The Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) shut down billing to an allegedly fraudulent MaineCare biller operated by a pastor with a criminal history and tied to a strange network of telehealth medicine, adult daycare, an Old Town church, AI-Powered homeschool curriculum, and training courses for hospice and home health providers.
[RELATED: Maine AG Seeks New Healthcare Crimes Chief as Fraud Questions Mount — But Why Now?…]
According to records obtained through a Freedom of Access Act (FOAA) request, the state suspended MaineCare billing for Trident Medical (also known as Trident Medical International) in April 2026.
The suspension came after MaineCare’s program integrity unit uncovered credible allegations that it billed for services it never provided, failed to conduct proper background checks on employees, and fraudulently used another person’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) number to prescribe drugs.
Trident, a non-profit, billed MaineCare $1,309,885 from 2022 to 2025.
Trident and its CEO, Clarence Merchant II, were given 60 days in which to appeal the suspension. It is not clear from records reviewed by The Maine Wire whether they ever made an appeal.
The Maine Wire was unable to contact Merchant for comment on his business despite five attempts to do so.
Trident Medical
According to both business records and its notice of suspension, Trident has its head office located at 447 Main Road in Carmel, though it appears that it is no longer located at that office.
Google Maps images from July 2025 show Trident signage at the address, but a more recent image from May 2026 shows that the signage had been removed.
Posts on Merchant’s personal Facebook page indicate that Trident also had an office in Millinocket, though the specific address of that office is not clear, and one at 192 Elm Street in Newport.
The current status of those offices is unclear, and neither appears in business or licensing records.
According to business records, Trident began operations in 2020, though Merchant’s LinkedIn page claims that he has served as its CEO since 2018.
Trident began under the name “Trident Medical International” before changing to simply Trident Medical in December 2024.
Records show that Trident Medical failed to file its annual report in June, and its registered agent resigned in July, and it failed to appoint a new one.
Currently, records list Trident as “not in good standing” and its registered agent as United States Corporation Agents, Inc., a corporation that acts as a registered agent for businesses across the country.
Business records place Trident’s home office at the Carmel address and the mailing address at 315 Hatchet Mountain Road in Hope, which appears to be a single-family residence.
Though business records indicate that Trident is no longer in good standing, licensing records suggest that it is still operational in some capacity, and its website remains operational and continues to advertise a variety of services.
Those services include a strange assortment of telehealth medicine options, such as “virtual urgent care” for $75 per 20 minutes, virtual first aid for $30 per 15 minutes, CPR training renewal, and a “weight loss program” for $300 per hour.
The details of the weight loss program are not clear because the description for that service was copy-pasted from the description of the previous service.
The website also advertises hospice care, “reproductive health,” and home health visits.
The Maine Wire attempted to call the number listed on its website, but it has been deactivated. We also attempted to enter into its virtual telehealth portal, but no provider was available.
Based on Merchant’s Facebook page, it appears that Trident did provide at least some real services in the form of hosting a food pantry at its Carmel office.
Trident maintains a provisional license to operate as an “adult day service program” with a capacity to serve up to 100 people. The provisional license was issued in January of this year and is set to expire in January 2027.
That license lists another address, 136 Central Street, Suite 300, Old Town, and does not mention the Carmel location. The Old Town location is the address of the Merchant Center advertised as Trident Medical’s adult day program on its website and the address of Merchant’s church.
The state’s professional licensure website does not have any record indicating that Trident was ever licensed to provide medical care of any sort.
The Merchant Center offers a variety of classes for significant fees, with a gold membership costing $450 per month and allowing the member to take 15 classes per month.
Trident also provides or provided training programs to help people become personal support specialists (who can work as home healthcare providers), certified nursing assistants, registered nurses, and hospice workers.
The software used to provide the training courses allows free enrollment in two of its programs and shows everyone else enrolled in a given course.
That feature shows that the majority of participants in their personal support services training appear to be New Mainers with names like Aneb Talasow, Isaak Abdi, or Zakaria Abdirahman.
