#273 Steve Robinson - How Somali Criminal Networks Are Stealing Millions of Dollars

Steven Robinson, Editor-in-Chief of the Maine Wire, leads New England’s fastest-growing digital media outlet focused on exposing political corruption and organized crime across local, state, and regional levels. A native of Dexter, Maine, and Bowdoin College graduate in political philosophy, he previously worked at Regnery Publishing, produced the Howie Carr Show, and handled Barstool Sports' Kirk Minihane Show and true-crime podcast The Case, which spurred murder charges per season. During COVID-19, he quit his job to travel 35,000 miles across North America in a camper van before returning to Maine in November 2022 to revitalize the Maine Wire as an aggressive, independent platform for underreported stories, bold investigations, and commentary. Robinson's groundbreaking "Triad Weed" series, launched in August 2023 after a leaked DHS memo revealed over 270 illicit cannabis operations by Asian Transnational Criminal Organizations in Maine, uncovered a vast Chinese mafia network spanning Maine to southeast China. His reporting exposed racketeering involving black-market cannabis, human and sex trafficking, money laundering, bank fraud, illegal border crossings, neurotoxins poisoning homes, murder, and national security threats—including CCP-linked properties near U. S. Army facilities. He provided exclusive details on the exploitation of U. S. Treasury–subsidized loans that allowed foreign nationals to purchase over 70 properties. Cited in Congressional reports and featured on CBS, Fox News, the Daily Mail, OANN, and more, Robinson's work has led to over 60 articles, property raids, arrests, Sen. Susan Collins' interrogations of intel agencies, and the documentary Triad Weed: How Chinese Mafia Infiltrated Maine. Local police praise it as a field manual, though Maine media avoids the story. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Get firearm security redesigned and save 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code SRS at https://www.stopboxusa.com/srs #stopboxpod Put your money to work with Stash—visit get.stash.com/SRS to receive $25 towards your first stock purchase and view important disclosures. https://bubsnaturals.com – USE CODE SHAWN Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out at https://roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide. Steve Robinson Links: X - https://x.com/BigSteve207 X - https://x.com/TheMaineWire Substack - https://robinsonreport.substack.com The Maine Wire - https://www.themainewire.com High Crimes Documentary - https://tuckercarlson.com/high-crimes Harpe - https://getharpe.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Shawn Ryan?

  Steve Robinson.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me back.

• 0:09Shawn Ryan?

  What have you been up to, other than boofing?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I take, take, take a break every once in a while.

• 0:15Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Boofing to investigate Somali fraud.

• 0:21Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, shit. Yeah, I didn't expect to see you back so soon, but all the Somali fraud that um, has been uncovered, you've been on this for a long time. So, uh, you know, we interviewed Nick, it's fucking awesome. And then, uh, we thought we'd get more into the weeds and bring you back on since you've been, you've been hammering this for years.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Well, you know what's wild is when we were talking about Chinese organized crime, we'd already reported all of the information about Gateway Community Services. I mean, months prior to when we met the first time, uh, we'd already reported the significant facts. The whistleblower had already come forward, uh, but it was being ignored by the local media. And of course, none of the Democratic politicians were reacting to it or acknowledging it. They were saying, oh, it's fake news. You don't, you can't believe the conservative media. Uh, it took Rich Mc, uh, Rich McHugh from News Nation saw this and was like, this is wild. There's, there's fraud going on in Maine, just like there is in Minnesota. And he amplified it and did a report on it. And then all of a sudden, there's just a feeding frenzy like I hadn't seen before. It was just, uh,

• 1:24Speaker 01

  the national media descended and I was getting so many emails and messages from people who were like, how is it that this is happening, but no other media outlets have picked up on it? Like, how have you not had resignations or, but you know, politicians coming out and issuing statements? Like, they're, they're gobsmacked at the lack of accountability and the media culture of, I guess, complacency in Maine when it comes to these fraud issues. Uh, because there's a number of stories like that where we've reported on them. We think they're bombshell stories, like Gateway is legitimately a bombshell story. It speaks to political corruption, Medicaid fraud, immigration fraud, systemic problems in our state. Uh, and it suddenly became this huge national headline that everybody's talking about, national media is talking about.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  And we're kind of looking at ourselves like we've been talking about this for 10 months and nobody cared, but I mean, credit to

• 2:15Shawn Ryan?

  It's infuriating, isn't it?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  It is, but

• 2:17Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's also, I guess it's a positive that it's finally coming around, but

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, we're used to it. We dealt with it with the Chinese organized crime where it's like you're kind of talking about it and banging the drum. It's a, it's a long road, a long, a long path down a dark tunnel. And eventually you come out and people start recognizing stuff and they, and you're able to share with them what you've learned. And there is a, there is a, hopefully a payoff and a solution at the end of the tunnel. But credit, huge credit to Nick Shirley. I was telling Jeremy earlier, I'm like, it's those big Mormon balls, you know?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Like I, if I see anybody with LDS on their, like LDS door knocker on their resume, because he can just go up and talk with anybody. You know, he's just like had a, a crew, his career training was door knocking for a Mormon mission. So it's he's like the perfect guy to just go up and just straight face, just ask you questions.

• 3:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Um, and I mean, I've never seen a video go that viral.

• 3:15Shawn Ryan?

  Me neither, man.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Just, I mean, uh, the amount of attention that he's brought to it, uh, and for him to go back in there and cover the non-emergency medical transportation stuff, which is he did in the video, I think, released, uh, just this week. That's, that's nuts. I, I hope he's, I hope he's looking out for his safety.

• 3:34Shawn Ryan?

  He is, he is.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  He is notorious. I mean, he probably wouldn't even be, uh, safe in Maine at this point, you know, they're, they're, uh, they're on, on guard. We show, we show up at some places and, and you take your phone out. We've had, one of our reporters actually had his phone stolen from him.

• 3:51Shawn Ryan?

  Are you getting threats?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:53Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, well.

• 3:56Shawn Ryan?

  Got your little gift, Steve.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Well, thank you very much.

• 3:59Shawn Ryan?

  Jason, any of those threats get out of control, you know? So, sounds like you just met Jason on your way down, uh, from Maine.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  I did, yeah.

• 4:08Shawn Ryan?

  So Jason's my buddy over at SIG.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 4:11Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, we thought, you know, with all the stuff you're uncovering and everything you're getting into, you gotta protect yourself, right? So that's the SIG P211 GTO. It's the SIG Sowers first go around at a 2011. And, uh, it's got a, it's got their new optics line on there, the red dot.

• 4:33Shawn Ryan?

  The thing is a machine. I'm actually shooting a competition with it this week. I never shoot competitions, but.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. That's awesome.

• 4:41Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. You're welcome.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we need it.

• 4:44Shawn Ryan?

  We'll break it in. We'll break it in. I'll back here.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 4:47Shawn Ryan?

  And then, you know,

• 4:50Shawn Ryan?

  everybody gets one of these. So vigilantly gummy bears. Maybe you can put one of those in your boofing kit. Let me know how it goes.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Well, I've actually got a funny story about the gummy bears because the last time we recorded, I went back to my Airbnb and I immediately get inundated with phone calls from a source. He's like, y'all can't believe this. It was a little bit before the election and they had a woman, a random woman had received absentee ballots, 250 absentee ballots in an Amazon Prime package shipped to her house through UPS, legitimate Maine absentee ballots. And

• 5:25Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  I stayed up until 3 a.m. working on that story to break it and was powered by vigilantly gummy bears. I was just crushing gummy bears and working on a story. So that, that story was powered by gummy bears.

• 5:40Shawn Ryan?

  We'll load you up. We'll load you up with gummy bears. But, uh, and then, you know, we got a Patreon account, subscription account and, um, we've turned it into a hell of a community. So we offer them the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from Samantha. Steve, what is the likelihood that local politicians and national ones across the nation will be held accountable for the fraud that has been allowed to take place?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  If you asked me a year ago, I would say very low. Now I would say very high. It also depends on what you mean by accountability. For Iman Osman having to resign and being forced out in disgrace, I would call that accountability. And he is facing two gun theft charges. You know, being forced out of office is a level of accountability. You know, if you're guilty of conspiring in some kind of a pay to play scheme to turn a blind eye to the fraud or to support the fraud or to introduce a bill that becomes the program that is defrauded. You know, and you're forced out of office, that's a, I would say, that's a level of accountability. But to people who straight up took payouts and bribes, it's very, very hard to prove

• 6:52Speaker 01

  a cash bribe. You know, these things are very, very hard to prove. And I think what we're going to find is that the fraud is happening at a scale that is so far beyond what we're capable of investigating through the traditional justice system, that you're just not going to be able to deal with it in that way. Just putting an end to the fraud is probably the best accountability that we can hope for. I don't know that the money's ever coming back, but putting, putting, putting an end to the fraud and voting people out of office who benefited from it or turned a blind eye to it is really the, the best I think we can hope for. And I'm, I'm reasonably confident that we'll get there. I think President Trump has made it a priority.

• 7:31Shawn Ryan?

  Why is it, do you think that's the best we can hope for? I mean, I, I don't argue that. I'm just curious of your opinion. Is it just from, you know, looking at history? Nobody ever gets held accountable? They're all playing on the same team?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess I'm, I'm a little bit cynical. I think there is an element of that. There's so much fraud and corruption on the Republican side that they don't want to dig too deeply on the fraud and corruption on the Democrat's side because turnabout's fair play. You know, they're kind of like, we don't, we don't want to look too deeply, you know, in the, in the Democrats closet because we don't want them looking too deeply in our closet. That kind of thing is certainly happening. Trump, though, flips that because he doesn't care about any of that. He doesn't care if it's, if it's Democrat corruption or Republican corruption. I'm sure on some level, there's some strategy and some horse trading going on, but he really, I think, is, just wants it to stop. And he's very pro-American, so he's the wild card in that. And, and the president and, and Stephen Miller, some of the people who are around him.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  So it makes me optimistic that you will see some change and. The incentive that they have is this huge bucket of federal money that comes to these states. You've already seen him start to say, and the municipalities, by the way, he's already started to say, if they continue to pay out these fraudulent programs, if they don't crack down on this, we're going to cut off the federal money. And that is going to be devastating for states. That'll be devastating for these cities that rely on huge amounts of federal money. The way the federal government asserts control over a lot of states and a lot of cities is by getting them dependent on federal money and then saying, you've got to do X, Y, and Z if you want to keep that federal money coming. You've got to put outhouses. This has actually happened in Bangor.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  You've got to put, oh, you took the COVID money. That means you have to put public outhouses in these areas where all the vagrants are doing drugs in public. There's a number of ways where they exert power over smaller governments through the money, but that can work the other way around. And Trump is taking steps to say, we're taking the money away. If you don't do what's right, if you don't do what's in America's best interest, we're taking the money away. And I think he has every right to do that because the states have shown that they're using the money totally irresponsibly. They're not policing fraud. They're using it to buy political favors.

• 9:47Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think nobody goes to prison? In what estimated $9 billion in Minnesota alone?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Because the fraud is so decentralized.

• 9:58Shawn Ryan?

  Not even a charge, right?

• 9:59Speaker 01

  It's so decentralized. It's so, there's so many people doing it. And the amount of, just think about what's involved in a criminal trial from the investigation, charging, they get a defense attorney who's going to come in and represent them, paid with daycare money. You know, they get a little bit of that daycare money to buy the best defense attorney to sow reasonable doubt about what's going on. Well, do you have surveillance or are you just relying on Nick Shirley's video? Do you have information? We all know what's going on here, but that's not the same standard that is going to work in a trial by jury. And who's the jury going to be comprised of? Think about that. You get one Somali on a jury in Minnesota. You think they're going to convict anybody?

• 10:43Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, aren't they supposed to make sure that the jury has no interest?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  They're supposed to.

• 10:52Shawn Ryan?

  And the case?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  They're supposed to, but I mean, uh, uh, maybe it's a Somali who has a different daycare. You never know.

• 10:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  But I mean, we've already seen that the jury system.

• 11:02Shawn Ryan?

  It's just proven that the Karashvam runs so deep that it's almost impossible to get rid of it.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, it's, I, I just, and I'm skeptical that you're going to claw back that money or that the people who were running the individual level schemes are, are going to ever see it any time in jail. I think there are definitely some people, I know in Maine, there are people who aided and abetted some of these schemes. There, there are, uh, you know, Maine natives, for example, who worked at Gateway, white liberal woman who put their clinical licenses on the line so that this organization could build Medicaid. Um, they can probably, uh, have an, uh, an investigation or a trial. Uh, they can be, they have more on the line, maybe. They don't have, you know, an estate in Kenya to bug out to, uh, at least I don't

• 11:50Speaker 01

  think. Um, so there could be some accountability there and that could send, that could have downstream effects of causing people to be a little bit more reluctant to aid and abet fraud in the future. Uh, but I think at this point, we're so far, we're, it would be premature to start thinking about justice or, uh, you know, vengeance at this point. We have to stop the bleeding.

• 12:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  We, this fraud is, is ongoing. We're still dealing with the political consequences of it. There's massive amounts of money that are still out there.

• 12:20Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, part of stopping it though is making an example out of somebody.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:24Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:24Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, and, and pinning their ass to the wall, whether that's politicians or Somalis or whoever it is, you know, whoever's involved, somebody needs to be made an example of.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  There are two examples.

• 12:36Shawn Ryan?

  Because when you don't make an example of it, then I know we're going to get into it. We're going to get into Rwandans, right? And now you have all these other groups who are like, well, fuck, Somalis are doing it. Rwandans are doing it.

• 12:53Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe we should do it. Nothing happens to them.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, they got caught. They got a slap on the wrist, you know? I mean, it's, it's just, I don't know. I'm just, I'm just. I think people, look, look at this. I mean, Polly Market says there's an 11% chance that Somalians who defrauded government to fund terrorism will be deported. Only an 11% chance. You know what I mean? And that's, I mean, this is, this is the people. You know what I mean? That's the sentiment. And, uh, and every time I look at Polly Market when it comes to accountability, low, low, low probability that the people think that, you know, that anything is ever going to happen. Nothing. It's just, it's.

• 13:37Shawn Ryan?

