illinois, and many more, are all poorly run, corrupt disasters. Billions of Dollars is being stolen each and every month. Our Budget could be quickly BALANCED with the correction of this large scale criminal activity. CORRUPTION is in the Democrat Leadership’s blood! We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT”
A job Vance already holds
The assignment Trump described is close to one Vance already has. In March, Trump signed an executive order creating the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud and named Vance its chairman. The order targets fraud in federal benefit programs, and it named the same three states, Minnesota, California and Illinois, as places where the administration alleged widespread fraud or weak controls.
The task force says it has identified $260.7 billion in suspected fraud since Trump took office and has prevented an estimated $72 billion a year in payments it calls potentially fraudulent. Those are the administration’s own figures and they have not been independently verified. In October, the task force was preparing criminal charges against more than 40 defendants in an alleged $40 million food stamp fraud scheme, according to Fox News Digital.
No new executive order or White House statement accompanied Thursday’s post, and it was not clear whether the post expands Vance’s duties or restates them. News organizations asked the White House, the Justice Department and the State Department for comment on Thursday. By mid-afternoon, Vance’s office and the governors of the three states Trump named, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Gavin Newsom of California and JB Pritzker of Illinois, had not publicly responded to the post.
Democratic governors have rejected similar accusations from Trump before. When the administration opened a fraud investigation into California in January, Newsom’s office said the state had blocked more than $125 billion in fraud since he took office and had arrested people who exploited state programs.
In a second post on Thursday, Trump wrote: “If the Democrats want to ‘root out corruption,’ they should start with investigating Blue States, perhaps the most CORRUPT governmental structures and entities anywhere on Earth.”
The posts came nine days after the midterm elections, in which Democrats won control of Congress. Vance wrote after the defeat that “the reason we lost is the war,” meaning the war with Iran, and Trump said this week that he did not disagree with that judgment.
The Iran lines, checked
The Iran passage matters because Vance has been one of the administration’s channels to Tehran. In June, he helped negotiate a 14-point memorandum with Iran that opened a 60-day window for talks on ending the war. The window closed without a final agreement. Last month, Vance wrote to Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, asking for a face-to-face meeting, according to The Wall Street Journal. Tehran welcomed the letter politely but has not formally agreed to meet. Thursday’s post tells Vance to give the corruption brief his complete and total attention. It does not say what happens to that channel.
“We’ve got their money.” Most of Iran’s frozen money is not in the United States, and it is not held by the American government. It sits in banks in other countries, blocked because U.S. sanctions bar its release. Tehran estimates that more than $100 billion is frozen abroad. Outside estimates are lower: roughly $20 billion to $50 billion in China, about $15 billion in Iraq, about $7 billion each in India and South Korea, about $6 billion in Qatar and about $2 billion in the United States, according to The Wall Street Journal’s accounting of the funds. Nothing in the public record supports a figure of hundreds of billions of dollars. Under the June memorandum, the United States undertook to make Iran’s frozen funds fully available as part of a final settlement, released in phases as Iran complied, according to summaries of the text. U.S. officials have denied that Washington has agreed to release any of the money outside that framework.
“We’ve got their Strait.” The Strait of Hormuz remains contested. It is not held by the United States. Iran declared the strait closed months ago and has attacked shipping in and around it since. Commercial ships now mostly use a southern route through Oman’s territorial waters, many of them under U.S. military escort. This week, Iran said its Revolutionary Guards struck the navigation and communications systems on Didamar Island, an Omani island that helps guide ships through the strait. U.S. Central Command has rejected Iran’s claim that American forces abandoned the strait, and U.S. warships continue to escort traffic. But Iran keeps the ability to threaten the waterway, and attacks on tankers continue. Escorting ships along the Omani coast is not the same as holding the strait.
Zark News will update this story if Vance’s office or the governors respond.
