Trump Pardons Former State Senator Jeremy Hutchinson

Key player in $245 million Medicaid fraud scheme

Former state Republican Senator Jeremy Hutchinson, key player in a massive bipartisan Medicaid-based bribery and wire/tax fraud scheme from 2014-2017, has received a full and unconditional pardon from President Donald Trump, releasing him from an eight-year federal prison sentence and removing the conviction from his criminal record.

Hutchinson was sentenced in 2023 after pleading guilty (along with numerous other participants in the scheme, including other state lawmakers) to one count each in three federal judicial districts — Western and Eastern in Arkansas and Western Missouri — of accepting bribes and tax fraud.

Hutchinson is former U.S. Republican Senator Tim Hutchinson and former Arkansas Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson’s nephew.

Hutchinson’s sentencing took place four years after he pleaded guilty in 2019 because he chose to testify against a couple of his key co-conspirators, Tom and Bontiea Goss of Preferred Family Healthcare, who together with Hutchinson and others, directed $245 million in Medicaid payments for state mental health services to Preferred Family Healthcare from 2011 to 2018. To avoid a trial, the Gosses ultimately pleaded guilty, also.

The bipartisan fraud scheme reverberated through the Arkansas Legislature, resulting in convictions for former state Republican Senator Jon Woods of Springdale and state Democrat Senator Henry “Hank” Wilkins of Pine Bluff, as well as former state Democrat Representative Eddie Cooper of Melbourne.

At Hutchinson’s sentencing, attorneys had argued that his eight-year sentence (that included $468,125 in restitution and three years of probation) was disproportionate to others in the scheme, using Wilkins’ sentence of one year and a day as an example.

The group’s Medicaid fraud resulted in payments to Preferred Family Healthcare totaling one-third more than payments to the state’s second-ranking behavioral health care provider at that time. In addition, court records show an estimated $20 million of taxpayer money was used for associated bribes and kickbacks.

At its peak, Preferred Family collected $43.9 million in 2016 from the state’s Medicaid-funded mental health program — one in every seven dollars the program spent that year.