Journalist uses AI to expose $500B+ annual Medicaid fraud scheme involving migrant agencies, no-bid contracts to warlords, and systematic overbilling funding terrorism.
Investigative journalist Steven Robinson uncovered a massive Medicaid fraud operation in Maine involving Somali diaspora and migrant services agencies. Using AI tools, he downloaded over 5,000 hidden no-bid contract documents revealing systematic fraud including contracts to a Somali warlord justified simply because "he's a refugee." The fraud extends beyond Maine, one autism program alone overbilled $46 million in a single year. Robinson estimates half of all Medicaid spending (roughly $500 billion annually) may be fraudulent, with money flowing back to Somalia through remittance services, sometimes funding terrorism. The fraud is enabled by low barriers to entry for home healthcare agencies, minimal oversight, politically connected NGOs, and a migration industrial complex that perpetuates itself like a Ponzi scheme, requiring constant new migrant arrivals to justify its existence and maintain translation services, welfare enrollment programs, and taxpayer-funded contracts.
"They literally just copied and pasted his biography into the justification section where it says 'Abdullahi Ali is a Somali refugee,' as if that's enough reason to hand somebody $500,000."
"While he's in Jubaland running for office with his militia, he's getting no-bid contracts."
"One year, one program, $46 million in overbilling."
"Half of Medicaid might even be an underestimate when it comes to the total amount of fraud that's happening."
"The Medicaid fraud is literally funding terrorism."
"We took the most dysfunctional, defrauded program America has ever created and we quadrupled it."
"Their loyalty is to their clan and not to Uncle Sam or the taxpayer or to some higher ethical creed."
"It's like a Ponzi scheme. You have to have this continuous flow of migrants in order for these migrant agencies to justify their own existence."
The Medicaid fraud crisis represents not just waste but a systematic failure that has created a migration industrial complex dependent on perpetual fraud for survival. Robinson's work demonstrates how AI tools can expose government corruption at scale, revealing fraud hidden in plain sight through overdisclosure. The situation is politically protected at state levels, with NGOs and politicians benefiting from the system while working-class Americans are priced out of housing and healthcare. The solution requires political will to suspend and reenroll all Medicaid providers with rigorous verification, authority governors already possess but refuse to use. Without immediate action and accountability, this trillion-dollar scheme will continue extracting wealth from American taxpayers while enriching foreign actors and funding instability abroad.
0:00 - Intro
0:30 - Recapping the story
8:28 - Why Medicaid is susceptible to fraud
21:25 - Bitkey & Unchained
23:41 - How the fraud works
30:06 - Asylum seekers & obfuscating the fraud
38:04 - CrowdHealth & SLNT
39:40 - Tracking fraudsters & the no-bid contract pipeline
1:01:57 - Minneapolis parallels & escalating threats
1:08:06 - "Somalia First" & government complicity
1:22:23 - AI tools & fiat's role
1:32:04 - Somali assimilation & foreign connections
(00:00) We took the most dysfunctional, defrauded program America has ever created and we quadrupled it. And then we added in a bunch of non-citizens after Obamacare was done. Exactly what you would do if you were trying to destroy a health care system in a country. Half of Medicaid might even be an underestimate when it comes to the total amount of fraud that's happening.
(00:17) It's like a Ponzi scheme. You have to have this continuous flow of migrants in order for these migrant agencies to justify their own existence. The Medicaid fraud is literally funding terrorism. Steve, thank you for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Marty. Appreciate it. >> Well, I know you're a busy man.
(00:37) Uh especially the last couple of weeks. I think uh you've hit the scene. Uh I mean, you've been on the scene for a while, but I think you're um conversation with Shawn Ryan is going pretty viral right now. And as we were just discussing before we hit record, obvious Nick Shirley, uh his on the ground reporting in Minneapolis definitely caught the eye and the attention of uh the country and has spawned a bunch of copycat uh sleuths, if you will, which I'm all in favor for.
(01:07) But you've been uh so sleuththing on this particular Medicaid fraud ring uh in Maine specifically for the better part of a year. Uh, and so I think you out of anybody uh, considering your investigative journalism skills and how long you've been on this beat, understand this story more than um, many others out there.
(01:26) 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. >> Yeah. So, we uh got some documents leaked to us that pointed toward uh Medicaid overbilling issues at a host of left-wing NOS's. Uh and these are documents that aren't routinely published, but they are public records.
(01:51) They should be published, but for political reasons, the Power Zippy kind of sweep them under the rug and and and don't um you know, they don't brag about the fraud that they found within Maine's Medicaid system. Uh we had these documents leaked to us. is showed uh this one NGO in particular, Gateway Community Services.
(02:10) It's been described as a nonprofit, but it's not. It's just a business. It's a it's an LLC, and they have a 501c3 filing for the purpose of taking uh taxpayer money that could only go to 501c3s. So, it's not a nonprofit in any any sense of the term. It's a it's a migrant services agency that's totally taxpayer funded. And the documents that we had found u showed that they were audited in around 2018 for uh reimbursements that they had submitted in 2015 to 2017 and the government found hey like 35% of the claims we've paid you for. You don't
(02:46) have the documents to substantiate these. So they give them an opportunity to come back and show the paperwork and essentially prove that the claims they were paid for are legitimate. Um, based on that, we began digging into Gateway Community Services. And what we found was an organization that wasn't just some podunk nonprofit, um, you know, like dogooder liberals trying to, I don't know, you know, fix poverty or teach people English.
(03:14) What we found was a really politically connected organization. Uh the CEO uh Abdulahi Ali was uh photographed at all kinds of events with the governor of Maine with top ranking uh Democratic politicians from the state. Uh representative Deca Da a former assistant executive director at Gateway uh is on the appropriations committee in the state legislature and she's the former mayor of South Portland.
(03:37) uh Representative Ysef Ysef is a former employee of the organization, also a former roommate of Abdullahi uh Ali and he's now you know making his way up the legislature and Eklas Ahmed who is a Sudin refugee is running the office of new Americans which was just recently uh created here in the state of Maine. So you have a an NGO that's really punching above its weight in terms of its political connections, the influence it has uh over policy.
(04:04) And as we dug more, we found additionally that uh on top of the $5 million a year of Medicaid money that was flowing into this organization, it was also receiving no bid contracts. And these no- bid contracts were for things that really looked a lot like campaign activity. We found that before the 2022 election, which is important here in Maine because that's when Governor Mills was standing for reelection against former Republican Governor Paul Leage, uh, Gateway Community Services and some of its allied NOS's received no bid contracts
(04:38) to create what were called or community health outreach workers. And you didn't have to have any qualifications in order to be a taxpayer funded chow. All you had to do was be able to knock on, you know, uh, the door of a migrant or a non-English-speaking resident of Maine and sign them up for Medicaid, sign them up for food stamps, and even buy them household supplies.
(05:01) Uh, with literally walking around money is what the Chows were doing is is going doortodoor in migrant neighborhoods and signing people up for welfare and giving them money, food, supplies, whatever. Uh and under federal law, you are required to offer assistance uh registering to vote anytime you sign somebody up for a fedally funded benefits program, which is Medicaid, which is SNAP.
(05:24) So what you effectively had was this politically connected uh migrant services organization run by a Somali refugee staffed by multiple uh Somali refugees and asylum seekers was getting no bid contract government money piped into it in order to go out and register high propensity Democrat voters and collect information on them that was available to political groups that were all operating out of the same offices in Lewon and Portland.
(05:52) So for us that was uh highly interesting. Anytime you see taxpayer money being used to tip the scales of an election that's something that's interesting and newsworthy I think. Uh and then on top of all of this uh I guess after the 2022 election and emboldened Abdulahi Ali is running for president in Jubiland Somalia which I didn't know about.
(06:13) I learned about Jubiland uh you know through the course of this reporting but it's the semi-autonomous state in southern Somalia largely controlled by al-Shabaab and uh the uh Abdulahi Ali was running as one of three candidates in a tumultuous election where the incumbent was supposed to be termlimited out but he just kind of decided nah we're not doing elections I'm going to do my own election and I'm the only one you can vote for and the other two guys held their election but the central government in Moadishu who said, "Well,
(06:43) we're not recognizing your election." So, we wouldn't recognize it as as democracy or elections or anything like that. And what it boils down to is uh whoever has the most guns is the one who wins the the election. And Abdulahi Ali, while he's the CEO of Gateway Community Services, while he's taking, you know, $700,000 in PPP loans, five $5 million a year in Medicaid money, millions of dollars in no bid contracts, all funded by US taxpayers.
(07:13) He's in Kenyan media uh doing Somali language interviews, bragging about how he has fundraised in America to bankroll a paramilitary group in southern Somalia that he's going to use to depose the incumbent president. Uh and so after learning all of this, we're just like, why the hell are mayors paying for this? This is crazy. You know, what's going on here? Uh so we did some reporting on it and that set in motion uh a series of sources coming to us including whistleblowers who had worked at the company for five five plus years who talked to us about a pattern
(07:44) of systemic fraud uh that they witnessed that in some cases they helped uh facilitate and from there we started looking at other organizations who were doing the same kind of Medicaid billable work and uh the it just I mean it was like every time we flipped over a rock There was a new Medicaid business that had, you know, uh, an address, a P.O.
(08:07) box, uh, an address that's just a ghost suite in some office building, and it's billing 500,000, a million dollars a year, and there's no discernable employees, no, uh, discernable clients. Uh, and so the the Medicaid fraud just keeps growing and growing and growing here in this state, and there seems to be no oversight of it whatsoever.
(08:29) a question that is more and more becoming into my been coming into my mind um since everything that's popping off in Minnesota and now obviously the reporting you've done on Maine over the last years like how was were these Medicaid programs identified by these Somali or anybody who's leveraging to um just commit fraud blatantly like how are they identified why Maine like how like what is the the root of these fraudulent networks that have that have really spawned over the last couple of decades because this has been ongoing for well
(09:06) over a decade at this point. And as an American citizen until the last year, uh I've been completely unaware of this. In fact, I've been told my whole life that Medicaid, Medicare are third rail political topics that can't be broached. uh we can't cut Medicaid, Medicare because it would lead to uh a bunch of older Americans um being on on the streets in their older age because they need to be federally subsidized um with medical assistance.
