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The Situation Room

First Look Inside Obama Presidential Center; Ebola Outbreak Timeline?; Justice Department Announces Fraud Charges. Aired 11-11:30a ET

Aired June 04, 2026 - 11:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: Happening now: understanding Ebola.

CNN is separating facts from fears, as a growing outbreak worries health officials worldwide, including right here in the U.S.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: And presidential premiere. We're getting a brand-new look inside the Barack Obama Center just weeks ahead of its grand opening.

Welcome to our viewers here in the United States and around the world. I'm Wolf Blitzer with Pamela Brown, and you're in THE SITUATION ROOM.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

BLITZER: And first on CNN, breaking news on one of President Trump's top critics. Sources now tell CNN John Bolton has reached a plea deal over his mishandling of classified information.

BROWN: Bolton served as national security adviser during Trump's first term. He was charged for keeping top secret documents at his home and sharing classified information with family members. Sources say Bolton will plead guilty to one count of illegal retention of sensitive national security documents, which comes with a sentence of up to five years in prison.

He has also agreed to pay more than a $2 million fine, according to one of the sources that spoke to CNN.

BLITZER: All right, we're going to have much more on this story coming up.

But, right now, there's a Department of Justice news conference under way. I want to listen in on some fraud charges being leveled.

TODD BLANCHE, U.S. DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: ... and our U.S. attorney's offices to bring fraudsters to justice.

I want to talk about a few cases that we're announcing today. And I think you will agree with me that some criminals have gotten so bold, so audacious as to defraud the government of tens of millions of dollars. I'm just going to give a few examples right now. It should shock your conscience.

Today, we unsealed a 32-count indictment against two state employees and two other co-conspirators for allegedly billing $30 million to the government for therapeutic behavioral services that were never provided. We have also unsealed an indictment charging four defendants in a scheme to defraud a COVID program.

Again, these programs, as we all know, were meant to benefit small businesses and individuals struggling because of the pandemic. In total, between our state and federal partners, today, we're announcing charges that were either unsealed today or over the past week against 14 defendants allegedly involved in fraud schemes targeting over $50 million here in Ohio.

And, again, these numbers are staggering, but just the tip of the iceberg, both here in Ohio and nationwide. Sadly, Ohio is facing some of the most significant fraud schemes in the country, Medicare fraud, pandemic relief fraud, even an international romance fraud scheme that I think you will hear about shortly.

And to meet this challenge, to meet this crisis, our response has been and will continue to be aggressive, comprehensive, and we will not stop until we fix this problem.

I want to emphasize something about what the cases that we're bringing represent, a unified statewide fraud-fighting effort that's firing on all cylinders. You're going to hear from some of us today after I finish of the U.S. attorneys, federal investigative partners, state partners, and agencies that are going to move fast, are going deep, and we're delivering results for the American people.

So I want to take a moment and thank the prosecutors and agents who work these cases. They're not easy cases to work. They're not easy cases to investigate, but they're extraordinarily important to the American people and to restoring faith, trust, and justice in our systems.

Also, to the leaders in Ohio, your commitment to this fight isn't just helpful. It's necessary for our success. This is an example, when federal and state partners work together toward justice, our cases are stronger. The deterrence is greater.

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And the biggest problems facing our country, the ones we have been told are just the way it is, there's nothing we can do about it, start to look solvable because they are.

I want to thank President Trump, because he's told us time and time again that it is the mission of this Department of Justice every single day to be relentless in the pursuit of law and order. Americans deserve to live free of violence and fraud. Americans deserve to know that if someone lies or cheats or steals to get ahead, they will be punished, and they deserve a government that will never be taking advantage of by fraudsters.

They're not just words. These are a promise that this department will keep. There's a lot of folks that want to say a few words, so I'm going to stop there, and I just want to again thank everybody behind me for being part of this fight, and it's now my honor to introduce the great Dr. Oz, who is, as I can tell you from my phone and my text messages-, working tirelessly seven days a week to combat what we're here to address today.

So I will ask Dr. Oz to say a few words now. Thank you.

DR. MEHMET OZ, ADMINISTRATOR, CENTERS FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES: The moral indignation that the president feels that many of you share prompted the creation of the task force. Many of its members are on the dais today.