  I think people are more pissed off now that we're not seeing any fucking accountability than they are at the actual crime. Because if you just allow the crime to happen over and over and over and over again, and nobody's ass gets pinned to the wall, then it is, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's basically a recruiting mechanism.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  But that gets to the real nature of the crime, right? Are we, are we turning a blind eye to this? Or are we benefiting from it? The political system, the, the political system in power. Uh, and I know we're getting closer and closer, I think, to the emergence of evidence in Minnesota that shows that, um, uh, Governor Tim Walz was aware of this. AG Keith Ellison was aware of what was going on and had struck, uh, you know, a deal with the devil essentially to look the other way in exchange for support from the Somali political community. I think that investigations in Maine will find that something similar happened there. And the more you look at the problem, the more it looks like not an independent scandal of we have the Minnesota welfare fraud scandal, the Maine welfare fraud scandal, the Ohio welfare fraud scandal. It's just one scandal.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  It's one scandal and it may have started out 25 years ago as opportunistic Somali diaspora migrants taking advantage of a welfare system that maybe was built on good faith and trust and didn't have the right safeguards and protections, but it has become, in my view, a nation building scheme that is backed by political factions in Somalia. The amount of wealth that they are extracting from the American taxpayer is, we're talking about rebuilding whole communities in Mogadishu. We're talking about their defense budget. We're talking about the single largest economic factor in Somalia is money flowing from our pockets.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  The claim that Somali Medicaid pirates put on the American paycheck, the American workers paycheck, that's the biggest economic factor in Somalia. So why wouldn't political actors there protect that and expand that and do what they could to support that and streamline it and they have. And I think we're seeing evidence in Maine, you're seeing evidence in Somalia of high level political actors who are involved in the Medicaid schemes, whether that's operating a home-based care agency or a money transmitting service. This is in no doubt a deliberate scheme by Somalia, by Somali political factions to extract wealth for their own purposes, for nation building. Yeah, yeah. Man, you need a podcast.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Why don't you have a podcast? Well, we do. We have a, we have a robinsonreport.substack.com and Main Wire TV. We do a lot of podcast-like episodes, but I'm like crawling around Lewiston and Chinese marijuana grows all the time. It's tough to do it really consistently. We want to as we continue to grow, but I mean, we've just this, the reporting that we've done on the Somali Medicaid fraud is built on public records requests that take us somewhere between five to six months to fill, pay the government thousands of dollars to get these records to show them where the fraud is that they're covering up, to show the people of Maine where the fraud is that the Mills administration is covering up. And we get massive Excel spreadsheets, you know, with payment data.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  8,000-page PDFs showing the audits that the Mills administration does and then sweeps under the rug. Like, they find the fraud and then they just sweep it under the rug and never tell anyone about it. It all takes a huge amount of time to go over and analyze. And we're a very, very small team. So, we'd love to do the podcast, but I think for me, the most beneficial thing I can do for the state of Maine is to really understand from an investigative perspective what's going on to get the information. And it takes a lot of time, too, because we're reporting in an adversarial environment. In a normal state, you get the public records request. I get what you're saying. You find, you find. Everybody's in. Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  They're so fucking... They're in. I mean, they're rooted in there. Yes. And they also, we're the conservative outlet in the state, so they feel like they're entitled to treat us hostily. Like, you know, like the Obama administration would treat Fox News. They feel like they don't have to talk to us or respond to our questions. But, you know, we get 8,000 pages of documents from them, and we're going through them. And we see something that looks like, you know, it looks like you guys identified a million-dollar fraud here and then never recouped the money or just walked away. It just looks really strange. We have some questions about this. Rather than coming in, just answering our questions and telling us what we're looking at, they ignore us and give us the silent treatment in the hopes that we're gonna go out and say something that's just

• 18:24Speaker 01

  a little bit wrong. And then they can go to the liberal newspapers or to CNN. You know, when CNN shows up and does like the, what they did to Shirley, basically, trying to say, "How do you know you're true? How do you know you're true?" Yeah. Which, I don't even know what that means. But when they give that treatment to us, the Mills administration is hoping that they'll be able to say, "Well, they just didn't know what they were looking at. They just, they misinterpreted the facts. They don't know what they're talking about." And they'll have this, like, secret cubby of information that they didn't make available to us. So, when you're reporting in an adversarial environment like that, it takes so much more time. I get it. The number of people you have to talk to, you have to do very careful due diligence on the documents that you're looking at. It's like reporting.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  out of North Korea. It's like you don't, you don't know exactly what's going on and they're always trying to fuck with you. They're always trying to undermine you and they're always trying to make you look bad. But you're right. I would love to, I would love to have a podcast. Maybe someday we can have a podcast that talks about the economic miracle, the turnaround. Yeah. The Maine miracle. Bet it's right around the corner. Oh, yeah. I've got this, I mean, we, we, I think have exposed Chinese organized crime in Maine to the highest possible levels. Talking with you, Tucker, I mean, like, there's nobody in Maine, there's nobody in the country who doesn't know that there's Chinese organized crime growing pot in Maine. And since we talked, it's only gotten worse. Really? It's only gotten worse. What's happened now?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  It's, uh, uh, I got public, I got some public records yesterday that shows that the change, as far as I can see, is that the state has gone out. They, they increased the tax on adult use cannabis. And as they did that, they also went out and hired a translation service so that they can communicate better with the Chinese growers who they've licensed now. Oh. So we're paying to, so we're paying for a translation service so that. Don't get rid of them. Just legitimize them. So the Chinese can lie, cheat and steal better is essentially why we have the, uh, the new translation service. And they just approved a license in Green, Maine for a, uh, 20,000 square foot marijuana grow. That, uh, one of the guys on the lease for the space is an illegal alien from China.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Who caught two felonies for drug trafficking in Washington state in 2022, wasn't deported because, uh, President Biden was in office. And this is okay under Maine law because his name is just on the lease, not on the marijuana license. That got approved with the help of a big time lobbying firm in Maine. So there's just so much money. Um, so I've got this weird dystopian dream that I'm going to be in my sixties and I'm still going to be like, that Somali Medicaid fraud or Chinese marijuana. It's like these problems, as much light as you shine on them, they're intractable. Man, you know, this, I don't really like lobbying firms. Maybe I need to get to know one because it seems like they can make anything happen. Yeah, I mean, I've been saying the same thing about.

• 21:18Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe somebody will use one to actually do the right fucking thing for once. Just kidding.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:23Shawn Ryan?

  I doubt it.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Lobbyists for for America. There's not a lot of money in doing the right thing.

• 21:28Shawn Ryan?

  I've noticed.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  You know, which is sad. And that's that's why the, you know, that's why you see those polymarket views is people are so cynical. You know, the, I think the, is a part of the American soul that just longs for justice. And after seeing it denied over and over and over again, you become cynical.

• 21:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, well, there's no, there, there is zero doubt in my mind that we live in a two tiered justice system.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:55Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, I mean, you believe that? Do you believe that?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  That things are on the level? No.

• 22:00Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 22:03Shawn Ryan?

  I don't want to put words in her mouth.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  No, no, there's, there's a, of course, I mean, we just this week, we saw, you know, the Clintons, you know, skip out on hearings with the House Oversight Committee. And I'll say Representative James Comer has done a great job with the House Oversight Committee. I think that the Clinton stuff is a little bit maybe for show. Did anyone really think that they were going to show up? But it's still good to do that. It's still good to show that there, there is this two tiered justice system. Moments like that help crystallize it for the normies who aren't paying super close attention.

• 22:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  But without what the House Oversight Committee is doing, both in Minnesota and in Maine, you wouldn't be seeing this. I mean, it was their investigations that pushed this thing over the edge. Everyone had been talking about, you know, Somali fraud rings in Minnesota for a long, long time. I mean, when you go back and you look at the news reports and what whistleblowers had attempted to say, it's like, man, this was really, really obvious for a decade or more, what was happening here. But it just got, you know, pushed to the side. And if you talked about it, you were racist and whistleblowers got fired. People got punished if they pointed at it. So it took someone with courage and a lack of a financial interest, maybe, in what was happening to come in and investigate and expose what was happening.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  But without House Oversight, just being ready to put facts on the record, which has the effect of enabling media outlets to have something tangible to grab on to. Because if you don't have. A fraud agency in Minnesota saying, "This is what happened. This is the audit result. This was how much was overbilled. These are the people who were in charge. These are the people we held accountable." If you don't have something for a media outlet to grab on to, it becomes very difficult for them to report on it. But if the House Oversight Committee or any investigative body says, "These are the programs being defrauded. This is the dollar amount we think is being defrauded. These are the actions we're taking. These are the people we want to talk to." Then you get media stories. It becomes much easier for the national media to tell the story of what happened.

• 24:07Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha, gotcha.

• 24:11Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Steve, let me give you your introduction. Steve Robinson, award-winning journalist and editor-in-chief of themainewire.com. Your work has been cited in congressional reports and during congressional hearings featured on major outlets and contributed directly to local, state, and federal law enforcement investigations throughout New England. Creator of the documentary "High Crimes: The Chinese Mafia's Takeover of Rural America." The first journalist to report on Gateway Community Services, a Somali-run Medicaid agency in Maine that is alleged to have defrauded taxpayers while the founder was running for office in Jubaland, Somalia. Did I say that right?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Did you not learn about this in civics class? This is basic American civics. Every Maine middle schooler needs to know about Jubaland, Somalia.

• 25:05Shawn Ryan?

  You regularly scoop corporate media, disrupting the journalism status quo and reveal the harsh reality of life in rural New England.

• 25:15Shawn Ryan?

  All right, let's get into it. We've heard about the fraud in Minnesota. We've kind of scratched the surface, a little more than scratched the surface, on what's going on in Maine. But how long have you been looking at this? Because I have family in Maine, in Portland. There's entire neighborhoods of, it looks like Somalia.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  It wasn't always that way. And that sounds like Lewiston is Somalia. Am I wrong? Yeah, I mean, it was a, there was, there was a choice made to embrace migrant resettlement. Eventually it became forced migrant resettlement in some of these communities. This is something that I've been following for, I mean, more or less my entire adult life. Just because it's a, it's a part of Maine's story now. I mean, they're bringing a lot of violence to the state, correct? I mean, you, I think we've, I've, I've sent to Jeremy the, the plot of gun violence in Somali, in Somali, Lewiston. The, you can plot on a Google map, the shots fired incidents.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  And these are not, you know, shootings with a victim. Most of them are unsolved. They're just lots and lots of gunplay. Lots and lots of gunplay. And you can see the concentration of the little dots for shootings around public housing buildings that have been taken over largely by the Somali diaspora. And that's the same with overdoses, by the way, too. So Lewiston, the, the city of Lewiston, I think you, you can say is, uh, it's not safer as a result of the migration trends. The problem is no place in Maine is doing particularly well. But even if you look at Lewiston in comparison to, say, Bangor, which is a somewhat comparable

• 27:13Speaker 01

  city in size, demographic, prior to the Somali migration, but hasn't had the same forced migrant resettlement yet.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  You can see that the economic stats are, are way different. It's like, something like 20% of Lewiston households speak a language other than English at home. And it used to be that that was French, because it was a big French mill town. It has an interesting history as a town with, with migration, but it's, it's scary. You know, we got the We got the shooting data and the first thing I did was just drive to Lewiston because I wanted to go see these neighborhoods and walk around them in the middle of the day and see what's going on and

• 27:52Shawn Ryan?

  You have videos of what they look like?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  I do, yeah. Yeah, I actually I took

• 27:56Shawn Ryan?

  Put them up right now.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  I took, yeah, I'll share them. I'll share particularly this video I took this summer. This was before the fraud stuff broke. Now, myself and some of my reporters are a little bit infamous in Little Mogadishu. It's not, it's not safe for us to be walking around there. But I, I walked around just kind of observing, taking things in with a video camera, just kind of, you know, hidden camera. When I was looking back at it, I was scrolling through and there was like, you know, guys with guns hanging out of there. My situational awareness was shit because I didn't even notice this at the time. But there was a guy who walked right by me with a nine millimeter hanging out of his waistband. You know, the people getting arrested in broad daylight, you know, fences, security cameras. There's

• 28:41Speaker 01

  no white picket fences and, and swing sets and kids playing out there. You know, there's, you know, people in the beekeeper suits scurrying along the street. It's, it's not recognizable from Maine of 20 or 25 years ago. And then there are people in the state who'll say, oh, you're racist. How could you say that? Oh, Lewiston is a booming city right now. A booming city. That's what Representative

• 29:07Shawn Ryan?

  Booming or boofing?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Both, actually.

• 29:10Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Representative, Representative Decker Delock actually said, that was her quote, that Lewiston, Lewiston was a dying town before the Somalis came.

• 29:21Shawn Ryan?

  Really? So what's the industry there? What do they say the industry there is? How's it booming? The real estate prices just skyrocketing? Is unemployment down?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 29:35Shawn Ryan?

  Is there massive job opportunity?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  There's a lot of home healthcare agencies.

• 29:42Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, okay.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  That bill Medicaid, there's a lot of.

• 29:45Shawn Ryan?

  It's a lucrative business to start from what I've been told.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  There's a lot of halal markets on Canal Street and Lisbon Street that have EBT machines. There's a, there's an economy that revolves around taxpayer funded programs for sure. But private industry, not so much. And I couldn't help but note the irony in Decatur Lock saying that there was, Lewiston was a booming city thanks to the Somali migration because those comments came out like a week after there was a shooting in Lewiston at a migrant event that caused it to shut down. So yes, it's booming with the sound of gunshots ricocheting off subsidized housing.

• 30:23Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  You know, things.

• 30:24Shawn Ryan?

  What's the population there roughly?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Like thirty three, thirty five thousand.

• 30:28Shawn Ryan?

  Is there, is there any in, I've never heard of a thirty five thousand person town booming, but would, is it legitimately though, is there any industry there? Or is there just somebody just talking out of their ass?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Industry, no, I wouldn't say industry is a great word for it. There are some businesses that are trying to open and trying to start there. It's got an interesting history because prior to the arrival of Somalis in Lewiston in two thousand is basically right when they started to arrive. The population of Lewiston had declined. So it's a town where, you know, in the, in the turn of the century, there's a famine in Quebec and the, you know, bad farming season. And so you see this huge wave of French Canadian migrants come down into Lewiston. And that was the first kind of, I don't know, migration crisis in Maine. The first migrant crisis in Lewiston, Maine was French Canadian Catholics.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Maine was predominantly a Protestant place. So you had some conflict between the French speaking Canadian Catholics and the English speaking Protestants, the locals. But it became a mill town and the French Canadians, the Irish migrants who were there as well, very industrious, building canals, built a cathedral, built these huge mill buildings. And that had kind of petered out during the nineties, thanks. To globalization and, you know, the offshoring of American manufacturing. This is a story that you see in almost every Maine town. There's a big bustling manufacturing, some hub that supports the town. This is true of where I grew up in Dexter, Maine, where we had Dexter Shoes until Warren Buffett bought it and offshored it.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  But through the 90s, Lewiston starts to lose population because their mills are closing down. And then the Somali migration is viewed by some policymakers as this is what we need. You see it even today, that we need to have open borders. We need to have just a borderless welfare state and mass migration to fix our economy. We need the cheap labor. We're not going to be able to, you know, turn around our declining birth rates. We just need to open our borders and bring in as many people as possible. So what we've done, we've done that experiment in Lewiston, Maine for 25 years. And this is where it got us.

• 32:43Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you hear the same story over and over and over again. What was it that really caught your attention?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Well, we obtained from a source these letters called notices of violation. And this is what happens when Department of Health and Human Services, Health Department, it goes by different names depending on what state you're in. They will go through and audit entities that bill Medicaid. And in the state of Maine, we expanded our Medicaid in 2019 hugely. Most of this, 90% of this is federal money that comes in for the expansion population. So you've got, I think it's something like 350 or 400,000 Mainers are on Medicaid. And that's of a population of 1.4 million.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Depends on how many, whether you're going with like COVID era numbers where there was basically no eligibility. Everybody was allowed on Medicaid, but they had to roll that back a little bit. We have from 2019 to 2024, which is the data set that we got. We have 5,000, a little over 5,000 Medicaid providers, that's what they call them. So these are businesses that are allowed to send an invoice to Maine and get it paid with Medicaid money. You would think this is supposed to be hospitals, doctors' offices, dentists, people who are taking, giving healthcare services to poor people, but you would think of, when you think Medicaid providers, that's not the reality, of course. So this, these

• 34:19Speaker 01

  5,000 Medicaid providers, DHHS takes 250 of the claims that they've submitted, 250 of the invoices that they've received from these providers, and they review them to see if they have documents to substantiate the billing, to see if they follow the rules of the program, which are pretty specific and strict and exhaustive. And they calculate an error rate based on how many of those claims don't follow the rules and don't follow, you know, what it takes to actually have a legitimate reimbursement. And one of the groups that we got a notice of violation for was Gateway Community Services, which

• 35:00Speaker 01

  I was familiar with because it's an extremely political group, very political, almost an adjunct of the main Democratic Party. It has an office in Portland and an office in Lewiston. These offices host political events for Democrats all the time, all the time. Representative Decca DeLac was a former Assistant Executive Director at Gateway Community Services. Representative Youssef Youssef worked at Gateway Community Services. Eklis Ahmed, the current lone employee of the Office of New Americans, used to work at Gateway Community Services. So this is not just a random one-off Medicaid billing entity run by Somali migrants, this is very

• 35:43Speaker 01

  politically connected firm. So we started looking at Gateway.

• 35:46Shawn Ryan?

  Gateway Community Services, is that like an umbrella company for a large network?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yes and no.