(09:38) And I naively u believed like, okay, that sounds right to me, but it's becoming abundantly clear that these systems are wrought with fraud and and how did this all start and how did they identify where to exploit the fraud? So I guess the the first thing is to make a distinction between Medicare and Medicaid.
(09:58) Uh Medicare is the program for the elderly. Uh there is lots of provider side fraud happening in Medicare. Uh normally you're looking at you know doctors writing fake prescriptions or billing for services that they haven't provided. And you do see some some high dollar hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud in Medicare.
(10:17) Uh Medicaid is a totally separate program and I think it's a little bit more susceptible to fraud in part because of how it's designed and how it operates. Uh Medicare is more centralized and it's administered by the uh CMS, you know, a federal bureaucracy. Medicaid is more uh it's uh decentralized. It's distributed through block grants.
(10:40) So the federal government gives each state a big bucket of money and allows them to administer their Medicaid programs. And so you have all the state lawmakers getting together and deciding um the ins and outs of how they want their Medicaid programs to function. Uh a good example of that is um Medicaid at the federal level won't reimburse for services provided to non-citizens.
(11:03) But some of the blue states like Maine, California, and Illinois have decided that um they're so generous and wonderful that they're going to cover health care benefits for non-citizens. So they have to create little carveouts like some well like Maine covers uh age 21 and under uh pregnant women and their children for a period of time.
(11:23) Uh some states cover 55 and older non-citizens. Uh but they have to pay for that with their own money, not federal money. Um but that's just an example of how the Medicaid programs, we've got, you know, 57 different uh Medicaid programs that are all operated differently based on how the state or the territory decides to uh run it or administer it.
(11:44) So within the programs that they create or allow that kind of creates the landscape for the fraudulent opportunities that that creates the the weaknesses and the uh you know the niches that can be exploited for fraud and the reason I think that the home health care agencies were picked is because unlike traditional health care where you go to a doctor's office or a dentist's office or a hospital there's a central location where the healthcare is being provided.
(12:11) So, a government uh inspector can show up and set and see, okay, yeah, this place is clean. It's obviously a doctor's office. There's patients coming in and out. With home health care, it's provided at a client's home. So, it's distributed in nature and the office that a home healthcare agency has can literally just be a one room suite in a abandoned warehouse filled with office complexes.
(12:35) We've found those in Maine. We've published video of them. Um, you know, it's similar to what Nick Shirley found with the daycarees that are just addresses that nothing's happening there. There's no people there. There's no kids there. It's the same thing with these office suites. They're they're used just to check a box and create the appearance of an actual business, but there's no activity really happening there.
(12:58) uh the home health care uh I guess services also has the weakness of all the employees are distributed all the clients are distributed and you really can't provide oversight on it and in some instances the government doesn't really want to provide oversight on it. A lot of the oversight that we've been able to uh determine has been happening are what are called desk reviews.
(13:21) So, somebody sitting at a desk at the Department of Health and Human Services calls the CEO of Anywhere Care LLC and says, "Oh, you know, do you have a do you have an operations manual? Uh do you keep records on your clients? Uh do you keep records on your employees?" And then that's the sum total of the oversight that happens.
(13:42) Uh they create these uh LLC's as home health agencies. their employees have to do a 50hour online course, which there's no verification that their employees are actually the ones taking the course. Could be anybody sitting down behind a computer and just filling it out. They rarely have to meet someone in person before they get approved to run a home healthcare agency.
(14:06) And then they send invoices to the state and the state pays them. Uh we found one instance of a 25year-old named Mustafa Alamemedi. He ran five stars home healthcare. Uh he was in one of these buildings filled with uh you know ghost suites or zombie suites, just a a one room office suite that he was never at. And he was able to bill uh $700,000 before he over two years before he came to the attention of auditors.
(14:33) The auditors send him a a note and say, "Hey, this kind of looks dodgy. You know, 70% of your claims lack any justification. can you send us extra documents so we can get this squared away? And in the email chain, you can see that he strings them along and says, you know, well, he's sick. Um, so he needs an extension.
(14:54) And then his entire family catches COVID, very sad. They go have to go to the emergency room, so he needs another extension. Uh, and then his the he sends the documents, but they get lost in the mail. It happens to all of us. So, he needs another extension. And for a whole year this goes on where he's just stringing along the regulators and he's continuing to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while he's doing this even though the Department of Health and Human Services knows that 70% of his prior claims were bogus. In the
(15:20) end, he ends up making a million dollars over three years and just walks away from the company. It dissolves. There's no criminal charges. There's no recoupment as far as we can tell. This 25-year-old kid just makes a million dollars mailing invoices to the Department of Health and Human Services. And nobody would have found out about it if we hadn't submitted a Freedom of Access Act request for all of these documents, all of these notices of violation that were sent out to any Medicaid company, not just uh Gateway
(15:49) Community Services. They were the one that inspired us to start looking for these notices of violation. But no one would have not known about this. There would have been no government press release about this. And that's just one instance of a home healthcare agency that literally they just file an LLC, apply to be a home health agency, and then send send invoices to the state and the money comes out of the government machine.
(16:12) It's really remarkable what's happened. And I think that to to answer your question, the reason why home healthcare is targeted is because very low barriers to entry. You don't need uh you know, you don't need a PhD or a master's degree or you know, you don't need to be a licensed social worker. You can literally just be you you can have arrived in the United States 6 months ago as long as you have work authorization documents.
(16:35) You can start an LLC and become uh you know enabled to bill Medicaid under one of these programs. And it doesn't appear to be that there's any consequences for defrauding the program. There have been no criminal charges filed in Maine against any home healthcare agency that has engaged in this pattern of fraud. How how in Maine specifically, how what's the scale of the fraud if you had to estimate? >> Uh, hundreds of millions of dollars easily.
(17:06) But it's a tricky thing though because as I said, no one's been charged. So, how can you say it's fraud? Like with with the example that I just gave to you uh in a strictly legal sense, you can't say that it's fraud. You can say that these were overpayments, that this was, you know, uh uh that he was erroneously billing Medicaid, which is what the HHS bureaucrat speak would say.
(17:30) But because it hasn't been investigated as fraud and there's been no charges brought against this guy for fraud, you can't really truly in a legal sense call it fraud when every normal person would look at this email exchange and the fi and the numbers and the fact that he's, you know, his LLC is registered out of a subsidized housing unit in southern Maine and be like, "Oh yeah, well very obviously this is fraud.
(17:54) " Uh and there are hundreds of cases like that where they're making off with 500,000, a million, $5 million. Uh and then there are some even bigger ones that are doing uh residential care uh like autism facilities and uh those combined are probably 300 or 400 million over the last 5 years. Um but I mean I would estimate at least half of the Medicaid program nationally is going toward fraud.
(18:22) And we're talking about a a program that's $1 trillion dollar a year in welfare spending. It really has become not a health care program. It's become USAID. It's like bigger than USID except for it's all at the state level. And the states have figured out that they can siphon that money into their preferred groups.
(18:41) And in Maine, it just happens to be the Somali diaspora and some of the other migrant NOS's. >> It's infuriating. But to your point, like the states get to choose like who are the people making this decision? Does the Somali diaspora get into Maine? Do they get on city councils and then eventually the state legislature and then they throw around their weight? Or are there um the co-conspirators uh on on the main side within within the government that for some reason or another think this is a worthwhile endeavor to funnel funds this way? Well,
(19:17) it depends on how tightly your your tinfoil hat is fit on because you can get really conspiratorial with this stuff. Going back to the Affordable Care Acts, aka Obamacare, uh there was this, you know, myth that Obamacare was some big technocratic program with lots of bells and whistles and moving parts, but all it did was expand Medicaid.
(19:39) It took the it took the the income threshold for Medicaid eligibility and raised it to I think 400 uh 400% of the poverty line. 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 uh 90% and the states will only have to pay 10%.
(20:14) So for the states, it was uh a deal you couldn't pass up. It was like free money coming into your state. So you expanded this program that, you know, 10 years later just so happens to have become a slush fund for leftist NOS's. That's kind of weird. Uh on the home healthcare side here in Maine before Governor Mills came in in 2019 and and expanded our Medicaid program, there were ballot initiative attempts by left-wing uh groups, 501c4 groups, um some 501c3 groups to create the home healthcare program.
(20:48) So the very programs that are being abused uh for political purposes that are having funds diverted into explicitly political groups um they were breathed into existence by leftist politicians and left-wing push groups. So, it just seems like a little bit too much of a coincidence that you have Soros funded groups lobbying for home health care agencies and then all of a sudden the home health care agencies are being defrauded by a a political and ethnic minority that the Democrats in Maine have captured and rely upon for street level activism uh but also ballot
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(23:34) com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin Multisig Vault. That's TFTCT10 at unchained.com. And then I guess I mean again, Tim Foil hat uh staying within the bounds of what's technically legal. I mean, it seems it seems just observing, listening to what you're describing, part of the part of the rub is like, hey, we're going to expand this program, get all this money, we'll funnel it to you, you help us get votes, and um you can implicitly you can use some of those funds to achieve some of your political
(24:11) goals back in your homeland if you so please. Yeah, I mean it it depends on which aspect of the conspiracy you can call it you're looking at. I mean the no bid contracts probably were illegal and the state auditor here actually you know uh did some um accidental honesty when he was reviewing some of the spending programs and said that the no bid contracts violated federal rules.
(24:38) So when the when the federal government uh under Biden passed the CARES Act and just dropped additional buckets of money onto the states, uh those all come with rules. Federal government has rules for how that money is supposed to be handed out. And even when you're doing a no- bid contract process, there are rules.
(24:55) Uh but the the Mills administration was doing things like ma make kicking money out the door giving the awards before any contract had been assigned before anyone in state government had you know officially signed their name on a document approving it. So they were just shoveling the money out the door to their friends uh not following the guard rails established by federal law or by state law.