Vice President Vance leads that endeavor and has boldly been able to create an all-of-government effect. All of government doesn't just mean all of federal government. It means all of state government as well. And I'm here representing Secretary Kennedy and some of the work that we have done looking at the numbers that are coming out of the federal government.

Because the budget of CMS is large, it's $2 trillion roughly, it means it's a big target. And foreign players and maybe even foreign governments have been taking bits and pieces of this pie for a while. But they have been weaponized. And we see that here in Ohio.

And we're speaking about the frustration that many Americans feel left and right of the political spectrum, and certainly red and blue states both are experiencing this, which is why it was important for us to be here today.

I was here last week with members of the CMS team. And we came because we were investigating home health care fraud, autism fraud, and a series of different ways that the federal government is being pierced with different arrows from criminal elements that desire to suck taxpayer dollars out of the federal government and out of state government coffers as well.

I was visiting a facility called Labelle Home Health. It's run by woman Najumi Tessing. You may not see her here today because she's in jail. And she went to jail because she was accused and convicted of taking billing practices to a level we had not seen before.

She was billing for people who were deceased. Billing for dead people is a bad look in court. And it showed at her conviction when she was accused and appropriately taken out for doing things that we find reprehensible.

Now, if she was the only one, we wouldn't be here in force. Unfortunately, this area around Columbus is responsible in Franklin County for one-third of all of the $1.5 billion spent on home health care in Ohio. Think about that. A third of all of the money spent on home health care in the entire great state of Ohio is generated here. That's three times what you would expect. There's a road very close to

where we are, 288 home health care facilities in that several block area on that one road. Again, it defies belief. Some of these buildings were vacant. You wouldn't put anybody up in those buildings, not certainly the place that would house home health care.

Now, this is a mecca for Somalian populations. It's a hub for Nepalese and Bhutanese populations. These are insular groups. But we are naive to think that practices that were felt to be commonplace in other parts of the world wouldn't come to this great country if we didn't pay attention to some of the program integrity issues, which were ignored en masse with the prior administration.

So, today, we have three major announcements from the health care part of this fraud endeavor. The first is that the state of Ohio -- and I want to applaud the Medicaid office here. They will be announcing at 1:00 -- and please pay attention to that important announcement -- that they are suspending 49 home health care providers who have been identified as high risk to the Medicaid program.

These people have billed millions of dollars to take advantage of our most vulnerable. And if you're willing to steal from folks who are down and having a difficult time, you will not just steal their money, you will steal their health, you will steal their lives. And we're seeing that.

No more champagne on private jets for these people, no more new cars, no more luxury endeavors and vacations. It's done. We're coming after you wherever you are. And as Attorney General Blanche highlighted, we are earnest and serious in this endeavor. We will not be daunted. Ohio Governor DeWine also sought a six-month moratorium for all new home health care and hospice in the state of Ohio.

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We granted that within a day. And we hope that will help at least slow the bleeding, using a surgical metaphor, so we can get a bandage on the wound, maybe put a couple stitches in, and take out some of the folks who have been stabbing the patient of Medicaid.

Second big announcement, in order to solidify collaboration, CMS, Medicare, Medicaid, and Ohio are going to launch a state specific Medicaid fraud room. It's going to copy the Medicaid fraud room created at the federal level by the task force.

The findings surface through this state partnership we believe will free us to be able to directly collaborate at a national level, getting all states to understand what the problems are within their areas and accelerating our ability to take out high-risk providers. We will identify them and we will force -- enforce actions around them.

The applied behavioral analysis process, it's called ABA therapy, for autism has been scandalous and obviously abused. This is, again, taking advantage of children with autism or getting their parents to lie about whether the child has autism. BROWN: All right, we have been listening to administration officials

there. You hear Dr. Mehmet Oz. Behind him is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who announced that DOJ is charging Ohio State employees with a $30 million fraud scheme.

BLITZER: Involving Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which is not unusual, by any means. It's been going on for a long time.

John Miller is with us. He's been listening and watching.

What goes through your mind when you hear these latest charges?

JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, this is a large effort on the part of the federal government to go state by state and to look into these programs.