• 35:53Shawn Ryan?

  Is everything under that?

• 35:54Speaker 01

  It's a strange, it's a strange entity. So it's, Gateway Community Services is a migrant services agency. They initially provide translation services. They're founded in 2013 under the LePage administration, and Governor LePage was, you know, a very conservative Republican made welfare fraud a huge priority investigating welfare fraud. Had some successful convictions. Actually, most of, I would say, all of the successful welfare fraud or Medicaid fraud convictions of the last 15 years stem from actions taken when LePage was still governor. Anything that happened when Mills was governor was kind of a carryover of measures that LePage took, such as the notice of violation that we got our hands on.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  It was an audit that had started under Governor LePage, looking at their billing from 2015 and 2017. So this was, you know, just kind of the inertia of a process already begun continued on into the Mills administration. And we got our hands on a record that showed that they had an error rate of 35%. They couldn't provide documents to substantiate translation services that they'd offered, or home healthcare services, or various services. And, you know, anyone who has worked in insurance fraud investigation, you look at the things that they're finding with Gateway, and you immediately say, oh, okay, so they're just making this up. You know, they're billing for services that they haven't provided and they can't document.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  And so we get curious about this because we have this leaked notice of violation and we want to know what's happening. Obviously, the Mills administration won't answer any questions about it. They won't tell us, you know, did you, what was the resolution of this? Did you finally figure out that they owed this money? Did they pay it back? How did they pay it back? Did they pay it back through a lump sum, or did they pay it back through set-asides? This is a great thing that we allow is if you're a organization running a Medicaid fraud in Maine, and you get caught defrauding the state government, they'll allow you to pay it back through set-asides. So rather than just giving the money back, you pay it back through a 5% or a 10% haircut on your future claims. So we're going to let you pay back last year's fraud by a slight deduction on next year's fraud.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  That's allowed in the state, under the premise that we're assuming like, all these organizations are legitimate. You know, we have to just assume that all these organizations are legitimate. We have to bend over backwards to give them the benefit of the doubt. But that's where our investigation starts, is with this DHHS audit that shows. Gateway Community Services was overbilling Medicaid by a huge amount. They're a politically connected firm and they've got immense ties to the Mills administration, to Maine Democrats.

• 38:37Shawn Ryan?

  How are they tied?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Well, we've got pictures of, the CEO is Abdullahi Ali, who is a, he's an interesting figure, as we'll get into, but he's been at political events. We have photographs of him with all kinds of political figures like Governor Mills, Secretary of State, Shenabellows. They, former employees have gone on to be state lawmakers, as we just talked about, Deca Delac and Youssef Youssef. Eklos Ahmed is now in the Mills administration. But the closest tie really is with the Secretary of State Shenabellows in a group that Gateway Community Services formed called the Community Organizing Alliance, which was an explicitly

• 39:23Speaker 01

  political group that had a fiscal sponsorship from the Maine People's Alliance, which is a, your typical Soros-funded, you know, dark money, left-wing push group, paid protesters, paid activists, paid door knockers, that kind of thing. But this kind of, their political connections get to the heart of the fraud scheme in Maine because it was very much a political scheme. You know, people ask, do you see Somalis who are making money from home healthcare agencies or from Gateway turning around and donating money to the politicians? And it works a little bit differently than that. They're donating boots on the ground and votes.

• 40:02Shawn Ryan?

  I was just gonna say that, they really don't have to. Because if they're taking over the population, then that's it. You just have to appease them and they will always vote for you.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  And you think-

• 40:13Shawn Ryan?

  Just like anybody else.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  You think that it has to be much bigger than it, like the population of voters has to be much bigger than it really does in order to get to the tipping point? Because if you look right now in Maine, where we have a Democratic primary for governor, for the second congressional district and for governor, there's a huge Somali vote in each of those races and almost entirely, I mean, 95% of those people will be Democrat primary voters. So if you're running in a competitive Democrat primary, your number one goal, perhaps the most, the single most determinative factor in those primary elections will be who the Somali bloc votes for. Because they're going to vote in unison, they're going to vote according to what the community leaders or the gatekeepers say, and they're going to vote for who's best

• 41:00Speaker 01

  for their economic interests. They're not going to vote for someone who takes a hard line on fraud. They're not going to vote for someone who wants Gateway investigated. So the incentives in the Democrat primary right now are to downplay the investigation, to stand with the very people who are defrauding these programs as opposed to what's in the best interest of Mayners. So that the incentive structure is set up for the Democrat primary to nominate the person who represents the Somali interests as opposed to the interests of even moderate Democrats. That's, you just have to get to be a significant block of voters within the Democratic primary, and then you have incredible control. Because

• 41:42Speaker 01

  if you, if you're, if you're the one who picks the nominee of the Democratic Party, and then it's even a coin flip that the Democrat wins the gubernatorial election, becomes the AG, wins a congressional election, then they're, they know who's, they know who buttered their bread. They know who to take care of. And that's what we've seen in the Mills administration is that at a minimum, you can say, they turned a blind eye, they swept these audits under the rug, and they did not publicize them in the way that these investigations should have been publicized, they should have been handled. Like, nobody, nobody would know that this was happening at Gateway if we hadn't gotten those notices of violation and publicized them. Just this week, Governor Mills comes

• 42:25Speaker 01

  out and says, "I support an investigation into Gateway." None of that would have happened. She wouldn't have admitted it. The, the records would have never been produced by the people doing the audits, by people who know what's going on. None of it would have happened if we didn't claw it out of the establishment's hands and bring it into light of day.

• 42:42Shawn Ryan?

  So, hold on, before you, it's great, they're going to investigate him. Do you think it will be a legitimate investigation? Or will this be?

• 42:52Shawn Ryan?

  Is this a publicity stunt?

• 42:55Speaker 01

  For Governor Mills, it's a publicity stunt. Yes.

• 42:57Shawn Ryan?

  So you don't think there will be a legitimate investigation?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  I think there will be. I think that the the US Attorney Andrew Benson will conduct a legitimate investigation. I think that that's he's Trump's nominee for US Attorney. He's been a judge for a little page appointee. I think that I mean, sorry, yeah, a little page appointee. I think that he's a man of integrity and will do a legitimate investigation there. The House Oversight Committee will do a legitimate investigation there and they can bring in people for transcripted interviews. They can bring people down to Washington DC for interviews under oath. There will be an investigation, just not at the state level.

• 43:32Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Maine is too far compromised.

• 43:35Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  To have a legitimate investigation. I mean, imagine this. So.

• 43:38Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I was getting at. I did not realize it was federal.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So but but only it's only because we were able to shake loose the secrets.

• 43:46Shawn Ryan?

  For you, man.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Of the Welfare Department that they even know there's something to investigate here. But as a sign of just how far gone things are in Maine, last summer Attorney General Attorney General Aaron Fry, who's like, you know, a nobody lawyer from Bangor, never really done anything or had a successful business, becomes AG under Mills because he's going to be loyal to her and is going to do what the governor wants, as opposed to having an adversarial system, going to do what the governor wants. We've reported now on the overbilling at Gateway, on the fact that Gateway's CEO, Abdallah Ali, was in 2024, running for President of Jubaland and admitting on Kenyan television multiple times that he is using money that he raised

• 44:30Speaker 01

  in the US to fund a militia that he wants to use to forcefully topple the incumbent President Madobe in Jubaland. So he's a.

• 44:39Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  He's a.

• 44:41Shawn Ryan?

  He's a warlord.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Can't say warlord. His attorneys say that's racist. I said, I said wannabe warlord. And they they said in a letter that that was a racially tinged phrase. But I mean, he was like bragging about using the militia he funded to topple the the incumbent president. It feels warlord-y. It feels like warlords in play.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  But so that's we've

• 45:05Shawn Ryan?

  How much money has this Gateway community? How much of what are we looking at?

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Purely on the Medicaid side through Gateway Community Services LLC. We're looking about five million per year in Medicaid billing. In Medicaid billing. That's what they've that's what they build according to state spending records that we've obtained. In addition to that, they got another over a million in no bid contracts handed to them from the Mills administration, which are a very interesting part of this story and get to, I think, part of the reason why Gateway was allowed to continue to, you know, exist and operate the way they were operating. But just to close the loop on the, you know, the Jubaland stuff. So he's running for president in Jubaland, all this money, the fraud accusations.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  We've reported all this. This is all on the record, like the whistleblower has come forward and said, I was there for five and a half years. Here's my name. I reported this to the state auditor and never heard back. I reported this to the Department of Homeland Security under Biden and never heard back. That was a year before I met the guy. And so all that's out in the public record. And in the summer of last year, Aaron Fry, the Attorney General, who sits on in charge of the opioid settlement money, awards Gateway $400,000 through their nonprofit arm. So this is a group that's been credibly accused of running a systemic Medicaid fraud. And we know that the head of the group is, you know, trying to be a warlord in Somalia.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  And the Attorney General gives them $400,000 in money that they, you know, they claim is going to be used for boofing kits.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Boofing kit money is what he sends to them. And, you know, these guys, they're so bad, they're probably not even buying.

• 46:56Shawn Ryan?

  Is that why they're all out of boofing kits up there in Maine?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  It's good because they smuggled all the money to Somalia.

• 47:02Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  So that's the, that, that, that's who would be investigating Gateway. And, and he declined to investigate them when the initial allegations came out. Instead, he gives them $400,000. So now the governor comes out and says, I support an investigation. Well, you know, I support the New England Patriots. Great, you know, it's got about the same effect on reality. You know, it's, it's just pure political posturing. Nothing happens at the state level. These people are going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming to see reality and have reality imposed upon them. And I think that the Trump Justice Department will do that for some of these, for some of the most egregious ones, yes, they will do it. But the fraud is so widespread and decentralized and diverse that we just do not have a Justice Department that can handle it.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  You know, even if you put every single one, every single fact on record and you lined up every single defendant, all the fraudsters, you lined them up and put all the facts right out there in public, which would be, you know, that's circumventing an enormous amount of investigative effort that is required to do that. You still don't have the energy to take all those cases, to process all those criminal cases, to deal with the, you know, the, the defense attorney and the prosecution going back and forth. We just don't have the attorneys, like physically, the people in those jobs with the man hours to prosecute these cases, we don't have it. That's how big the fraud is. And it's not just me saying that, it's people, high level people I've talked with in the Trump White House have said that that's what they're, that's the problem that they're dealing with, that the problem, the amount of fraud is so staggeringly large, we just

• 48:33Speaker 01

  can't deal with it with the, the mechanisms that we have in place to deal with it like we have dealt with the benefits fraud in the past. So you're going to have to come up with, uh, things like ending the temporary protected status for Somalis. You're going to have to cut off the money.

• 48:49Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that's a legitimate excuse?

• 48:51Speaker 01

  I do. From what I've seen, absolutely.

• 48:53Shawn Ryan?

  You shouldn't even tackle any of it?

• 48:55Speaker 01

  No, no, no, you do.

• 48:56Shawn Ryan?

  All of it?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  You do. I don't think it's an excuse for inaction. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying it's, it's a motivation to think creatively and come up with an asymmetric response.

• 49:08Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  I think that you need to, first, the first thing I would do is, one, every single governor in the state, they can cut off billing to any Medicaid provider if there's been a credible accusation of fraud. They don't need charges, they don't need an audit, they don't need, you know, like a criminal finding, they don't need arrests, they don't need any of that. All they need is a credible accusation. That can be an email that comes in and says, you know, I think Sean's sketchy, stop paying him Medicaid money. The governor can say, all right, we're gonna stop and we're gonna investigate and see what's going on here. So like right now, here, I'm making a credible allegation. It's all fraudulent. Every single state should stop billing to every Medicaid provider and force them to re-enroll. Just force them to come and, and prove that they're legitimate.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Every hospital and doctor's office in America can do this in 24 or 48 hours. They can come to the, the Department of Health and Human Services and say, yeah, you know, we're, we're legitimate. But these, you know, shady fly-by-night home healthcare agencies that have popped up, you know, three years ago and suddenly they're billing a million dollars? They won't be able to do this. They won't want to do this because they'll think that there's criminal liability. They don't want to turn, you know, show their face around the, the health office or anywhere where there might be some accountability. So they're just gonna say, nope, we're going away. That's gonna end the funding. So you turn off the money that's flowing into these organizations without any kind of having to go through the investigation or the criminal process.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  But also, if you're, if you're funding, if you're sending a half a million, a million, five million to this home healthcare agency and you stop dead and then they never say anything, that's a pretty good clue, isn't it?

• 50:43Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  It's a pretty good clue about what's happening. And you never hear from patients saying, oh, my healthcare has been cut off. My vital healthcare services that I rely on has been cut off. It's a pretty good clue as to what's happening and that allows you to further investigate. Only the ones who are legitimate are gonna come back in and go through this re-enrollment process. And that could happen now, under existing law. Every governor could force these people to re-enroll through a more legitimate process. They just have to exercise their power to do it.

• 51:12Shawn Ryan?

  And if you say they can only, I mean, I think I'm just gonna play devil's advocate. I mean, I think that... I shouldn't say I think that the hesitation is, the hesitation could be maybe that, you know, that, and I could understand this, if they, if they cut one off and somebody dies, a condition gets worse, they would probably be held liable, maybe?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  I mean, I mean, how many, how many people are dying as a result of the stolen benefits that could be spent better? How many people are dying?

• 51:45Shawn Ryan?

  Tons, tons.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, how many people are dying of the economic desperation in my state?

• 51:49Shawn Ryan?

  Tons.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Because they're, they're being looted so that, you know, Medicaid pirates can go run for office in Somalia.

• 51:55Shawn Ryan?

  But don't get me wrong.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm playing devil's advocate to your devil's advocate. Yeah, but we're not, we're not talking though, we're not talking about.

• 52:03Shawn Ryan?

  But 24 hours, I mean, if they can.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  We're not talking about life-saving.

• 52:06Shawn Ryan?

  24 hours.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  We're not talking about life-saving healthcare. We're talking about ass wiping. This is, this is, this is what these home healthcare agencies do.

• 52:13Shawn Ryan?

  Transportation, translation.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. This is transportation, translation, home healthcare agencies, SNAP benefits at the halal markets. We're not talking about life-saving care. No one's, no one's, no one's going to shut off the, you know, Medicaid reimbursement for cardiac surgeons. You know, like these, these, any, anyone involved in life-saving care is going to be a big enough organization so that a temporary stop in Medicaid billing is not going to cripple the, the organization. They're going to be able to re-enroll very quickly. And you could even, honestly, if you wanted to, you could say, okay, we're not going to do hospitals. Because the hospitals, there's a lot of funny business in American hospitals, but they're not the ones submitting completely bogus claims. So no one is going to die. To the extent that patients, there are actual patients at these home healthcare agencies, they're

• 52:58Speaker 01

  the family of the person listed as the CEO of the home healthcare agency. They're allowed to do that. You can start a home healthcare agency. And the home healthcare agency, the employees of a home healthcare agency go to your home and they assist you with the, the tasks of daily living, which is groceries, shower, cleaning your kitchen, wiping your butt. And you can start a home healthcare agency, you can hire your family, your cousins, and they can also be patients of your home healthcare agency. So your home healthcare agency can be just a total family operation with Medicaid money flowing in both as a benefit to your family members, but also as the money that pays to your family members. We see this in the notices of violation where the investigators, to the

• 53:43Speaker 01

  extent that they're trying to figure out what's happened at some of these home healthcare agencies, say like, oh, well, was this person receiving services from, you know, insert home healthcare agency at the same time that they were being paid to provide these services? So it's even the, even the stuff that follows the rules looks fraudulent from the, an outside perspective, because these pro, these programs are almost designed to be exploited and defrauded. But I don't, I don't think anyone's gonna die if you turn off the billing. No one's

• 54:12Shawn Ryan?

  Doesn't sound like it.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  There will be, and there's a good example.

• 54:15Shawn Ryan?