(25:21) 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. If the the Trump administration wanted to be really vindictive, they could go back after this federally awarded money uh both on the car's act side but as well on on the Medicaid side and claw it back because it did violate the law in the way that it was passed out.
(25:42) In terms of the the um the individual level frauds that are happening with, you know, false invoices submitted to the state, that's just straight up Medicaid fraud. 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.
(26:05) Uh we also see tons of mortgage fraud to to abet some of the residential care programs. Um so just briefly on the residential care in addition to this homebased care where the the idea if you're a you know a wildeyed 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.
(26:30) She doesn't want to be in a nursing home, but she needs help showering or getting groceries or with the task tasks of daily living. So, once a day, you know, someone's going to show up and help her, you know, live in her own house. That's how it's supposed to work. Uh in practice, there's just no like 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 and there's no real home healthcare being provided.
(26:59) But with the residential care, uh in some cases there are actual patients like disabled adults, autistic adults, um intellectual and developmental disabilities, and they are staying in these two bed, two-bedroom homes, and they're supposed to have 247 care. Um sometimes with a 3:1 staffing ratio. Um so these are people who are maybe have the cognitive capacity of an 8-year-old or a 12year-old.
(27:27) uh can't live on their own and require pretty intensive support. These are the people that Medicaid was invented to take care of. Uh and so the organizations mostly comprised of of migrants of African migrants who have arrived in Maine over the last 5 years will buy up hundreds if not thousands of houses throughout the state of Maine and convert them into these residential care facilities.
(27:50) 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. But the best way to be profitable running that kind of business is to uh cut corners with the level of care and the level of expertise that you're providing uh for the disabled adults.
(28:19) And what we've seen in our reporting is a lot of these uh residential care homes are operating together as a prohibitive collective and they're sharing employees across multiple companies. So we have huge numbers, thousands of asylum seekers who arrived here from Angola, uh the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda between 2019 to 2023.
(28:43) and they're the ones staffing these houses. 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 a strict medication plan or a dietary plan. Uh but they're working 80 to 120 hours a week. So, super profitable if you're the guy at the top running the autism company.
(29:05) Um one of our top guys build $28 million in 2024. um one of the newer ones built $17 million last year. Uh it's very profitable if you have this um workforce of non-English-speaking migrants who don't have a lot of options and you can um exploit them and make them work as long as you want. Uh but it also results in hundreds of houses being taken off of the market.
(29:30) Houses that could have been available to middle-class manners are instead being um kind of put into service as part of this autism industry. And in addition to that, the CEOs of these companies go out and buy multif family units and duplexes so that they can rent to their workers for cash. So it's a sophisticated scheme. It it looks a lot like organized crime and all of the money is coming from John Q taxpayer.
(29:56) And just like with the home care agencies, there appears to be almost no oversight or no one cares or maybe they're intentionally looking the other way for some inexplicable reason. I mean the economic consequences of this cannot be understated. I mean, especially in a day and age today in 2026 and obviously postcoid with the destruction of the middle class, obviously economic pressures have been immense, stronger than they've been in in many decades since the 70s arguably.
(30:30) and the fact that our own government is siphoning taxpayer dollar towards these programs for immigrants, uh, asylum seekers, which maybe we should dive into that, like what is the definition of asylum seeker? Like how low is the bar to to claim asylum and come and exploit all these things? >> Yeah, I mean, I I think that's that's an incredibly important point because asylum seeker is just a madeup word.
(30:57) It's just a language game that the left has played to tug on your heartstrings. There's no such thing as an asylum seeker. There are parrolled illegal aliens. You're you're an illegal alien. You you enter the United States illegally and then when you encounter an ICE officer, you send a letter to the Justice Department saying, "I hereby declare asylum.
(31:17) " And you get a letter back saying, "All right, get in line with the other 5 million people." Magically, you're an asylum seeker. you become this this magical untouchable, you know, morally praiseworthy category of immigrant. You're no longer an illegal alien in the eyes of the left and and most of the media. You become something more more noble, the asylum seeker.
(31:37) In fact, you're you're an illegal alien and you're on parole. and you've claimed to be an asylum seeker, but historically, if you look at the records, uh, even under Obama and Biden, somewhere between 50% to 80% of asylum claims will be rejected. So, you're like, you know, Schrodinger's illegal alien. We haven't opened the box yet, and we're not going to open the box until a immigration judge hears your asylum claim.
(32:01) So, we can pretend like you're a refugee until that box is opened. But 80% of the time when we open that box, you're just going to be a fake asylum seeker. You're you're an economic migrant who is claiming persecution, but can't prove that you're being persecuted at all. And in fact, some of the people that we find uh claiming to be asylum seekers here in Maine have ties to the governments in their home countries.
(32:25) There's a uh the individual I talked with Sean Ryan about who's running an autism facility, multiple autism facilities here in Maine. He was a government contractor in Rwanda. I mean, he he's like he ran like a software company in Rwanda and had government contracts. There's no evidence whatsoever of him being persecuted in his home country.
(32:46) And his Twitter feed is filled with, you know, positive comments about Paul Kagame, the guy who's been president for 25 years. So there's there's no indication whatsoever that he is a persecuted minority fleeing uh Rwanda. He's just here pretending to be an asylum seeker to take advantage of the weaknesses of our asylum rules.
(33:06) And just to uh to your uh earlier point about the you know the costs of the the economic distortions that this creates just in Maine last year at the beginning of the legislative session the you know the wons in the in Augusta in the state government came and they said surprise we have an $18 million structural deficit.
(33:26) No one could have seen this coming. It's all Medicaid. It's all uh you know Medicaid was way more expensive than we thought it was going to be. What are we going to do about it? And you know where the story is going. It wasn't, well, let's get rid of all the fraud or let's, you know, reduce some of these programs that have grown explosively in five or six years.
(33:44) They raised taxes. They raised taxes on hospitals, on adult use cannabis. They increased the fee to become a licensed arborist in the state of Maine. They put a new tax on Netflix. Uh, 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 mayor migrant community that Democrats have brought into the state very intentionally.
(34:10) Taxes are going up on people who work in the state. Uh so that's like a you know just a small example of the cost that mayors pay as a result of Medicaid fraud. But even Medicaid generally increases costs for everybody in America who uses health care because the reimbursement rates for Medicaid are uh so low that every hospital that accepts Medicaid patients has to make up the cost by jacking up rates for the privately insured.
(34:39) So, it's like a hidden sneaky tax that you're paying every time you pay your your private health insurance bill, your commercial health insurance bill. You're paying for Medicaid through inflated private insurance rates. You want to, you know, you wonder why the cost of private insurance or employer based insurance has skyrocketed.
(34:58) It's in part because we took the most dysfunctional, bad, uh, defrauded program that has America has ever created and we quadrupled it. And then we added in a bunch of non-citizens after Obamacare was done. It was what exactly what you would do if you were trying to destroy a health care system in a country. And it's comical to an extent because the left will will point at the Trump administration or conservativeleaning solutions to this problem say no this is this is why the problem exists in the first place is corporate greed
(35:34) uh and and terrible healthcare policy from from the right. And it's not to say that corporate greed doesn't exist and that there aren't bad policies put forth by the right, but I think it's objectively clear that there is a massive amount of fraud. like you said earlier that $500 billion a year in Medicaid uh just simply fraudulent that is creating these distortions that are throwing the pricing mechanisms for housing, healthcare, um a bunch of I'm sure food cost in the local area in the local area if you have this diaspora
(36:08) coming in and um competing for relatively scarce goods and it's just comical that the uh the backlash to the unearthing of all this fraud thought has been what it what it is. I mean, obviously what's happening in Minnesota, people are getting very um very triggered by it, particularly on the left, and they're trying >> Well, I I understand that though, Marty.
(36:31) I mean, if I was if I'm 25 years old and I'm making a quarter million a year just sending invoices to the health department and then all of a sudden some some uh YouTuber shows up and screws that all up, I'm going to be a little angry. you know, if I've been if I've been making a quarter of a million sitting at home playing Xbox with my friends, yeah, I'm going to be upset when you take that away.
(36:52) Uh, so that in part, I think, explains some of the anger amongst the community that was engaged in the fraud. But I think there's also panic by uh the the co-conspirators, the people in the political class, the people like um Tim Walls or Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanigan, uh uh Keith Ellison. I think that there's some panic there because they know that if you have a real real good investigation that digs into how this was allowed to happen and who was involved that it's going to point to them. Uh and the same thing is true in
(37:24) Maine. I think you have some people uh you know politicians, elected officials, appointed officials as well as their staffers who know that they have some level of complicity in allowing this fraud to happen because it was politically advantageous. And so they're freaking out not because the money's going away, but because it might take away their political advantage.
(37:45) It might threaten their political victories in the future. So I can understand the freakout that they're having. And I'd also say that you're 100% right that Republicans, conservatives have done a terrible job of articulating uh what a a a better health care policy could look like for the country. There's been no articulation of a better healthcare policy.
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(39:58) the Gestapo that is uh the immigration crimes enforcement uh agency. And uh it's just scary looking out at it. And it doesn't seem like um many people, particularly your layman voter on the left, left your layman lefting voter can't see through this at all. I can't see that they're being used as um greater fools to in my in my opinion, in my observation to protect this fraudulent system.
(40:28) And I guess it's also it's a dynamic that underlies almost every you know contentious political or social or cultural dispute that we're having these days which is the the siloing of information. You know if you go and you look at you know X right now there's a different conversation happening. If you go and you look at like mommy blog or Instagram, um there's all these communities where people have been able to silo themselves off and only get access to information that reinforces their their own emotions, their own
(40:59) beliefs, which is really dangerous. And I think uh even even people like you and me who, you know, try to consume information from diverse sources, you've got to be really diligent about going out and making sure that you're getting not trapped in an echo chamber of your own making.
(41:17) 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 uh in the you know the suicidal empathy woman out in the streets ready to die for a you know a Somali daycare operator uh and it's just not happening. I don't know exactly what the answer to it is. Hopefully there's some technological solutions uh that can help uh improve the news consumption.
