Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #709: Inside Maine's Medicaid Fraud Machine with Steve Robinson

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#709: Inside Maine's Medicaid Fraud Machine with Steve Robinson · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

• 0:00
  You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
• 0:10
  We talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
• 0:13
  All the central banks going nuts.
• 0:16
  So it's all acting like safe haven.
• 0:18
  I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
• 0:25
  In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
• 0:28
  I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
• 0:31
  If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
• 0:36
  Steve, thank you for joining us.
• 0:39
  Thanks for having me, Marty. Appreciate it.
• 0:41
  Well, I know you're a busy man, especially the last couple of weeks.
• 0:44
  I think you've hit the scene.
• 0:47
  I mean, you've been on the scene for a while, but I think your conversation with Sean Ryan is going pretty viral right now.
• 0:54
  And as we were just discussing before we hit record, Nick Shirley, his on-the-ground reporting in Minneapolis definitely caught the eye and the attention of the country and has spawned a bunch of copycat sleuths, if you will, which I'm all in favor for.
• 1:11
  But you've been sleuthing on this particular Medicaid fraud ring in Maine specifically for the better part of a year.
• 1:19
  And so I think you, out of anybody, considering your investigative journalism skills and how long you've been on this beat, understand this story more than many others out there.
• 1:30
  And so I think maybe just to jump off why, how you caught the scent of this particular story, why you decided to chase it and what's unraveled over the last 10, 11 months.
• 1:42
  Yeah, so we got some documents leaked to us that pointed toward Medicaid overbilling issues at a host of left-wing NGOs.
• 1:52
  And these are documents that aren't routinely published, but they are public records.
• 1:56
  They should be published, but for political reasons, the power zippy kind of sweep them under the rug and don't, you know, they don't brag about the fraud that they found within Maine's Medicaid system.
• 2:08
  We had these documents leaked to us. It showed this one NGO in particular, Gateway Community Services. It's been described as a nonprofit, but it's not. It's just a business. It's an LLC, and they have a 501c3 filing for the purpose of taking taxpayer money that could only go to 501c3s.
• 2:26
  C3s. So it's not a nonprofit in any sense of the term. It's a migrant services agency that's
• 2:33
  totally taxpayer funded. And the documents that we had showed that they were audited in around 2018
• 2:41
  for reimbursements that they'd submitted in 2015 to 2017. And the government found, hey,
• 2:48
  like 35% of the claims we've paid you for, you don't have the documents to substantiate
• 2:53
  these. So they give them an opportunity to come back and show the paperwork and
• 2:57
  essentially prove that the claims they were paid for are legitimate.
• 3:01
  Based on that, we began digging into Gateway Community Services. And what we found was
• 3:07
  an organization that wasn't just some podunk nonprofit, you know, like do-gooder liberals
• 3:13
  trying to, I don't know, you know, fix poverty or teach people English. What we found was a really
• 3:19
  politically connected organization. The CEO, Abdullahi Ali, was photographed at all kinds of
• 3:26
  events with the governor of Maine, with top-ranking Democratic politicians from the state.
• 3:31
  Representative Dekka Delac, a former assistant executive director at Gateway,
• 3:36
  is on the Appropriations Committee in the state legislature, and she's the former mayor of South
• 3:40
  Portland. Representative Yusuf Yusuf is a former employee of the organization, also a former
• 3:45
  roommate of Abdullahi Ali, and he's now making his way up the legislature. And Ekles Ahmed,
• 3:52
  who is a Sudanese refugee, is running the Office of New Americans, which was just recently created
• 3:58
  here in the state of Maine. So you have an NGO that's really punching above its weight in terms
• 4:04
  of its political connections, the influence it has over policy. And as we dug more, we found
• 4:10
  additionally that on top of the $5 million a year of Medicaid money that was flowing into this
• 4:17
  organization, it was also receiving no-bid contracts. And these no-bid contracts were
• 4:23
  for things that really looked a lot like campaign activity. We found that before the 2022 election,
• 4:30
  which is important here in Maine because that's when Governor Mills was standing for re-election
• 4:35
  against former Republican Governor Paul LePage, Gateway Community Services and some of its allied
• 4:40
  NGOs received no-bid contracts to create what were called CHAOs, or Community Health Outreach
• 4:47
  Workers. And you didn't have to have any qualifications in order to be a taxpayer-funded
• 4:52
  CHAO. All you had to do was be able to knock on the door of a migrant or a non-English-speaking
• 4:58
  resident of Maine and sign them up for Medicaid, sign them up for food stamps, and even buy them
• 5:04
  household supplies. Literally walking around money is what the Chows were doing, is going
• 5:10
  door to door in migrant neighborhoods and signing people up for welfare and giving them money, food,
• 5:15
  supplies, whatever. And under federal law, you are required to offer assistance registering to vote
• 5:23
  anytime you sign somebody up for a federally funded benefits program, which is Medicaid,
• 5:27
  which is SNAP. So what you effectively had was this politically connected migrant services
• 5:33
  organization run by a Somali refugee, staffed by multiple Somali refugees and asylum seekers,
• 5:41
  was getting no-bid contract government money piped into it in order to go out and register
• 5:47
  high-propensity Democrat voters and collect information on them that was available to
• 5:52
  political groups that were all operating out of the same offices in Lewiston and Portland.
• 5:56
  So for us, that was highly interesting. Anytime you see taxpayer money being used to tip the scales
• 6:02
  of an election. That's something that's interesting and newsworthy, I think. And then on top of all
• 6:07
  of this, I guess after the 2022 election and emboldened, Abdullahi Ali is running for president
• 6:14
  in Jubaland, Somalia, which I didn't know about. I learned about Jubaland through the course of
• 6:21
  this reporting, but it's the semi-autonomous state in southern Somalia, largely controlled by
• 6:26
  al-Shabaab. And the Abdullahi Ali was running as one of three candidates in a tumultuous election
• 6:34
  where the incumbent was supposed to be term limited out. But he just kind of decided,
• 6:39
  nah, we're not doing elections. I'm going to do my own election and I'm the only one you can vote
• 6:43
  for. And the other two guys held their election. But the central government in Mogadishu said,
• 6:48
  well, we're not recognizing your election. So we wouldn't recognize it as democracy or elections
• 6:53
  or anything like that. And what it boils down to is whoever has the most guns is the one who wins
• 6:59
  the election. And Abdullahi Ali, while he's the CEO of Gateway Community Services, while he's
• 7:06
  taking $700,000 in PPP loans, $5 million a year in Medicaid money, millions of dollars in no-bid
• 7:13
  contracts, all funded by U.S. taxpayers, he's in Kenyan media doing Somali-language interviews,
• 7:19
  bragging about how he has fundraised in America to bankroll a paramilitary group in southern
• 7:26
  Somalia that he's going to use to depose the incumbent president. And so after learning all
• 7:32
  of this, we're just like, why the hell are Mainers paying for this? This is crazy. You know, what's
• 7:37
  going on here? So we did some reporting on it. And that set in motion a series of sources coming
• 7:43
  to us, including whistleblowers who had worked at the company for five plus years, who talked to us
• 7:49
  about a pattern of systemic fraud that they witnessed that in some cases they helped facilitate.
• 7:55
  And from there, we started looking at other organizations who were doing the same kind of
• 8:00
  Medicaid billable work. And it just, I mean, it was like every time we flipped over a rock,
• 8:07
  there was a new Medicaid business that had an address, a PO box, an address that's just a ghost
• 8:14
  suite in some office building, and it's billing $500,000, a million dollars a year, and there's
• 8:20
  no discernible employees, no discernible clients. And so the Medicaid fraud just keeps growing and
• 8:28
  growing and growing here in this state, and there seems to be no oversight of it whatsoever.
• 8:34
  The question that has more and more been coming into my mind since everything that's popping off
• 8:40
  in Minnesota and now obviously the reporting you've done on Maine over the last year is like,
• 8:46
  how were these Medicaid programs identified by these Somalis or anybody who's leveraging them
• 8:56
  to just commit fraud blatantly? Like, how are they identified? Why Maine? Like, what is the root
• 9:04
  of these fraudulent networks that have really spawned over the last couple of decades? Because
• 9:10
  This has been ongoing for well over a decade at this point.
• 9:13
  And as an American citizen, until the last year, I've been completely unaware of this.
• 9:19
  In fact, I've been told my whole life that Medicaid, Medicare are third rail political topics that can't be broached.
• 9:26
  We can't cut Medicaid, Medicare, because it would lead to a bunch of older Americans being on the streets in their older age because they need to be federally subsidized with medical assistance.
• 9:40
  And I naively believed like, OK, that sounds right to me, but it's becoming abundantly clear that these systems are wrought with fraud.
• 9:50
  And how did this all start and how did they identify where to exploit the fraud?
• 9:54
  So I guess the first thing is to make a distinction between Medicare and Medicaid.
• 10:01
  Medicare is the program for the elderly. There is lots of provider side fraud happening in Medicare.
• 10:09
  Normally, you're looking at doctors writing fake prescriptions or billing for services that they
• 10:14
  haven't provided. And you do see some high dollar, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud in
• 10:19
  Medicare. Medicaid is a totally separate program. And I think it's a little bit more susceptible to
• 10:25
  fraud in part because of how it's designed and how it operates. Medicare is more centralized and
• 10:32
  it's administered by the CMS, a federal bureaucracy. Medicaid is more decentralized.
• 10:41
  It's distributed through block grants. So the federal government gives each state a big bucket
• 10:47
  of money and allows them to administer their Medicaid programs. And so you have all the state
• 10:52
  lawmakers getting together and deciding the ins and outs of how they want their Medicaid programs
• 10:57
  to function. A good example of that is Medicaid at the federal level won't reimburse for services
• 11:05
  provided to non-citizens. But some of the blue states like Maine, California, and Illinois have
• 11:10
  decided that they're so generous and wonderful that they're going to cover health care benefits
• 11:15
  for non-citizens. So they have to create little carve-outs like Maine covers age 21 and under
• 11:23
  pregnant women and their children for a period of time. Some states cover 55 and older non-citizens,
• 11:30
  but they have to pay for that with their own money, not federal money. But that's just an
• 11:34
  example of how the Medicaid programs, we've got 57 different Medicaid programs that are all
• 11:41
  operate it differently based on how the state or the territory decides to run it or administer it.
• 11:47
  So within the programs that they create or allow, that kind of creates the landscape for the
• 11:54
  fraudulent opportunities. That creates the weaknesses and the niches that can be exploited
• 12:01
  for fraud. And the reason I think that the home health care agencies were picked is because
• 12:06
  unlike traditional healthcare where you go to a doctor's office or a dentist's office or a hospital,
• 12:12
  there's a central location where the healthcare is being provided. So a government inspector can
• 12:17
  show up and sit and see, okay, yeah, this place is clean. It's obviously a doctor's office. There's
• 12:22
  patients coming in and out. With home healthcare, it's provided at a client's home. So it's
• 12:28
  distributed in nature. And the office that a home healthcare agency has can literally just be a one
• 12:35
  room suite in an abandoned warehouse filled with office complexes. We've found those in Maine.
• 12:41
  We've published video of them. It's similar to what Nick Shirley found with the daycares that
• 12:47
  are just addresses that nothing's happening there. There's no people there. There's no kids there.
• 12:51
  It's the same thing with these office suites. They're used just to check a box and create the
• 12:57
  appearance of an actual business, but there's no activity really happening there. The home health
• 13:02
  care, I guess, services also has the weakness of all the employees are distributed, all the
• 13:09
  clients are distributed, and you really can't provide oversight on it. And in some instances,
• 13:15
  the government doesn't really want to provide oversight on it. A lot of the oversight that
• 13:20
  we've been able to determine has been happening are what are called desk reviews. So somebody
• 13:26
  sitting at a desk at the Department of Health and Human Services calls the CEO of Anywhere
• 13:32
  care LLC and says, oh, do you have an operations manual? Do you keep records on your clients?
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  Do you keep records on your employees? And then that's the sum total of the oversight that happens.
• 13:45
  They create these LLCs as home health agencies. Their employees have to do a 50-hour online course,
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  which there's no verification that their employees are actually the ones taking the course.
