Multiple national news outlets published reports on Monday citing whistle-blower allegations about fraud and corruption by the Maine-based Gateway Community Services first reported by The Maine Wire.
NewsNation and The Hill ran reports on December 8 based on interviews with former Gateway Community Services (GCS) employee Christopher Bernadini, who first spoke with The Maine Wire earlier this year, leading to an exclusive report in May that other Maine news outlets chose to ignore, in part perhaps due to the Lewiston-based groups close ties to senior Democratic lawmakers in the state.
GCS has been found liable for nearly a million dollars worth of erroneous billing to MaineCare, the state’s Medicare agency, in an unsettling precursor to revelations about the fraudulent theft of a billion dollars from similar taxpayer-funded sources in Minnesota, leading to 80 indictments – all but eight of which charge ethnic Somalis.
Abdullahi Ali, founder and CEO of GCS, ran for president of Jubaland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia, last year and publicly boasted at the time in Somali media of funding a militia there with proceeds “earned” in the United States. The Maine Wire’s reports on this scandal also fell on the willfully deaf ears of mainstream media outlets in Maine.
Ali founded Gateway together with its former executive director and current State Representative Deqa Dhalac (D-South Portland), who sits on the Maine Legislature’s Appropriations Committee. Prominent Democrats in the state have called Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles a racist for calling out Rep. Dhalac as potentially complicit in GCS’ mismanagement.
[RELATED: Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Bobby Charles Pushes Back After Maine Democrats Call Him ‘Racist’]
“I just couldn’t fathom it — I thought we were helping people; I thought this was all on the up-and-up,” Christopher Bernardini told NewsNation about GCS, adding. “I have a passion for helping people and I thought that we were doing the right thing this whole time.”
Bernardini also told NewsNation he decided to come forward “when I saw how they were swindling people. When I had clients calling me to tell me their staff hadn’t shown up and I was told to bill those hours anyway. It just got worse and worse until I started really putting up a stink.”
In addition to the fraud allegations, GCS shares office space in Lewiston with New American outreach groups that played significant roles in voter turnout operations for area Democrats in recent elections, including Governor Janet Mills’ (D) 2022 re-election.
As the national media-storm surrounding Medicaid and COVID-19 funding fraud in Minnesota continues to intensify, more scrutiny of Maine’s opaque and suspect overlap between “non-profits” and political activism is likely to grow.
