Trump says he’ll stop health care fraudsters. Last time, he let them walk.

Five years ago, the CEO of one of the largest pain clinic companies in the Southeast was sentenced to more than three years in prison after being convicted in a $4 million illegal kickback scheme.

But after just four months behind bars, John Estin Davis walked free. President Trump commuted Davis’ sentence in the last days of his first term. In a statement explaining the decision, the White House said that “no one suffered financially” from Davis’ crime.

In court, however, the Trump administration was saying something very different. As the president let him go, the Department of Justice alleged in a civil lawsuit that Davis and his company defrauded taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars with excessive urine drug testing. The DOJ alleged that Comprehensive Pain Specialists made such a “staggering” sum from cups of pee that employees had given the testing a profit-minded nickname: “liquid gold.”

Davis and the company denied all allegations in court filings and settled the DOJ’s fraud lawsuit without any determination of liability. Davis declined to comment for this article.

Since returning to the White House, Mr. Trump has said he will target fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and his Republican allies in Congress have made combating fraud a key argument in their plans to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides health care for millions of low-income and disabled Americans. During an address to Congress last month, Mr. Trump said his administration had found “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” without citing any specific examples of fraud. READ MORE