By MICHELLE L. PRICE and ALI SWENSON

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President JD Vance announced Wednesday that the Trump administration would “temporarily halt” some Medicaid funding to the state of Minnesota over fraud concerns, as part of what he described as an aggressive crackdown on misuse of public funds.

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Medicaid is the U.S. health care safety net for low-income Americans. As of late 2025, nearly 70 million people were enrolled nationwide.

Vance, who made the announcement with Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the administration was taking the action “in order to ensure that the state of Minnesota takes its obligations seriously to be good stewards of the American people’s tax money.”

Wednesday’s move is part of a larger Trump administration effort to spotlight fraud around the country. That effort comes after allegations of fraud involving day care centers run by Somali residents in Minneapolis prompted a massive immigration crackdown in the Midwestern city, resulting in widespread protests.

In January, Oz posted a video on social media alleging billions of dollars in hospice and home care fraud in Los Angeles. He came under fire from California Democrats for the video, in which he stood in front of an Armenian bakery while suggesting without providing evidence that much of the fraud was “run by the Russian Armenian mafia.”

Vance said in an interview on Fox News Channel earlier Wednesday that the Justice Department and Treasury Department would also be involved in the effort, and would be looking at tax records to uncover fraud.

“There’s a whole host of tools that we have never used,” Vance said.”

By MICHAEL R. SISAK, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Harvey Weinstein has hired Luigi Mangione and Sean “Diddy” Combs’ lawyers to represent him at his third New York rape trial, reshaping his legal team after declining to end the matter with a guilty plea.

The lawyers, Jacob Kaplan, Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos, confirmed the move in court papers Tuesday. They take over for Weinstein’s longtime lawyer, Arthur Aidala, who ceded his courtroom role to focus on the ex-studio boss’ appeals and pending civil matters.

Kaplan was a member of Weinstein’s original defense team in 2018 and is expected to have a leading role in his defense at the third trial, which involves a charge that the Oscar-winning producer raped hairstylist and actor Jessica Mann in a Manhattan hotel in 2013.

At a hearing in January, Weinstein insisted he “never assaulted anyone” and said his “spirit was breaking” after nearly six years behind bars.

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The trial, postponed from a March 3 start, hasn’t been rescheduled. Weinstein is due in court March 4 for a status conference. Legal publication Law360 first reported the legal team shake up.

Kaplan and Agnifilo are representing Mangione in his parallel state and federal cases in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. They succeed in getting terrorism charges thrown out in the state case and the death penalty barred in the federal case.

Agnifilo and Geragos represented Combs, achieving a split verdict and acquittals on sex trafficking and racketeering charges, and currently are among the lawyers defending wealthy brothers Alon, Oren and Tal Alexander at their sex trafficking trial in Manhattan federal court.

Kaplan, Agnifilo and Geragos are all partners at the Manhattan firm Agnifilo Intrater.

“Harvey believes that, after two prior trials on this matter, a recalibrated outlook and strategic approach offers the most effective path forward,” Weinstein spokesperson Juda Engelmayer said.

In a messy split verdict last June, Weinstein was convicted of forcing oral sex on one woman, Miriam Haley, acquitted of forcibly performing oral sex on another woman, Kaja Sokola, and the jury didn’t decide on the rape charge involving Mann. Deliberations ended when the foreperson refused to participate further.

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Haley, Sokola and Mann have done.

Weinstein and his lawyers argued that the retrial verdict was tainted by infighting and bullying among jurors. Judge Curtis Farber, who will also oversee the third trial, rejected that, telling Weinstein at the January hearing: “You had a fair trial.”

At his first trial, in 2020, Weinstein was convicted of raping Mann and forcing oral sex on Haley, but New York’s highest court overturned those convictions and ordered last year’s retrial. The Court of Appeals ruled that Weinstein was prejudiced by testimony about allegations that weren’t part of the case.

Weinstein and Aidala, who argued the appeal and represented Weinstein at his original trial and retrial, appeared to come to a mutual and amicable agreement about the lawyer’s shifting role.

“Our work does not end here,” Aidala said. “We will continue to advocate forcefully on his behalf in the appellate courts, where we are confident that serious legal errors will be addressed and his most significant conviction will ultimately be overturned.”

Kaplan, Agnifilo and Geragos are in the midst of several high-profile cases, including Mangione’s state trial slated to begin June 8, which could affect the timing of Weinstein’s trial. Even without accusers other than Mann, prosecutors have said it could take up to five weeks.