(41:42) Uh 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'm maybe I'm biased again, maybe I'm a victim of my own echo chamber, but right now I look at some of the people who are out there, you know, huffing on their whistles so that drunk drivers and child molesters don't get deported.
(42:02) And I I can't sympathize with that. I can't empathize with it. I'm like, I I have no idea what what would bring you to do that. What would motivate you to do that? >> Well, it seems like it's very coordinated, too. I'm not sure if you saw Cam Higgby um you reporting on the signal groups that he was able to get access to, and it it seems like a sort of paramilitary militia operation.
(42:24) >> It does. I mean, it seems it seems like a a state sponsored insurgency. Uh, I think that they've tied some uh high-ranking Minnesota officials to the group or at least they're, you know, um, correlating signal names with staffers to the governor or the lieutenant governor. Uh, and there has to be a way that they're able to run license plates.
(42:46) Uh, you know, as a investigative reporter, you know, I know I know a thing or two about you, you know, how you can use license plate data. And it's not just anybody who can, you know, Google a license plate and figure it out who the registered owner is. There's a select group of um professions who are allowed to run license plates.
(43:07) Private investigators, for example, can query license plates. Uh some insurance companies can do that. Uh but also there's a fair number of government employees who can query license plates. So, the fact that they have a Excel spreadsheet with 5,000 vehicles in it with their license plates and indications that they've been queried against government databases suggests that at least a few government employees are involved in helping them figure out who's driving these vehicles.
(43:33) And of course, they claim that they're trying to determine which of these vehicles uh is being operated by ICE or the US Marshalss or some some federal immigration authority. But here in Maine, we uh the Secretary of State just last week uh terminated the confidential plate system for uh undercover law enforcement.
(43:55) So before she did this, if you were uh an FBI agent in an undercover vehicle who was staking out a, you know, a child predator or a fentinel dealer, whatever the undercover investigation was, if that guy's got a buddy who's a private investigator, and he suspects you and runs your plates, it'll come back not on file. Uh now if you run those very same plates it's going to come back uh US government or department of justice or federal bureau of investigation depending on how they've registered those vehicles.
(44:25) So what the secretary of state in Maine has done is tee up and make it easier for leftist agitators if the chaos in Minneapolis comes to Maine in the same way. Tees it up for them to be able to dox and identify ICE agents some of whom I know and know that they live in these communities. So you're setting up a scenario where these people are going to be followed home to their families by left-wing agitators who have shown that they're totally unhinged.
(44:52) Like they don't want to have conversations. They want to have physical confrontations. They want to be violent. They're looking to martyr themselves in the name of protecting Somali Medicaid pirates. Uh so at least that example shows from the highest levels of state government, a woman who is secretary of state, who runs our elections, by the way, and is currently running for governor in the state is doing everything she can to use her official state power to help leftist agitators identify federal agents.
(45:21) And at the same time, we have Graham Platner who's running for US Senate right now. Uh wants to beat he's going to beat Janet Mills in the primary and then will have a chance to run against Susan Collins. He's the one with the Nazi tattoo who was a a national celebrity for a little while. He's out there literally stoking armed insurrection against the government.
(45:41) He's talking about like actual confrontation with ICE agents. Really really getting belligerent at rallies. It has all the all the echoes of uh you know civil war. uh they're they're turning this insurgency, they're turning the temperature up on it for political purposes. They obviously think that this is going to help them win elections and grow their power and grow their own money.
(46:02) Well, that's the really scary thing is if accountability, if these people aren't held accountable and they're allowed to get away with it, like how many more election cycles will be necessary before they have complete control and they can just dominate because they've created this infrastructure via Medicaid fraud and essentially buying boats and uh importing uh immigrants, giving them money to buy more votes like like that could be codified and it could be very hard to to unwind.
(46:36) Obviously, what we've seen in Virginia um since the Democrats took uh took control of that legislature uh and and the governorship there um they've gone full boore almost immediately uh in making it harder to um audit this stuff and making it harder to have certain perspectives. Uh and it it is quite scary to think if accountability isn't brought forth, if these people aren't held accountable that this this will be codified and there's no escaping it rather.
(47:06) >> You know, I'm I'm optimistic though. I mean, the Virginia is a pretty dark example. Uh you know, they did move really. I mean, everything about the way that election unfolded is really dark. uh uh given what the uh attorney general nominee was uh quoted as saying and the speed with which they move to implement some of the most radical leftwing policies that is scary.
(47:29) But I think that the um the large language models uh sometimes called AI tools uh if used properly will empower journalists in ways that are unimaginable. Uh, and one of the thing that we um at the main wire spend a lot of time doing is figuring out how we can leverage these tools in order to um help our journalism and do journalism in creative ways.
(47:52) And I'm not just talking about like, you know, prompting Grock, write me a story about Medicaid fraud. talking about uh you know designing programs that allow you to scrape government records, analyze government records, um you know, look over voter roles for duplicate voters or multiple voters registered at the same address, uh or identify patterns of um you know, Medicaid fraud, like you know, for example, we obtained through we had we actually had to sue in order to get these records, but we got all of the Medicaid spending record. cost me like
(48:23) uh $2,000 under the Freedom of Access Act here in the state of Maine. Uh 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 5 years now that we've expanded Medicaid, what kind of new businesses are coming into existence, and how are those new businesses fairing? Uh and we did find a pattern of uh startup Medicaid agencies that go from zero to 17 million in three years. Uh and anytime you see, you know,
(48:55) income growth like that, it merits further investigation. Um but we also find clusters of Medicaid agencies at at the similar addresses. And so what what Nick Shirley found when he was out, you know, with a whistleblower walking around and looking at these different places, we were seeing this last year by just by looking at the records, uh, 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
(49:25) activities and just so happened to be run by um, you know, quote unquote new mayors. Um, one for example that we found was um on Anderson Street in Portland. There were five home health care agencies in one building along with a dahab shield which is an emroi money transfer company that is blessed by the central bank of Somalia and actually the winner of the 2024 Somalia Excellence Awards.
(49:53) I'm sure you pay very close attention to that award ceremony, but Dahab Shiel has that that honor. Uh, and I went into the building and I tried to send $40 to my friend's mom in Mogadishu, but uh wasn't able to do it without giving the uh 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.
(50:19) So, I had to I had to back out. And my mom's uh friend or my friend's mom was disappointed that she's not going to get my 40 bucks. 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.
(50:40) And I just couldn't help but look at it. This is the full cycle. This is health care in America. The money goes into these Medicaid companies, which may or may not have any patients or even employees. It goes to the Dah Hahab shield and then out the door on the brakes truck and it ends up in Moadishu building you know luxury apartments or you know funding AK-47 purchases from Azure Bjan or something like that.
(51:07) Uh 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 including some custom tools that we've built just for looking at this stuff. We were able to I guess come up with an asymmetric solution to just drowning in the data uh that allowed us to pinpoint what we would do and streamline what we would do in terms of on the ground in uh journalism.
(51:30) Um, and tools like that and use cases of Grock or Gemini or Chat GBT make me optimistic that journalists if they use and understand these tools can become smarter and more sophisticated than the government bureaucrats who are trying to, you know, hi hide what they're doing. Uh, because it's very difficult to hide where the money is going ultimately.
(51:52) >> Yeah, I think it's inevitable. I don't think the politicians can keep up with the uh the autist who have been handed these powerful tools. >> I agree. I think that's part of the reason why they become so desperate. >> I think you've seen a big like they are uh especially with Elon doing coming in with Doge and closing up uh uh the USA ID. Now this is applying to Medicaid.
(52:14) I think at least the smarter ones see the writing on the wall that stealing taxpayer money to fund political schemes is going to be a lot harder. And that's in part why you're seeing the level of desperation you are in Minneapolis um in Portland, Maine, uh because they know uh you know the the the easy money days are over.
(52:35) >> Yeah. Well, you were explaining to Sean, in case anybody's listening to this hasn't watched that episode yet, how you used Grock to sort of guess URLs that would give you documents that the uh the government was refusing to hand over. >> Yeah. I mean, this was uh fun and kind of funny.
(52:54) I mean, I've had people message me since then who listened to that and were like, "Oh, can you send me the program so that I can do this?" And I'm like, it it really wasn't that uh, you know, spectacularly brilliant. It was just on a whim getting grocked to uh design a simple Python script that would scrape documents off of government websites.
(53:15) But the the the origin of the story is that uh when the state spends money uh through a no bid contract process, um so usually when the state spends money, it's supposed to put out an RFP, a request for proposal. So the the state says, you know, I want to buy uh 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.
(53:39) Here's the price. Here's why you should buy our boats." And then they debate amongst the proposals and the competition for that RFP ends up producing in theory the best value for the taxpayer. 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.
(54:00) And sometimes there are legitimate reasons for this. Like if you're in, you know, down east Maine where you need the prop on your boat fixed, it's like some government research vessel and there's like only one dude named Randy in town who fixes boat props. Instead of doing an RFP, you just let Randy fix the boat and then you fill out on the form like Ry's the only guy in town who fixes boats, so we're going to give him $4,000 to fix the boat.
(54:25) Uh, so there are decent normal non-corrupt reasons for the RFP process, 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. They were going to left-wing NOS's. They were going to, you know, like the the groups that support transing 5-year-olds in kindergarten.
(54:45) They're like just the popoly of leftist groups were getting no bid contract money shoveled to them. And it wasn't just $5,000. It was like, you know, $120,000. We even found um $120,000 in no bid contracts to the Portland Press Herald, which is the, you know, the biggest daily newspaper. Uh they were actually paid to write positive articles about the state, about the Mills administration's education policy.
(55:11) We we found no bid contracts to the Bangor Daily News, the second biggest uh uh nonprofit. They were paid for public affairs work for a couple of different programs. So our interest was peaked in how the state was spending money through these no bid contracts. But we found that because of the it was written into state law that they only had to publish these no bid contracts once for a 7-day period and then they disappeared from the state archives.
(55:36) So you've got a website that shows you the the no bid contracts, but you have to log in within a 7-day window or it's going to disappear and not be archived anymore. 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 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.