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  Could be anybody sitting down behind a computer and just filling it out.
• 14:02
  They rarely have to meet someone in person before they get approved to run a home health care agency.
• 14:09
  And then they send invoices to the state and the state pays them.
• 14:13
  We found one instance of a 25 year old named Mustafa Alamedi.
• 14:19
  He ran five stars home health care.
• 14:22
  He was in one of these buildings filled with ghost suites or zombie suites, just a one-room
• 14:28
  office suite that he was never at.
• 14:30
  And he was able to bill $700,000 over two years before he came to the attention of auditors.
• 14:38
  The auditors send him a note and say, hey, this kind of looks dodgy.
• 14:43
  You know, 70% of your claims lack any justification.
• 14:47
  Can you send us extra documents so we can get this squared away?
• 14:51
  And in the email chain, you can see that he strings them along and says, you know, well, he's sick.
• 14:56
  So he needs an extension. And then his entire family catches COVID. Very sad.
• 15:01
  They have to go to the emergency room. So he needs another extension.
• 15:04
  And then he sends the documents, but they get lost in the mail.
• 15:08
  It happens to all of us. So he needs another extension.
• 15:10
  And for a whole year, this goes on where he's just stringing along the regulators.
• 15:15
  And he's continuing to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while he's doing this,
• 15:19
  even though the Department of Health and Human Services knows that 70% of his prior claims were
• 15:24
  bogus. In the end, he ends up making a million dollars over three years and just walks away from
• 15:30
  the company. It dissolves. There's no criminal charges. There's no recoupment, as far as we can
• 15:35
  tell. This 25-year-old kid just makes a million dollars mailing invoices to the Department of
• 15:40
  Health and Human Services, and nobody would have found out about it if we hadn't submitted a Freedom
• 15:46
  of Access Act requests for all of these documents, all of these notices of violation that were sent
• 15:51
  out to any Medicaid company, not just Gateway Community Services. They were the one that
• 15:56
  inspired us to start looking for these notices of violation. But no one would have known about
• 16:01
  this. There would have been no government press release about this. And that's just one instance
• 16:05
  of a home health care agency that literally they just file an LLC, apply to be a home health agency,
• 16:11
  and then send invoices to the state, and the money comes out of the government machine.
• 16:16
  It's really remarkable what's happened.
• 16:17
  And I think that to answer your question, the reason why home health care is targeted is because very low barriers to entry.
• 16:25
  You don't need, you know, you don't need a Ph.D. or a master's degree or, you know, you don't need to be a licensed social worker.
• 16:32
  You can literally just be you can have arrived in the United States six months ago.
• 16:37
  As long as you have work authorization documents, you can start an LLC and become enabled to bill Medicaid under one of these programs.
• 16:46
  And it doesn't appear to be that there's any consequences for defrauding the program.
• 16:51
  There have been no criminal charges filed in Maine against any home health care agency that has engaged in this pattern of fraud.
• 17:02
  How in Maine specifically, how what's the scale of the fraud?
• 17:06
  If you had to estimate.
• 17:07
  hundreds of millions of dollars easily. But it's a tricky thing, though, because as I said,
• 17:12
  no one's been charged. So how can you say it's fraud? Like with the example that I just gave to
• 17:18
  you, in a strictly legal sense, you can't say that it's fraud. You can say that these were
• 17:25
  overpayments, that this was, you know, that he was erroneously billing Medicaid, which is what the
• 17:33
  HHS bureaucrat speak would say, but because it hasn't been investigated as fraud and there's
• 17:38
  been no charges brought against this guy for fraud, you can't really truly, in a legal sense,
• 17:43
  call it fraud when every normal person would look at this email exchange and the numbers
• 17:49
  and the fact that his LLC is registered out of a subsidized housing unit in Southern Maine
• 17:54
  and be like, oh, yeah, well, very obviously this is fraud. And there are hundreds of cases like that
• 18:00
  where they're making off with $500,000, $1 million, $5 million. And then there are some even bigger
• 18:07
  ones that are doing residential care, like autism facilities. And those combined are probably $300
• 18:15
  or $400 million over the last five years. But I mean, I would estimate at least half of the
• 18:22
  Medicaid program nationally is going toward fraud. And we're talking about a program that's $1
• 18:28
  trillion a year in welfare spending. It really has become not a healthcare program. It's become
• 18:35
  USAID. It's like bigger than USAID, except for it's all at the state level. And the states have
• 18:41
  figured out that they can siphon that money into their preferred groups. And in Maine,
• 18:46
  it just happens to be the Somali diaspora and some of the other migrant NGOs.
• 18:53
  It's infuriating. But to your point, like the states get to choose,
• 18:56
  Who are the people making this decision?
• 18:59
  Does the Somali diaspora get into Maine?
• 19:02
  Do they get on city councils and then eventually the state legislator and they throw around their weight?
• 19:07
  Or are there co-conspirators on the Maine side within the government that for some reason or another think this is a worthwhile endeavor to funnel funds this way?
• 19:20
  Well, it depends on how tightly your tinfoil hat is fit on, because you can get really conspiratorial with this stuff.
• 19:28
  Going back to the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, there was this myth that Obamacare was some big technocratic program with lots of bells and whistles and moving parts.
• 19:41
  But all it did was expand Medicaid.
• 19:43
  It took the income threshold for Medicaid eligibility and raised it to, I think, 400% of the poverty line.
• 19:54
  So it just massively expanded eligibility for Medicaid, and it allowed the states to opt into that program, and it incentivized them to opt in by saying that for the entire expansion population, everybody who joins because you expanded eligibility, the federal government's going to cover it 90%, and the states will only have to pay 10%.
• 20:16
  10%. So for the states, it was a deal you couldn't pass up. It was like free money coming into your
• 20:22
  state. So you expanded this program that 10 years later just so happens to have become a slush fund
• 20:30
  for leftist NGOs. That's kind of weird. On the home healthcare side here in Maine,
• 20:35
  before Governor Mills came in in 2019 and expanded our Medicaid program, there were
• 20:41
  ballot initiative attempts by left groups 501c4 groups some 501c3 groups to create the home healthcare program So the very programs that are being abused for political purposes that are having funds diverted into
• 20:59
  explicitly political groups, they were breathed into existence by leftist politicians and left-wing
• 21:06
  push groups. So it just seems like a little bit too much of a coincidence that you have Soros-
• 21:12
  funded groups lobbying for home health care agencies. And then all of a sudden, the home
• 21:16
  health care agencies are being defrauded by a political and ethnic minority that the Democrats
• 21:23
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  And then I guess, I mean, again, tinfoil hat, staying within the bounds of what's technically legal.
• 23:41
  I mean, it seems.
• 23:43
  It seems.
• 23:44
  This is observing, listening to what you're describing.
• 23:47
  Part of the rub is like, hey, we're going to expand this program, get all this money.
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  We'll funnel it to you.
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  You help us get votes.
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  And you can implicitly, you can use some of those funds to achieve some of your political goals back in your homeland, if you so please.
• 24:07
  Yeah, I mean, it depends on which aspect of the conspiracy you can call it you're looking at.
• 24:14
  I mean, the no-bid contracts probably were illegal.
• 24:17
  And the state auditor here actually, you know, did some accidental honesty when he was reviewing some of the spending programs and said that the no-bid contracts violated federal rules.
• 24:30
  So when the federal government under Biden passed the CARES Act and just dropped additional buckets of money onto the states, those all come with rules.
• 24:39
  Federal government has rules for how that money is supposed to be handed out.
• 24:43
  And even when you're doing a no-bid contract process, there are rules. But the Mills administration was doing things like kicking money out the door, giving the awards before any contract had been assigned, before anyone in state government had officially signed their name on a document approving it.
• 25:02
  So they were just shoveling the money out the door to their friends, not following the guardrails established by federal law or by state law.
• 25:10
  And the auditor himself noted in the last report that he issued that that could subject the state of Maine to clawbacks by the federal government.
• 25:18
  If the Trump administration wanted to be really vindictive, they could go back after this federally awarded money, both on the CARES Act side, but as well on the Medicaid side, and claw it back because it did violate the law in the way that it was passed out.
• 25:32
  In terms of the individual level frauds that are happening with false invoices submitted to the state, that's just straight up Medicaid fraud.
• 25:43
  And in each instance that a fake claim is submitted, you have wire fraud, you have mail fraud, you have additional crimes that emanate out from the fraudulent activity itself.
• 25:55
  We also see tons of mortgage fraud to abet some of the residential care programs.
• 26:02
  So just briefly on the residential care, in addition to this home-based care where the idea, if you're a wild-eyed progressive and you think that these programs are really going to help, the idea is that a home care agency is going to go into grandma's home and she wants to live independently.
• 26:21
  She doesn't want to be in a nursing home, but she needs help showering or getting groceries or with the tasks of daily living.
• 26:28
  So once a day, you know, someone's going to show up and help her, you know, live in her own house.
• 26:33
  That's how it's supposed to work.
• 26:35
  In practice, there's just no, it's like all of your cousins are your clients and you just bill in their names and maybe kick them 50 bucks a week in order to be a client of your business.
• 26:47
  And there's no real home health care being provided.
• 26:50
  But with the residential care, in some cases, there are actual patients like disabled adults, autistic adults, intellectual and developmental disabilities.
• 27:01
  And they are staying in these two bed, two bedroom homes and they're supposed to have 24 seven care, sometimes with a three to one staffing ratio.
• 27:11
  So these are people who maybe have the cognitive capacity of an eight-year-old or a 12-year-old, can't live on their own, and require pretty intensive support.
• 27:21
  These are the people that Medicaid was invented to take care of.
• 27:25
  And so the organizations, mostly comprised of migrants, of African migrants who have arrived in Maine over the last five years, will buy up hundreds, if not thousands of houses throughout the state of Maine and convert them into these residential care facilities.
• 27:41
  And then they'll compete to try to get the waivers that are attached to each of the disabled individuals. And so they want as many disabled individuals in their care as possible because each one of them comes with hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medicaid funding.
• 27:57
  But the best way to be profitable running that kind of business is to cut corners with the level of care and the level of expertise that you're providing for the disabled adults.
• 28:09
  And what we've seen in our reporting is a lot of these residential care homes are operating together as a prohibitive collective, and they're sharing employees across multiple companies.
• 28:22
  So we have huge numbers, thousands of asylum seekers who arrived here from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda between 2019 to 2023.
• 28:34
  And they're the ones staffing these houses.
• 28:36
  And 70% of them don't speak English, which creates a lot of difficulties when you're taking care of somebody who is highly disabled, has a strict medication plan or a dietary plan.
• 28:47
  But they're working 80 to 120 hours a week.
• 28:50
  So super profitable if you're the guy at the top running the autism company. One of our top guys
• 28:57
  billed $28 million in 2024. One of the newer ones billed $17 million last year. It's very profitable
• 29:06
  if you have this workforce of non-English speaking migrants who don't have a lot of options and you
• 29:12
  can exploit them and make them work as long as you want. But it also results in hundreds of houses
• 29:19
  being taken off of the market, houses that could have been available to middle-class mainers are
• 29:23
  instead being kind of put into service as part of this autism industry. And in addition to that,
• 29:30
  the CEOs of these companies go out and buy multifamily units and duplexes so that they
• 29:35
  can rent to their workers for cash. So it's a sophisticated scheme. It looks a lot like
• 29:41
  organized crime, and all of the money is coming from John Q. Taxpayer. And just like with the
• 29:47
  home care agencies, there appears to be almost no oversight or no one cares,
• 29:53
  or maybe they're intentionally looking the other way for some inexplicable reason.
• 30:00
  I mean, the economic consequences of this cannot be understated. I mean, especially
• 30:08
  in a day and age today in 2026 and obviously post COVID with the destruction of the middle
• 30:14
  class. Obviously, economic pressures have been immense, stronger than they've been in many decades,
• 30:19
  since the 70s, arguably. And the fact that our own government is siphoning taxpayer dollars
• 30:27
  towards these programs for immigrants, asylum seekers, which maybe we should dive into that.
