Dr. Oz travels to L.A. seeking fraud. Newsom says his findings are baseless and racist allegations

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Gov.Gavin Newsom on Thursday filed a civil rights complaint against Dr.

Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, after Oz posted a video accusing Armenian crime groups of carrying out widespread healthcare fraud in Los Angeles.The video shows Oz being driven around a section of Van Nuys where he says that about $3.5 billion worth of medicare fraud has been perpetrated by hospice and home care businesses, claiming that “it’s run, quite a bit of it, by the Russian Armenian mafia.” At one point in the video, which was posted Tuesday on the agency’s official social media accounts, Oz stands in front of a sign for an Armenian bakery and says, “you notice that the lettering and language behind me is of that dialect and it also highlights the fact that this is an organized crime mafia deal.”In a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, Newsom called on the agency to investigate “Dr.Oz’s baseless and racist allegations against Armenian Americans in California.”“Such racially charged and false public statements by anyone involved in administering these critical federal healthcare programs seriously risks chilling participation in those programs by individuals targeted by the statements,” Newsom‘s office wrote in the complaint.Movses Bislamyan, the owner of the store whose sign is pictured in the video, told ABC7 News that he saw about a 30% drop in business the day after the viral video was posted.“I am really disappointed,” he told the station.

“Recording my signs, my location, and talking about some kind of fraud going on here.We have nothing to do with it.”The video comes as the Trump administration has launched a national effort to highlight allegations of federal funding fraud in Democratic-led states including Minnesota, California and New York.A day after the video was posted, Newsom issued a st...