  I have to look for a legitimate excuse on why they, I'm just trying to think like,

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Janet Mills did it to Gateway.

• 54:21Shawn Ryan?

  Legitimate.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Janet Mills did it to Gateway, by the way. She turned off the billing, finally.

• 54:25Shawn Ryan?

  She did?

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Yes. This was nine, 10 months after we'd reported on it, the national media firestorm kicks up and she just says, you know, it gets to 1.6 million is their, the amount that they've been, you know, HHS has alleges that they've overbilled according to their arcane audit process, which is a drastic underestimate of what actually happened. But they, she's shut off their billing. So this is a, this is a mechanism that works. This is, this is not controversial. It's a way to protect the integrity of the Medicaid system. All you need is an allegation and you can shut off billing. And so make the allegations, folks. Go, go out there and make the allegations and governors too can use that in red states.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  This fraud's happening there too. You can use this authority very brazenly, I would say, to combat the problem. But to your original point about the, how you, how you deal with it, or the scope of the fraud, how we prosecute people. It's such a massive problem and so decentralized, you're gonna have to think asymmetrically. And I think if you, the more you investigate this as a journalist, or the more the law enforcement investigates this, you find more and more these connections to political actors in Somalia or Central Africa. You find more and more that there are high-level political figures in Somalia who are benefiting from this scheme on the money transmission side,

• 55:50Speaker 01

  on how they have their own daycares or healthcare businesses in Minnesota or in Maine. And you can't help but view this as a form of nation-building for Somalia, but also economic terrorism against the middle class in Maine, in Minnesota. I think this is economic terrorism, and I think it needs to be treated that way. They are systematically defrauding the American taxpayer at the nation-state level in order to build out their country in Somalia. And it is economic terrorism. And the victims are the people who are dying of overdoses in Lewiston. The victims are the people who those benefits could have been spent on. The victims are the people in northern rural Maine, the working-class people,

• 56:34Speaker 01

  guys I went to high school with who are seeing, you know, half their paycheck go away in taxes so that Abdullahi Ali can drive a Mercedes and have an estate in Kenya while he's running for warlord of Jubaland. Like, those are the victims of the economic terrorism that the Medicaid fraud is wreaking. And once you start treating it like economic terrorism, it becomes a national security problem. So I think you need to unlock national security-level responses to stop the fraud, to prevent it from happening in the future. And if you're ever going to get some semblance of justice for what's happened here, it has to be at the national security level. There has to be a kinetic response to remove this, to stop this.

• 57:16Shawn Ryan?

  Jeez. What happened to the Lewiston shooting donations for the families?

• 57:22Speaker 01

  This is, this is an unbelievable one. I mean, it's like...

• 57:28Shawn Ryan?

  How many people were killed?

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Eighteen.

• 57:30Shawn Ryan?

  Eighteen people were killed?

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Makes your soul shudder to think about the callousness of, you know, I guess, the, what happened that night, but also the people who seized on it and took advantage of it in the aftermath.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  So the short version is, uh, the same people who are defrauding the Medicaid system came and looted the shooting donations. Um, Somali NGOs came and, and were given, uh, money from the, the money that was raised for the victims. Were the victims Somali? No. Well, then how did they get the money? It's a very good question, John. It's a question that the main, I do. It's a question that the main community foundation won't answer. Um, so just to set this up, there's a huge amount of money is raised after the shooting. People from all over the place are sending in money. Um, they want to help. There's an outpouring of support in true American fashion. There's coming together of what can we do to help these people? Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Uh, people are sending money, you know, checks made out to the city of Lewiston, to the Chamber of Commerce. GoFundMes are popping up all over the place. There's just a, a groundswell of support to do anything we can because these people, you know, 18 people plus the, the people who were, um, wounded and survived, people who have the, um, psychological or mental, um, uh, injuries from that night, still dealing with therapy. The, um, families that now are missing a caregiver and are going to have to deal with the cost of that childcare, um, going forward. There's an immense financial burden on these people and people came out to say, how can we ameliorate that? How can we stop that?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  At some point, because there was so much money being raised through these different funds, there was a, um, decision made to centralize everything with the main community foundation. This is a big 501(c)(3) organization. They, you know, like 600 million a year. They manage money. They give out money. They run charitable, multiple charitable purposes and do grant giving. This is kind of what they do, charitable giving. Um, so they seemed like a natural person to, a natural group organization to bring legitimacy to the financial, uh, the donations rather than having like GoFundMe here, GoFundMe here. How the hell do you know if the GoFundMe is actually getting where it's supposed to go? Turns out those GoFundMes might've been more legitimate than what the main community foundation ended

• 59:55Speaker 01

  up doing. Uh, this MCF, by the way, was blessed by the Mills administration. You go to the, the Lewiston shooting website that they put up and it was like, if you want to support the, the victims, go here. At the beginning, all the representations made by the Maine Community Foundation were that 100% of the money that was given is going to go to the survivors and the victims' families. At some point, there was this splintering where they conceived of this idea of a broad area recovery is what they called it. Someone conceived of the idea that you've raised, I think it was like 6.9 million dollars. Well, some of that money should go to NGOs.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  So they split the funds and they started treating it like it was two separate funds.

• 1:00:41Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  They've never been very clear about how those payments were separated because so much of the money came in before this decision was made. A lot of it was just like Chamber of Commerce, you know, here's a hundred thousand dollars, some company in Maine, here's a hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:01:00Shawn Ryan?

  How much money was there?

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  6.9 million.

• 1:01:03Shawn Ryan?

  6.9 million divided by 18 families. Not that much.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Uh, no. It ended up being, they came up with a pretty complex formula for who would get the money. And there was also a lot of private charity. I'll say like there were a lot of Maine employers stepped up and covered the costs of their employees who were wounded that night and survived. Some of the hospitals in Maine did a good job of basically saying like, no, you're not gonna, you're not gonna have medical costs as a result of this. So there was a lot of private charity that wasn't encompassed by the Maine Community Foundation, but 1.9 million was set aside for these NGOs.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  And these organizations, this 1.9 million was allocated by a steering committee, the Maine Community Foundation created, which included at least four NGO heads who steered money to their own organizations.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  So this is blood drenched money raised in the aftermath of Maine's worst mass murder. And these NGO heads, most of them explicitly migrant NGOs, many of them run by Somali community leaders, saw it as an opportunity to steer money into their NGOs, their own NGOs. There was no conflict of interest policy. Somehow, they were just allowed to steer money to their own organizations, which is just like gobsmacking. The level of, it's just heinous that they would even think to do that. But then, once you get these members on the steering committee, all these other little NGOs that are kind of related and

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  they have the same office building, some of them are in the Gateway Community Services office building, by the way. Gateway Community Services is on the steering committee. Gateway Community Services steers. Are you serious? Yeah. They're nonprofit. They have a 501(c)(3) filing. That's basically the same thing, just allowing them to take money, like the Lewiston shooting money, that's only available to 501(c)(3)'s or government money that's only available to 501(c)(3)'s. But Nathan Davis, who is the son of State Senator Gilles Duson, he runs the nonprofit arm of Gateway Community Services. He's on the steering committee. He steers money to Gateway Community Services from the Lewiston shooting fund. Each of these NGOs

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  got over $65,000. And there were a ton of them. Actually, Aiman Osman, who was the Lewiston city councillor who just resigned, he's facing two gun theft charges. He also faced allegations that he lied on his campaign finance documents to pretend that he lived in the Somali district in Lewiston to run for city council and won, didn't live there because the building he listed was an uninhabitable condemned building owned by his brother. And then after his election, he was charged with, a grand jury indicted him with two gun theft charges. And then he lied on his bond documents, saying that he lived at that address again, and then resigned after that. And I don't know if the Lewiston police have

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  been able to find him for a bail check yet. But he ran the Lewiston Auburn Youth Foundation. Oh. Lewiston Auburn Youth Foundation got $65,000.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  From the Lewiston shooting money. So we actually took, we took money raised for victims of Maine's worst mass shooting and gave it to multiple people, actually, who had been or would be indicted for gun crimes. And again, I mean, the list goes on and on of the Somali organizations that held their handout for Lewiston shooting money. And I talked with, I actually, for my Substack, I interviewed four victims, survivors, family members who were there that night, including a woman who was shot multiple times and was still dealing with the consequences of that.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  And she talked about having medical bills, like $85,000. At the same time, she's learning that the Lewiston Auburn Youth Foundation got $65,000, that Generational NOR got $65,000, that Gateway Community Services got $65,000, that the Somali Bantu Association got $65,000, that, you know, the IFCA, you know, AK Health and Human Services, like all of these Somali organizations, which some of them don't even exist anymore, some of them maybe never existed, some of them are just like Facebook groups. It's unclear. None of them have given the money back. But like you see, these women, these victims are like, why did the Maine Community Foundation

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  give the money that was raised based on our suffering to these Somali NGOs that did nothing, nothing? They're not even pretending now that they did anything for the victims. And it's so fucking infuriating because the governor won't acknowledge it. AG Fry says that he's looked into it and it's, everything was done on the level, there's nothing for a criminal investigation. The mayor of Lewiston won't acknowledge it. Nobody on the establishment is saying that there's something wrong with this. And I mean, God bless Governor Lepage. He grew up in Lewiston, was like poor and homeless in Lewiston, didn't even speak English until he was 11, French speaking.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  And he came in having just, you know, lost an effort to become governor again. He came to Lewiston, he raised a half a million dollars. Somehow, he figured out how to give that all to the shooting victims.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Doesn't seem like rocket science. No kidding. Seems like, you know, that somewhat a victim comes with a medical bill. You, I mean, create a trust, create a trust, have a trustee. Victim has a medical bill, you pay it. Why do you have to have a steering panel formed of all these, you know, progressive, hard leftists and Somali immigrant activists?

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, what, how do you get that money back? But the, the, the big picture takeaway of that is, if you have gotten to the point as a Somali NGO head, where you're okay showing up, you know, stepping over the dead bodies of Maynor's who have just been gunned down and taking $65,000 for a charity. Medicaid fraud is not that big of a deal, is it? Right? If you're willing to do that. No. Of course you, of course you just send an invoice to the Department of Health and Human Services. And I'll say that the, a lot of this has only reached the level of attention that it has because Amy Sussman, whose nephew Max Hathaway was killed that night,

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  has just been a bulldog on it. Just been like, uh, uh, unsleeping advocate for the victims and their families. Good for her. And has chased the Maine Community Foundation to the ends of the earth to try to get some kind of change, some kind of justice. And so far, the Maine Community Foundation just thinks that they can stick their heads in the sand. They've got enough money, they can wait this out, that there uh, aren't some serious questions about their integrity and their, how they handled this. You know, a lot of the organizations that they gave money to through the Lewiston Shooting Fund were organizations that they had previously given money to and had previous relationships with. They haven't really said anything about how they're gonna rethink

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  the way they handle charitable giving through the foundation. I can tell you though, that there's, you know, 70, 80% of the state are gonna be rethinking their relationship with the Maine Community Foundation if they had one.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll bet. Fucked up, that story. Damn, dude. So many national reporters, my friends in the national media have gotten text messages over the last three weeks, like, did this really happen? Like, Gateway actually like took Lewiston shooting money? Like, Iman Osman got Lewiston shooting money? Yeah. And again, this is one we, we reported on this 18 months ago. We reported on this when it happened.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. That actually, the mainstream outlets, the corporate outlets in Maine, came in and reported on it and said, no, the AG says everything was fine. All these are upstanding NGOs. What are you talking about? MCF, Maine Community Foundation, they gave us a statement and they said that they, they, everything that they did was above board. So why would you question the statement that the Maine Community Foundation has put out? Like, we've checked this out. All the mainstream outlets just gave them a, gave it a good, leaving, not even a, not even a leaving alone, they gave it like the stamp of approval that they delegitimized Amy Sussman's complaints, they delegitimized Governor Page's complaints, any of the victims,

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  their family members who were concerned about where the money went. The mainstream media came in and said, these people are just fringe wackos. Like, don't pay attention to, you know, the fact that they're dealing with five-figure medical bills while Abdallah Ali is cashing $65,000 checks. Don't pay attention to that. You had morning, they're dead. Yeah.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Man.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  This stuff is just so infuriating. Yeah.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Let's take a break.

• 1:10:59Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:11:41Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:11:56Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Steve, we're back from the break and uh and the shit gets heavy. But you've described the migrant services industry as a Ponzi scheme.

• 1:12:08Shawn Ryan?

  How so?

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  In order to continue to operate, you need a constant flow of migrants. You know, a Ponzi scheme, you're paying your old investors with new money coming in. You need a new flow of migrants in order for the migrant services industry to stay afloat. So eventually the migrants have come in, they learn English, hopefully they become assimilated, and they no longer rely on 501(c)(3)'s, NGOs, the Office of New Americans, they no longer need these. So if you have, you know, if you speak English and you're assimilated, you don't need the Office of New Americans. You can use all the offices that the old Americans are using.

• 1:12:45Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  What we see in Maine is a pattern where the first generation of arrivals, the first wave of whether it's Somali migrants or West African migrants or Central African migrants.

• 1:13:01Shawn Ryan?

  What is that? Is it a program? What's going on? I mean, this is this is a little different than people coming up through the southern border. How are they getting here? I mean, this is a country with extreme poverty.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13Shawn Ryan?

  How how can they even afford an airline ticket to get to the US? How is this happening?

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  I assume you've seen Black Hawk Down.

• 1:13:21Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the that's kind of where it starts. Multipolar civil war in Somalia in the 90s. Madness, families fighting families, clans fighting clans, just total anarchy. And that creates a the, I guess, the pretense for mass migration or asylum seeker refugee migration from Somalia into the United States. And they come into Atlanta. Atlanta is a big delta port. And then

• 1:13:50Shawn Ryan?

  That was wasn't that all that was back in 93, right?

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but their their temporary protected status has endured until Trump just shut it down. From that, from that moment until when Trump decided this week to to end that. It's endured and the level of migration has, if anything, increased. And what what you see happening is it's a program at first. Yes, there is a deliberate effort to resettle the Somali refugees by groups like Catholic charities. So Catholic Charities makes a huge amount of money moving people migrants around to places in the country that don't necessarily vote to have that happen. You might, by one lens, you might consider Catholic Charities to be a human trafficking organization because that's what they do.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  They get paid, they make huge amounts of money to take people who've crossed the border illegally and distribute them throughout the United States.

• 1:14:46Shawn Ryan?

  This is great, Steve. I'm Catholic. Well, know this.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Well, good for you. Catholic Charities doesn't really have anything to do with being Catholic. It's just a nonprofit that makes a ton of money and has some kind of affiliation with the Catholic Church. But the Lutherans do this as well. There's tons of organizations that are in this migrant resettlement business and they cloak it in.

• 1:15:07Shawn Ryan?

  How big is the business?

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Billions. Billions. Billions. I mean, tens of billions of dollars. I mean, during the Biden administration, the amount of money that was dumped into these, I mean, it starts to be mind-numbing amounts of money that are dumped on these organizations. And it's to take and process migrants who cross the border and fly them, distribute them to little communities like the Springfield, Ohio. You know, those 15,000 Haitians don't just show up in Springfield, Ohio. That's coordinated by NGOs that have huge amounts of government money. That's what happened in Maine. Beginning in the early 2000, you have organizations are relocating Somali refugees from Atlanta

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  to Portland, and eventually from Portland, they figure out that Lewiston has more vacant large family housing to accommodate the families that are moving there. And from 2000 to 2003, you've got maybe 300 Somalis who are in Lewiston proper. And eventually, once you form that little bit of community, they're, I mean, Somalis are like anybody. You go to another country, you want to be with people who speak your language, they can help you figure out the lay of the land, they can help you figure out how to be, how to exist. And you start to create a magnet and a draw for other Somalis who are fleeing the civil war, and they want to come and they want to be with people who are like them, people who have gone through this experience of arriving in America before, because it's

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  more comfortable. It helps them. It's a natural human thing. You can understand that. But once you get to that level of a diaspora or a refugee settlement within your American city, it becomes its own draw. And when you add to that a very easy, generous benefit system, which is what Maine initially had, was a level of general assistance, which is a welfare program administered by the cities. And then you have the SNAP, TAMP, EBT cars that are administered by the state but funded by the federal government. And then you have Medicaid, which is the big healthcare benefit. You have all these benefit programs that kind of wrap around and surround Somali refugees once they arrive in Maine. And then you have the free housing. It becomes, why would you go to Texas?