Weinstein faces up to 25 years in prison for the charge he was convicted on: first-degree criminal sex act involving Haley. The unresolved third-degree rape charge involving Mann is punishable by up to four years — less than he already has served.

The Oscar-winning producer has been behind bars since his initial conviction in 2020, and was sentenced to prison in a separate California case that he is appealing.

Last Thursday, I awoke before dawn to the news that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, had been arrested in England on suspicion of misconduct related to his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. I immediately thought of the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the brave survivor of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking ring who’d won a civil settlement from Mountbatten-Windsor after she accused him of rape (and whose memoir I co-wrote).

My next thought was this: So far, only about half of the 6 million documents that comprise the Epstein files have been released, but in the UK their contents are already causing heads to roll. Why isn’t that happening here in America? I know at least part of the answer.

Since the Jan. 30 release of 3.5 million pages of Department of Justice investigation files, many concerned citizens around the globe have been trying, in earnest, to wade through the muck. It’s not an easy job. Part of that seems to be by design. The documents are not organized to help readers understand their context. Instead, each page is just one fragment of an exploded jigsaw puzzle, and trying to assemble that puzzle without all the pieces (and without knowing what a complete picture should look like) is proving difficult for even the most seasoned experts on Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes.

In the ensuing avalanche of news stories, boldface names have grabbed the spotlight — Epstein helped director Woody Allen’s daughter get into college, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spent time with his family (and nanny) on Epstein’s island, supermodel Naomi Campbell asked to fly on Epstein’s plane. But, despite the valiant efforts of so many outspoken survivors, the heart of this vile conspiracy has been oddly pushed into the background: the brutal reality of what it felt like to be a girl caught in Epstein’s web.

Imagine you’re a 14-year-old girl, recruited by an older female, who is being led into an upstairs room in Epstein’s Palm Beach, Florida, mansion. The man you’ve been told to call “Jeff” enters wearing only a towel and tells you to take off your clothes. You are afraid. Trapped. So you eventually strip down to your underwear. He orders you to do things to him. He masturbates. He gives you $300 and tells you to leave your phone number so he can summon you again. Imagine that you later get into a fight at school with a classmate who calls you a prostitute. Imagine that you are later involuntarily admitted to a juvenile-education facility “because of disciplinary problems that recently escalated.”

I worked for four years with Giuffre on her memoir, “Nobody’s Girl,” and the scenes I’ve just asked you to imagine are in her book. But Giuffre is not the girl at the center of that story (Giuffre was 16 — two years older — when Maxwell lured her into their den). No, the story above describes the experiences of one of more than 30 underage victims that Florida investigators interviewed in 2005 and 2006, which led to Epstein’s first arrest and, ultimately, his conviction as a sex offender. The girl in that story had her life ruined two decades ago. Imagine.

Now we know that hundreds if not thousands of girls and young women were abused by Epstein and Maxwell and their crony friends. And yet the cruel undoing of these young people keeps falling off the front pages. Is it because it’s too upsetting to imagine? Is it because it’s old news?

I’m a journalist, so I understand news cycles. But I’m still bothered by the way the visceral suffering at the core of this rotten story isn’t consistently claiming its rightful place at the front of our minds. I get it: There is so much to read about Epstein these days. But by letting our attention be drawn toward talent agent Casey Wasserman’s sexting with Maxwell, say, or by Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi’s meltdown about the high-flying Dow Jones Industrial Index being what really matters, we risk losing the plot.

This, for the record, is the plot: In 1996, a 14-year-old girl named Annie Farmer was flown to Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, where Maxwell told her to undress and began to massage her breasts; later, Epstein jumped into bed with her, saying he wanted to cuddle. This kind of grooming behavior was experienced by scores of girls and young women, many of whom reported it to the authorities. And this abuse often escalated into rape.

For Giuffre, what followed was being forced to sexually service Epstein and Maxwell’s influential friends. In sworn depositions that have been made public, Giuffre named Mountbatten-Windsor and several others of these men, all of whom issued strong denials. Some of these co-conspirators’ names have popped up in the latest tranche of public files, but Giuffre is no longer here to hold them to account, having died by suicide last April.

Only by holding our focus on what these girls and women endured will Americans have the fortitude to demand that the Trump administration give us our due. Some survivors say they can’t find their interviews in the files that have been released so far, which proves that the Department of Justice has still not met the requirements of the Epstein Transparency Act. The solution is clear: Release the remaining 2.5 million pages in the Epstein files, with only the survivors’ names redacted. Next, law enforcement must rigorously interrogate the men and women who exchanged chummy emails with Epstein and played in his hideous sandbox. Until these two things occur, basic accountability and justice will remain out of reach. Even just based on what we already know, we should all find that unimaginable.

