Skip to content

Judicial Watch, Inc. is a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law.

Judicial Watch, Inc. is a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law.

Because no one
is above the law!

Donate

Corruption Chronicles

Former U.S. Surgeon Gen. Guilty

A former presidential cabinet member has pleaded guilty to defrauding the government as New York’s health commissioner by forcing state workers to be her personal servants on taxpayer dime. 

Following a 20-count grand jury indictment, Dr. Antonia Novello, George H.W. Bush’s Surgeon General from 1990 to 1993, pleaded guilty to a felony in order to avoid jail. Novello had been charged with four felonies for defrauding the government and 16 thefts of services counts while she served as New York’s high-profile health commissioner from 1999 to 2006. 

Her violations were initially exposed in a New York Inspector General’s report that said she billed the state’s taxpayers nearly $50,000 in overtime compensation for Health Department employees to do personal jobs. Novello made her staff buy groceries, pick up dry cleaning, move furniture, water house plants and chauffer her and her friends around town, according to the report. 
Sprees.pdf

The investigation further revealed that Novello is somewhat of a “shopaholic” who routinely ordered security guards and Medicaid fraud investigators in her state agency to drive her on trips to upscale department stores and her favorite malls near the state capital. State workers also regularly drove Novello and her mother from Albany to a New Jersey airport—about 300 miles roundtrip—to fly to their native Puerto Rico for personal business. 

The plea deal requires Novello, an executive at an Orlando Florida children’s hospital, to perform 250 hours of community service at an Albany health clinic, pay $22,500 in restitution and a $5,000 fine. She could have faced up to a dozen years in prison had she been convicted of all charges. 

The disgraced former Surgeon General’s attorney actually justified her fraud by explaining that she treated those employees very well, “as though they were family.” The dirty business of politics caused Novello’s family-like employees to turn on her, according to the attorney.


Related

Plaintiffs Seek to Keep Reparations Suit Alive

In The News | September 18, 2024
From Evanston Now: The initial lawsuit was filed in May by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal action group, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Judi...

Judicial Watch Pursues Class Action Lawsuit against Reparations Policy – Asks Federal Court to…

Press Releases | September 18, 2024
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it asked a court to reject a motion by the City of Evanston, IL, to dismiss Judicial Watch’s class action lawsuit on behalf o...

ICE Issues Half the Detainers for Criminal Aliens in Local Custody under Biden than…

Corruption Chronicles | September 17, 2024
Besides failing miserably to control illegal immigration at the southwest border, the Biden administration has also been shamefully derelict when it comes to interior enforcement, ...