(56:03) Uh so we filed a Freedom of Access Act request for all of the no bid contract documents and they came back to us and said, "We can't do it. We just technologically we don't know how. It's impossible for us to provide you with those documents." which I thought was fishy. Uh but I was like, "Okay, there's really nothing I can do after they've told me that.
(56:24) " Uh but then in looking at some of our older stories where we had linked to uh uh 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. So we knew all of the documents that we were requesting from the government were still on a government server, were still available online.
(56:45) the PDFs were were out there. They just weren't indexed anywhere and you couldn't figure out how to get to them and download them. So, I took I copied all of the URLs from the nobit contracts that we did know about and pasted them into Grock and asked Grock to find the naming pattern. What was the convention that was being used to establish names for all these PDFs because they had numbers and they kind of looked like they were in order.
(57:11) and Grock very quickly found what the naming convention was and then a little while tinkering around with it. I created or asked it to create a script that would randomly guess at uh URLs following the pattern that we'd identified and if there was a PDF there to download it and then 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 and we had to uh tinker around with it five or six times.
(57:40) Uh, but then when we 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 that 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 uh without justifying it.
(57:59) " Sometimes the money goes out the door before the contracts even signed. And we found uh just crazy stuff uh you know enough to write a whole year's worth of stories on including no bid contracts to Abdulahi Ali who was running for warlord in Jubiland like while he's in Jubiland running for office with his militia he's getting no bid contracts and the justification there's like a little form on these documents to justify like why why are you doing this no bid contract and they literally just copied and pasted his biography into to the
(58:32) justification section where it says uh Abdah Ali is a Somali refugee. As if that's enough reason to hand somebody, you know, $500,000, like he's a refugee, so give him $500,000. Uh all kinds of different uh no bid contract abuse. Um people people handing contracts to to NOS's that they would later end up working for.
(58:55) Uh NOS's for huge sums of money to cover up mistakes that the government had made. um just just really some inexplicable stuff and all of it pointing towards corruption. And in hindsight, it's like, yeah, you could have found these. You easily could have found these documents. I didn't have to like go all Grock pirate on your ass and pull these.
(59:14) You didn't want me to find these because you knew that there was something bad uh happening here. I mean, we we found we found one where the guy 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 state house grounds.
(59:39) And uh they told us it was totally on the level and he he, you know, didn't exert any pressure on the process. uh he just happened to resign right after we published our story on it. Uh you know, it's like the some of it's just like small ball. It's like is does it really going to change the world when you know the the guy's given $800,000 to his brother's company? No, probably not.
(1:00:00) But all of that petty small corruption, it's like Banana Republic stuff and it adds up. And when you turn a blind eye to these little uh teeny tiny examples of corruption, it gives license and emboldens the people who would do bigger and bigger uh forms of corruption. And last week we the uh 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 over billing in one autism program in Maine in in 2023. So, one year, one program,
(1:00:35) $46 million in overbilling, and it just so happens to be the program that uh was abused so thoroughly in Minnesota and the same program that Gateway Community Services was overbilling. 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.
(1:01:00) Uh, so that's why I 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. >> I would not be shocked at all if it was somewhere around 80%. Uh, >> it's it's it's madness. And and I, you know, Elon actually retweeted me the other day when I asked where are all the parents in Minnesota who have lost their daycare? you know, if you if you because those the daycarees have all been shut down now, but not a single parent has comeo come forward and said, "Well, what am I
(1:01:31) supposed to do for child care now?" But if you actually, you know, destroyed the child care for tens of thousands of families, I think you'd be able to find at least one parent to come forward, but you haven't found any of them. And it's the same with all these home healthcare agencies.
(1:01:46) as the funding gets turned off, you don't see patients coming forward and being like, well, you know, grandma's not getting her home healthcare anymore because all of these agencies went away. It's because they're just they're total frauds. It was like the second video that Nick Shirley put out when he went back with uh his uh his cracked out boomer David.
(1:02:07) It was I mean they went to the one daycare center. It was like three Somali men in their 40s and 50s and it's like who's dropping their kids off >> with these guys and they were wearing very nice clothes. >> Sure, they had nice cars. But it's like and that's like the frustrating thing is like since all this has been unearthed over the last year really since US A was um was sort of pilered by by Doge.
(1:02:33) Um it's like we're expected to have like a polite conversation about this, but it's like hey this is like so obvious like don't tell me not to believe my lying eyes. Like this is overt fraud. I don't need I don't need people to be charged trials to happen years to go by before uh accountability and justice is served.
(1:02:52) Like we 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 um and you produce things and are a productive member of society, you will be able to climb the economic ladder.
(1:03:14) And that has been ripped out from under tens of millions probably over a 100 million Americans over the last really 15 years since the 2008 financial crisis. And it's it's insulting. It's humiliating. And the fact that we're being being asked to just like, hey, wait, we'll do the we'll do the um investigations. There will be charges.
(1:03:38) It's like something's got to give. We got to stop this as quickly as possible. Yeah, I mean that's that exact problem is something that I've been uh wrangling with myself for 10 months now because there's part of the American character that wants, you know, you know, uh guilty or innocent until proven guilty, you know, give them their day in court.
(1:03:59) They need to have a defense attorney. You know, what does the evidence say? Uh but the evidence now is just so overwhelming and it's one community and it's like well h how stupid do we have to pretend to be uh to our own detriment in order to uphold uh these you know legal traditions that these people don't even believe in and don't even care about very obviously.
(1:04:22) Uh, 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 the the full American criminal justice experiment. We experience we just we just don't have enough lawyers.
(1:04:46) Like you could you could have every single person who ran a daycare or a home healthcare agency, every single person who's done Medicaid fraud st stand forward and come, you know, raise their hand and say, "Yep, I did a fraud." And then we're going to start the criminal justice process with trials and everything. We just don't have enough lawyers.
(1:05:01) We don't have enough man-hour. We don't have enough defense attorneys. There's just we are physically incapable as a bureaucracy of handling the magnitude of fraud before us. So, it's either some of this goes totally unpunished and just gets, you know, we hope we make an example out of a few of them and and then the others know not to do it anymore, or you come up with you come over the top and you have a a a solution that is, in my view, kinetic or military uh you have mass mass deportations and dennaturalizations.
(1:05:35) You have to be able to respond to this in a way that is uh you know overwhelming and is proportionate to the amount of fraud that's happened. Uh I told Sean I I believe that this is economic terrorism. I believe that this is statebacked. I believe that state actors or at least um political factions within uh foreign states are encouraging this, aiding, abetting this, are protecting these pipelines of money.
(1:06:01) Uh if you look at Somalia, it's some absurd percent of their national GDP is remittances coming from the US. Some of their most profitable companies are companies that exist solely to suck wealth out of the United States. And so if you're an elected official or a clan leader or a, you know, reigning warlord in Somalia, it's pretty important to you to keep that money flowing.
(1:06:25) So you're going to do everything you can to keep that money flowing. And that would include having agents in uh Minnesota and in Maine to protect that flow of money to give advice and coaching and counseling on making sure that that money is coming back. And we have actually identified an individual who is prominent in Maine's political scene whose name is Hussein Hersy Ahmed who was the finance minister for Jubiland and is a member of uh Somalia's parliament and he owns a large commercial building in Lewon where the Somali diaspora is concentrated and his
(1:07:00) tenants include home healthcare agencies uh halal stores with EBT card machines uh uh left-wing NOS's that advocate for new mayors and the Somali community. Um, you can't help but wonder if all of these connections that you're seeing between like, you know, the the UN ambassador for Somalia who had a daycare in in Minnesota, are are these just, you know, random? Are these accidents? Were they opportunistic and trying to make money or is it in in fact part of a a a a um a plan that was designed for nation building for enriching them just like
(1:07:39) you know people would say you know George Bush invaded Iraq so we could suck the oil out. Well could it be that Somalia is invading parts of the United States to suck that Medicaid oil out? Uh I think the evidence points toward yes. And I also don't think that uh the Somali are the only, you know, nation or only ethnic group that are engaged in this kind of behavior.
(1:08:00) I think that a lot of Central American countries are doing it as well. And I think that uh Rwanda and some other Central African countries are doing it as well. >> Yeah, we're being taken for fools. And and again, that's the going back to the suicidal empathy that exists in across large swavs of our population. And it's it's I mean I think that's the biggest hurdle to actually having this kinetic response that you describe because you you've seen Ilan Omar and um others in the Somali community that have risen to the ranks of um US political um seats in
(1:08:36) the in in the House of Representatives, whatever it may be, state and local legislators as well. and they openly go to rallies filled with other Somalians and claim um claim sort of uh what's the word I'm looking for? They claim >> victimhood. >> Well, not victimhood. No, they claim they they they openly admit that they they are where they are because they want to make Somalia stronger.
(1:09:01) >> Oh, yes. Yeah. The the Somalia first. We Yeah, we've we have uh we have some some Ilhans of our own in Maine. Uh I think I mentioned her earlier, Deca Da. Um I mean she's this woman is on video at least five or six times in Somali and and in English saying Somalia is our number one priority.
(1:09:22) 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. We have video of her uh deplaning in Puntland, Somalia, and she gets like a Kardashian greeting. You know, there are people lining the the airirstrip celebrating her and like losing their minds.
(1:09:43) It's like, you know, the Beatles landing in the United States for the first time. And she's a state law maker, you know, like she's making $21,000 a year as a state lawmaker with really not that much power. But back in Somalia, for some reason, she's she's hailed like Princess D.
(1:10:00) Uh, and you have to wonder, well, maybe there's something we're not seeing. Maybe there's some money that she's uh 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. Uh but yeah, they are they're openly saying it 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.
(1:10:26) You know, we we've been so bad to Africa and Central America. I think we should be allowing them to steal our money and take it back to their countries. >> Yeah. As their neighbors are struggling. And and not only that, that they're struggling too, which is the funny thing. They'll they'll complain about groceries and the cost of schooling, daycare, um healthcare, and not recognize like, hey, there's a glaring core of this problem is staring you right in the face.