Dr. Clarence Merchant II, Ph.D., Th.D., and True Life Church
Along with his service as CEO of Trident Medical, Merchant, who claims to hold two doctorates—one in theology and one in Christian social service—also serves as the pastor for True Life Church, based at the same Old Town address as the Merchant Center.
Merchant’s sermons are frequently posted on the church’s Facebook page.
The church appears to be the same legal entity as Trident Medical. It does not appear in records as a distinct non-profit or business, and ProPublica‘s entry for Trident lists it as the same entity as “True Life Recovery.”
The church’s website links to another associated website, the True Life Bible Institute, where people can pay between $1,400 and $3,500 for courses that grant anything from an associate’s degree in Biblical studies to a doctorate of theology.
True Life Bible Institute is notably not accredited to hand out legitimate degrees of higher education.
It is not clear where Merchant obtained the degrees he purports to have.
Both the websites for True Life Church and the True Life Bible Institute link to something called Apostolic365 Radio, but the link simply returns a 404 error.
Both sites also include shops that sell T-shirts with what appear to be AI-generated Christian images and slogans.
In addition to his forays into higher education, Merchant offers two distinct but apparently very similar “AI adaptive” programs of K-12 homeschool curriculum.
One, which has the same “Merchant Center” name as his adult day-care program, appears to cater to parents educating mentally disabled children.
The other, Homeschool Pathways, claims to be a comprehensive curriculum mapped out and compiled by Merchant. Though the course description for that claims that each grade level is sold separately, both that and the Merchant Center curriculum are being sold for $60 per month subscriptions.
True Life has ties to another of Merchant’s projects, Anchor Point Case Management, that offers to serve as “advocate, guide, and support system” for people navigating health issues.
The website prominently boasts that they accept private pay, and that they charge $395/month for ongoing management services that include four hours of “coordination” per month, with a small fee of $75 for every hour over those four.
They also charge $60-$100 per hour for “pastoral counseling and spiritual support.”
Merchant is also the author of multiple self-published books being sold on Amazon. While he has one work critical of AI, Beyond the Algorithm: Choosing God Over AI, he also somehow managed to publish eight books in the span of under one month in November and December 2025.
State licensing records show that Merchant previously held a license as a certified nursing assistant from 2003 to 2011.
According to an article from the Ellsworth American, Merchant was charged in 2012 with theft by unauthorized taking after he allegedly went to a foreclosed home at the request of a bank to determine whether anyone was still living there, then proceeded to break in and remove items from the home.
It is not clear whether he was convicted of the crime.
According to a 2023 Bangor Daily News report, Merchant was working as an emergency medical technician (EMT) in 2022 when he was called to care for a man suffering cardiac arrest from an overdose.
According to the report, the Board of Emergency Medical Services found that Merchant acted negligently and lied to the board about how long he administered CPR to the patient.
Merchant reportedly signed a consent agreement with the board in which he agreed to voluntarily surrender his EMT certification and not seek recertification, admitting to lying to the board.
He also, according to the report, repeatedly failed to notify the board, as required, of a 2016 criminal conviction on three counts of theft by deception, one count of attempted theft by deception, and one count of making or aiding a false tax return.
The Bangor paper reported that Merchant was sentenced to a year in jail with all but 45 days suspended and was required to pay $45,506 to the Maine Revenue Services.
“Mr. Merchant has not been sufficiently rehabilitated from his convictions to warrant the public trust,” the EMS board said, according to the Bangor paper.
The Maine Wire was not able to independently verify the Bangor paper’s reporting.
The Maine Wire made five separate attempts to get in contact with Merchant to ask him about his various enterprises and the allegations made against him by the state. We called the number listed on Trident’s webpage, the number listed on Trident’s official licensing records, the number listed on the Merchant Center’s Facebook page, and the number listed on True Life’s Facebook page.
Out of those four numbers, all but the one associated with True Life have been fully deactivated. The Maine Wire left a voicemail at the True Life number, but no one responded after over 24 hours.
The Maine Wire also reached out to the email address listed on True Life’s website, but that was also inactive and could not receive messages.