• 30:35
  Like, what is the definition of the asylum seeker? Like, how low is the bar to claim asylum and come
• 30:40
  and exploit all these things. Yeah. I mean, I think that's an incredibly important point because
• 30:47
  asylum seeker is just a made up word. It's just a language game that the left has played to tug on
• 30:52
  your heartstrings. There's no such thing as an asylum seeker. There are paroled illegal aliens.
• 30:57
  You're an illegal alien. You enter the United States illegally. And then when you encounter an
• 31:02
  ICE officer, you send a letter to the Justice Department saying, I hereby declare asylum.
• 31:07
  and you get a letter back saying, all right, get in line with the other 5 million people,
• 31:11
  magically you're an asylum seeker. You become this magical, untouchable, morally praiseworthy
• 31:17
  category of immigrant. You're no longer an illegal alien. In the eyes of the left and most of the
• 31:23
  media, you become something more noble, the asylum seeker. In fact, you're an illegal alien and
• 31:29
  you're on parole. And you've claimed to be an asylum seeker. But historically, if you look at
• 31:34
  the records, even under Obama and Biden, somewhere between 50% to 80% of asylum claims will be
• 31:42
  rejected. So you're like, you know, Schrodinger's illegal alien. We haven't opened the box yet,
• 31:47
  and we're not going to open the box until an immigration judge hears your asylum claim.
• 31:52
  So we can pretend like you're a refugee until that box is opened. But 80% of the time when we
• 31:57
  open that box, you're just going to be a fake asylum seeker. You're an economic migrant who
• 32:03
  is claiming persecution but can't prove that you're being persecuted at all. And in fact,
• 32:08
  some of the people that we find claiming to be asylum seekers here in Maine have ties to the
• 32:14
  governments in their home countries. The individual I talked with Sean Ryan about, who's running an
• 32:21
  autism facility, multiple autism facilities here in Maine, he was a government contractor in Rwanda.
• 32:27
  I mean, he ran like a software company in Rwanda and had government contracts.
• 32:32
  There's no evidence whatsoever of him being persecuted in his home country. And his Twitter feed is filled with positive comments about Paul Kagame, the guy who's been president for 25 years. So there's no indication whatsoever that he is a persecuted minority fleeing Rwanda. He's just here pretending to be an asylum seeker to take advantage of the weaknesses of our asylum rules.
• 32:57
  And just to your earlier point about the cost of the economic distortions that this creates, just in Maine last year at the beginning of the legislative session, the wonks in Augusta and the state government came out and they said, surprise, we have an $18 million structural deficit.
• 33:16
  No one could have seen this coming.
• 33:18
  It's all Medicaid.
• 33:20
  It's all, you know, Medicaid was way more expensive than we thought it was going to be.
• 33:24
  What are we going to do about it?
• 33:25
  And you know where this story is going. It wasn't, well, let's get rid of all the fraud or let's reduce some of these programs that have grown explosively in five or six years.
• 33:36
  They raised taxes. They raised taxes on hospitals, on adult use cannabis.
• 33:40
  They increased the fee to become a licensed arborist in the state of Maine.
• 33:45
  They put a new tax on Netflix. So, you know, it couldn't be more obvious, you know, what's happening here in order to pay for programs that are being defrauded by the new Mainer migrant community that Democrats have brought into the state very intentionally.
• 34:01
  Taxes are going up on people who work in the state.
• 34:04
  So that's like a, you know, just a small example of the cost that Mainers pay as a result of Medicaid fraud.
• 34:11
  But even Medicaid generally increases costs for everybody in America who uses health care because the reimbursement rates for Medicaid are so low that every hospital that accepts Medicaid patients has to make up the cost by jacking up rates for the privately insured.
• 34:30
  So it's like a hidden sneaky tax that you're paying. Every time you pay your private health insurance bill, your commercial health insurance bill, you're paying for Medicaid through inflated private insurance rates.
• 34:43
  You wonder why the cost of private insurance or employer-based insurance has skyrocketed.
• 34:49
  It's in part because we took the most dysfunctional, bad, defrauded program that America has ever created, and we quadrupled it.
• 35:00
  And then we added in a bunch of non-citizens after Obamacare was done.
• 35:03
  It was exactly what you would do if you were trying to destroy a health care system in a country.
• 35:08
  And it's comical to an extent because the left will point at the Trump administration or conservative-leaning solutions to this problem.
• 35:20
  So I know this is why the problem exists in the first place is corporate greed and terrible health care policy from the right.
• 35:29
  And it's not to say that corporate greed doesn't exist and that there aren't bad policies put forth by the right.
• 35:35
  but I think it's subjectively clear that there is a massive amount of fraud. Like you said earlier,
• 35:42
  $500 billion a year in Medicaid, just simply fraudulent, that is creating these distortions
• 35:49
  that are throwing the pricing mechanisms for housing, healthcare, a bunch of short food costs
• 35:57
  in the local area if you have this diaspora coming in and competing for relatively scarce
• 36:03
  goods. And it's just comical that the backlash to the unearthing of all this fraud has been what it
• 36:12
  is. I mean, obviously what's happening in Minnesota, people are getting very triggered
• 36:18
  by it, particularly on the left. I understand that though, Marty. I mean, if I'm 25 years old
• 36:25
  and I'm making a quarter million a year just sending invoices to the health department,
• 36:29
  and then all of a sudden some YouTuber shows up and screws that all up, I'm going to be a little
• 36:34
  angry. If I've been making a quarter of a million sitting at home playing Xbox with my friends,
• 36:41
  yeah, I'm going to be upset when you take that away. So that in part, I think, explains some of
• 36:45
  the anger amongst the community that was engaged in the fraud. But I think there's also panic by
• 36:50
  the co-conspirators, the people in the political class, the people like
• 36:56
  Tim Walz or Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, Keith Ellison, I think that there's some panic
• 37:04
  there because they know that if you have a real, real good investigation that digs into
• 37:09
  how this was allowed to happen and who was involved, that it's going to point to them.
• 37:14
  And the same thing is true in Maine. I think you have some people, politicians, elected officials,
• 37:20
  appointed officials, as well as their staffers who know that they have some level of complicity
• 37:25
  in allowing this fraud to happen because it was politically advantageous.
• 37:30
  And so they're freaking out not because the money's going away,
• 37:32
  but because it might take away their political advantage.
• 37:36
  It might threaten their political victories in the future.
• 37:38
  So I can understand the freakout that they're having.
• 37:41
  And I'd also say that you're 100% right that Republicans,
• 37:45
  conservatives have done a terrible job of articulating
• 37:47
  what a better health care policy could look like for the country.
• 37:53
  There's been no articulation of a better health care policy.
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  It will roll through the end of January.
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  It's impersonal.
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  They deny an increasing amount of claims.
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• 38:08
  You can opt out.
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• 38:12
  I've been a CrowdHealth member, a very happy CrowdHealth member for four years.
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  I've had two children, a couple of health events in that time period, and CrowdHealth
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• 38:26
  a family of five. And that's with CrowdHealth and direct primary care. You can opt out of health
• 38:30
  insurance. Go to joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC. You're going to get $99 a month for the first
• 38:35
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• 39:32
  And the other question too is like with the suicidal empathetic individuals out there on
• 39:37
  the streets, those are being triggered by rhetoric, a lot of which was put out by Governor
• 39:42
  walls and others to go protect the model asylum seekers from the Gestapo, that is the Immigration
• 39:53
  Crimes Enforcement Agency.
• 39:56
  And it's just scary looking out at it.
• 39:59
  And it doesn't seem like many people, particularly your layman voter on the left, your layman
• 40:06
  left-leaning voter, can't see through this at all.
• 40:09
  I can't see that they're being used as greater fools to, in my opinion, in my observation, to protect this fraudulent system.
• 40:20
  I guess it's also it's a dynamic that underlies almost every contentious political or social or cultural dispute that we're having these days, which is the siloing of information.
• 40:33
  If you go and you look at X right now, there's a different conversation happening.
• 40:38
  If you go and you look at like mommy blogger Instagram, there's all these communities where people have been able to silo themselves off and only get access to information that reinforces their own emotions, their own beliefs, which is really dangerous.
• 40:53
  And I think even people like you and me who try to consume information from diverse sources, you've got to be really diligent about going out and making sure that you're not trapped in an echo chamber of your own making.
• 41:07
  You have to do a job, a good job of curating your own information sources so that you don't become the mirror image of what you're seeing in the, you know, the suicidal empathy woman out in the streets ready to die for, you know, a Somali daycare operator.
• 41:22
  And it's just not happening.
• 41:24
  I don't know exactly what the answer to it is.
• 41:26
  Hopefully there's some technological solutions that can help improve the news consumption.
• 41:32
  But right now it seems like these echo chambers are just working to radicalize people really on both sides But I think right now you know maybe I maybe I biased again Maybe I a victim of my own echo chamber But
• 41:45
  right now, I look at some of the people who are out there, you know, huffing on their whistles
• 41:48
  so that drunk drivers and child molesters don't get deported. And I can't sympathize with that.
• 41:54
  I can't empathize with it. I'm like, I have no idea what would bring you to do that. What would
• 41:58
  motivate you to do that? Well, it seems like it's very coordinated, too. I'm not sure if you saw
• 42:03
  Cam Higby, a piece of reporting on the signal groups that he was able to get access to.
• 42:09
  And it seems like a sort of paramilitary militia operation.
• 42:15
  It does. I mean, it seems it seems like a state sponsored insurgency.
• 42:19
  I think that they've tied some high ranking Minnesota officials to the group, or at least they're, you know, correlating signal names with staffers to the governor or the lieutenant governor.
• 42:33
  And there has to be a way that they're able to run license plates.
• 42:39
  As an investigative reporter, I know a thing or two about how you can use license plate data.
• 42:47
  And it's not just anybody who can Google a license plate and figure out who the registered owner is.
• 42:52
  There's a select group of professions who are allowed to run license plates.
• 42:58
  Private investigators, for example, can query license plates.
• 43:01
  Some insurance companies can do that.
• 43:03
  But also there's a fair number of government employees who can query license plates.
• 43:08
  So the fact that they have an Excel spreadsheet with 5,000 vehicles in it with their license plates
• 43:14
  and indications that they've been queried against government databases suggests that at least a few government employees
• 43:20
  are involved in helping them figure out who's driving these vehicles.
• 43:24
  And, of course, they claim that they're trying to determine which of these vehicles is being operated by ICE
• 43:30
  or the U.S. Marshals or some federal immigration authority. But here in Maine, the Secretary of
• 43:37
  State just last week terminated the confidential plate system for undercover law enforcement.
• 43:45
  So before she did this, if you were an FBI agent in an undercover vehicle who was staking out a
• 43:53
  child predator or a fentanyl dealer, whatever the undercover investigation was, if that guy's got
• 43:59
  a buddy who's a private investigator and he suspects you and runs your plates, it'll come
• 44:04
  back not on file. Now, if you run those very same plates, it's going to come back a U.S. government
• 44:10
  or Department of Justice or Federal Bureau of Investigation, depending on how they've registered
• 44:15
  those vehicles. So what the Secretary of State in Maine has done is tee up and make it easier
• 44:22
  for leftist agitators, if the chaos in Minneapolis comes to Maine in the same way,
• 44:26
  tease it up for them to be able to dox and identify ICE agents, some of whom I know and
• 44:33
  know that they live in these communities. So you're setting up a scenario where these people
• 44:37
  are going to be followed home to their families by left-wing agitators who have shown that
• 44:42
  they're totally unhinged. They don't want to have conversations. They want to have
• 44:46
  physical confrontations. They want to be violent. They're looking to martyr themselves in the name
• 44:52
  of protecting Somali Medicaid pirates. So at least that example shows from the highest levels
• 44:59
  of state government, a woman who is secretary of state, who runs our elections, by the way,
• 45:04
  and is currently running for governor in the state, is doing everything she can to use her
• 45:08
  official state power to help leftist agitators identify federal agents. And at the same time,
• 45:14
  we have Graham Plattner, who's running for U.S. Senate right now, wants to beat, he's going to
• 45:19
  beat Janet Mills in the primary and then will have a chance to run against Susan Collins. He's
• 45:24
  the one with the Nazi tattoo who was a national celebrity for a little while. He's out there
• 45:29
  literally stoking armed insurrection against the government. He's talking about actual
• 45:33
  confrontation with ICE agents, really, really getting belligerent at rallies. It has all the
• 45:39
  echoes of civil war. They're turning this insurgency, they're turning the temperature up on
• 45:46
  for political purposes. They obviously think that this is going to help them win elections and
• 45:50
  grow their power and grow their own money. Well, that's the really scary thing is if
• 45:56
  accountability, if these people aren't held accountable and they're allowed to get away
• 46:02
  with it, how many more election cycles will be necessary before they have complete control and
• 46:08
  they can just dominate because they've created this infrastructure via Medicaid fraud and
• 46:14
  essentially buying votes and importing immigrants, giving them money to buy more votes.