Wolf and Pam, you will recall the Minnesota childcare programs that were prevalent in the Somali community there and the fraud that was charged in those cases. They moved on to Ohio, but we're talking about $38 million, two people charged with felony counts, and then two more, both of them state employees who would have been the alleged inside people who pushed these billing processes through.

Mehmet Oz, the Dr. Oz that we saw, he's the head of CMS, which is the Medicare-Medicaid administration in terms of taking care of 160 million Americans. And they're talking about rampant fraud in Ohio involving numerous people and that the state under Governor Mike DeWine is about to suspend 49 home health care outfits that they consider not necessarily charged in this, but high risk for even more fraud.

So I think we will see more of this story rolling out in Ohio. And I think we will see more of it rolling out in other states. There is a political backdrop here, which is, these are programs that this administration through Congress has delivered serious cuts to.

And there's a narrative that comes with that, which is not that there aren't people in need, but these programs are wasteful and subject to rampant fraud. So some of these cases are going to be seen as validation of those claims.

BROWN: Yes, that's a really good point, because when the Big Beautiful Bill was being looked at by Congress, Republicans argued that they needed to make these cuts and what would offset that would be getting rid of the fraud of these programs, Medicaid and Medicare. So that's a really important point there.

Thank you so much, John Miller. We appreciate it.

And still ahead: why the CDC chief says funding cuts aren't affecting the U.S. response to Ebola just before the World Cup comes to North America. Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins us with the very latest on the outbreak.

BLITZER: And, later, housing is one of the many industries working to use more A.I. But are the rules meant to prevent bias keeping up? Stay with us. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.

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BROWN: Happening now: The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo may have started months before the World Health Organization was alerted. That's what a Congolese official told CNN, as global health officials investigate the outbreak and try to understand its timeline.

The United Nations health agency says there have been 344 confirmed Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo so far, including 60 deaths. The U.S. has deployed disease prevention teams to the DRC and Uganda.

So let's go straight to CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Sanjay, always great to see you.

So the WHO had said the Ebola outbreak most likely started before its first known suspected case in April, maybe as early as February. How could this revised timeline impact the understanding of this outbreak?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think it makes things murkier, for sure. And we're talking about February 22, which is about 11 weeks earlier now. How many patients were potentially exposed during that time? The key to getting an outbreak under control is to be able to contact-trace.

Even more than talking about monoclonal antibodies and vaccines, which are undoubtedly important, pandemics like this -- or, I should say, outbreaks like this typically come to an end because of good contact tracing.

But if you don't know that the patients were actually infected during that 11-week period, that can be a problem. That's the bad news. The good news, if you take a look at this graph here -- and we have shown this a couple times, Pamela -- you can look at the trajectory of previous outbreaks, 2014, 2018.

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Those are the white lines. The -- that red line is what we're dealing with now. And now you're starting to see that line change a little bit. Some of the cases that were suspected turned out to not be Ebola. So the numbers have actually been revised down a bit since then.

So we're going to keep a close eye on that. But the real question is, will there be an opportunity to do enough contact tracing to figure out what happened during that roughly three-month period?

BROWN: And one difference of this outbreak versus some of the previous ones is that Americans who have been infected and are exposed are being treated abroad versus being brought back to the U.S.

But that could change, right?

GUPTA: Yes, this was very interesting, because you may have heard over the past few weeks a very strong sentiment -- I think Secretary Rubio said this -- that no Americans with Ebola -- there will be no Ebola in the United States.

That's starting to change, both from Secretary Rubio and also from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's the head of the NIH. We talked to him last night about this, Anderson and I did. And here's how he framed it.

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GUPTA: In 2014, the patients came home to great centers in Atlanta, Nebraska, other places around the country. Why not now? Is this public health or is this more of a political sort of decision?

DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA, NIH DIRECTOR AND ACTING CDC DIRECTOR: No, it's public health, Sanjay.

So, first, the idea is that we have some place in country, if -- suppose a doctor goes in to treat a patient, people in DRC, right, an American doctor, as an American doctor happened to go in. We want a place where they can safely quarantine if they are exposed, right?

That provides confidence that they're going to be taken care of, that there isn't going to be, like, a last-minute sort of struggle to find a place that they can go. That sometimes happened in 2014-2015. But we're not ruling out moving people out to the United States if things -- that would -- believe that that case requires some more intensive management.