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  You know, if you're a Somali refugee who just shows up, why would you go to Texas or Tennessee? Why would you go to any of those states when you know you've got family, you've got cousins, you've got friends, hundreds of them, in Maine? And they've already got the forms printed out for you. Actually, my, my friend I met, Abdi Iftin, who's a Somali author, he lives in Maine, and he wrote a book that was super pro-American. He lived through the civil war, and he talks about having arrived in Maine as a refugee and being given these forms. It was just like a matter of like intake processing. As a Somali, you show up and they give you the free housing forms, the welfare forms. Did he get here through one of the NGOs?

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  He, he has a, he has a complicated story in that he, he was, he grew up in Mogadishu, and his family attempted to flee and came back because they, where there's nowhere to flee to. So he kind of lived through this chaos and anarchy and eventually hooked up with a BBC reporter, or an NPR reporter, and started doing reports for NPR on this like little tin cellphone, basically. So he gets an experience of journalism, giving these reports. And a little community developed in America, like Team, Team Abdi, essentially, who were reading his reports from the front lines of Mogadishu, from like his cultural perspective, because he spoke English, because he, he learned English watching Schwarzenegger and

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Stallone bootlegs in Mogadishu. And so his process was a little bit more, it wasn't part of this mass migration. He ended up getting a ticket in the diversity lottery after he'd snuck into Kenya, or traveled into Kenya. So he, he wasn't a part of the, you know, the mass migration pipeline that a lot of them come through, and he came here legally. But he talks about this culture, which he's, he's called out and has faced death threats from his own community, like torrents, torrents of death threats, because he's got a huge TikTok following, and he reports on, he calls out fraud, and he reports on what's happening with Somalis in America to 800,000 TikTok followers, and that's the biggest social. He is a Somali?

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Yes. What's his, what's his account handle? At Somali Cowboy. At Somali Cowboy. I got it. Yeah, you won't be able to, I, he doesn't do very many posts in English. He does Somali language posts and he's done some of, some of the interviews I've done with him, some podcasts that I've done with him. He posts. I better brush up on my Somali. You will. Or whatever they say. Um, but, uh, his perspective has been really, really interesting as a, a member of the Somali diaspora, a genuine refugee who didn't take that turn down the path to government benefits and really embraced, embraced assimilation. He made it.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  He made it, yeah. Came here and he worked his ass off and he made it. Yeah, and he works in, he does translation. He wrote a, a book that sold a ton of copies. And, um, you know, he, now he works as a writer and a journalist and a translator. So he, you guys work pretty close together and he fills in the blanks? Yeah, we have, we have become, um, because he, he actually reached out as part of some of our reporting on, um, the Medicaid fraud. And so there's an interesting, there's an interesting event that ties into a lot of this. This would be, that would be an interesting interview. Could me, can you connect me to him? Absolutely. That would be, that would be very interesting. I've just seen some dark shit. I'll bet he has. You should listen to his, uh, his audio book. It's like, that's why I wanted to interview

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  him is after I listened to his life story. I was like, wow, you are remarkably upbeat and happy for the shit that you've lived through. But, uh, uh, part of, part of this story is we're looking through 2024 financial disclosures for all of the lawmakers, state lawmakers. And we see that Representative Dekka Delac, Somali refugee, big figure in this story, mayor of South Portland, now, uh, on the appropriations committee, pretty, uh, powerful influential figure in the main Democratic Party. She took this weird trip to Azerbaijan.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  It's kind of weird, paid for by the Azeri government. Okay. And Representative Mana Abdi, also Representative from Lewiston, also Somali, took this weird trip to Azerbaijan. And we keep looking through these financial disclosures and we see that Senator Jill Dooson, whose son, Nathan Davis, works at Gateway Community Services, she was also on that trip. And we start looking for other information about it and we find this torrent of Facebook pictures. And Abdallah Ali is on that trip, the CEO of Gateway Community Services, who later in the year, after this trip to Azerbaijan, would be running for Warlord of Jubala, Jubaland,

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  with, he said, a militia that he financed with the money that he raised in the United States. Also on that trip was Tarlan Ahmadov, an Azeri official who come to Maine, worked for Catholic charities and was running the Office of New Americans for Governor Mills.

• 1:22:33Shawn Ryan?

  The Office of New Americans?

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it sounds Orwellian, it's because it is. It's just a migrant resettlement office. It's about helping that pipeline that Abdi didn't go down. It's about facilitating. It's like a superhighway to welfare, independence, and being a controlled voting bloc for the progressive left and for the permanent government interests. But we see this junket that like, why is the Azeri government paying these people from Maine, who don't really have, really seriously, when you think about it, not that much power?

• 1:23:10Shawn Ryan?

  You know what's fucking crazy, man? Is, this is all orchestrated and it sounds like what you're saying is the voting bloc is a big thing. And, you know, why don't they just do what the citizens vote them in to do?

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Maybe they are.

• 1:23:32Shawn Ryan?

  So that they can get voted back in instead of going rogue and then just fucking importing voting blocks. Like what?

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  It's less possible.

• 1:23:42Shawn Ryan?

  They wouldn't be able to be, I mean.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  You don't get the, you don't get the, the all expenses paid junkets to Turkey and Azerbaijan if you're.

• 1:23:49Shawn Ryan?

  You don't get to participate in the corruption.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I mean, there's, I, I can't think of any legitimate reason why the, this huge cohort of Maine lawmakers, by the way, Akla Ahmed, the policy researcher at the Office of New Americans, she was also on this junket and so was Cumberland County Probate Judge Paul Aronson, kind of sticks out in that dynamic. They're all on this junket to Azerbaijan. We can't really figure it out. None of them want to talk to us about it and we start reporting on it and eventually we discover Tarlan Ahmadov has this long history of wildly anti Armenian statements, like posting the kind of things about Armenians that would, you know, if you post about, you know, Jews or any other ethnic group, you're just going to be drummed out of polite society.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Eventually he is fired from the, being the director of the Office of New Americans. But this kind of ties into the Gateway story. It's this weird junket. Like, why are they going to Azerbaijan? Why does it happen right before, right while really? Abdullah Ali is saying he wants to raise money for munitions and troops in Jubaland. And then he's, you know, he loses his election eventually, but it's this weird geopolitical game that they're playing with American taxpayer dollars. There's nothing to do with what's best for Mainers, what's best for people in Lewis.

• 1:25:06Shawn Ryan?

  That's obvious.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  You know, we actually looked up the trade with Azerbaijan and Maine, just because we thought, maybe there's some niche like toothpick industry or something, you know, trees are getting exported from Maine to Azerbaijan. It's like $60,000 a year in trade between Maine and Azerbaijan is nothing. It's like, there's no plausible reason. So what other game are you playing? Sending this huge delegation of all these people who have ties to Gateway Community Services, credibly accused of running this elaborate Medicaid fraud for five and a half years, and then you're running, you know, for, for president of a foreign, you know, territory.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  It's just so far removed from what the government of the state of Maine should be doing. And it's like, I'm, you know, I'm a Maine reporter. Why the fuck should I have to know about Jubaland? Or, or, or these, these elaborate games that they're playing with our money? But this is, you know, another part of, of the, I guess, the scheme that was being cooked up that kind of orbits Gateway. Because we talked earlier about the, the amount of money that's flowing to them purely on the Medicaid side, you know, about $5 million a year for translation services, personal support services, which is again, wiping asses. Maybe they're wiping asses. Maybe they're just saying that they wipe asses and billing

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  the state for it. But they also, you start to look at the businesses that are in and around the addresses where Gateway has its headquarters. There's one on Canal Street in Lewiston, which is right in Little Mogadishu. And there's one in a kind of rundown area of Portland on Forest Ave. And you look at the other businesses that are registered at these locations, and you start to see, geez, why are there so many home healthcare agencies registered right at the same office as Gateway? Why is there this weird transportation company registered right at the same place as Gateway? Why are there these, you know, explicitly political NGOs registered at the same address, at both the same addresses?

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  This is like the, it sounds like the exact same footprint is Minnesota. Yes, it is. How many states do you think this is happening in? To a greater or lesser degree, all of them. I mean, Medicaid is such a, I mean, that's the program we're talking about, is Medicaid is being defrauded at a scale you just, you can't even imagine. I'm talking just Somali fraud. Just Somali fraud? Just Somali fraud. Definitely Ohio, Ohio, Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, probably Georgia.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  But, you know, I'm not, I'm just curious. Yeah, I'm a main reporter, but I would say, uh, any state where you've had the combination of a, um, a set apart refugee minority has come in, then you have an establishment Democrat, um, you know, political coalition has leveraged them for their own political gain, you'll see this, because this is what happened, is the, it was never baked in the cake that the Somalis who arrived in Maine were going to become fraudsters or in Minnesota, that was never, that was never, you know, predestined. I've seen, uh, you know, a lot of people who, I guess, like, talk disparagingly, as if like, that's the only thing.

• 1:28:29Shawn Ryan?

  How do we fucking get them into jobs?

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  They, a lot of them are, a lot of them are.

• 1:28:34Shawn Ryan?

  What, why is there no, why is it always a fucking pathway to, to welfare? Why is there never a pathway to success?

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  For political control.

• 1:28:42Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, when you pull somebody out of a country like that, I don't know if you've ever been to a fucking third world country like Somalia, but when you, when you pull some, they'll do anything to get out of that shit. But, I mean, if you, and they're still gonna fucking vote for you because you pulled them out of that. So, like, why, why is it, why is it the commonal, why is it just a pathway, a funnel to welfare? It makes no sense to me. Like, it just destroys our fucking country. People on welfare, like, that's, that, that should be a temporary fix for Americans. Not, you shouldn't live

• 1:29:24Shawn Ryan?

  your entire life on welfare, especially if you're a fucking immigrant.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Or you shouldn't.

• 1:29:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they work their asses off in their, I mean, I work my ass off, you work their ass off. Those people probably work harder than any of us in the situation that they're living in. I mean, they're, they're fucking going to the river to get water. I mean, it's, it's. They don't have running water.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have work ethic. It's not like they're

• 1:29:50Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I'm getting at.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  They're not, they're tough people.

• 1:29:53Shawn Ryan?

  They don't come here lazy.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Shawn Ryan?

  They come here. I mean, I, I would imagine they come here ready, ready to make a living, ready to, to contribute, ready to, ready to, to live the, the American dream, right? But instead, we, we, we, we give them a pathway to, to welfare, to free living, free medical, free everything.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  It's for political

• 1:30:21Shawn Ryan?

  Nobody stops it, like.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  It's political.

• 1:30:24Shawn Ryan?

  This isn't a, this.

• 1:30:27Shawn Ryan?

  Some of it is a political, some of it is, I mean, it, okay, but I mean, it's just. Ah, man.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  I think that the

• 1:30:37Shawn Ryan?

  Like, nobody's fucking stopping this, is what I'm saying. Like, it's, that's the fix. Give these people a pathway to jobs. There's a shit ton of jobs that nobody wants to do. There's job, it just.

• 1:30:55Shawn Ryan?

  Do it. Incentivize them.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  The

• 1:31:00Shawn Ryan?

  Why the fuck isn't nobody?

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:04Shawn Ryan?

  This is the shit that's sad. Like, we can bat this shit back and forth, oh, fucking Democrats, oh, Republicans, but neither one of these fucking parties have fixed a damn thing. It's, it's just, it, it, you know what I mean?

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:17Shawn Ryan?

  But this, it's the same shit. It's the same, we bat the same fucking things back and forth. You know, it is all political. It's like, hey, uh, we don't have anything to talk about. Let's bring up abortion.

• 1:31:29Shawn Ryan?

  Have we ever solved anything? Have we ever come to a fucking conclusion? No, let's talk, let's bat immigration back and forth.

• 1:31:38Shawn Ryan?

  But it's just fucking, like, nobody solves anything. Like, there is no problem solving that happens here anymore.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  I, you know, I would kinda, I would disagree. I mean, I think that the Democrats in Maine have solved the problem. You know, their policies aren't popular with rural, working-class Mainers, bringing in new voters. They solved the problem.

• 1:32:00Shawn Ryan?

  What's the problem?

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  The problem is that they're gonna get voted out of office if they continue pursuing policies that aren't popular with rural, working-class

• 1:32:08Shawn Ryan?

  Are they gonna get voted out of office? I mean, you look, look at, look at a place like, I don't know, pick, pick.

• 1:32:18Shawn Ryan?

  Politicians. 10% approval rating, 90% reelection rate. Are they gonna get voted out? Look at some of the shit going on down in Texas. Look at their politicians. Do you like any of them?

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  I think part of understanding how the...

• 1:32:34Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you know.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I understand exactly what you're saying. But I think that the part of understanding how the Medicaid fraud and the Somali fraud has unfolded is understanding how the Medicaid program is administered because it localizes the distribution of this money. So it's not that your member of Congress doesn't really have much say over how your Medicaid program is administered. The Medicaid program is, I think the most recent year for which we have numbers, a trillion dollars in spending.

• 1:33:03Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not saying that, I'm not saying these people have the power to stop this immediately. What I'm saying is they could introduce a bill. Somebody has to come up with an alternative.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  For work requirements.

• 1:33:17Shawn Ryan?

  Before.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Shawn Ryan?