• 46:22
  That could be codified and it could be very hard to unwind, obviously, what we've seen in Virginia
• 46:29
  since the Democrats took control of that legislator and the governorship there.
• 46:37
  They've gone full bore almost immediately in making it harder to audit this stuff
• 46:43
  and making it harder to have certain perspectives.
• 46:47
  And it is quite scary to think if accountability isn't brought forth,
• 46:52
  if these people aren't held accountable, that this will be codified
• 46:55
  and there's no escaping it rather quickly.
• 46:58
  I'm optimistic, though.
• 46:59
  I mean, Virginia is a pretty dark example.
• 47:03
  You know, they did move really, I mean, everything about the way that election unfolded is really dark,
• 47:08
  given what the attorney general nominee was quoted as saying and the speed with which they moved to implement some of the most radical left wing policies.
• 47:18
  That is scary. But I think that the the large language models, sometimes called AI tools, if used properly, will empower journalists in ways that are unimaginable.
• 47:31
  And one thing that we at The Main Wire spend a lot of time doing is figuring out how we can leverage these tools in order to help our journalism and do journalism in creative ways.
• 47:43
  And I'm not just talking about, like, you know, prompting Grok, write me a story about Medicaid fraud, talking about, you know, designing programs that allow you to scrape government records, analyze government records, you know, look over voter rolls for duplicate voters or multiple voters registered at the same address or identify patterns of, you know, Medicaid fraud.
• 48:06
  Like, you know, for example, we obtained through we actually had to sue in order to get these records, but we got all of the Medicaid spending record cost me like two thousand dollars under the Freedom of Access Act here in the state of Maine.
• 48:19
  We got all of the provider payment data from 2019 to 2024. So we could go through and we could look and see who's making money. How is this program changing over the last five years now that we've expanded Medicaid? What kind of new businesses are coming into existence and how are those new businesses faring?
• 48:37
  And we did find a pattern of startup Medicaid agencies that go from zero to 17 million in three years.
• 48:45
  And anytime you see income growth like that, it merits further investigation.
• 48:51
  But we also find clusters of Medicaid agencies at the similar addresses.
• 48:57
  And so what Nick Shirley found when he was out with a whistleblower walking around and looking at these different places,
• 49:03
  We were seeing this last year just by looking at the records, looking at the Medicaid spending records and seeing where all these office buildings were, where there were clusters of Medicaid agencies that just so happened to be engaged in similar activities and just so happened to be run by, you know, quote unquote, new Mainers.
• 49:21
  One, for example, that we found was on Anderson Street in Portland, there were five home health care agencies in one building along with a Dahabshil, which is an Emradi money transfer company that is blessed by the Central Bank of Somalia and actually the winner of the 2024 Somalia Excellence Awards.
• 49:43
  I'm sure you pay very close attention to that award ceremony, but Dahabshil has that honor.
• 49:49
  And I went into the building and I tried to send $40 to my friend's mom in Mogadishu, but I wasn't able to do it without giving the Somali guy my social security number, which, you know, I'm willing to make some sacrifices for journalism, but I don't know if I was willing to give my social security number to the guy.
• 50:09
  So I had to back out and my mom's friend or my friend's mom was disappointed that she's not going to get my 40 bucks.
• 50:16
  But when we're leaving this building, which, again, has five Medicaid funded agencies and a Somali money transfer office, as we're leaving it, the Brinks guy is walking out with bags of cash and getting into his armored truck.
• 50:31
  And I just couldn't help but look at it.
• 50:33
  This is the full cycle.
• 50:34
  This is health care in America.
• 50:35
  The money goes into these Medicaid companies, which may or may not have any patients or even employees.
• 50:42
  It goes to the Dahabshil and then out the door on the Briggs truck, and it ends up in Mogadishu building luxury apartments or funding AK-47 purchases from Azerbaijan or something like that.
• 50:56
  But that was what we were able to see on the data end, just looking at some of the data and using some of the large language model tools,
• 51:04
  including some custom tools that we've built just for looking at this stuff, we were able to,
• 51:09
  I guess, come up with an asymmetric solution to just drowning in the data that allowed us to
• 51:14
  pinpoint what we would do and streamline what we would do in terms of on the ground journalism.
• 51:20
  And tools like that and use cases of Grok or Gemini or ChatGPT make me optimistic that journalists,
• 51:28
  if they use and understand these tools can become smarter and more sophisticated than the government
• 51:35
  bureaucrats who are trying to, you know, hide what they're doing. Because it's very difficult
• 51:41
  to hide where the money is going ultimately. Yeah, I think it's inevitable. I don't think
• 51:46
  the politicians can keep up with the autists who have been handed these powerful tools.
• 51:50
  I agree. I think that's part of the reason why they become so desperate. I think you've seen a
• 51:54
  big, like they're, especially with Elon doing, coming in with Doge and closing up the USAID,
• 52:04
  now this is applying to Medicaid. I think at least the smarter ones see the writing on the wall
• 52:09
  that stealing taxpayer money to fund political schemes is going to be a lot harder. And that's
• 52:16
  in part why you're seeing the level of desperation you are in Minneapolis, in Portland, Maine,
• 52:21
  because they know, you know, the easy money days are over.
• 52:26
  Yeah.
• 52:27
  Well, you were explaining to Sean, in case anybody who's listening to this hasn't watched
• 52:32
  that episode yet, how you use Grok to sort of guess URLs that would give you documents
• 52:37
  that the government was refusing to hand over.
• 52:40
  Yeah.
• 52:41
  I mean, this was fun and kind of funny.
• 52:43
  I mean, I've had people message me since then who listened to that and were like, oh, can
• 52:48
  you send me the program so that I can do this?
• 52:51
  And I'm like, it really wasn't that spectacularly brilliant.
• 52:56
  It was just on a whim getting Grok to design a simple Python script that would scrape documents off of government websites.
• 53:05
  But the origin of the story is that when the state spends money through a no-bid contract process, so usually when the state spends money, it's supposed to put out an RFP, a request for proposal.
• 53:19
  So the state says, you know, I want to buy a bunch of boats. So they put out the RFP and then everybody who wants to sell the government boats submits a proposal that says, well, here's our boats. Here's the price. Here's why you should buy our boats.
• 53:33
  And then they debate amongst the proposals and the competition for that RFP ends up producing, in theory, the best value for the taxpayer.
• 53:42
  But for some reason, you can subvert or skip that competitive RFP process, which is transparent, and you can do a no bid process instead.
• 53:51
  And sometimes there are legitimate reasons for this.
• 53:53
  If you're in down east Maine where you need the prop on your boat fixed, it's like some government research vessel, and there's only one dude named Randy in town who fixes boat props.
• 54:05
  Instead of doing an RFP, you just let Randy fix the boat.
• 54:09
  And then you fill out on the form, Randy's the only guy in town to fix his boat, so we're going to give him $4,000 to fix the boat.
• 54:15
  So there are decent, normal, non-corrupt reasons for the RFP process.
• 54:20
  But what we found after looking at a bunch of them was that they were just being handed out to friends of people in the administration.
• 54:29
  They were going to left-wing NGOs.
• 54:30
  They were going to the groups that support transing five-year-olds in kindergarten.
• 54:36
  There's the panoply of leftist groups were getting no-bid contract money shoveled to them.
• 54:41
  And it wasn't just $5,000.
• 54:42
  It was like $120,000.
• 54:44
  We even found $120,000 in no-bid contracts to the Portland Press-Herald, which is the biggest daily newspaper.
• 54:54
  They were actually paid to write positive articles about the state, about the Mills administration's education policy.
• 55:01
  We found no-bid contracts to the Bangor Daily News, the second biggest nonprofit.
• 55:07
  They were paid for public affairs work for a couple of different programs.
• 55:11
  So our interest was piqued in how the state was spending money through these no-bid contracts.
• 55:16
  But we found that because it was written into state law that they only had to publish these
• 55:21
  no-bid contracts once for a seven-day period, and then they disappeared from the state archives.
• 55:28
  So you've got a website that shows you the no-bid contracts, but you have to log in within
• 55:34
  a seven-day window or it's going to disappear and not be archived anymore.
• 55:38
  I have no idea why they would set it up that way. I have some guesses as to why you would engineer a system like that. But they made it so that if you didn't get in there right in time, you would never see the justification for that no bid contract spending.
• 55:53
  So we filed a Freedom of Access Act request for all of the no bid contract documents.
• 55:58
  And they came back to us and said, we can't do it, which is technologically, we don't know how.
• 56:03
  It's impossible for us to provide you with those documents, which I thought was fishy.
• 56:09
  But I was like, okay, there's really nothing I can do after they've told me that.
• 56:14
  But then in looking at some of our older stories where we had linked to documents, no-bid contracted documents that by now were no longer archived on the government website, we saw that they were still active somewhere on a server.
• 56:28
  So we knew all of the documents that we were requesting from the government were still on a government server, were still available online.
• 56:35
  The PDFs were out there.
• 56:37
  They just weren't indexed anywhere, and you couldn't figure out how to get to them and download them.
• 56:42
  So I copied all of the URLs from the no-bit contracts that we did know about and pasted them into Grok and asked Grok to find the naming pattern.
• 56:54
  What was the convention that was being used to establish names for all these PDFs?
• 56:59
  Because they had numbers and they kind of looked like they were in order.
• 57:02
  And Grok very quickly found what the naming convention was.
• 57:06
  And then a little while tinkering around with it, I created or asked it to create a script that would randomly guess at URLs following the pattern that we'd identified and if there was a PDF there to download it.
• 57:19
  And so then I had to say, like, you know, assume that there's up to a thousand per month and search within these different parameters and everything.
• 57:27
  And we had to tinker around with it five or six times.
• 57:30
  But then when we got it the way we wanted it to, I let it run for 13 or 14 hours and ended up downloading over 5,000 documents that were all no-bid contract documents.
• 57:41
  Each one of these documents pointed to an instance where a government bureaucrat said, I'm going to spend money in a non-transparent way without justifying it.
• 57:50
  Sometimes the money goes out the door before the contract's even signed.
• 57:53
  And we found just crazy stuff, you know, enough to write a whole year's worth of stories on.
• 58:00
  including no-bid contracts to Abdullahi Ali, who was running for warlord in Jubaland.
• 58:06
  While he's in Jubaland running for office with his militia, he's getting no-bid contracts.
• 58:12
  And the justification, there's a little form on these documents to justify why are you doing this
• 58:18
  no-bid contract. And they literally just copied and pasted his biography into the justification
• 58:24
  section where it says, Abdullahi Ali is a Somali refugee. As if that's enough reason
• 58:29
  to hand somebody $500,000. He's a refugee, so give him $500,000. All kinds of different
• 58:37
  no-bid contract abuse. People handing contracts to NGOs that they would later end up working for.
• 58:45
  NGOs for huge sums of money to cover up mistakes that the government had made.
• 58:51
  Just really some inexplicable stuff and all of it pointing towards corruption.
• 58:55
  And in hindsight, it's like, yeah, you could have found these. You easily could have found these documents. I didn't have to go all grok pirate on your ass and pull these. You didn't want me to find these because you knew that there was something bad happening here.