(1:10:54) and and you have this inability to actually confront it because of feels. >> Yeah. I'm glad I'm glad you you brought that aspect of it up because I had the experience. So, we both worked at Bar Stool. I I you you got out before I did, but after I uh got down at Bar Stool, my wife and I did uh we bought a camper van and we drove all around the country.
(1:11:15) 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 and we had the benefit of just going through all these back towns and seeing a lot of just getting between the coasts, seeing parts of the country that um aren't doing so hot.
(1:11:36) Um, and after that we settled back in Maine. And one of the first big investigative projects I started was uh looking at Chinese organized crime in Maine. And particularly these cannabis houses that had uh popped up all over the rural parts of the state. And I mean we racked up uh you know at least 10,000 miles driving to all these places in rural Maine.
(1:11:58) Maine's a bigger state than than people think. And I got to see a lot of the state and a lot of the conditions that people are living in. 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. Um lots of dilapitated places that looked like, you know, 20 years ago they were dilapitated, didn't need a a new coat of paint.
(1:12:23) Uh but now they're just derelictked. and you would see the poverty and the suffering that people were enduring in rural Maine. And it's not right in your face because it's not New York City or Boston. You know, the media cameras, they're not there. It's distributed out into the woods of rural Maine, but it's still human suffering.
(1:12:40) It's still poverty. It's still people who are being neglected and forgotten by their governments. And we'd go into the homeless camps as well in Bangor, Portland, Rumford, Samford, all these towns that had, you know, once had pro prosperous manufacturing sectors. Um, but now their biggest manufacturing sector, and this isn't a joke, their biggest manufacturing sector is cannabis and breweries because our our economists classify that as manufacturing.
(1:13:06) But we'd see these homeless camp camps and go and we'd interview these people to try and figure out, you know, why are you here? you know, what circumstances led you to be, you know, in this camp where obviously everybody is using fentanyl. Um, and so to see that all of the the very real suffering that's happening throughout Maine in these rural communities and even in the urban communities and old buildings that used to employ a thousand people collapsing in on themselves.
(1:13:35) Uh, and then to look at these guys making a million dollars a year doing a Medicaid fraud. It's like, holy cow, have we misprioritized our resources? And it really just makes me angry more than anything that we've got a a government that is so uh distorted in how it allocates resources that we've totally forgotten about the people who have lived here for five or six generations and are now living living in misery, poverty, and squalor.
(1:14:00) Uh but the people who came here six months ago can go get the luxury apartments that were built for them because it was trendy to uh build out refugee housing. >> How have mayorers reacted to your reporting? Is there positive momentum in the right direction because of this? >> I mean I think so. When I uh 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.
(1:14:31) uh I've gone from 25,000 hits a month on the website to usually like half a million to a million hits. Um so growing in traffic and in interest across the board and you know I think even even the uh incumbent politicians who are reluctant to acknowledge us as uh you know real media uh like the you know 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 but I mean it it doesn't matter just helps us it forces us to be creative.
(1:15:01) um they're increasingly forced to acknowledge the reality of what we're reporting on. And the the governor after ignoring our reporting on Gateway Community Services for 10 months, uh when the national media started picking it up and piling on, all of a sudden she decided that she was going to, you know, suspend funding to to Gateway, which is uh important for two reasons.
(1:15:24) The first is that uh you know finally uh 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. Uh but it also points toward what I think is a solution that every state can uh avail themselves of to crack down on Medicaid fraud.
(1:15:45) And that is that every every governor uh and their health department have the ability to suspend payments to any Medicaid provider based on an allegation of fraud or wrongdoing. You don't need a criminal conviction. You don't need an audit finding. Uh you you all it needs to be is a credible allegation.
(1:16:05) That could be an anonymous email that says I believe you know legit home healthc care is defrauding the you know the government. uh they have huge discretion over how they allow those funds to go out. So, every single governor could right now disenroll their Medicaid providers and force them to go through a more rigorous process of reenrolling.
(1:16:28) And what that would look like is you stop payments to everybody who is getting Medicaid money and say you need to come in here and you need to sit in front of, you know, a panel of five people. you know, maybe it's a uh the program integrity expert, the auditor, just some people who are maybe a little bit skeptical and have a brain, and you need to explain that you're a real organization and prove it.
(1:16:50) Uh, you know, 60 or 70% of these entities wouldn't even show up for that, and they certainly wouldn't be able to prove that they actually have customers and they actually have employees. Um, that's something that every single state could do. You could immediately kick them out of the program, force them to reenroll.
(1:17:07) You could do that with EBT cards, by the way. uh all those EBT card terminals, those are being abused. People are swiping their EBT card and then getting, you know, 80 cents on the dollar. They get the cash back in exchange for the benefits so that they can spend the cash on drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. Um all of those welfare programs, you could just basically unplug it and plug it back in.
(1:17:28) Uh we have that. You don't need Congress to pass a law. It's already contained within the 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.
(1:17:45) It's about providing health care for people who through, you know, just a luck of life uh aren't able to provide care for themselves. And so the fact that it's become bastardized by fraudsters uh so that people can drive Lamborghinis in Kenya uh it's should be offensive to progressives that the social safety net has been abused in this way. But there's a solution.
(1:18:05) Um there are there are plenty of uh things that the the governors could do, plenty of things that they could do at the congressional level that would stop this from happening. Uh but you have to have the political will to do it and you have to have politicians who aren't benefiting from the very schemes that we're trying to fix and reform.
(1:18:21) completely agree and you just answered what was going to be my next question. What can we do about this? Because at the state level, at the obviously at the federal level, we talked about it a bit like the bureaucracy is such it would be impossible. Um, so you need some sort of outside of the box solution to this, which I'm in favor for personally.
(1:18:39) But then like individual citizens, I think it's just imperative to make sure that these stories don't go away. And I think more importantly, um, recognize that there are entrenched interests that are trying to put forth rhetoric that riles people's up, gets them in the street and, you know, pushes things to uh, a violent level and and recognize that you're being manipulated to um, protect these these programs that are just pure fraud.
(1:19:12) Um, that's what I worry about most moving forward, obviously with what happened uh over the last few weeks in Minnesota with the confrontations with ICE agents and um the uh the two individuals that were shot and um it's really disconcerting to see um because you could see how this could escalate really quickly 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 Yeah, I mean we may have already uh gotten to that point, frankly. I mean,
(1:19:45) it's there does seem to be uh an element of cosplaying amongst some of the the left-wing agitators here. I mean, we had uh last week there was a uh some hoax spam caller from Canada was put placing uh fake bomb threats to schools, banks, businesses all throughout Maine at the same time that the ICE uh activities were ramping up.
(1:20:12) Um, so schools were going into lockdown. Banks were going into lockdown. Caused a lot of chaos and confusion and there was a police department in central Maine that was responding to what they thought was a person of interest uh in relation to a threat that had been made against a high school there. as they're responding uh to this person of interest, this 60-year-old woman, you know, stops her car in the middle of the road, jumps out with a a whistle and a blowhorn, and starts screaming at the cops and getting in their face and trying to physically
(1:20:42) stop them from investigating what they thought was uh uh something related to an active shooter case, a school shooter case, had nothing to do with immigration whatsoever. And this woman thinks that she's going to be a hero by jumping out of the car. Uh, and and there was no indication whatsoever this was ICE.
(1:20:59) It was just like local police department chasing a a tip or lead. I mean, this woman, fortunately, is going to be charged. They're going to throw the book at her. But it just gives you an example of how they're um it's like the facts don't matter. I mean, they're they're stopping SUVs with white men in them that look like they could be ICE agents and demanding to see their papers.
(1:21:18) I mean, it's like darkly hilarious that they've become fascistic in their approach to fighting fascism. You know, they're like racially profiling people and demanding to see their papers uh out in Minnesota. And I'm sure uh it's coming to Maine as well. Uh and and really any state where they try to uh you know enforce what's happening here.
(1:21:38) But like I said, I I have to remain optimistic. I you know I do think that the the tools that are coming online you know there I'm sure there's going to be great um evil that will be permitted with authoritarian governments when they have uh you know the the likes of Palunteer or the Chinese social credit system.
(1:21:59) There are some really malevolent things that they can do when it comes to tracking you or or controlling you with large language models. But I think if you use the tools effectively as a journalist or a citizen activist, u you can um become much more uh much stronger, much more powerful, you can enhance your investigative efforts uh and you can become more efficient at finding uh the truth of what's going on of what your government's doing.
(1:22:22) >> Yeah. >> Well, thank you for doing what you're doing. That's that's another reason to be optimistic is individuals like you out there actually doing uh legitimate investigative journalism which seems to have gone by the wayside in our society uh in in recent decades. I mean actually diving into the numbers and um doing the hard work of sifting through all these documents and unearthing all this data again it seems like it was a lost art for a while there.
(1:22:50) >> We have fun doing it. It's uh I I think it's exciting for I mean for me the uh it's it's thrilling to come up with a a good scoop and be able to uh share it with people especially u you know the the more unlikely uh a scoop is the the further fetched a story is uh if you can connect the dots to it and show that it's uh that it's true.
(1:23:12) Uh I think it's uh it's fun and I enjoy doing it. Um, but one one thing I'll give a shameless plug for, we've actually tried to um make one of our AI tools available for other people to use. Uh, we call it Harpe and it's a we named it Harpe because that's the blade that Perseus used to chop off Medusa's head and we think Medusa is like a good uh analogy for what the government has become.
(1:23:38) Uh, but we I had I paid a developer to um create a program that would turn these no bid contracted documents that we scraped so that they were machine searchable and machine readable because they were really just like scans of actual documents. So you couldn't search through them for um you know dollar amounts or the names of bureaucrats or the names of agencies.
(1:23:59) They weren't really usable. Uh and then we we I had him tweak it to put give it some other purposes and it became a useful tool for sorting through big batches of documents and doing link analysis on them. So you could look on the other side after you've processed the documents like oh okay so what addresses what addresses do we keep seeing in these documents and who's what entities are related to those addresses.
(1:24:22) So, we're trying to turn it into a tool that's powered by Gemini on the back end and is uh 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. But if you leverage uh uh large language model tools, you might be able to make sense of them and you know sort the signal from the noise and find stories there.