Amy Wallace is a journalist and author who collaborated with Virginia Roberts Giuffre on her memoir, “Nobody’s Girl.” She wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

This month, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the individual entrusted with safeguarding the health of 330 million Americans — posted a 90-second video of himself and Kid Rock doing shirtless calisthenics in blue jeans, riding a stationary bike in the sauna, doing a slow-motion cold plunge and toasting glasses of whole milk in the pool. The internet responded with memes and mockery. I sat in my office at UCLA, where I’ve practiced pulmonary and critical care medicine for more than 40 years, and I did not laugh.

I felt the anger, real anger.

Because here’s what was not in that video: the more than 2,200 Americans who contracted measles in 2025, in a country that effectively eliminated the disease in 2000. The three who died. The more than 900 confirmed cases already reported in the U.S. in 2026. The children in South Carolina — totaling nearly 1,000 cases from a single outbreak— whose parents were persuaded by rhetoric this secretary spent decades amplifying about how the MMR vaccine was more dangerous than the disease.

It is not. Decades of rigorous science have shown it is not.

When the absurd reaches a certain pitch, mockery is a natural defense. But I worry we’ve become so numbed by spectacle, so conditioned to treat governance as entertainment, that we’ve lost our capacity for the emotion this moment demands: genuine outrage. The real thing. The kind that mobilizes physicians, parents and legislators to say, “This is not acceptable.”

Let me be precise about what Kennedy has done in his first year as HHS Secretary, because the shirtless antics are designed to distract you from it.

He fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — the expert panel that has guided national vaccine policy for decades — and replaced them with vaccine skeptics.

He forced out Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez.

He cut National Institutes of Health funding, gutting cancer research and addiction treatment programs.

He stopped federal support for mRNA research — one of the most significant advances in the history of immunology, being developed for vaccines against multiple sclerosis, influenza and certain cancers. When the FDA initially rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine this month on what experts called ideological grounds, only public backlash forced a reversal — during one of the worst flu seasons in modern history.

Then, last month, Kennedy gutted the childhood immunization schedule, reducing universally recommended vaccines from ages 11 to 17. Hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rotavirus and influenza were relegated to “shared clinical decision-making” — a bureaucratic euphemism for abandonment. Routine recommendations trigger automatic prompts in electronic medical records and allow nurses to vaccinate under standing orders. Shared decision-making requires a physician at every vaccination decision, creating bottlenecks that will reduce uptake among the more than 100 million Americans without regular primary care access.

During Kennedy’s 2025 confirmation hearings, he told senators under oath: “I support vaccines. I support the childhood schedule.” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican physician from Louisiana, voted to confirm Kennedy explicitly on those pledges.

Every pledge has been broken.

The lone Republican who voted against him — Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor — warned his colleagues. They did not listen. Trust in the CDC has since plummeted from 66% to 54%. Confidence in MMR vaccine school requirements among Republicans has fallen 27 points in just six years.

These are not poll numbers. They are harbingers of future outbreaks, future hospitalizations, future deaths.

I’ve seen this before. I was an intern at UCLA in the early 1980s when the first cases of what we would come to call AIDS appeared on our wards — young men dying of infections we had never seen in previously healthy patients. I watched an institution and a government fail to respond with the urgency a nascent epidemic demanded, and I watched people die because of that failure. The lesson was not subtle: When public health leadership falters, when ideology supplants science, when the people in charge decide that politics matters more than medicine, people die. Not in the abstract. In beds. In hospitals.

I am watching it happen again. The United States is poised to lose its measles elimination status — an achievement that took decades to build. Kennedy’s newly appointed CDC deputy Ralph Abraham responded to this prospect by calling it “just the cost of doing business.” Three people died of measles in this country last year. The cost of doing business.

So, when I see the secretary of Health and Human Services drinking whole milk in a pool with Kid Rock, I do not see comedy; nor should the response be memes or sarcasm. I see a man who bears direct responsibility for the resurgence of vaccine-preventable disease in the most medically advanced nation on Earth, performing a grotesque pantomime of wellness while children get sick. That is not a joke. It is a scandal. And it is long past time we treated it as one.

Robert B. Shpiner is a clinical professor of medicine at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, with over 40 years of ICU experience at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.