• 59:09
  I mean, we found one where the guy in charge of the Office of Procurement in Maine, so the guy in charge of making sure that all of these contracts are on the level, ended up signing off on a contract for his brother's company to mow the lawns around the statehouse grounds.
• 59:30
  And they told us it was totally on the level and he didn't exert any pressure on the process.
• 59:36
  He just happened to resign right after we published our story on it.
• 59:39
  You know, it's like some of it's just like small ball. It's like, is it really going to change the world when, you know, the guy's given eight hundred thousand dollars to his brother's company?
• 59:50
  No, probably not. But all of that petty, small corruption, it's like Banana Republic stuff.
• 59:56
  And it adds up. And when you turn a blind eye to these little teeny tiny examples of corruption, it gives license and emboldens the people who would do bigger and bigger forms of corruption.
• 1:00:08
  And last week, the federal government, the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, released a report that showed that there was $46 million in overbilling in one autism program in Maine in 2023.
• 1:00:25
  So one year, one program, $46 million in overbilling.
• 1:00:29
  And it just so happens to be the program that was abused so thoroughly in Minnesota and the same program that Gateway Community Services was overbilling.
• 1:00:39
  So, you know, when you start to look for and examine the fraud in serious ways with like adults and accountants and people who know what they're looking for, it's everywhere.
• 1:00:50
  So that's why I mean, half half of Medicaid might even be an underestimate when it comes to the like the total amount of fraud that's happening.
• 1:00:58
  I would not be shocked at all. It was somewhere around 80%.
• 1:01:03
  It's madness. And Elon actually retweeted me the other day when I asked,
• 1:01:09
  where are all the parents in Minnesota who have lost their daycare? Because the daycares have all
• 1:01:18
  been shut down now, but not a single parent has come forward and said, well, what am I supposed
• 1:01:22
  to do for childcare now. But if you actually, you know, destroyed the childcare for tens of
• 1:01:28
  thousands of families, I think you'd be able to find at least one parent to come forward,
• 1:01:32
  but you haven't found any of them. And it's the same with all these home healthcare agencies.
• 1:01:37
  As the funding gets turned off, you don't see patients coming forward and being like, well,
• 1:01:41
  you know, grandma's not getting her home healthcare anymore because all of these agencies went away
• 1:01:46
  because they're just, they're total frauds. It was like the second video that Nick Shirley
• 1:01:51
  put out when he went back with uh his uh his cracked out boomer david it was i mean they went
• 1:01:59
  to the one daycare center it was like three somali men in their 40s and 50s and it's like
• 1:02:05
  who's dropping their kids off with these guys and they were wearing very nice clothes sure they had
• 1:02:11
  nice cars but it's like and that's like the frustrating thing is like since all this has
• 1:02:15
  been on earth over the last year, really, since USAID was was sort of pilfered by by
• 1:02:22
  Doge It like we expected to have like a polite conversation about this but it like hey this is like so obvious Like don tell me not to believe my lying eyes Like this is overt fraud I don need I don need people to be charged trials to happen years to go by before accountability and justice is served
• 1:02:44
  Like, we've got to stop this right now because, again, going back to the economic pressures that hardworking Americans who truly believe that there is a social contract in this country where if you work hard and you produce things and are a productive member of society, you will be able to climb the economic ladder.
• 1:03:04
  And that has been ripped out from under tens of millions, probably over 100 million Americans over the last really 15 years since the 2008 financial crisis.
• 1:03:16
  And it's insulting.
• 1:03:18
  It's humiliating.
• 1:03:19
  And the fact that we're being asked to just like, hey, wait, we'll do the investigations or we'll be charges.
• 1:03:29
  It's like something's got to give.
• 1:03:30
  We've got to stop this as quickly as possible.
• 1:03:32
  Yeah, I mean, that's that exact problem is something that I've been wrangling with myself for 10 months now, because there's part of the American character that wants, you know, you know, guilty or innocent until proven guilty.
• 1:03:48
  You know, give them their day in court. You need to have a defense attorney. You know, what does the evidence say?
• 1:03:53
  But the evidence now is just so overwhelming and it's one community. And it's like, well, how stupid do we have to pretend to be to our own detriment in order to uphold these legal traditions that these people don't even believe in and don't even care about, very obviously.
• 1:04:12
  And one of the things that I wanted to convey to Sean and to you is that in my conversations with Trump administration officials and with people in the Justice Department, we do not have the resources to give all of the fraudsters the full American criminal justice experience.
• 1:04:32
  experience. We just don't have enough lawyers. You could have every single person who ran a
• 1:04:39
  daycare or a home health care agency, every single person who's done Medicaid fraud,
• 1:04:44
  stand forward and come, raise their hand and say, yep, I did a fraud. And then we're going to start
• 1:04:48
  the criminal justice process with trials and everything. We just don't have enough lawyers.
• 1:04:52
  We don't have enough man hours. We don't have enough defense attorneys. We are physically
• 1:04:57
  incapable as a bureaucracy of handling the magnitude of fraud before us. So it's either
• 1:05:04
  some of this goes totally unpunished and just gets, you know, we hope we make an example out
• 1:05:09
  of a few of them and then the others know not to do it anymore. Or you come up with,
• 1:05:14
  you come over the top and you have a solution that is, in my view, kinetic or military. You have
• 1:05:22
  mass, mass deportations and denaturalizations, you have to be able to respond to this in a way
• 1:05:29
  that is overwhelming and is proportionate to the amount of fraud that's happened.
• 1:05:34
  I told Sean, I believe that this is economic terrorism. I believe that this is state-backed.
• 1:05:41
  I believe that state actors, or at least political factions within foreign states,
• 1:05:47
  are encouraging this, aiding, abetting this, are protecting these pipelines of money.
• 1:05:52
  If you look at Somalia, it's some absurd percent of their national GDP is remittances coming from the U.S.
• 1:06:00
  Some of their most profitable companies are companies that exist solely to suck wealth out of the United States.
• 1:06:07
  And so if you're an elected official or a Klan leader or a reigning warlord in Somalia, it's pretty important to you to keep that money flowing.
• 1:06:16
  So you're going to do everything you can to keep that money flowing.
• 1:06:18
  And that would include having agents in Minnesota and in Maine to protect that flow of money, to give advice and coaching and counseling on making sure that that money's coming back.
• 1:06:30
  And we have actually identified an individual who is prominent in Maine's political scene, whose name is Hussein Hirsi Ahmed, who was the finance minister for Jubaland and is a member of Somalia's parliament.
• 1:06:44
  And he owns a large commercial building in Lewiston where the Somali diaspora is concentrated.
• 1:06:50
  And his tenants include home health care agencies, halal stores with EBT card machines, left wing NGOs that advocate for new Mainers in the Somali community.
• 1:07:02
  community. You can't help but wonder if all of these connections that you're seeing between like,
• 1:07:10
  you know, the the UN ambassador for Somalia who had a daycare in Minnesota, are these just,
• 1:07:17
  you know, random or these accidents? Were they opportunistic and trying to make money?
• 1:07:21
  Or is it in fact part of a plan that was designed for nation building, for enriching them? Just like,
• 1:07:30
  People would say, George Bush invaded Iraq so he could suck the oil out. Well, could it be that Somalia is invading parts of the United States to suck that Medicaid oil out? I think the evidence points toward yes. And I also don't think that the Somalis are the only nation or only ethnic group that are engaged in this kind of behavior. I think that a lot of Central American countries are doing it as well. And I think that Rwanda and some other Central African countries are doing it as well.
• 1:07:58
  Yeah, we're being taken for fools.
• 1:08:00
  And again, that's the going back to the suicidal empathy that exists and across large swaths of our population.
• 1:08:08
  It's it's I mean, I think that's the biggest hurdle to actually having this kinetic response that you described, because you've seen Ilhan Omar and others in the Somali community that have risen to the ranks of U.S.
• 1:08:24
  political seats in the House of Representatives, whatever it may be, state and local legislators
• 1:08:32
  as well.
• 1:08:33
  And they openly go to rallies filled with other Somalians and claim sort of, what's the word
• 1:08:43
  I'm looking for?
• 1:08:43
  The claim.
• 1:08:45
  Victimhood.
• 1:08:45
  Well, not victimhood.
• 1:08:46
  No, they claim, they openly admit that they are where they are because they want to make
• 1:08:51
  Somalia stronger.
• 1:08:52
  Oh, yes.
• 1:08:53
  Not the United States.
• 1:08:54
  Yeah, the Somalia first. Yeah, we have some Ilhans of our own in Maine. I think I mentioned her earlier, Deka DeLock. I mean, this woman is on video at least five or six times in Somalia and in English saying, Somalia is our number one priority. We should be focused on Somalia. Focus all your resources and all your money on Somalia. We need to bring our money back to Somalia. I'm Somalia first.
• 1:09:21
  We have video of her deplaning in Puntland, Somalia, and she gets like a Kardashian greeting.
• 1:09:28
  You know, there are people lining the the airstrip, celebrating her and like losing their minds.
• 1:09:34
  It's like, you know, the Beatles landing in the United States for the first time.
• 1:09:38
  And she's a state lawmaker, you know, like she's making twenty one thousand dollars a year as a state lawmaker with really not that much power.
• 1:09:46
  But back in Somalia, for some reason, she's she's hailed like Princess Di.
• 1:09:50
  And you have to wonder, well, maybe there's something we're not seeing. Maybe there's some money that she's bringing back to Somalia. After all, she has said multiple times over and over again, Somalia is the number one priority and we need to bring money back to Somalia.
• 1:10:04
  But yeah, they are.
• 1:10:05
  They're openly saying it.
• 1:10:07
  And there's a constituency of white liberals who say, well, yeah, that's what we should do, because American imperialism has destroyed these parts of the world.
• 1:10:17
  You know, we've been so bad to Africa and Central America.
• 1:10:20
  I think we should be allowing them to steal our money and take it back to their countries.
• 1:10:25
  Yeah, as their neighbors are struggling.
• 1:10:28
  And not only that, they're struggling, too, which is the funny thing.
• 1:10:32
  They'll complain about groceries and the cost of schooling, daycare, health care, and not recognize like, hey, there's a glaring core of this problem staring you right in the face.
• 1:10:45
  And you have this inability to actually confront it because of feels.
• 1:10:50
  Yeah, I'm glad you brought that aspect of it up because I had the experience.
• 1:10:56
  So we both worked at Barstool.
• 1:10:58
  You got out before I did.
• 1:11:00
  But after I got done at Barstool, my wife and I did, we bought a camper van and we drove all around the country.
• 1:11:07
  It was like peak COVID lockdowns and we were just sick of society and wanted to just get away and go travel to free states and be in nature.
• 1:11:15
  And we had the benefit of just going through all these back towns and seeing a lot, just getting between the coasts, seeing parts of the country that aren't doing so hot.
• 1:11:24
  And after that, we settled back in Maine. And one of the first big investigative projects I started was looking at Chinese organized crime in Maine and particularly these cannabis houses that popped up all over the rural parts of the state.
• 1:11:41
  And, I mean, we racked up, you know, at least 10,000 miles driving to all these places in rural Maine.
• 1:11:49
  Maine's a bigger state than people think.
• 1:11:51
  And I got to see a lot of the state and a lot of the conditions that people are living in.
• 1:11:57
  And I'd see, you know, middle of winter, double-wide trailers wrapped in saran wrap with their wood stoves going just so that they can, you know, stay warm through the winter.
• 1:12:06
  lots of dilapidated places that looked like, you know, 20 years ago, they were dilapidated,
• 1:12:12
  didn't need a new coat of paint, but now they're just derelict. And you would see the poverty and
• 1:12:17
  the suffering that people were enduring in rural Maine. And it's not right in your face because
• 1:12:23
  it's not New York City or Boston. You know, the media cameras, they're not there. It's distributed
• 1:12:28
  out into the woods of rural Maine, but it's still human suffering. It's still poverty. It's still
• 1:12:33
  people who are being neglected and forgotten by their governments. And we'd go into the homeless
• 1:12:37
  camps as well in Bangor, Portland, Rumford, Samford, all these towns that had, you know,
• 1:12:43
  once had prosperous manufacturing sectors. But now their biggest manufacturing sector,
• 1:12:49
  and this isn't a joke, their biggest manufacturing sector is cannabis and breweries,
• 1:12:54
  because our economists classify that as manufacturing. But we'd see these homeless
• 1:12:58
  camps and go into, we'd interview these people to try and figure out, you know, why are you here?
