Reality TV personality Kim Kardashian recently shined the spotlight on the case of assisted living community and nursing home owner Philip Esformes in a series of tweets.
Kardashian, who has more than 75 million followers on Twitter, appeared to support Esformes April 8 as she noted that former President Donald Trump previously commuted a sentence he had received in 2019 and that the Justice Department plans to bring more charges against him. She encouraged her followers to learn more about the case.
Kardashian’s tweets came a few days after federal prosecutors received the green light to retry Esformes on pending healthcare fraud charges after US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on April 4 rejected an emergency appeal from Esformes. Esformes had sought to stay a decision from the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirming his 2019 conviction on 20 fraud charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering, paying and receiving kickbacks, bribery, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. The federal government had called the $1.3 billion healthcare fraud case “the largest healthcare fraud scheme charged by the US Justice Department.”
The jury in 2019 did not reach a verdict on six other counts that Esformes faced, and it’s those counts that the government has said that it intends to retry him on.
Trump commuted Esformes’ 20-year prison sentence in December 2020 but left intact the remaining parts of his sentence, including three years of supervised release, the payment of $5.5 million in restitution and the forfeiture of $38.7 million “equal in value to the property traceable to the property involves in [Esformes’] money laundering offenses.”
On the same day that Esformes’ sentence was commuted, the White House announced a commutation in another assisted living-related case that also has a connection to Kardashian. Trump commuted the remainder of Judith Negron’s term of supervised release. Earlier in the year, he had commuted Negron’s term of incarceration after she had served eight years of her 35-year sentence.
Negron, the former co-owner of Miami-based American Therapeutic Corp., in December 2011 had been sentenced to prison for orchestrating a $205 million Medicare fraud scheme that involved paying bribes and kickbacks to owners and operators of assisted living facilities and others. At the time, it was one of the longest prison terms ever imposed in a Medicare Fraud Strike Force case, according to a 2011 Justice Department press release. The sentence also included three years of supervised release, and Negron and two co-defendants also were ordered to pay $87 million in restitution.
Negron previously told the Associated Press that her case was brought to the attention of Trump by people such as Alice Johnson, who received clemency in June 2018 after lobbying by Kardashian. Johnson, according to the AP, had been serving time since a 1996 conviction on charges related to a Memphis, TN-based cocaine-trafficking operation.
Read McKnight’s Senior Living’s coverage of the Esformes case.
