Suspects in Haitian president’s assassination arrive in US,

Eighteen suspects in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse are now in Miami, and the alleged funding source is almost too on-the-nose: COVID-19 relief fraud. You can’t make this up. The same pandemic that shuttered borders and crushed small businesses also apparently provided the cash for a hit squad to take out a head of state. It’s a grim, absurd detail that tells you everything about how broken the system has become.

The men are accused of laundering money from a $2 million wire transfer meant for ‘humanitarian aid’ and funneling it into the plot. That money was never going to feed a hungry family. It was going to buy weapons and pay mercenaries. The fraud wasn’t a side effect of the plot; it was the engine. Every dollar stolen from those programs was a dollar that could have saved a life, and instead it was used to end one.

This case lands in Miami because that’s where the financial trail led. But it’s hard not to see the bigger picture. The federal government spent trillions in the name of pandemic relief, often with precious little oversight. We were told to hurry and trust the process. Now we see exactly where that trust gets you. It gets you half a continent away, watching a failed state’s assassins get arraigned in a Florida federal courthouse, allegedly paid for by American taxpayers.

Our foreign policy and our domestic spending are linked in ways Washington often ignores. If you can’t keep the books clean on a COVID loan, you can’t claim to have a plan for stabilizing the Caribbean. The only real lesson here is accountability. It should start with these eighteen suspects, but it certainly shouldn’t end with them. Someone signed off on that wire transfer, and someone else looked the other way. That’s the trail we should still be following.