• 1:13:03
  what circumstances led you to be in this camp where obviously everybody is using fentanyl.
• 1:13:10
  And so to see all of the very real suffering that's happening throughout Maine in these rural
• 1:13:16
  communities and even in the urban communities and old buildings that used to employ a thousand
• 1:13:22
  people collapsing in on themselves. And then to look at these guys making a million dollars a year
• 1:13:28
  doing a Medicaid fraud. It's like, holy cow, have we misprioritized our resources. And it really
• 1:13:35
  just makes me angry more than anything that we've got a government that is so distorted in how it
• 1:13:41
  allocates resources that we've totally forgotten about the people who have lived here for five or
• 1:13:46
  six generations and are now living in misery, poverty, and squalor. But the people who came
• 1:13:52
  here six months ago can go get the luxury apartments that were built for them because
• 1:13:56
  It was trendy to build out refugee housing.
• 1:14:01
  How have Mainers reacted to your reporting?
• 1:14:03
  Is there a positive momentum in the right direction?
• 1:14:07
  I mean, I think so.
• 1:14:08
  When I took over the main wire, we had, I think, like 2,000 followers on Facebook, and we're up to like 23,000, 24,000 now.
• 1:14:20
  I've gone from 25,000 hits a month on the website to usually like half a million to a million hits.
• 1:14:28
  So growing in traffic and in interest across the board.
• 1:14:31
  And, you know, I think even the incumbent politicians who are reluctant to acknowledge us as, you know, real media,
• 1:14:41
  like the governor and the secretary of state won't take questions from us at press conferences and, you know, don't invite us to stuff.
• 1:14:48
  But I mean, it doesn't matter. It just helps us. It forces us to be creative. They're increasingly forced to acknowledge the reality of what we're reporting on.
• 1:14:57
  And the governor, after ignoring our reporting on Gateway Community Services for 10 months, when the national media started picking it up and piling on,
• 1:15:06
  all of a sudden she decided that she was going to suspend funding to Gateway, which is important for two reasons.
• 1:15:14
  The first is that, you know, finally, you know, if you if you jump up and down and scream at a problem long enough, even the people who don't want to pay attention to you will be forced to pay attention to you eventually.
• 1:15:25
  But it also points toward what I think is a solution that every state can avail themselves of to crack down on Medicaid fraud.
• 1:15:36
  And that is that every governor and their health department have the ability to suspend payments to any Medicaid provider based on an allegation of fraud or wrongdoing.
• 1:15:50
  You don't need a criminal conviction. You don't need an audit finding.
• 1:15:53
  you all it needs to be is a credible allegation. That could be an anonymous email that says,
• 1:15:59
  I believe, you know, legit home health care is defrauding the government. They have huge
• 1:16:06
  discretion over how they allow those funds to go out. So every single governor could right now
• 1:16:12
  disenroll their Medicaid providers and force them to go through a more rigorous process of
• 1:16:18
  re-enrolling. And what that would look like is you stop payments to everybody who is getting
• 1:16:25
  Medicaid money and say, you need to come in here and you need to sit in front of a panel of five
• 1:16:30
  people. Maybe it's the program integrity expert, the auditor, just some people who are maybe a
• 1:16:37
  little bit skeptical and have a brain. And you need to explain that you're a real organization
• 1:16:41
  and prove it. 60 or 70% of these entities wouldn't even show up for that. And they certainly
• 1:16:48
  wouldn't be able to prove that they actually have customers and they actually have employees.
• 1:16:52
  That's something that every single state could do. You could immediately kick them out of the
• 1:16:56
  program, force them to re-enroll. You could do that with EBT cards, by the way. All those EBT
• 1:17:01
  card terminals, those are being abused. People are swiping their EBT card and then getting,
• 1:17:06
  you know, 80 cents on the dollar. They get the cash back in exchange for the benefits so that
• 1:17:10
  they can spend the cash on drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. All of those welfare programs,
• 1:17:15
  You could just basically unplug it and plug it back in. We have that. You don't need Congress to pass a law. It's already contained within the Medicaid infrastructure. You could just disenroll everybody, force them to justify their existence and prove that they're legitimately providing health care for poor people, because that's what this program is about.
• 1:17:35
  It's about providing health care for people who, through just a shit luck of life, aren't able to provide care for themselves.
• 1:17:44
  And so the fact that it's become bastardized by fraudsters so that people can drive Lamborghinis in Kenya, it should be offensive to progressives that the social safety net has been abused in this way.
• 1:17:55
  But there's a solution. There are plenty of things that the governors could do, plenty of things that they could do at the congressional level that would stop this from happening.
• 1:18:04
  but you have to have the political will to do it. And you have to have politicians who aren't
• 1:18:08
  benefiting from the very schemes that we're trying to fix and reform.
• 1:18:13
  Completely agree. And you just answered what was going to be my next question. What can we do
• 1:18:16
  about this? Because at the state level, obviously at the federal level, we talked about it a bit,
• 1:18:21
  like the bureaucracy is such, it would be impossible. So you need some sort of outside
• 1:18:26
  of the box solution to this, which I'm in favor for personally. But then like individual citizens,
• 1:18:33
  I think it's just imperative to make sure that these stories don't go away.
• 1:18:38
  And I think more importantly,
• 1:18:40
  recognize that there are entrenched interests that are trying to put forth
• 1:18:45
  rhetoric that riles people's up,
• 1:18:48
  gets them in the streets and pushes things to a violent level and,
• 1:18:54
  and recognize that you're being manipulated to protect these,
• 1:18:58
  these programs that are, they're just pure fraud.
• 1:19:03
  That's what I worry about most moving forward, obviously, with what happened over the last few weeks in Minnesota with the confrontations with ICE agents and the two individuals that were shot.
• 1:19:16
  And it's really disconcerting to see because you could see how this could escalate really quickly.
• 1:19:23
  And then if it does escalate and things really heat up, it's going to get to a point where people don't even remember what they're fighting for in the first place.
• 1:19:32
  Yeah, I mean, we may have already gotten to that point, frankly. I mean, there does seem to be an element of cost playing amongst some of the left wing agitators here.
• 1:19:44
  I mean, we had last week, there was some hoax spam caller from Canada was placing fake bomb threats to schools, banks, businesses all throughout Maine at the same time that the ICE activities were ramping up.
• 1:20:03
  So schools were going into lockdown, banks were going into lockdown, caused a lot of chaos and confusion.
• 1:20:08
  and there was a police department in central Maine that was responding to what they thought
• 1:20:13
  was a person of interest in relation to a threat that had been made against a high school there.
• 1:20:18
  As they're responding to this person of interest, this 60-year-old woman, you know,
• 1:20:24
  stops her car in the middle of the road, jumps out with a whistle and a blow horn,
• 1:20:29
  and starts screaming at the cops and getting in their face and trying to physically stop them from
• 1:20:34
  investigating what they thought was something related to an active shooter case, a school
• 1:20:40
  shooter case, had nothing to do with immigration whatsoever. And this woman thinks that she's
• 1:20:45
  going to be a hero by jumping out of the car. And there was no indication whatsoever this was ICE.
• 1:20:50
  It was just like local police department chasing a tip or a lead. I mean, this woman,
• 1:20:54
  fortunately, is going to be charged. They're going to throw the book at her. But it just gives you an
• 1:20:58
  example of how they're, it's like the facts don't matter. I mean, they're stopping SUVs with white
• 1:21:05
  men in them that look like they could be ICE agents and demanding to see their papers. I mean,
• 1:21:10
  it's like darkly hilarious that they've become fascistic in their approach to fighting fascism.
• 1:21:17
  You know, they're like racially profiling people and demanding to see their papers
• 1:21:21
  out in Minnesota. And I'm sure it's coming to Maine as well. And really any state where they
• 1:21:27
  try to, you know, enforce what's happening here. But like I said, I have to remain optimistic.
• 1:21:33
  You know, I do think that the tools that are coming online, you know, I'm sure there's going
• 1:21:39
  to be great evil that will be permitted with authoritarian governments when they have,
• 1:21:45
  you know, the likes of Palantir or the Chinese social credit system. There are some really
• 1:21:50
  malevolent things that they can do when it comes to tracking you or controlling you with large
• 1:21:55
  language models. But I think if you use the tools effectively as a journalist or a citizen activist,
• 1:22:01
  you can become much more, much stronger, much more powerful. You can enhance your investigative
• 1:22:07
  efforts and you can become more efficient at finding the truth of what's going on,
• 1:22:12
  of what your government's doing. Yeah. Well, thank you for doing what you're doing.
• 1:22:16
  That's another reason to be optimistic is individuals like you out there actually doing
• 1:22:20
  legitimate investigative journalism, which seems to have gone by the wayside in our society
• 1:22:27
  in recent decades. I mean, actually diving into the numbers and
• 1:22:33
  doing the hard work of sifting through all these documents and unearthing all this data.
• 1:22:39
  Again, it seems like it was a lost art for a while there.
• 1:22:42
  We have fun doing it. I think it's exciting. For me, it's thrilling to come up with a good scoop
• 1:22:49
  and be able to share it with people, especially, you know, the more unlikely a scoop is,
• 1:22:56
  the further fetched a story is, if you can connect the dots to it and show that it's true.
• 1:23:03
  I think it's fun and I enjoy doing it.
• 1:23:06
  But one thing I'll give a shameless plug for, we've actually tried to make one of our AI tools
• 1:23:14
  available for other people to use.
• 1:23:16
  We call it Harpe and it's a
• 1:23:19
  We named it Harpe because that's the blade that Perseus used to chop off Medusa's head.
• 1:23:24
  And we think Medusa is like a good analogy for what the government has become.
• 1:23:29
  But I paid a developer to create a program that would turn these no bid contract documents that we scraped so that they were machine searchable and machine readable because they were really just like scans of actual documents.
• 1:23:44
  So you couldn't search through them for dollar amounts or the names of bureaucrats or the names of agencies.
• 1:23:50
  They weren't really usable.
• 1:23:52
  And then I had him tweak it to give it some other purposes.
• 1:23:56
  And it became a useful tool for sorting through big batches of documents and doing link analysis on them.
• 1:24:02
  So you could look on the other side after you've processed the documents like, oh, okay, so what addresses do we keep seeing in these documents and what entities are related to those addresses?
• 1:24:12
  So we're trying to turn it into a tool that's powered by Gemini on the back end and has multiple applications for whatever investigation you're working on, but primarily things that involve huge amounts of data that you can't really understand just with your own brain.
• 1:24:28
  But if you leverage large language model tools, you might be able to make sense of them and sort the signal from the noise and find stories there.
• 1:24:38
  And we are still trying to develop it in a way that I'm sure you've been involved in a number of software projects.
• 1:24:45
  We're trying to do it in a way where we don't create this huge honeypot of data that somebody could come hack.
• 1:24:51
  So we want it to be run locally on people's computers.
• 1:24:53
  So we're still working on a model that's not just custom built for me, but could be shared.
• 1:24:58
  But we hope to make that accessible to people.
• 1:25:00
  and ideally, you know, journalists and other people who are trying to do public interest
• 1:25:05
  journalism so that they can replicate some of the things that we've done in Maine,
• 1:25:10
  finding really good stories and mountains of data. Because, you know, a lot of this stuff
• 1:25:16
  is hiding in plain sight, like usaspending.gov. A lot of this data, it's been sitting out there
• 1:25:22
  in public for a long, long time. But there's, you know, you can hide stuff through overdisclosure.
• 1:25:27
  If you just dump a mountain of data out there and no one can really know what to do with it, no one knows how to process it, it's counterintuitive, but that's a way of concealing what the government is actually doing through overdisclosure.
• 1:25:41
  And you just need other tools.
• 1:25:43
  You need an asymmetric solution in order to sort through that data.