(1:24:48) uh and we are still trying to develop it in a way that I'm sure you've been involved in a number of uh software projects. We're trying to do it in a way where we don't create this huge honeypot of data that somebody could um come hack. So we want it to be run locally on people's computers. So we're still working on a model that's not just customuilt for me but could be shared.
(1:25:08) Uh but we hope to make that accessible to people and ideally uh you know journalists and other people who are trying to do public interest journalism so that they can um replicate some of the things that we've done in Maine uh finding really good stories and uh mountains of data. Uh because you know a lot of this stuff is hiding in plain sight like usaspending.gov.
(1:25:28) A lot of this data it's been sitting out there in public for a long long time but there's you know you can hide stuff through overdisclosure. 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. Um that's that's a it's almost like it's counterintuitive, but that's a way of concealing what the government is actually doing through overdisclosure.
(1:25:49) Uh and you you just need other tools. You need an asymmetric solution in order to sort through that data. Um so if people wanted to find out more about that, they can go to getarpay.com and sign up for our mailing list and we'll be sending out an email when we have a version that's ready for, you know, beta testing.
(1:26:05) Um, this is my first time doing a project like this. I basically just found the most autisticbased programmer in Maine and told them what I needed and so hopefully it becomes something that's uh useful for other journalists. >> I'll have to uh link you up with my friends at Maple AI who are doing uh running LLMs in secure enclave so you can do confidential compute which sounds like it could be beneficial for the particular use case you were describing.
(1:26:30) >> Absolutely. Yeah. I mean we'd love to we'd love to talk with anybody. we really we made this just for me to accomplish a certain set of tasks, but at some point we're like, you know what, this is pretty useful and cool. I think other people could benefit from it. Um, so, uh, we'll definitely have to connect on that.
(1:26:45) >> Yeah, it's the, uh, the age of the double-edged sword. These technologies are incredibly powerful in good ways and bad. And it's again being optimistic. I think more and more people are recognizing um that you can leverage these tools and do things that were simply impossible only two years ago which is massive.
(1:27:07) Um broader point uh because I know we have a uh a mutual interest in Bitcoin. One thing I just wanted to put out there too is like a lot of this fraud is enabled by the ability to issue debt and print money at will. And part of the reason >> part of the reason why I'm so >> passionate about Bitcoin is it can sort of force the the issue in terms of u making it so the government has to explain why they're distributing funds the way they are.
(1:27:40) They can't just print money or issue debts willy-nilly if they have to answer to the uh the confines and the framework works put forward by by by sound currency in the digital age in the form of Bitcoin. >> It it's it's all it's all debt financed. I mean all the Medicaid money is is uh you know money that doesn't exist except for on an imaginary balance sheet.
(1:28:02) Um, and uh, the co money, I mean, $15 billion was just invented from thin air and sprinkled on Maine and our roads aren't better. You know, our schools aren't better. Uh, there's we literally no one knows where that money went. But when you start looking at the no bid contracts, it's like, oh, okay. So, it went to the people who were politically connected.
(1:28:23) It really was the the cantalon effect of uh you know the people who were closest to the the governor and the government benefited most from all the COVID surplus money that was being pumped into the state. Uh and you're 100% right that it's only like the the fiat system enables this kind of fraud, waste, and abuse. Uh the it's totally to blame for uh the rise of housing prices in Maine.
(1:28:47) Um, you know, we've got fraudulent fiat dollars pumped into the economy and all these Medicaid entrepreneurs are out there and suddenly it's not a big deal for them to bid, you know, a half a million dollars on a house that should probably cost like $200,000. And then the middle class mayors who are, you know, working on a lobster boat or, you know, in working as a carpenter or something, uh, they're priced out of the houses that would be would have been, you know, maybe their second home or uh, a starter home even. Um, so
(1:29:16) they're the ones who are suffering from it. And there's another uh, uh, crypto angle to it as well. uh that I guess just like just like in in Bitcoin in remittances there's all kinds of shitcoinery grow going on. I mean this does this isn't just specific to to Maine but we found um dozens and dozens examples uh of Somali fraudsters who are trying to come up with their own um cryptocurrency, their own shitcoin that's going to solve the uh remittance problem.
(1:29:49) you know, you're not going to have to rely on uh, you know, no more bank secrecy act, no more anti-m moneyaundering rules. You don't have to go to the Dahab shield or the Taj or the Western Union. You can just use uh Somali coin to transfer your money back instantaneously to your auntie's phone back in Moadishu. And uh, you know, you know how that story ends.
(1:30:10) Basically, every single one of them is a a pump and dump scheme uh that ends up with a select few people getting extremely wealthy. Um but that is not to say that the money transfer business isn't massive in Somalia. It's like uh you know there are several large money transmitter firms. Uh Western Union and Moneygram don't really operate in Somalia. They operate in Kenya.
(1:30:36) So you can transfer money that way into Kenya and then someone can go into Kenya and come back to Somalia. But they have specific uh tailored money transmitter firms. They're basically digital hoalas that will transfer money and those are hugely influential in a political sense and an economic sense because whoever controls the end pipeline of that money gets gets a skim.
(1:31:02) So if it's in Jubiland and it's coming into um al-Shabaab controlled territory, well then you have a radical Islamic terrorist organization that's getting a five to 10% skim off of all that Medicaid fraud money that's going into the country. So the Medicaid fraud is literally funding terrorism. Uh but even when it's not funding radical Islamic terrorism, 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 Moadishu.
(1:31:29) So there's uh incredible interclan strife to control like where that spet of money is going to be directed because no matter who who controls it, they get a skim on it. So it's like this entire you know clan warfare multipolar civil war anarchctic version or territory in in Africa that's all determined by you know spets of money spa spraying American tax dollars in different directions.
(1:31:57) Uh it's really it's really up. >> It it is. It is. But it it's also hilarious. But yeah, like it affected the Minneapolis mayoral campaign this year. >> Hugely. And and uh I actually I have some Somali friends who are pro-American and don't run Medicaid businesses. And I rely on them to help me understand some of the things that just look inexplicable like Omar Fata losing that election when everyone was like, "Oh, he's he's Somali and the diaspora is going to vote for him.
(1:32:27) That's 100,000 votes. this is settled like not this is act he doesn't stand a chance but the the clan resentments are so strong that they endure even to people who are you know were maybe 2 or 3 years old when they arrived in the United States or maybe even their first generation like the they're US citizens they were born in the United States but they've grown up with these lingering class resentments uh so that like for example in in uh in uh Maine the Darude clan is the preeminent political faction.
(1:33:00) Uh, and I think it's the same in Minnesota as well, but Omar Fatah was not Darude. I think he was like Haw or something like that. And so that's why he people voted for Jacob Fry, you know, a Jewish white guy instead of the uh the Somali candidate in that election. Um, but those there's like four or five major clans and then when within those clans there's subclans that have resentments against one another.
(1:33:28) Uh but those uh as a result of a lot of inbreeding uh but also just the the cultural legacy of how their societies were organized, those clan resentments are much stronger than any attachments that they have to uh you know a regional government in Somalia, their national government or whatever uh political body that they might um live under once they immigrate to the United States.
(1:33:52) They're never going to have more feelalty to the government of Minneapolis or Minnesota than they do to their own clan. And that's one of the reasons why the fraud became so big and so endemic and everybody knew about it, but no one said anything about it is because their loyalty is to their clan and not to, you know, Uncle Sam or the taxpayer or to some higher ethical creed.
(1:34:14) Yeah, that was another illuminating thing from the uh on the ground reporting in Minneapolis is just like asking people on the street like what are they like and people were like I don't know they don't talk to us like it yeah I mean it's it is a very uh insular society like the the assimilation has not happened I mean you like the the pract the practical look at it in Maine is beginning in 2000 you had legitimate refugees come to Atlanta, Georgia.
(1:34:46) And then you had a secondary wave of migration to Portland, Maine through Catholic Charities and some other NOS's. And Portland, Maine didn't have as much surplus um large family housing as Lewon. And so Portland and Lewon made a deal and Lewon became the place that accepted the larger families of Somali refugees. And so by about um 2003, you had 250 to 300 Somali who were living in that community.
(1:35:14) Uh and then over time that grew to now probably 15,000 to 20,000 in Lewon and the surrounding area, but it is uh very much a a culture apart. It's very much still um uh not integrated. And my my theory as to why that is is because the the the immigration industrial complex is like a Ponzi scheme.
(1:35:41) Like most of the early Medicaid businesses that the first generation of Somali started were translation businesses. So they would be the ones hired by the hospitals or the schools or whatever um you know government office needed to have uh these translation services for like ADA reasons or accommodation reasons. So the translator the translation businesses were the first ones to tap into Medicaid and become pretty profitable, get this taxpayer money flowing in.
(1:36:09) 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 whether they need it or not. You can say there was a translator there and they needed the translation service. And there's been a lot of indictments and investigations around that.
(1:36:27) But in order to keep um 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 because over time, people are going to assimilate and they're not going to need the translation services. And that goes as well for uh the the migrant services agencies that help people get housing or help them get Medicaid or help them get transportation.
(1:36:52) like the entire NGO blob that exists to uh use taxpayer money to help migrants who don't speak English and don't understand American culture. It's sustained by this constant flow of, you know, new Americans or migrants, illegal aliens coming into the state or into the country. So that's why I think it's like a Ponzi scheme.
(1:37:12) have to have this continuous flow of migrants in order for these migrant agencies to justify their own existence and to justify the huge and growing amounts of taxpayer money flowing into these organizations. Like we just created the office of new Americans. You know, why do you need an 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've got all kinds of people who don't speak English showing up at the country looking for
(1:37:41) welfare and this office is going to have, you know, bureaucrats out there helping them sign up for welfare. 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.