  You just have to come up with an alternative. Put it into a fucking bill and introduce it.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we've done it. We have, like, the ideas are out there to stop welfare dependency. Governor Page introduced those reforms in Maine. Groups like the Foundation for Government Accountability advocate for the dignity of work and policies that will reduce welfare dependency. Those ideas are out there. It's not inventing, it's not lifting off, you know, a starship rocket booster. It's very, very basic. They know what the ideas are. They're rejecting them on purpose because they want to build dependent political coalitions to protect their own political power. And we see this in the administration of these programs, in the records that we found just at the local level in Maine. But what I was saying about Medicaid is, this is unlike Medicare, which is for older

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  people and is centrally administered in Washington DC. And your senator, your representative, they have a big say over stuff happening with Medicare. Medicaid is block granted to the states. So the federal government takes a whole bunch of tax money and they just give a big bag of cash to the state legislature and say, here, you run a program for poor people.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  That's how Medicaid operates. And each state gets to determine little different programs and how they're going to operate. And they've got to kind of color in between the lines that the federal government sets out. But they have huge latitude. So with all this federal money coming in, a little bit of state money. And what are politicians going to do when you give them a big bag of money? They're going to try to spend that in a way that makes their constituents happy, makes them look good, protects their power. And the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, you know, it gets, you know, people think it's some complicated technocratic policy, but all it did was just make Medicaid bigger. Just made the bag of cash bigger. That's what, that's basically what Obamacare did. Took Medicaid, this huge dysfunctional bloated welfare program, made enrollment of it much, much bigger.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  So more people could be on this program. And Maine, like Minnesota, is an expansion state. We expanded in 2019, 2020. So more people are eligible. The bag of cash grows. All this money's coming into Maine. And the governor and the legislature, they've got all this money to play with to decide, you know, where it's going to go. And then you add COVID into that. And they're spending this money in a way that is going to protect their political power and accomplish their ideological mission. And the dependency of the Somali community is just a byproduct of that. It's, you know, they, they are rewarding the Somali community with taxpayer money and turning a blind eye to the fraud in order to protect their own political power.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  And the, again, the byproduct, the consequence of that has been a Somali diaspora that is dependent, that is kind of orbits these fraud programs, these schemes. So if you're a young Somali guy and you see all your peers are starting home healthcare agencies or daycares, getting rich, buying mansions and opening day, you know, driving Mercedes Benz G wagons.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Are you gonna go work at L.L. Bean? You know, are you gonna, are you gonna go get a job and work for $15 an hour at Dunkin' Donuts when your friend is making a million dollars a year doing fake healthcare stuff? No. So that you're, the incentives are all misaligned because you've turned a blind eye to fraud. You've designed a system where fraud is far more profitable than doing the right thing. That's what we have. And you've done it, I think, intentionally to protect political power. And we found, I guess, getting back to some of our boots-on-the-ground investigations, there's a contract process in the state where you're handing out money. Usually, if you're gonna spend a whole bunch of money, you do a request for proposals

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  and you have to have, you know, competing proposals to see who's gonna provide that service. Transparent gets the lowest price for taxpayers. You can also do no-bid contracts, which is somebody in the government just picks who the best person is to get this money. In Maine, for whatever reason, we have these forms that you have to fill out when you do a no-bid contract, and they're, they're public on the state website for seven days and then they disappear. That's the transparency we have. That's how the system was designed. For seven days, if you check the website during that seven-day period, you can see the form. Could be a million dollars, could be $10 million, could be $5,000 because some guy in Hancock County needs like a new prop on a boat or something. But you have to check it during that period of time and you'll find the no-bid contract for money that's being spent.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  It's, it's the most corrupt and least transparent way to spend money, to reward your friends, to reward your political allies. And we requested through the Freedom of Access Act, all of the no-bid contract documents. We wanted all of these documents because just because they're only public for seven days doesn't mean they're not still a public record, subject to that record request. And the Mills administration came back and told us they couldn't do it. Wasn't technically possible. They weren't able to provide us with those documents. So I was looking back over some older stories that we did. And I found links to old no bid contracts. I was like, hold on a second. These are all still on a government server somewhere.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  And so I used, uh, I used Grok to write a program that would guess at the URLs where those documents were and download the documents if it found them. And ran it for like 15 hours on my home computer and scraped from the government servers 5,000 documents that they told me they couldn't give me, all pointing towards no bid contract spending.

• 1:38:57Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit, did you send it to them?

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I didn't. If they want it from me, they're gonna have to pay me.

• 1:39:03Shawn Ryan?

  You should send it to them.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  No, if they want it from me, they're gonna have to pay me because that's what I have to do when I get documents from them. I have to pay them to search for documents so they could pay me for the documents. But they actually, Representative David Boyer introduced a bill to make that change. So now those all have to be public. It was like a tiny, tiny win for transparency, but only because we embarrassed them.

• 1:39:21Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:39:25Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:40:08Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  In those no bid contract documents, again, this is a huge trove of scanned documents. You can't search, you can't text search through them. It's just this mountain of raw material that you have to search through just like until your eyes bleed, looking to figure out what the hell's going on here. We find no bid contracts to Gateway. Particularly

• 1:40:54Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  No bid contracts to Gateway for, funded by federal COVID money that came in, in February of 2022, right before Governor Mills is running for reelection up against former Republican Governor Paul Page. And if you pull the contracts, which we did, and read them, and the funding agreements and everything, this money went to create what were called CHOWs, Community Health Outreach Workers. I'm willing to bet that this happened in a lot of states because it wasn't just the Somali groups. It was the Hispanic groups, the New Main or Public Health Initiative, like all of the who's who

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  of the left wing NGOs got CHOW money to create these community health outreach workers. And you didn't have to have any

• 1:41:46Shawn Ryan?

  Are these, this is, is this COVID PPE loans?

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  Uh, some of these groups did, Gateway got $700,000 in PPP money, yeah. But this is separate from that. This was CARES Act. This is like the various big, you know,

• 1:42:00Shawn Ryan?

  Supposedly, I just read that Palantir has developed some program that's going to go through and, and basically find all the fraud from the PPE loans.

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  That's what we need. We need asymmetric solutions. And I could talk a little bit about some of the things that we've done to try to process all of these documents, but I think that the CHOWs are important because one of the things that I hope Some other people listening to this will take away is going into their state and trying to figure out if the same patterns were replicated because the same, because it's a state by state program where there's Medicaid or state administered COVID spending, they just take the same playbook and they run it in a little bit of a different way to a different beat in every state. And so journalists who are working in other states, you know, Nick Shirley, anybody who's in Minnesota or California or Ohio, they can say, huh, jeez, they found that in Maine. I wonder if that's happening in my state.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  It is. You just have to find it. These chows were, you know, your only qualification had to be that you could speak the language of the migrant population that you were targeting. The community health outreach workers, the positive spin of it is that they're providing healthcare to marginalized communities during a pandemic. Okay, so you're going and handing out COVID tests or something in Little Mogadishu to these migrant communities that are increasing, by the way, because as this is all happening, we have a second and third wave of mass migration to Maine that is Central African, not Somalis. We have Congolese, Angolans and Rwandans coming into Maine, a genuine refugee crisis in Portland. But the community health outreach

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  workers are tasked with signing up migrants for Medicaid, for food stamps and EBT card. They were allowed to give the migrants walking around money. They were allowed to buy household supplies. Walking around money. They were, they were given in the contract, it doesn't say walking around money, says you're allowed to buy household supplies. I'm sure that there was a lot of policing of how that household supply money was handed out. They're also tasked with keeping a database on all of the people that they've just gone around and bestowed these patronage benefits on. And under federal law, if you sign somebody up for an EBT card or Medicaid, you are required

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  to provide them assistance registering to vote. So any program that requires NGOs to go out and sign people up for welfare benefits is a de facto voter registration program. So we took no bid contract money funded by the federal government, handed out through this opaque process, gave it to Gateway Community Services and other groups operating or in the same, you know, community and turned it into a taxpayer funded voter registration and ballot harvesting program. And so who did those people vote for? When they know where their household supply money came from. Who did those people vote for? And I'll give you a clue because right after they get this no bid contract money,

• 1:45:01Speaker 01

  Gateway Community Services Abdallah Yali creates an organization called the Community Organizing Alliance. It's run by two of his staffers who worked at Gateway, Sophia Khalid, who was a Lewiston City Councilor and a former special assistant at Gateway Community Services, and her brother Mohammed Khalid. They're working for him, but they work at Community Organizing Alliance now, which is in the same office building. So it's this, it's got a new name, but it's in the same office building. It's like the political arm of Gateway Community Services. And it's tied in with the top Democrats from the state of Maine, non Somali Democrat political activists. And this is an explicitly political organization that is existing in the same building

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  at the same time that these taxpayer-funded chows are going out and sprinkling money over the community and coming back with a list of, you know, potential voters who are living in these households.

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  And Sophia Khalid now is still running the Community Organizing Alliance. And she did a fundraiser, just, it was like maybe a month after our last episode. She did a fundraiser with the Secretary of State of Maine, Shenabellows, who is right now refusing to turn over the voter rolls in the state of Maine to the Trump Justice Department. They're investigating how many non-citizens or migrants could potentially be voting in the state of Maine. And Shenabellows says, no, I'm not turning over those voter records. And Shenabellows, Graham Platner, I'm sure you've seen about him, the guy who's running for Senate in Maine. And just a who's who of Democrats go into Lewiston and do a rally

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  in support of the Somalis after this fraud stuff started breaking in Minnesota. And who is running it but Sophia Khalid, who's a former Gateway employee, running the Community Organizing Alliance, no bid contracts from the Mills administration? And yesterday, Nick Shirley released his reporting on, I guess, the second batch on the non-emergency Medicaid transportation money.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  And we found also registered at the Canal Street address of Gateway Community Services is a company called Careway Express, which is a non-emergency Medicaid transportation provider that is registered in the name of Mohammed Khalid, who's Sophia Khalid's brother. The reason why I bring up this transportation money is because this is massive, massive money. This is a $750 million, $750 million contract over 10 years that was awarded to a publicly traded company called Motive Care. And then they distribute it to subcontractors. And it's the subject of a lot of controversy in Maine right now because Motive Care went

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  bankrupt after this contract was awarded through an RFP that was- An RFP. Request for Proposal. Okay. So the state of Maine says, "We need non-emergency medical transportation, which is paid for by Medicaid, by federal dollars. These are car rides for methadone patients." Like, you're Sean, you live in Lewiston, you need a boofing kit, you need a ride to go get the kit. Literally, you can get a ride to the needle exchange clinic through non-emergency medical transportation, or the methadone clinic, or your doctor's appointment, whatever it is. So there's this huge need for rides, transportation for Medicaid patients. The state does this on a 10-year basis, they've got a big bucket of money for it, and they say, "We need transportation for all of these regions."

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  This had been provided by some nonprofits like Panquist Cap, Waldo Cap, some 501(c)(3)'s that are left-leaning, they run their own vehicle fleets, whatever. Three years ago, Motive Care bids for it, and they get it, contract for the whole state. And their model is different. They're just like a call center and a ride processing organization. They subcontract to all these little, tiny, like 35 different subcontractors, many of which in their more urban areas are Somali businesses, like run the Somali cab services. And we don't really know, you don't have a lot of transparency about how they operate after the money flows through Motive Care to them. One of them is Mohammed Khalid's Careway Express, operating out of the same office

• 1:49:19Speaker 01

  as Gateway Community Services. But this is $750 million over 10 years.

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  Seven hundred and fifty million dollars? Yes, for rides in Maine, disproportionately weighted towards the, you know, the districts with the most people. That's how the funding formula, it gets it, the funding formula is complicated, but it's a huge amount of money. Panque's Capsues, because they don't like how the RFP turned out and they think it was sketchy. It comes out during the RFP process that the people evaluating, deciding to give this money to Motive Care and therefore their Somali subcontractors, can't really explain why they did that. They're like, yeah, you know what, that wasn't really fair. We copied and pasted some stuff from some other areas. We can't really explain how this all worked out. Terribly unfair. The people who were evaluating the RFP, giving this money away, said, yeah, it was an unfair and flawed process.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  But it hasn't been resolved yet. And a bipartisan group of lawmakers last week sent a letter to Governor Mills saying, just rebid the contract. You have the authority. You just rebid the contract. And she won't. She won't do this. For, for more than a year now, they've been saying, just, just rebid the contract. You can do it. The company, Motive Care, has gone bankrupt now. They're not providing the rides. There's been this breakdown in service, means poorest, most vulnerable people, people who actually should be on Medicaid and get these rides, who want legitimate healthcare services, not, you know, made up daycare services or made up home care services, they're not getting transportation, they're getting stranded, the system is failing them, so just rebid the contract and it solves all the problems.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  The contract can go back to the Maine-based company that has been handling it forever. And it's this mystery, why won't she rebid this contract? Because it's hurting poor people. Democrats say they want to help poor people. Formerly a Democrat NGO had that contract anyway, it's just like a big nonprofit, like a legitimate nonprofit that plays by the rules, it might be left-wing, but plays by the rules. Why won't she just rebid that contract? As of today, she has not responded to Democrats and Republicans. An overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republican lawmakers coming out and saying, "Just rebid the contract." She won't do it. And this is over a year? Over a year ago? This has been, I think, three years now.

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  Three years? This company's been bankrupt? So Motive Care gets the contract. They're not a super financially healthy company. They go bankrupt. They've gone into penny stock status. They now say that they've come out of the other side of bankruptcy, bigger, stronger, leaner. They're lobbying lawmakers very hard to keep that contract. Obviously, why wouldn't they? Any company would. But their model is not to hire the same people, the same cars, or to operate fleets. Their model is to give the money to subcontractors like Carway Express. They just happen to have a disproportionate number of contractors in these urban areas, our Somali-run companies, who are co-located with the most notorious Medicaid fraud right

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  now in Maine. And you see the same exact thing in Nick's second video. When that guy David is taking them around, he's like, "Let me show you the second biggest fraud: non-emergency medical transportation." I'm like, "Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner." Wow. It's like home care services, non-emergency medical transportation, SNAP, and EBT fraud, where you take the EBT card and you swipe it and you get cash back at a discount for the amount of benefits that are taken off your card. All these different programs that are being scammed. But the thing is, so why won't Janet Mills just rebid the contract? Why do you think she won't? Because she knows who it's going to, right? She knows that it's benefiting the Somali contractors.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  It's the only possible way that it makes sense is if she understands the amount of the no-bid contracts, Medicaid money, the non-emergency medical transportation money. We're talking tens of millions of dollars that's flowing into this political community, which... Is very, very active, tends to, tends to vote quite a bit. You've got your activist base, what you're funding, your door knockers and your ballot harvesters. You've got this captured political community that you're pumping tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into and they're turning out and they're voting for you. And again, it might not make a determinative difference in general elections because a lot of people are coming out to vote and the Somalis aren't, you know, going to tip

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  the scales in a general election, but in the primary elections they will. Hmm. And Janet Mills is now running against Graham Platten, Graham Plathner, this hard left progressive, and they're all going to Lewiston to compete for the Somali vote because you're talking about 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 votes. And then you've got the adjacent people who are in the migrant services world, who are, you know, funded by the migrant services Ponzi scheme, this constant churn of migrants coming in who need welfare checks, dependency and translation services and this whole industry that gets developed around the borderless welfare state. They're the voting block that's going to decide who the Democratic nominees are.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  So you either got to pander to them or you've got to pump taxpayer money into them if you want that vote. That's what's going to decide who the primary nominees are from Maine, from Minnesota, from whatever state where this phenomenon is happening, this phenomenon of migrant services industrial complex. It's what it is. Yeah. Man, let's talk about the Immortals. The Immortal Somali. Yeah. This is something I kind of thought about, but never really dwelled on it because I didn't know how you would design a journalistic investigation to like figure out if there's a story there.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  But I was talking with Liz Collins from Alpha News, who is, she's like fantastic. I mean, this is the moment for Alpha News. They're covering, they're based in Minneapolis, they do state level news and they're actually willing to report the truth and challenge the regime out there. And she just says something to me, she's like, have you ever looked at cardiac arrests involving Somalis? It's like.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  I kind of grocked what she was getting to and I was like, you mean like our Somalis dying of natural causes and being reported? And she was like, yeah, she's like, I was talking with Minneapolis police officers and none of them ever remember responding to a cardiac arrest, aneurysm, stroke of a older Somali person. And you're just looking at the actuarial, actuarial tables. You would think 100,000 people out there, the odds say that some of them are going to have heart attacks, they're going to die, and then the police or the emergency services are going to be called to respond. None of the police officers ever remember going to a Somali DOA.

• 1:56:25Speaker 01

  And so I go to some of my sources in the Lewiston Police Department and ask, do you remember ever responding to Somali DOA's cardiac events? Like, they start laughing, like, you know, we were just talking about this at the station and no one really remembers responding to Somali DOAs. So, so what's happening? You know? Based on that sample, you know, it's not, it's not totally scientific, but we know there's some natural deaths happening from medical events within the Somali community that are not being reported to the, to the state, to the medical authorities, to EMS. Now, why is that? So what happens if you, if, if grandma's got subsidized senior housing and EBT card

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  and Medicaid benefits and you report that she's passed away? Okay, so those benefits get shut off. Everybody can understand, yeah, you just keep the benefits going. This is how you end up with social security or more so the EBT cards benefits going to dead people. But what are they doing with the bodies?

• 1:57:25Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I was gonna ask.

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  What are they doing with the bodies?

• 1:57:29Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. Interesting when they find that.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  I don't know, man. That's...

• 1:57:39Shawn Ryan?

  Man, we're just, we're turning into a third world country. It's so weird.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  I want to show you a, a video. I was, I was asked not to let you publish this, but the source said that I could at least show it to you. This is a security camera footage from outside a Somali market.

• 1:58:07Shawn Ryan?

  What the hell is that? Is that a body? Oh, never mind.

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  The guy, he's, he's sitting down. You see that thing he sits on the ground when he comes out?