• 1:25:47
  So if people wanted to find out more about that, they can go to getharpe.com and sign up for our mailing list.
• 1:25:52
  And we'll be sending out an email when we have a version that's ready for beta testing.
• 1:25:55
  This is my first time doing a project like this.
• 1:25:58
  I basically just found the most autistic-based programmer in Maine and told them what I needed.
• 1:26:04
  And so hopefully it becomes something that's useful for other journalists.
• 1:26:08
  I'll have to link you out with my friends at Maple AI who are running LLMs in secure enclaves so you can do confidential compute, which sounds like it could be beneficial for that particular use case you were describing.
• 1:26:21
  Absolutely.
• 1:26:22
  Yeah.
• 1:26:22
  I mean, we'd love to talk with anybody.
• 1:26:24
  We made this just for me to accomplish a certain set of tasks.
• 1:26:28
  But at some point, we were like, you know what?
• 1:26:30
  This is pretty useful and cool.
• 1:26:32
  I think other people could benefit from it.
• 1:26:34
  So we'll definitely have to connect on that.
• 1:26:37
  Yeah.
• 1:26:37
  It's the age of the double-edged sword.
• 1:26:40
  These technologies are incredibly powerful in good ways and bad.
• 1:26:44
  And it's, again, being optimistic, I think more and more people are recognizing that you can leverage these tools
• 1:26:51
  and do things that were simply impossible only two years ago, which is massive.
• 1:26:58
  Broader point, because I know we have a mutual interest in Bitcoin.
• 1:27:04
  One thing I just wanted to put out there too is a lot of this fraud is enabled by the ability to issue debts and print money at will.
• 1:27:14
  and part of the reason why I'm so passionate about Bitcoin
• 1:27:20
  is it can sort of force the issue
• 1:27:24
  in terms of making it so the government has to explain
• 1:27:28
  why they're distributing funds the way they are.
• 1:27:30
  They can't just print money or issue debts willy-nilly
• 1:27:33
  if they have to answer to the confines
• 1:27:37
  and the frameworks put forward by sound currency
• 1:27:42
  in the digital age in the form of Bitcoin.
• 1:27:44
  It's all debt financed. I mean, all the Medicaid money is money that doesn't exist except for on an imaginary balance sheet. And the COVID money, I mean, $15 billion was just invented from thin air and sprinkled on main. And our roads aren't better. Our schools aren't better.
• 1:28:04
  there's the we literally no one knows where that money went. But when you start looking at the no
• 1:28:09
  bid contracts, it's like, oh, OK, so it went to the people who were politically connected.
• 1:28:13
  It really was the cancel on effect of, you know, the people who were closest to the governor and
• 1:28:18
  the government benefited most from all the covid surplus money that was being pumped into the state.
• 1:28:23
  And you're 100 percent right that it's only like the fiat system enables this kind of fraud,
• 1:28:30
  waste and abuse. It's totally to blame for the rise of housing prices in Maine. We've got
• 1:28:39
  fraudulent fiat dollars pumped into the economy and all these Medicaid entrepreneurs are out there.
• 1:28:45
  And suddenly it's not a big deal for them to bid a half a million dollars on a house that
• 1:28:49
  should probably cost like $200,000. And then the middle-class Mainers who are working on a lobster
• 1:28:57
  boat or working as a carpenter or something, they're priced out of the houses that would
• 1:29:03
  have been maybe their second home or a starter home even. So they're the ones who are suffering
• 1:29:09
  from it. And there's another crypto angle to it as well that I guess just like in Bitcoin,
• 1:29:17
  in remittances, there's all kinds of shitcoin already going on. I mean, this isn't just
• 1:29:24
  specific to Maine, but we found dozens and dozens of examples of Somali fraudsters who are trying to
• 1:29:32
  come up with their own cryptocurrency, their own shitcoin that's going to solve the remittance
• 1:29:40
  problem. You're not going to have to rely on no more bank secrecy acts, no more anti-money
• 1:29:45
  laundering rules. You don't have to go to the Dahabshil or the Taj or the Western Union. You can
• 1:29:51
  just use Somali coin to transfer your money back instantaneously to your auntie's phone back in
• 1:29:57
  Mogadishu. And you know how that story ends. Basically, every single one of them is a pump
• 1:30:03
  and dump scheme that ends up with a select few people getting extremely wealthy. But that is not
• 1:30:09
  to say that the money transfer business isn't massive in Somalia. It's like there are several
• 1:30:18
  large money transmitter firms Western Union and MoneyGram don really operate in Somalia They operate in Kenya So you can transfer money that way into Kenya and then someone can go
• 1:30:31
  into Kenya and come back to Somalia. But they have specific tailored money transmitter firms.
• 1:30:38
  They're basically digital halalas that will transfer money. And those are hugely influential
• 1:30:44
  in a political sense and an economic sense, because whoever controls the end pipeline of
• 1:30:49
  that money gets a skim. So if it's in Jubaland and it's coming into Al-Shabaab controlled territory,
• 1:30:57
  well, then you have a radical Islamic terrorist organization that's getting a 5% to 10% skim
• 1:31:02
  off of all that Medicaid fraud money that's going into the country. So the Medicaid fraud is
• 1:31:06
  literally funding terrorism. But even when it's not funding radical Islamic terrorism,
• 1:31:11
  It's funding a secular warlord or like, you know, a less radical Islamic, but also still, you know, a warlord or the government of Mogadishu.
• 1:31:20
  So there's incredible inter-clan strife to control like where that spigot of money is going to be directed, because no matter who controls it, they get a skim on it.
• 1:31:30
  So it's like this entire, you know, clan warfare, multipolar civil war, anarchic version or territory in Africa.
• 1:31:39
  That's all determined by, you know, spigots of money spraying American tax dollars in different directions.
• 1:31:46
  It's really it's really fucked up.
• 1:31:49
  It is, but it's also hilarious.
• 1:31:51
  But yeah, it affected the Minneapolis mayoral campaign this year.
• 1:31:56
  Hugely.
• 1:31:57
  Hugely.
• 1:31:57
  And I actually I have some Somali friends who are pro-American and don't run Medicaid businesses.
• 1:32:05
  And I rely on them to help me understand some of the things that just look inexplicable, like Omar Fatah losing that election when everyone was like, oh, he's he's Somali and the diaspora is going to vote for him.
• 1:32:18
  That's one hundred thousand votes. This is settled.
• 1:32:20
  Like this is he doesn't stand a chance.
• 1:32:23
  But the Klan resentments are so strong that they endure even to people who are, you know, were maybe two or three years old when they arrived in the United States or maybe even their first generation.
• 1:32:37
  Like they're U.S. citizens. They were born in the United States, but they've grown up with these lingering class resentments.
• 1:32:43
  So that, like, for example, in Maine, the Darud Klan is the preeminent political faction.
• 1:32:51
  And I think it's the same in Minnesota as well. But Omar Fattah was not Darud. I think he was like Hawaii or something like that. And so that's why he people voted for Jacob Fry, you know, a Jewish white guy instead of the the Somali candidate in that election.
• 1:33:09
  But there's like four or five major clans, and then within those clans, there's sub-clans that have resentments against one another.
• 1:33:18
  But those, as a result of a lot of inbreeding, but also just the cultural legacy of how their societies were organized,
• 1:33:27
  those clan resentments are much stronger than any attachments that they have to a regional government in Somalia,
• 1:33:34
  their national government, or whatever political body that they might live under once they immigrate
• 1:33:41
  to the United States. They're never going to have more fealty to the government of Minneapolis or
• 1:33:47
  Minnesota than they do to their own clan. And that's one of the reasons why the fraud became
• 1:33:52
  so big and so endemic and everybody knew about it, but no one said anything about it, is because
• 1:33:56
  their loyalty is to their clan and not to Uncle Sam or the taxpayer or to some higher ethical creed.
• 1:34:04
  Yeah. That was another illuminating thing from the on the ground reporting in Minneapolis is just like asking people on the street, like, what are they like?
• 1:34:13
  Many people are like, I don't know. They don't talk to us.
• 1:34:15
  Yeah. I mean, it's it is a very insular society.
• 1:34:24
  Like the assimilation has not happened.
• 1:34:26
  I mean, the practical look at it in Maine is beginning in 2000, you had legitimate refugees
• 1:34:35
  come to Atlanta, Georgia.
• 1:34:36
  And then you had a secondary wave of migration to Portland, Maine through Catholic charities
• 1:34:42
  and some other NGOs.
• 1:34:44
  And Portland, Maine didn't have as much surplus large family housing as Lewiston.
• 1:34:50
  And so Portland and Lewiston made a deal.
• 1:34:52
  And Lewiston became the place that accepted the larger families of Somali refugees.
• 1:34:57
  And so by about 2003, you had 250 to 300 Somalis who were living in that community.
• 1:35:05
  And then over time, that grew to now probably 15,000 to 20,000 in Lewiston and the surrounding area.
• 1:35:12
  But it is very much a culture apart.
• 1:35:17
  It's very much still not integrated. And my theory as to why that is, is because the immigration industrial complex is like a Ponzi scheme.
• 1:35:30
  Like most of the early Medicaid businesses that the first generation of Somali started were translation businesses.
• 1:35:39
  So they would be the ones hired by the hospitals or the schools or whatever, you know, government office needed to have these translation services for like ADA reasons or accommodation reasons.
• 1:35:51
  So the translator, the translation businesses were the first ones to tap into Medicaid and become pretty profitable, get this taxpayer money flowing in.
• 1:35:59
  And the translation services are also really, really easy to defraud because you can basically tack on translation to every single service that a Somali individual gets.
• 1:36:10
  Whether they need it or not, you can say there was a translator there and they needed the translation service.
• 1:36:14
  And there's been a lot of indictments and investigations around that.
• 1:36:17
  But in order to keep the translation services going, you need to perpetuate that need, which means you need a constant flow of new migrants coming in who don't speak English.
• 1:36:28
  because over time people are going to assimilate and they're not going to need the translation
• 1:36:32
  services. And that goes as well for the migrant services agencies that help people get housing or
• 1:36:38
  help them get Medicaid or help them get transportation. Like the entire NGO blob
• 1:36:44
  that exists to use taxpayer money to help migrants who don't speak English and don't
• 1:36:51
  understand American culture, it's sustained by this constant flow of new Americans or migrants
• 1:36:58
  illegal aliens coming into the state or into the country. So that's why I think it's like a Ponzi
• 1:37:03
  scheme. You have to have this continuous flow of migrants in order for these migrant agencies to
• 1:37:08
  justify their own existence and to justify the huge and growing amounts of taxpayer money flowing
• 1:37:14
  into these organizations. Like we just created the Office of New Americans. Why do you need an
• 1:37:20
  Office of New Americans if you have controlled immigration I mean if you have a borderless welfare state yes you do need an Office of New Americans because you got all kinds of people who don speak English showing up at the country looking for welfare And this office is going to have you know bureaucrats out there helping them sign up for welfare
• 1:37:38
  But if you have controlled immigration into your country, there's no need for that office because the people who come into the country can use the same offices as the old Americans because they'll speak English, presumably.
• 1:37:49
  Yeah.
• 1:37:51
  And the NGOs, you mentioned Catholic charities.
• 1:37:54
  Like these NGOs play a big role and they need the money.
• 1:37:59
  They need more of it.
• 1:38:00
  So hugely.
• 1:38:00
  I mean, Catholic Charities is, in my opinion, a human trafficking organization.
• 1:38:04
  They get paid to, you know, move migrants around to communities that never voted for that and don't want that.
• 1:38:14
  You know, it's really it's a it's a bastardization of the Catholic Church to have charities like the Catholic Charities.
• 1:38:21
  And even the Lutheran organizations, the Lutheran NGOs, they are like prancing around in a Christian skin suit claiming to be Christians when what they're really doing is facilitating third world migrations to Western areas.
• 1:38:37
  But they are, I mean, their effect on society has been extremely pernicious.
• 1:38:42
  And the fact that they do it while preening and pretending to have the moral high ground is, I think, repugnant.
• 1:38:48
  Yeah, they're building the Tower of Babel.