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GUPTA: So, what he's basically saying, look, if somebody is sick enough where they think that they need to be in the United States, although many places in Africa, to be clear, can provide really excellent care, but should an American be sick enough that they think warrants a transfer back to the United States, that could happen, Pamela.

So, within the next few weeks -- and it's hard to put a timeline on these sorts of things -- that's something that could happen, and obviously probably go to one of these big centers in Atlanta or Nebraska, which we have talked a lot about recently.

BROWN: And that really is a change from what we had previously heard from Secretary Rubio, as you had pointed out.

GUPTA: Yes.

BROWN: And during that interview, that excellent interview that you did with Dr. Bhattacharya with Anderson, you also brought up the significant cuts and changes to public health programs.

And he seemed to be downplaying that that has impacted identifying and treating these cases, right?

GUPTA: Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Let me be really specific here on what we're talking about here, because I think people say cuts sort of generally speaking, and maybe people generally know.

But here are the sort of four things that I think people have been worried about in terms of impact on being able to control outbreaks or epidemics, withdrawing from the World Health Organization, dissolving essentially USAID, the staff cuts at CDC, and reduced foreign aid overall.

And I think the question has been, both in terms of surveilling for a potential outbreak like this, and obviously then being able to control it once it's occurred, what sort of impacts do these cuts have? And we asked Dr. Bhattacharya about that.

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BHATTACHARYA: I have not seen any diminishment in our capacity to manage the manage the outbreak. What I do see is a massive challenge caused by just unfortunate physical reality of how Ebola spreads and a environment where there really is a lot of sort of difficulty to reach local populations, because it is.

It's a war-torn area controlled by warlords, in many ways where the government itself doesn't have a tremendous amount of control.

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GUPTA: I will say, Pamela, a couple of things.

First of all, this is a different type of Ebola virus. I think, in the initial days, they were testing for another type of Ebola. That slowed down the sort of identification of this outbreak.

And the second thing I think, as Dr. Bhattacharya is saying -- and I have spent a lot of time in this part of the world -- it's hard, I mean, simply to get patients care, to get testing reagents to these clinics, to then transmit that information to the Ministry of Health.

It's so murky. You have no idea what's going on, especially in these early weeks and months. And maybe we will never know for sure what the impact of those cuts are, because you're trying to prove a negative in this case.

But talking to people on the ground there, hearing from Clarissa Ward, for example, who's on the ground there, there does seem to be an impact from these cuts. There's just not enough of the same resources that you saw back in 2018 and then 2014.

BROWN: All right, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, always great to have you on. Thank you -- Wolf.

[11:25:02] BLITZER: We always learn a lot from Sanjay.

BROWN: We do.

BLITZER: And we're getting new information this morning. We're getting a first look right now at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago just ahead of its official opening later this month.

Take a look at the building nicknamed the Obamalisk because of its monolithic form. Its design is based on a visual of four hands coming together.

BROWN: The 19-acre campus is in Chicago's historic Jackson Park and has panoramic views of Lake Michigan. It includes a four-story museum, the John Lewis Plaza, the Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit and Vegetable Garden, and a new branch of Chicago's public library, an NBA regulation-sized basketball court, and a replica of the Oval Office.

BLITZER: The center includes exhibits dedicated to the founding of the country and historical movements like civil rights and women's suffrage.

Displays also show famous campaign memorabilia, like the iconic "Hope" poster, as well as videos capturing Obama's historic 2008 campaign and presidential win.

BROWN: And visitors will get a taste of Michelle Obama's influence on style with rooms showcasing the Isabel Toledo coat -- you probably recall that -- and the dress that she wore for Inauguration Day in 2009, as well as the gown she wore for her painting in the National Portrait Gallery.

The campus also includes 28 commissioned works of arts. The $850 million price tag makes it the most expensive presidential library.

BLITZER: CNN's Sara Sidner and I will bring you live coverage from Chicago at the museum on June 18. The Obama Presidential Center opens to the public the next day on Juneteenth.

BROWN: Looking forward to that?

BLITZER: I'm looking forward to Chicago.

BROWN: Yes, for sure.

All right, just ahead: A fired North Carolina police officer faces charges after this violent run-in with a black woman, but her attorneys are fighting for even stronger punishment. We will ask them why straight ahead.

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