Power Leaves a Paper Trail
The taxpayer funded hotel rooms. The taxpayer funded plane tickets. The taxpayer funded a double life.
Maj. Collin Welch, 40, a National Guard officer assigned to the District of Columbia National Guard, pleaded guilty Tuesday to stealing approximately $54,000 in government money and inducing a Mongolian woman and her daughter to remain in the United States unlawfully, according to U.S. prosecutors. He is awaiting sentencing in U.S. District Court in Washington.
According to a statement Welch signed as part of his plea agreement, the affair began in 2019 while he was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, with the Alaska National Guard. He returned to Alaska in 2021 and moved to Arkansas the following year. In 2022, he married the Mongolian woman — while still legally married to his first wife.
To pull it off, Welch produced a fake divorce decree to convince his second wife he was no longer married, prosecutors say. After moving her to the United States, he forged additional government records — including letters purportedly from immigration authorities, Social Security cards, and a Defense Department letter falsely claiming the pair were enrolled in military health coverage — to convince her she was legally in the country and on a path to citizenship.
In 2023, Welch relocated to Washington for a role requiring extensive foreign travel. He used his government travel card to rent hotel rooms in the Washington area for video calls with his second wife, so she would not discover he was living with his first family. He also submitted false reimbursement expenses and lied to superiors to obtain authorization for foreign travel to visit her, according to court documents.
In 2024, Welch charged the government for plane tickets to bring the Mongolian woman and her daughter to the United States. He married her again in Virginia, falsely declaring he had never been married before. He paid for their living arrangements in Northern Virginia until the arrangement collapsed late last year when he attempted to cover rent with forged checks, resulting in eviction.
Welch's attorney, Gregory Rosen, said in a statement that two combat deployments — to Afghanistan and Djibouti — and years away from family placed significant strain on his client. 'None of that changes the fact that Major Welch accepts full responsibility for his actions,' Rosen said.
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The numbers come first, and here they are: $54,000 in stolen taxpayer funds, a government travel card weaponized for personal deception, forged federal documents, and two women kept in the dark by a man entrusted with a security clearance and a uniform. The administrative state is often criticized for waste and inefficiency — but this case is a reminder that the deeper threat to public trust is the individual officer who treats government resources as a personal slush fund. The military's credibility rests on the integrity of the men and women who wear its rank. When that integrity is sold for hotel room charges and forged checks, the institution pays a price no appropriations bill can cover.