• 1:38:50
  contributing to it
• 1:38:52
  at least
• 1:38:53
  to fix a problem
• 1:38:59
  you have to understand that it exists
• 1:39:01
  in the first place and I think the work that you're doing
• 1:39:03
  is making it abundantly clear
• 1:39:05
  that the problem does exist
• 1:39:07
  and my hope is that
• 1:39:09
  we don't get
• 1:39:11
  thrown into a civil war
• 1:39:12
  and cooler heads prevail
• 1:39:14
  and we can fix this
• 1:39:16
  because it's just straightforward
• 1:39:18
  again going back to don't tell me not to believe my lying eyes like there is overt rampant fraud
• 1:39:25
  going on with u.s taxpayer dollars and debt that we're we're accruing um which is going up
• 1:39:31
  exponentially uh it's been a big yeah and i i would say don't don't just don't believe what
• 1:39:37
  you're seeing on uh you know cnn or even fox uh you know they they get paid to show you the tear
• 1:39:45
  gas canisters exploding and the conflict and stoke this idea that a civil war is brewing.
• 1:39:53
  In Maine, poll after poll has shown that it's like 80% of people support what ICE is doing.
• 1:39:58
  You're looking in every state where there's these conflicts, you're looking at a tiny
• 1:40:02
  fringe minority that in many cases is being bused from state to state to state in order to
• 1:40:08
  create this political theater that plays out on your TV screen. Here on the ground,
• 1:40:13
  And it's a tiny, tiny group of people who are huffing on their whistles and screaming at ICE.
• 1:40:19
  But the vast majority of people in Maine support what ICE is doing.
• 1:40:24
  We had an example that I tweeted about earlier today.
• 1:40:29
  ICE is chasing these two illegal aliens.
• 1:40:32
  And the local Mainers are standing out on the road going, they went that way.
• 1:40:36
  They went that way, trying to help the ICE agents track these guys down.
• 1:40:40
  One Mainer gives an ICE agent his four-wheeler. And so the guy jumps on his four-wheeler and chases down the illegal aliens that he was apprehending. And you can see, and someone posted their blink camera footage. And you can see the ICE officer gets them, detains them, handcuffs them, and then puts them on the back of the four-wheeler and drives off with these two guys apprehended on the back of a four-wheeler.
• 1:41:05
  Like, that's Maine. That's real America. That's, I think, how the majority of Americans feel. Like, they will give their four-wheeler and, you know, their sidearm. They will, you know, donate resources in order to facilitate what ICE is doing because it's God's work.
• 1:41:22
  These aren't starving refugees who escaped Nazi Germany that are being apprehended.
• 1:41:27
  You can look at the DHS's website.
• 1:41:29
  They are publishing the criminal histories and backgrounds of these people.
• 1:41:35
  And they're not people you want in your community.
• 1:41:37
  They're scammers, thieves, child molesters, murderers, abusers.
• 1:41:41
  They're bad people and they're illegal aliens.
• 1:41:44
  And I think everybody should celebrate the fact that we're finally removing them from our communities.
• 1:41:49
  Well, that's been, I'm sure you saw too, but the way the media can manipulate people
• 1:41:55
  is never, we have another example.
• 1:41:58
  I'm not going to say it's never been made clearer to me than this example, but it's
• 1:42:01
  a great example of like Tom Homan getting a medal or some medal from Obama in 2012 for
• 1:42:07
  deporting twice as many people as he did in 2025.
• 1:42:10
  It's like, well, it's the same guy in control here.
• 1:42:14
  It was being celebrated a little over a decade ago.
• 1:42:17
  Now it's Gestapo Nazi fascism.
• 1:42:20
  Yeah.
• 1:42:21
  I mean, like I did a ride along with some ICE agents in Maine on Friday and, you know, we didn't glorify it.
• 1:42:29
  I mean, would I have liked to have seen some action, some excitement, you know, some tear gas going off?
• 1:42:33
  Yes, that would have been more exciting.
• 1:42:35
  We just kind of sat outside of a subsidized apartment complex waiting for a drunk driving illegal alien to come out of his building and he didn't come out.
• 1:42:44
  And so there was nothing there.
• 1:42:45
  But, hey, they're not all going to be winners.
• 1:42:47
  But when we posted about it and just wrote a story about like, here's what we saw.
• 1:42:52
  We did an interview with the deputy director of ICE.
• 1:42:55
  Here's what she said.
• 1:42:56
  We just posted her quotes verbatim.
• 1:42:59
  And we get all these responses, Nazi bootlicker, like, oh, you're just like propagandists for ICE, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:43:07
  And I'm reminded that CNN just, you know, six or seven years ago when Obama was in office, they did a ride along with ICE.
• 1:43:14
  And it was just like normal run of the mill television.
• 1:43:17
  like, hey, here's how the law is enforced. Sometimes there are illegal alien child molesters
• 1:43:22
  living near schools and ICE goes and gets them. And there was never any controversy about it.
• 1:43:27
  And this was CNN of all places. And it was like, yeah, Obama's tough on those illegal aliens. That's
• 1:43:32
  why we voted for Obama. He's tough. So opinions have just changed like on a dime. And really,
• 1:43:38
  it's all Trump. It's like Trump has, for whatever reason, so many people's brains just broke when
• 1:43:44
  Trump became president and they haven't been able to critically think outside of if Trump supports
• 1:43:49
  it, it's bad. If Trump does it, it's bad. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a mass psychosis that needs to
• 1:43:54
  be studied. I think it'll be written about for centuries because it is baffling seeing how
• 1:44:01
  deranged people have become just because Trump has a particular perspective and they immediately
• 1:44:06
  have to take the opposite perspective, which in this case is like, you're trying to protect
• 1:44:10
  child abusers, murderers, drug dealers.
• 1:44:15
  It's like, how did we get here?
• 1:44:18
  They are.
• 1:44:19
  They're out on the streets.
• 1:44:20
  All of our politicians, they're ready to pick up arms and go to civil war
• 1:44:24
  in order to protect the rights of, you know, really, really bad people.
• 1:44:29
  I mean there one guy that just kind of sticks in my craw I know there probably worse offenses out there committed by illegal aliens but there a Chinese national who was just picked up last week who was arrested
• 1:44:41
  for scamming an elderly man out of over a hundred thousand dollars. And he'd convinced the guy,
• 1:44:48
  it was like your classic telemarketer scam. You know, you can't trust your bank. Your bank is
• 1:44:52
  stealing from you. You need to go buy gold bars and like, I'm going to come and you give me the
• 1:44:56
  gold bars. And he actually got $100,000 worth of gold out of this elderly man, basically his entire
• 1:45:03
  life savings. And the only reason he was caught is because he got greedy and thought he was going
• 1:45:08
  to come back and get another $100,000 out of this guy. And he was smart enough after a while to get
• 1:45:14
  in touch with law enforcement. So they laid a trap for the guy and caught him. That was like a year
• 1:45:19
  ago. The guy had been arrested, processed, mugshot, everything, and then released. Somehow he's an
• 1:45:25
  illegal alien from China. And for whatever reason, they caught him. They knew what he'd done.
• 1:45:29
  And he was released and just now captured and processed for deportation. But it's like,
• 1:45:34
  if you've ever had to deal with one of your grandparents getting scammed by a telemarketer,
• 1:45:39
  you might have an inkling of the homicidal rage that that can induce in you when you know that
• 1:45:46
  someone is picking on your grandma or your grandpa. And to have these politicians standing
• 1:45:50
  up there and be like, no, he should stay here. We don't want him deported. He's just as American as
• 1:45:56
  you or I. Just stop deporting the people who are scamming our elderly. I just don't know if
• 1:46:03
  they're living in a different factual universe or if their moral judgments have concluded that
• 1:46:07
  the political gain to be had from not deporting someone like that is worth it. But it's just,
• 1:46:14
  again, it's alien to me. It's difficult to sympathize with people who feel that way.
• 1:46:20
  Yeah, I mean, I'm talking tinfoil hats earlier. Mine's on pretty tight. I think we're under a cultural revolution that's been going on since the 70s, like weather underground. I don't think any of that went away. In fact, it's only gotten stronger.
• 1:46:33
  And if you look at Antifa, again, how coordinated they are, the information they have access to, the paramilitary nature of their coordination, it's just like there's a force out there that would like to turn America into a communist shithole.
• 1:46:49
  And they are putting their finger on the scale right now.
• 1:46:53
  Yeah.
• 1:46:54
  And I think that there's also undeniable foreign influences pushing it, urging it on.
• 1:47:00
  And again, tinfoil hat.
• 1:47:02
  But I know I've been deep down the Chinese organized crime rabbit hole after making the documentary about the cannabis trafficking in Maine.
• 1:47:11
  So it's top of mind for me. But in digging into a bunch of these individuals who are prominent within the fraudulent Medicare, Medicaid enterprises,
• 1:47:21
  we keep finding these weird connections between the Chinese and Somalis, just these weird, weird connections that, you know, don't don't really make sense.
• 1:47:32
  Belt and road connections?
• 1:47:34
  That's kind of what we're thinking.
• 1:47:37
  You know, it's like beyond the remit of a local Maine news outlet.
• 1:47:41
  But when you find, for example, the guy who is currently running Gateway Community Services,
• 1:47:47
  because the aforementioned CEOs on the lam in Kenya studied abroad at a university in mainland China
• 1:47:55
  that has had programs with American universities that are severed now
• 1:47:59
  because the China committee warned of connections to the CCP's military, said basically these study
• 1:48:06
  programs are being used to conduct espionage and undermine America's interests. He says he's
• 1:48:13
  proficient in Mandarin, does work in China, and then he comes back to Maine and becomes a CEO at
• 1:48:19
  this dumpy Somali nonprofit. Weird. Just doesn't make sense. There's all kinds of stuff like that
• 1:48:24
  where, as a journalist, I can't put my finger on it and just be like, well, here's the story.
• 1:48:28
  It's just stuff that makes me go, huh, that's weird. Why would somebody with that kind of a resume come back and work at this like dumpy Somali nonprofit? Doesn't really make sense.
• 1:48:38
  The Tim Wall's China connection, too.
• 1:48:41
  That's what I'm saying.
• 1:48:42
  It doesn't, you know, why is there just continuously there are these connections between, you know, China and Somalia.
• 1:48:51
  And it's really, really weird.
• 1:48:53
  And the Chinese aren't really known to work with other ethnicities.
• 1:48:58
  They prefer to work with their own.
• 1:49:00
  So that adds another interesting degree to it.
• 1:49:03
  But you could see them using Somalis as a tool or something like that.
• 1:49:07
  But there's definitely, whether it's wealth extraction or subverting the American political order, there are definitely external forces at work who are encouraging this, fanning the flames, in addition to the internal revolutionaries who are like cosplaying the civil rights movement all over again, except for they're just retarded Marxists wearing furry tails.
• 1:49:34
  yeah
• 1:49:34
  you'd be naive to think that there aren't external forces
• 1:49:38
  that are looking on with
• 1:49:39
  with what's happening Steve
• 1:49:41
  again thank you so much for
• 1:49:43
  all the work you're doing thank you for taking time
• 1:49:46
  out of your day to
• 1:49:47
  to have this discussion with me I think it's incredibly
• 1:49:50
  important and hopefully
• 1:49:51
  more people pick up
• 1:49:54
  on the work that you and many others are doing
• 1:49:55
  and actually read
• 1:49:58
  the reports that you guys are putting
• 1:50:00
  out and understand
• 1:50:01
  that we are getting got
• 1:50:03
  right now. We're being played for fools. And if you care about this country, if you care about
• 1:50:09
  your family and the future of your children, probably important to make some noise about this
• 1:50:15
  and make sure that we're not getting defrauded on the scale of trillions of dollars over the
• 1:50:18
  course of many years. Absolutely. Well, thank you very much for having me on, Marty. I appreciate
• 1:50:23
  that. Long time listener. I love your show. So it's a great honor to be on with you. So thank
• 1:50:29
  you very much. The respect is mutual, friend. Thank you. And we'll do this again at some point.
• 1:50:35
  Anytime. All right. Peace. Love, freaks.
• 1:50:37
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