• 1:58:14Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on, I had to restart it.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  So he comes out and he sits on the ground?

• 1:58:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:22Speaker 01

  That's his arm.

• 1:58:24Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, his arm.

• 1:58:30Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean that's his arm?

• 1:58:32Speaker 01

  I mean, like, it's his arm, and it became no longer connected to his body, and he's walking out of the back room of the market, um,

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  to go get medical help.

• 1:58:46Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  And this was reported in the news that this had happened. Um, they never really figured out what exactly happened. He claimed that he was chopping up meat at this market and fell into the saw and chopped his own arm off?

• 1:59:11Speaker 01

  This is just one of the many mysteries that come with being a police officer in Lewiston, Maine.

• 1:59:16Speaker 01

  Guy's still in Lewiston, by the way.

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  He's the one with one arm. Um, that market, by the way, is affiliated with a group that got Lewiston shooting money.

• 1:59:31Shawn Ryan?

  Geez.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  AK, the AK market had AK Health Services. Um, yeah, my mind goes to when all these bodies need to be accounted for, my mind goes to the facilities that they have for processing meat.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  Right? You know, if they've, if they've got the bandsaws that can hack somebody's arm off just in an accident like that, I don't know, how, how do you, I mean, as a younger man, I jacked deer before and so have dealt with the problem of trying to make a, a large carcass disappear. It's hard. It's not.

• 2:00:10Speaker 01

  It's not, uh, it's not, it's not as simple as you might think, but yeah, that's, that's a, that's something where a Republican governor could come in and look at the age of people getting Medicaid benefits or EBT card benefits in Lewiston and just be like, holy shit, we've got a hundred, a bunch of people who are 110 years old getting EBT card benefits. What's going on here? Can we just call them and see if they're real people? That's all a lot of this would require to stop is just calling, just like basic checkups, going to the offices. I mean, we, uh, I've got my notes from, we did, uh, we visited some of these home healthcare businesses that have sprung up over the last

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  five years. Um, one building on Bishop Street in Portland has all of these businesses registered there. They're not all, uh, home healthcare businesses. There's some transportation businesses, but you've got, uh, you know, AB Home Healthcare. How many are there approximately? There's 39 companies. We don't know how many of them are real. How many of them have actually? 39 companies in one building? Yeah. Uh, and they're all, we actually have video of it that we'll release in conjunction with, uh, this episode. We went in, we knocked on all the doors and nobody's home. They're, they're one-room office suites. They all have matching signs on the door. They're checking the box of having an office so that they can unlock the Medicaid money. Yeah.

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  But no one's there. And if somebody from the government just knocked on the door, they'd figure out pretty quickly or just like walk, did what we did, just walk around the building. We visited twice in December and then in January to see what was going on. And it's clear what's happening. They just like, someone figured out, here's this empty office building. Go get a suite. You check the box. You unlock the Medicaid money. You look like a legitimate business. But you've got AB Home Healthcare, uh, Bright Star Home Care, Bright Star LLC, Bright Star Residential, Bright Stars USA, Bishop Star Residential, Coastal Care LLC, Fable Home Care, Greater Portland Home Care. That one has billed $2 million. Um, Maine Home Care, Noble Transportation, which is a Medicaid transportation company.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  Prestige Home Care. That one's billed $2.5 million. Knocked on the door. Nobody's there. Um, Southern Maine Home Care. Uh, that one is, uh, uh, 4.3 million. Supreme Choice Home Care, 1.1 million. Uh, Tozolana Personal Care. Uh, Five Stars is an interesting one.

• 2:02:39Speaker 01

  Five Stars is one we found audit documents for. The guy who runs Five Stars Personal Care is, his name is Mustafa. And you can see in the emails that they audit his spending and he gets a million dollars from 2022 to 2024. And at the beginning of 2024, they flag him, they audit his transactions. He has a 70% error rate. So 70% of the time, he sends paperwork to Medicaid to get money. Something doesn't stack up. There's not documents to substantiate it. There's just, he doesn't pass the straight face test. So they send him a letter, notice of violation, we're going to be auditing you. We need some additional documents.

• 2:03:21Speaker 01

  If he had those documents, all he would have to do is send them to the Department of Health and Human Services and they'd say, okay, you check out, you can continue billing Medicaid. He's, you can see in the emails that he strings along the process where he doesn't respond to the letters at first, and then he says that his responses were getting lost in the mail, and then his family is sick, and then his family is sick, again, they all have COVID really, really bad, and this has all delayed him. So he gets extension after extension after extension throughout, you know, the audit process, and he's allowed to continue billing, hundreds of thousands of dollars, while he's under audit, while he's making up these excuses, while he's living in public housing, by the

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  way, and running this business out of public housing as a 25-year-old in Maine. And finally, in February of 2025, they shut off billing to him after this whole process. So he's made a million dollars doing this home healthcare business. They shut off the money. He never complains as far as we can see. No one dies, no one loses their healthcare. He just gets to walk away from the business. The business entity folds and he goes on his life, you know, goes and starts a new enterprise. We've even seen instances of the same person corresponding with the state about one of these audits

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  for a firm that gets shut down because they can't substantiate their care, going out and starting a second Medicaid business, running it parallel while they're doing the delay game on the audit process and they're starting another business that runs. So you can do this scheme, get your Medicaid billing shut off and you're not going to be barred from starting a new Medicaid business. And don't even think about criminal charges or a criminal investigation for any of this. And don't even think about making it public. This all just gets swept under the rug unless someone does a public records request, finds it, pours over these documents that they make it as hard as possible for you to read and interpret and understand.

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  And there's no way you find out about what's happening here without some kind of outside, you know, agent bringing transparency. And it's been a huge process for us to disentangle what's happening. Like, why are these companies? Why do we have fraud investigators at the Department of Health and Human Services who are investigating all of this, finding it, teeing it up, and then nothing happens? The money's not recouped? There's no charges? There's... This is just the commonality with everything. It's just swept under the rug because they don't want to upset the community. They don't want to upset their voters. They're pumping money into a community that they want their political support.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  And we actually had, when Ayman Osman resigned from the city council for his gun charges, there was a member of the Somali community who came up at the city council meeting, which we were covering, and said bluntly, I think Elon Musk actually retweeted this video, said bluntly... Hey Democrats, we vote for you, you need to protect us. That's the play, that's the trade-off. That's the pay-to-play that's happening in Maine and in Minnesota. The Democrats protect the money-making schemes that the migrant communities are running, and in exchange, they get political support. And the migrants are taking large amounts of money out of this country in some cases,

• 2:06:53Speaker 01

  because part of them, I think, knows it's not, what they're doing isn't sustainable. So they're trying to pad their nests for when they have to leave the country. But it's not for the benefit of the people of Maine, American taxpayers. It's so totally destructive to the fabric of society. And it does build this animus between the communities. You know, like, the progressive left wants this vision of a totally harmonious, diversity is our strength, multicultural society. But then they do everything they can to prop up these tribal differences and create privileged communities based on race and ethnicity that build this enmity.

• 2:07:35Speaker 01

  And that's really like the defining socio-cultural trend in Maine right now, is working Mainers are increasingly wondering why all these migrants who got here five years ago are driving around in Mercedes G-Wagons and having nicer houses than they'll ever be able to have. Worked their entire life, paid 40% of their paycheck to the government. They don't have a skosh of the comfort of living that the migrants have.

• 2:08:06Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go into, it's not just the Somalis.

• 2:08:14Shawn Ryan?

  But wait, it gets worse.

• 2:08:17Speaker 01

  It does.

• 2:08:21Speaker 01

  I'll say this, so we have some stuff that we haven't reported that we saved for you. Really? Totally exclusive. This is the first time people will learn about it. One is, just to, to put a bow on the Somali conversation, I said, I believe that this is backed at the nation-state level by political factions in Somalia. We have a major player in Little Mogadishu in Lewiston, who is right now the sitting Finance Minister of Jubaland, Somalia. The same nation-state semi-autonomous region where Abdallah Ali tried to run for president. His name is Hussein Hirsi Ahmed. And through Ahmed Management LLC, he owns a commercial real estate building in Little Mogadishu.

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  He rents to halal markets with EBT, sweat machines, healthcare agencies, left-wing pro-migrant NGOs. He runs a money transmitter business. And he got his foothold, as far as we can tell, in Maine by opening up the main branch of a Minneapolis-based money transmission service. So he's got, he also has some transportation businesses. He's into all legs of the entrepreneurial worlds that the Somalis inhabit in Maine. The healthcare, you know, renting, the landlord jobs, the home healthcare agencies, transportation, but the big one is money transmitting. If you're transmitting money through whatever scheme back to Jubaland,

• 2:09:49Speaker 01

  you get a skim on that. So that's where the real money comes from, if you're back in Jubaland. And apparently, that's how you become the Finance Minister. So he arrived in, as best we can tell, he starts getting main driver's licenses in Lewiston in the early 2000s. And he builds this money transmitting business. Eventually, he buys the commercial real estate that becomes a very important building, renting to other Somali groups. And now he's the sitting Finance Minister. That is wild. Yeah. That's why I say that it's backed at the nation-state level. Like, what is your job if you're the Finance Minister of Jubaland? You've got all these money transmitting businesses. You know, we, sorry, I don't want to delay you before we move on,

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  but these are the, these are the healthcare companies that were based on Anderson Street, 203 Anderson Street in Portland, Babylon, Beacon.

• 2:10:44Speaker 01

  Oh, you know what? Sorry. Scratch that. This is a different place on Bishop Street, not the one I was talking about. Also a scam. A bunch of Somalis there, no one at the offices. But what I'm talking about at 203 Anderson, there's four home healthcare businesses at this office, along with a Dahab shield, which is the preferred money transmission service of the Central Bank of Somalia. Also the winner of the Somalia Excellence Awards in 2024 for wiring money specifically back to Somalia. This business exists specifically to send money back to Somalia, and it's co-located with a bunch of Medicaid-funded businesses

• 2:11:23Speaker 01

  in downtown Portland. When we were there to visit, I tried to wire $40 to Abdi's mom in Mogadishu. They didn't let me. But as we're leaving, we see the Brink's truck guys walk out with bags of cash and get in their truck and walk away. And it's like, this is the full cycle. This is the life cycle of the main taxpayer dollar. You know, it goes into the government, it goes down through Medicaid into these companies, it goes to the Dahab shield, and then it goes on the Brink's truck and eventually finds its way back to jubilee land Somalia. So the money transmission service is just a huge part of this, and it's backed at the nation-state level for Somalia, but also, I think, about

• 2:12:05Speaker 01

  the people we'll talk about next. I think that other countries are taking advantage of the American welfare state in a systematic way. It's economic terrorism, backed by nation-states. It needs to be treated just like you would treat any act of terrorism. Like, they are, whether it's for their own benefit or to weaken the United States, they're systematically exploiting American largesse, the welfare system, and it's having a punishing, punishing effect on the American middle class. It's breeding the cynicism. It's destroying us financially, creates all these perverse incentives in our economy, but it's 100% backed by

• 2:12:47Speaker 01

  political actors in these other countries. And until they pay a consequence for it, until it's treated like economic terrorism, it's going to continue.

• 2:12:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Man, this is depressing. Let's take a break. When we come back, we'll get into Hotel Rwanda.

• 2:13:07Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:15:22Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:16:06Shawn Ryan?

  All right, we're back from the break. You ready? Onto the next, onto the next.

• 2:16:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:16:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm always ready.

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, uh...

• 2:16:20Shawn Ryan?

  You were telling me about a tool on the break that you were using to sift through all these documents.

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  So, I mean...

• 2:16:26Shawn Ryan?

  Actually, you brought it up on the last segment.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so first, first during the, during the Chinese organized crime reporting and then during some of the Medicaid fraud reporting, we have this problem of huge amounts of data, whether it's Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, huge bodies of government records. We need to figure out how to process this, and it's more than one journalist can handle. We need this asymmetric solution as a journalist to be able to deal with all of this large amounts of data. And over the last three years, as we've been having this experience, coming up, you know, butting up against this problem, all these AI tools have come out. And Grok has been useful in developing some Python scripts to like, take the no bid contract documents off of the government server.

• 2:17:09Speaker 01

  And I started thinking about, can we develop a program or use these AI tools to be like a force multiplier for journalists? And I had a programmer reach out to me. Actually, what ended up happening was... We put all of those no bid contracts, we made them public. We went through them and tried to find as much as we could, did our reporting. We just dumped them on the internet and said, hey, anybody who wants to see these, the government won't make them public, we'll make them public. Here's transparency for you. And generated a lot of attention in main politics. And someone reached out to me who was a programmer, who in like two seconds came up with a script that took them all and made them machine readable and searchable and used like some

• 2:17:51Speaker 01

  Google AI, the Gemini AI, and really easily made them so much simpler for a dummy like me to understand. And so I started talking with this guy and he was conservative, Maynard based, maybe a little bit autistic. And I ended up paying him to develop a program that we call Harpe. And it's named after the blade that Perseus used to cut off Medusas head. It's a good analogy, a good imagery for fighting corrupt government.

• 2:18:20Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 2:18:20Speaker 01

  But it's a tool where you basically drop in a huge body of raw records, whether it's scans of real estate records or no bid contract documents, government spending records, really any kind of record or Excel spreadsheets, just all the records that you want to process and research.

• 2:18:38Shawn Ryan?

  And then you can. With thousands and thousands of pages.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. And it goes a little bit beyond what you can do with just ChatGPT or Grok or Gemini alone, in that you can give it instructions for how to handle information, you can create some projects within it, and then it will do link analysis for you. So you can find patterns in the data that you wouldn't be able to otherwise. So we can take the 5,000 pages of audit record, 8,000 pages of audit records that we have and put them into Harpe and it will analyze them with optical character recognition and then it will do link analysis on it and spit out a web of the interrelationships between these people. So when we find addresses like the ones that we've visited, where there are 30 or 40

• 2:19:26Speaker 01

  different healthcare LLCs registered.

• 2:19:28Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, nice.

• 2:19:28Speaker 01

  It'll spit up boom, boom, boom. And you'll see, it'll just, it'll take, you know, weeks and weeks and weeks of reading through these documents and condenses it into a three hour project.

• 2:19:39Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  And so we've, it's been pretty successful for us using this, this product. And at some point, really when, when Jeremy started asking about coming on with you, I was like, It would be really great if we could find a way to allow other people to come and have access to this tool. I mean, it's like, I don't want- This is free? So it's, we're, we're putting out a list where we haven't decided what we want to do with it yet. I think that there will be some costs we'll need to recruit with it because I, I mean, I paid the developer to, to make it. But people can sign up for like a beta tester list at GetHarpe. We're looking for some people to help us break the, break the program and figure it out and- Right on. And, and, and test it and sign up for it to figure out what the uses for it will

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  be. Because I've been telling my, just the programmer what I want out of it. And it's been designed to fit my needs as an investigative journalist. But we think that it would be useful to some of the like lay investigators who have been just decided like, I want to figure out what's going on in my community. And they start looking around and they find, you know, you know, a hundred trucking companies are registered at one address in Ohio and people there are voting, a bunch of people there are voting. They find these weird things. There's so much data out there, you can drown in it. So you need a, a solution to help see the signal through the noise. That's what we hope Harpe will be. And if people- What's it called? It's Harpe. Harpe.

• 2:21:04Speaker 01

  Like the blade. It's GetHarpe, H A R P E dot com. People can sign up and we'll be, we've got to work out some kinks for it because again, we just, we made it as a tool for me to use and never intended it to be something that we would share. Well, yeah, shoot me the link. We'll put it in the description. Yeah. I'm sure a lot of people will be interested to- I think in the, in the hands of the right people, you could create a journalistic revolution in the country by giving them this asymmetric solution. Because everybody is drowning in data. You know, there's like a lack of transparency and overwhelming transparency. Like, oh, we published the bill. Oh, we have governmentUSAspending.com. All the spending data is public. But because there's so much of it, people can't really interpret it for themselves. And it's possible to decipher it.

