Newsom files civil rights complaint against Dr. Oz over video on Armenian Americans

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California filed a formal civil rights complaint on Thursday against Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, alleging that a government video posted this week illegally discriminated against Armenian Americans in Southern California.

In the video, which was posted on official government social media accounts on Tuesday, Dr. Oz stands outside a bakery in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles and says about $3.5 billion worth of fraud had taken place in hospice and home care. The camera pans to nearby businesses with signs in Armenian script, and Dr.

Oz says the fraud being committed "is run, quite a bit of it, by the Russian Armenian mafia." The story notes that his own parents emigrated to the United States from Turkey. Dr. Oz also says the four-block area he was touring has 42 hospices and calls Los Angeles "one of the epicenters for fraud, waste and abuse." Business owners shown in the footage have denied involvement in fraud, and the video has generated intense local backlash in the Armenian American community.

The video is described as part of a Trump administration initiative that has alleged fraud in social services in Democratic-led states.

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