(1:37:58) >> Yeah. and the and the NOS's you mentioned Catholic Charities like the these NOS's play a big role and they need the money they need more of it so >> hugely I mean Catholic Charities is in my opinion a human trafficking organization they get paid to to um you know move migrants around to communities that uh never voted for that and don't want that um you know it's uh really it's a it's a bastardization of the Catholic Church to have charities like the Catholic Charities and even the Lutheran uh organizations, the Lutheran
(1:38:33) NOS's, they are like prancing around in a in a Christian skin suit claiming to be Christians when what they're really doing is facilitating uh third world migrations to western areas. Uh but they are I mean their effect on society has been extremely pernitious and the fact that they do it while uh pining and pretending to have the moral high ground is I think repugnant.
(1:38:57) Yeah, they're building the Tower of Babel. >> Yeah. >> Contributing to it. At least it's uh to fix a problem, you have to understand that it exists in the first place. And I think the work that you're doing is making it abundantly clear that the problem does exist. And um my hope is that we don't get uh thrown into a civil war and cooler heads prevail and we can can fix this because it's just straightforward.
(1:39:28) Again, going back to don't tell me not to believe my lying eyes. Like there is overt rampant fraud going on with US taxpayer dollars and debt that we're we're acrewing um which is going up exponentially. U it's been a big topic. >> Yeah. And I I would say don't don't just don't believe what you're seeing on uh you know CNN or even Fox.
(1:39:50) you know, they they get paid to show you the tear gas canisters exploding and the, you know, the conflict and stoke this idea that a civil war is brewing. Uh, in Maine, poll after poll has shown it's like 80% of people support what ICE is doing. You're looking in, you know, in every state where there's these conflicts, you're looking at a tiny fringe minority that in many cases is being busted from state to state to state in order to create this political theater that plays out on your TV screen.
(1:40:22) Like here on the ground, there's it's a tiny tiny group of people who are huffing on their whistles and screaming at ICE. Uh but the vast majority of people in Maine support what ICE is doing. Uh like we had an example that I I tweeted about uh earlier today. Uh ICE is chasing these two illegal aliens and the local mayors are like standing out on the road going, "They went that way. They went that way.
(1:40:46) " Like trying to help the ICE agents track these guys down. One mayor gives gives an ICE agent his four-wheeler. And so the guy jumps on his four-wheeler and chases down the ice the the the illegal aliens that he was apprehending. And you can see and uh someone supply 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. Like that's Maine. That's
(1:41:16) real America. That's I think how the majority of Americans feel like they will give their four-wheeler and, you know, their their sidearm. they will uh you know donate resources uh in order to facilitate what ISIS is doing because it's God's work. You know these aren't uh starving refugees who escaped Nazi Germany that are being apprehended.
(1:41:36) You can look at the DHS's website. They are publishing the the the uh criminal histories and backgrounds of these people and they're not people you want in your community. They're scammers, thieves, child molesters, murderers, abusers. They're they're bad people and they're illegal aliens. And I think everybody should celebrate the fact that we're finally removing them from our communities.
(1:42:00) Well, that's been uh I'm sure you saw too, but like the the way the media can manipulate people has never we have another example. I'm not going to say it's never been made clearer to me than this example, but it's a great example of like Tom Hman getting a medal of or some medal from Obama in 2012 for deporting twice as many people as he did in 2025.
(1:42:19) And it's like, well, it's the same guy in control here. Uh, it was being celebrated a little over a decade ago. Now it's Gustapo Nazi fascism. >> Yeah. I mean, like, I did a a ride along with some ICE agents in Maine on Friday. And, you know, we didn't glorify it. I mean, would I have liked to have seen some action, some excitement, you know, some tear gas going off? Yes, that would have been more exciting.
(1:42:44) We just kind of sat outside a a subsidized apartment complex waiting for a drunk driving illegal alien to come out of his building and he didn't come out and so there was nothing there but hey they're not all going to be winners. Um but when we posted about it and just wrote a story about like here's what we saw. We did an interview with the deputy director of ICE. Here's what she said.
(1:43:05) We just posted her quotes verbatim and uh we get all these responses. Nazi bootlicker like, "Oh, you're just like propagandist for ICE, blah, blah, blah." 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, and it was just like normal run-of-the-mill television like, "Hey, here's how the laws enforced.
(1:43:28) Sometimes there are illegal alien child molesters living near schools and ICE goes and gets them." And there was never any controversy about it. And this was CNN of all places. And it was like, "Yeah, Obama's tough on those illegal aliens. That's why we voted for Obama. He's tough.
(1:43:44) " Uh, so opinions have just changed like on a dime. And really, it's all Trump. It's like Trump has, for whatever reason, so many people's brains just broke when Trump became president. And they haven't been able to critically think outside of if Trump supports 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 be studied.
(1:44:05) I think it'll be written about for centuries cuz it is baffling like seeing how deranged people have become just because Trump has a particular perspective and they immediately have to take the opposite perspective which in this case is like you're trying to protect child abusers, murderers, drug dealers. Uh it's like how do we get here? >> They they are they're out on the streets.
(1:44:30) all of our politicians, they're they're ready to pick up arms and go to civil war in order to proh protect the rights of, you know, really really bad people. I mean, there's one guy that just kind of sticks in my craw. I know there's probably worse offenses out there committed by illegal aliens, but there's a Chinese national who was just picked up last week who was uh arrested for scamming an elderly man out of over $100,000.
(1:44:56) and he'd convince the guy, it was like your classic telemarketer scam, you know, you can't trust your bank. Your bank is stealing from you. You need to go buy gold bars and like I'm going to come and you give me the gold bars. And he actually got $100,000 worth of gold out of this elderly man. Basically, his his entire life savings.
(1:45:13) And the only reason he was caught is because he got greedy and thought he was going to come back and get another $100,000 out of this guy. And he was smart enough after a while to get in touch with law enforcement. And so they laid a trap for the guy and caught him. Uh that was like a year ago.
(1:45:29) The guy had been arrested, processed, mugsh shot, everything. And then released like somehow, you know, he's an illegal alien from China. And for whatever reason, they caught him. They knew what he'd done and he was released and just now captured and processed for deportation. But it's like if you've ever had to deal with one of your grandparents getting scammed by a telemarketer, uh you you might have an inkling of the homicidal rage that that can induce in you when you know that someone is picking on your grandma or your grandpa. And to to have these
(1:45:58) politicians standing up there and be like, "No, he should he should stay here. We don't want him deported. He's just as American as as you or I." Like to stop stop uh stop deporting the people who are scamming our elderly. Uh, I just don't know if they're living in a different factual universe or if their moral judgments have concluded that the political gain to to be had from not deporting someone like that is worth it.
(1:46:22) Uh, but it's just again, it's alien to me. You can't It's difficult to sympathize with people who feel that way. >> Yeah. I mean, I'm talking Tim Foil's hat Tim Foil hats earlier. Mine's on pretty tight. Like, I think we're under a cultural revolution. It's been going on since the 70s, like Weather Underground.
(1:46:38) I don't think any of that went away. In fact, it's only gotten stronger. And if you look at Antifa again, how coordinated they are, um the information they have access to, the paramilitary nature of their coordination, it's just like there's there's a a force out there that would like to turn America into a communist hole, and they are putting their finger on on the scale right now.
(1:47:02) >> Yeah. And I I think that there's also undeniable foreign influences um pushing it, urging it on. Uh, and again, tinfoil hat, but I know I've been deep down the Chinese organized crime rabbit hole after making the uh the documentary about the cannabis trafficking in Maine, so it's top of mind for me.
(1:47:21) But in digging into a bunch of these um uh individuals who are prominent within the fraudulent Medicare uh Medicaid enterprises, we keep finding these weird connections between uh the Chinese and Somali. just these weird weird connections that you know don't don't really make sense >> road connections or >> that's kind of that's kind of what we're thinking you know it's like beyond the remit of a local main news outlet but when you find for example the guy who is currently running Gateway Community Services because the affforementioned
(1:47:57) CEOs on the lamb in Kenya um studied abroad at a university in mainland China that has had uh programs with American universities that are severed now because the China Committee warned of uh connections to the CCP's military said, you know, basically this these study programs are are being used to conduct espionage and undermine America's interests.
(1:48:22) Um he says he's proficient in Mandarin, does work in China, and then he comes back to Maine and becomes a CEO at this dumpy Somali nonprofit. Weird. Just doesn't make sense. There's all kinds of stuff like that where, you know, as a journalist, I can't put my finger on it and just be like, "Well, here's the story." It's just stuff that makes me go, "Huh, that's weird.
(1:48:40) Why would why would somebody with that kind of a resume come back and work at this like dumpy Somali nonprofit? Doesn't really make sense." >> The Tim Wallace China connection, too. Going spend >> That's what I'm saying. It doesn't, you know, why why why is there just continuously there are these connections uh between, you know, chi China and Somalia? And it's it's really really weird.
(1:49:03) And the and the Chinese aren't really known to work with um other ethnicities. They prefer to work with their own. Um so that adds another uh interesting degree to it. But they could you could see them using Somali as a tool or something like that. Um but there's definitely whether it's wealth extraction or uh subverting the American political order.
(1:49:24) There are definitely external forces at work who are encouraging this, fanning the flames. in addition to the uh you know the internal revolutionaries who uh you know are like cosplaying the civil rights movement all over again except for they're just you know Marxists wearing you know furry tales. Yeah, you'd be naive to think that there aren't external forces that are looking on with uh with Glee with what's happening.
(1:49:51) Steve, again, thank you so much for all the work that you're doing. Thank you for taking time out of your day to to have this discussion with me. I think it's incredibly important and hopefully uh more people pick up on the work that you and many others are doing and actually read the uh reports that you guys are putting out and understand that we are getting got right now.
(1:50:13) Uh we are being played for fools. And if you care about this country, if you care about your family and uh the future of your children, it's probably important to make some noise about this and make sure that we're not getting defrauded on the scale of trillions of dollars over the course of many years. >> Absolutely.
(1:50:30) Well, thank you very much for having me on, Marty. I appreciate it. Long long time uh longtime listener. I love your show. So, it's a it's a great honor to be on with you. So, thank you very much. >> Oh, the uh the respect is mutual, friend. Thank you. And uh we'll do this again at some point. anytime. >> All right, peace and love, freaks.
(1:50:46) Take care. >> Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show.
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