• 2:21:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. But we have the AI tools now that make it really, really, gives us, finally gives us the opportunity to make that data meaningful and then tell stories about it. And so that's what we hope to do. Nice. My shame, shameless plug for GetHarpe. We'll put it in the description. So let's move into Hotel Rwanda. Yeah. What's going on here?

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  For about two years, I've been hearing stories about autism homes, residential care facilities in Maine, and they line up with the refugee trends that we started seeing in 2019. In 2019, there's a mass migration to Maine, thousands of Central Africans, primarily from Angola, but also from the Democratic Republic of Congo and from Rwanda, very distinct from what was happening with the Somali migration. The mass migration to Maine got so severe that it caused crises twice. I guess you could consider it an ongoing crisis, but the

• 2:22:55Speaker 01

  Portland Expo building, where the Maine Celtics play, turned into a de facto refugee camp twice, once in 2019, once in 2023. It was filled with hundreds, if not up to 1,000 people just sleeping on cots because so many people had arrived. It got so bad that, as in Lewiston in 2000, in 2023 in Portland, the mayor had to say, "We just can't do it. The strain on our public services, the strain on our general assistance, the strain on everything, we're just, we can't accommodate this flow of jobless, homeless refugees. It just can't

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  happen." And no one really explained why this was happening, like why this flow of Central African migrants were just showing up in Maine of all places, where we didn't have the housing to accommodate these people. Yes, we had a generous welfare system, but was that it? Was that the only reason they were showing up? And I know there were other migration crises happening across the country, particularly under Biden, with an open southern border. It's like every small town was dealing with some variation of this. But all of a sudden in 2023, the emergency rental assistance money, which was federal money that had been funding the housing for a lot of these people, to the extent they could find housing or

• 2:24:15Speaker 01

  have housing, that goes away. And it just kind of disappears. All these people who didn't have homes and didn't have jobs just kind of faded or drifted away. And I think we found where they went and what happened to them because they... Moved into the residential care industry in the state of Maine. And we found this by looking at the Medicaid spending data. And this is a Excel spreadsheet, spending by provider from 2019 to 2024. So you can see all 5,000 people who are billing Medicaid in Maine.

• 2:24:54Speaker 01

  And we filtered out people who had billed in 2019 and 2020 to find just the startups. We wanted to look at who are the people who just started billing Medicaid in Maine from, you know, beginning in 2020? And who are the people who are doing it really, really well? And what we found right away was the top company was a company called Legends Residential. Legends Residential is a autism home operator. And they start billing in 2021 at like $3 million. And in 2024, they billed $17.34 million.

• 2:25:35Speaker 01

  So this is a company that has grown very quickly, operating autism homes. And there hasn't been a surge in autism in Maine. So this company grows very quickly. And we find this pattern of all of the fastest growing newly created Medicaid providers in Maine are MaineCare Section 21 residential home operators. These are people who operate two-bed homes for autistic or developmentally and intellectually disabled individuals. So there are adults who can't live by themselves and they require 24/7 care. These are people who can, and in some cases have harmed themselves just by eating unsupervised.

• 2:26:19Speaker 01

  So it's, you need, these are the most vulnerable people in our society. These companies have all been created in the last five years. They've taken over a huge share of these Section 21 waivers for the disabled or autistic population. They're growing in terms of the money that they're bringing in through Medicaid hugely. I mean, almost exponentially from $3 million to 17 million in the span of three years. That's very, very great growth for any business. Medicaid is usually not rich in high profit margins. Most Medicaid, most businesses that depend on Medicaid are barely getting by because the reimbursement rates are low. But these guys are only getting Medicaid money. There's no other money coming into these businesses.

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  So I start looking at Legends Residential and the CEO is a guy named Paul Manura, who I've interviewed, and he has an interesting history. I talked with, so I found an interview that Paul Manura did in 2019 with a Maine TV news outlet, and this is when he just showed up in Maine. And it was your classic thing of, he's come from the Congo, he's a refugee, he's just happy to be there for his first Thanksgiving ever, and, you know, poor starving refugee. Fast forward from 2019 to now, he's driving a Mercedes Benz G-Wagon, he also

• 2:27:44Speaker 01

  has a Dodge Charger, he's got an $800,000 home, got multiple other properties in Maine, he runs this big business. He's also got businesses in Arizona, he's got businesses in Massachusetts, and it's all happened since then. It's kind of weird. Like, how did he, you know, just that is what caught my eye, just the rapid, rapid success, the huge amount of money that's coming into these autism home operators. Like, why is there so much profligate wealth being displayed by Paul Manura? And Paul's number two, Joe Shambusho, also has a Mercedes Benz G-Wagon. I photographed it last week in front of a Legends Residential

• 2:28:25Speaker 01

  Care office. And so we start looking down at all of these companies and digging into them. All of the CEOs or directors of these companies appear to have historical ties to Rwanda, or to be of Rwandan descent. And they all have previous licenses, previous addresses, or LLCs, or business filings that tie them to Arizona. It's weird. From like the 2019 to 2023 period, they all have these businesses in Arizona. Some of them are also- Why Arizona? That's what we tried to answer, tried to figure out, why, why do that? Why do the people who have the most successful autism care businesses in Maine all have ties to Arizona?

• 2:29:10Speaker 01

  To give you an example, we go to visit Paul Manure's office, the Office of Legends Residential Care in South Portland. It's in an office suite. Unlike the home healthcare offices that the Somalis are running, this is attended. This appears to be an actual business and there are people there. The first time I'm there, I noticed right across the hallway is Golden Home Group Services, which does the exact same thing. And they're like right in the same building, like, that's weird. It's the number two business on my list, kind of jumped out at me. And I asked the secretary, I was like, so are you guys the same business or what's going on here? The secretary says, oh, I think the, the founders are related or something. Like, well, that's interesting as a journalist.

• 2:29:52Speaker 01

  And later, when I talked with Paul on the phone for a phone interview, he said that they're just friends. But the founder of that, of Golden Home Group Services, Michelle Conyambo, has a sober home in Arizona. In addition to being an immigration lawyer for Catholic charities, has a sober home in Arizona. And I thought that that was weird. So we started looking into it and what we discovered is in 2013, in 2023, there was a sensational indictment that came down of sober home operators in Arizona. This was another Medicaid fraud scandal. I don't know why it didn't make more national news, but there was this elaborate scheme

• 2:30:35Speaker 01

  where people were operating sober homes like Minnesota daycares, except for they had real patients. They had Navajo Native Americans and they were patient brokering. That's what the allegation is in the indictment that is still pending. It's actually been in 2025, it was expanded. They indicted another 20 individuals and entities. And so it's criminal, there's multiple criminal trials that are playing out this year and next year for this huge Medicaid fraud scandal that revolved around these sober homes where they would take Native Americans and say like, give us your Medicaid benefits, we'll bill the taxpayer as if you came here for rehab, for treatment for drug addiction or

• 2:31:17Speaker 01

  alcoholism, and we'll give you a cash kickback and then you can go to the next one and the next one and the next one. So just generating huge amounts of money. By providing fake services, again, is the allegation in the indictment. All of the people who are indicted with in relation to this happy house was the name of the sober home, all of them are from Rwanda or have historical ties to Rwanda. It's weird. And in the new indictment, I guess, the newly added entities in 2025, they added

• 2:31:56Speaker 01

  a church in Tolles in Arizona that is alleged to have wired money by the millions back to Rwanda. There's in the indictment, there's listed a $2 million money transfer back to Rwanda. And I'm thinking, you know, I'm looking at the, you know, the Finance Minister of Jubaland and then money by the millions going back to Rwanda. That's really, really weird. And I discover more and more ties of all these guys. They're, they've got previous LLCs. None of them are directly connected to the happy house fraud, but at least one of them runs a sober home in and around where all these sober homes were busted for running this model.

• 2:32:37Speaker 01

  But they, there, it looks like there was this indictment that came down in 2023. They get their hands slapped, they got caught and they kind of moved to another state because that's when the mass migration starts to Maine. And you see the Angolans and the Congolese, the Rwandans show up in Maine and then slowly they disperse into the jobs at these residential care facilities. So they're currently living in and working in these residential care facilities and billing is being submitted to Medicaid in their names for inhabiting these autism care facilities in Maine. That's, it looks like the pattern is. Moving from state to state, trying to figure out what is the best way to extract

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  money from a Medicaid program in a given state, based on their laws, their rules, whatever the facts are on the ground. And the people who are at the top of these organizations, we've gone through and we've pulled their TransUnion reports, they're all driving G wagons. They're all driving G wagons. They all have multiple properties, multiple mortgages, they're expanding. They're, I mean, this is a, this is a group of companies together, their CEOs and their number twos and number threes, the people in control of these organizations, they own over a thousand easily, properties in Maine, because they're buying the residential, the homes, the two-bedroom homes to convert to residential care facilities, and then they're

• 2:34:03Speaker 01

  also buying duplexes and multifamily housing to rent for cash to their workers. So it's like the, they've got this, you know, it's a, it's a comprehensive money-making operation that they have, and again, it's based on the flow of migrants over an open border in order to sustain it. We start talking with people who are, who know these organizations, who have worked for them, who have worked in these houses, who have worked in the industry, people in the real estate industry, like mortgage brokers who have done some of these financial transactions, to try to learn more about what exactly is happening here. And I also, I interviewed Paul Manura, and he insisted that I come into his office and

• 2:34:48Speaker 01

  talk to him, but then he stopped responding to my emails when I started asking him some hard questions. He didn't want to talk about his Mercedes G wagon. He said he was doing, he said he was doing everything he does to help the community. And I was like, well, Paul, I mean, it's like, I want to help my community too, but how's a G wagon help that? And he was like, how do you know what I drive? So we started interviewing people who had worked for the company, and we get a picture of what's happening here. On the surface, if you look at these records, they look like they're Discrete entities, discreet corporate entities, all running their own businesses. But they're effectively one informal collective sharing employees. A former supervisor told us about a WhatsApp chat.

• 2:35:31Speaker 01

  The CEOs of this company arrange how they're going to move the employees around. And so you have Central African migrants who complete a 50-hour online training course in order to become qualified to care for a disabled adult at one of these houses. 50 hours online. No one checks to make sure you're actually the person taking it. You don't have to speak English and they'll put you in charge of the care of another human being. And don't even have to speak English. Yeah. In fact, Paul told me 70% of his employees don't. How do they communicate with their patients? It's a very good question. That's not important, is it? It's a very good question, but that gets to like, that's the fundamental baseline

• 2:36:16Speaker 01

  issue is that the... Are there patients? It would be better if there weren't, really. Like, that's what, having been working on this investigation and then seeing what's happening in Minnesota and the daycares are, don't have people, I'm like, it would be better if the patients were fake because the level of... So there is patients? Yes. We've, we've, we've, we've door knocked some of these facilities. We've confirmed that there are patients. Oh, man. The people that we talked to. Patients? There's, I mean, there's ethical issues. More important than the fucking fraud and the money is the actual human being that's going through this. Are they being cared for? Do you know? The people who have been inside these facilities say that there are staggering

• 2:37:00Speaker 01

  levels of neglect and abuse happening. We know of at least two instances of patients dying. I've seen a police report of an adult whose dietary instructions were, you know, you're supposed supervised eating. He choked to death in a facility where he's supposed to have 24/7 residential care. Someone awake, a healthcare professional. He choked to death eating his breakfast. I've seen the police report. Damn. And it's happened, I talked with Lewiston, police officers, Bangor police officers, Portland police officers from the big agencies.

• 2:37:41Speaker 01

  They'll find disabled adults wandering the highway. They go and they grab them. They know where they're supposed to be. They bring them back to their taxpayer-funded residential care facility. And it's supposed to have a three to one staffing ratio, which means they're high need, high, you know, they need a lot of care 24/7. Is this going on in Portland? Everywhere. You know, there's a section in Portland with those high-rise brick buildings. Those are. You know what I'm talking about? Yes, you're talking. Is that run by them? That's subsidized housing. That's, those are, those are just projects. These are mostly two-bedroom residential houses because that's specifically what this

• 2:38:26Speaker 01

  program is supposed to do is give disabled adults a feeling of normalcy. Like, it's their home. They're paying for it with their Medicaid benefits. There are professionals who are supposed to be coming in and taking care of them in their own home. What's happening, though, is that these employees are treating it like it's their home. It's their space. It's their spot to go watch TV or play Xbox. And the patient gets, you know, hides in their back room or in the basement. But the law enforcement who finds these people out wandering around will grab them, bring them back to their house. There's nobody there. Supposed to have, supposed to have three people there to look after this one person. There's no one there. And how long has that been happening? And are they still billing for the 24/7 care in the name of three people?

• 2:39:10Speaker 01

  Well, you bet your ass they are. I've talked with over a dozen people who are familiar with how these autism homes are operating. And there appears to be a deliberate conspiracy by these companies, the fastest-growing new entrance into the autism home space, to poach disabled adults from their pre-existing caregivers, to bring them over. And because there's so much Medicaid money attached to these people, they can, they know that each one of those disabled adults that they bring into one of their homes is a payday. Yeah. I mean, Ledgers Residential.

• 2:39:51Speaker 01

  The records that Paul Munir testified to the state legislature in January of 2025, he said he cares for 40-plus individuals with autism or intellectual and developmental disorders. That same year he gets, or the year prior, he has 17.3 million. So make that math work for me. You've got 40-plus people you're caring for, 17.34 million. And the state has 44 Section 21 waivers for him, which sounds like $400,000 per patient. It's a lot of money. And he could be, maybe there's another Medicaid program that he's dipping into like Section 29, which is not residential care, it's a different level of autism care, but there's so much money flowing into these organizations that it doesn't make sense.

• 2:40:36Speaker 01

  And if it's the first thing that I find, looking at the spending data, you have to imagine that we've got this whole Department of Fraud, we have this whole Department of Adult Protective Services, who are supposed to take care of disabled adults, who are supposed to be the people that are called when there's abusive adults happening or neglect of adults happening. And they are being called. But the people I've talked with, who have been inside these houses, they are being called, and nothing's being done about it. It's this, and it's so infuriating. I talked with a clinical professional who worked with these disabled adults before and after this all happened, from about 2018 to 2023, is when it really kind of blossomed.

• 2:41:21Speaker 01

  And so she's seen the quality of life and the, I guess, how these people are doing in terms of their mental health. Some of them have the cognitive ability of an eight-year-old, or they've got different disabilities, but she's had a stable relationship with them over a period of years and knows them and cares for them. And provides them clinical care. And she's seen their quality of life just go, talking about...

• 2:41:49Speaker 01

  You know, there's neglect that's happening in the form of sleeping. The care, the residential care professionals are not supposed to be sleeping. So they're, they're showing up and it's, they're working 120 hours a week because they're being shuffled around all these different LLCs in this informal, you know,

• 2:42:07Speaker 01

  autism racket, you can call it. And sleeping is condoned. There's just this kind of like banal neglect is condoned.

• 2:42:15Shawn Ryan?

  It's just sit there.

• 2:42:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:42:17Shawn Ryan?

  Just sit there. Warm bodies, be a body in a house, do whatever the fuck you want. We don't care. We do not care.

• 2:42:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. But you've got baseline. You've got it. You've still got these disabled adults that you have to keep alive if you want that money coming in. And these are people with feeding instructions, medication instructions written in English that they don't read. 70% of them. The founder of the company admits 70% of them do not speak English. And, you know, he recommends English language instruction, but it's not mandated by the, the state. It's not a requirement of, uh, to become a direct support professional. It's not a requirement. And, uh, that results in, um, so much just like callous depravity of like one individual, I'm told, is fed boiled chicken, only boiled chicken because they figured out he's got some dietary restrictions.

• 2:43:07Speaker 01

  And they've just got it like, it's kind of complicated, but they don't care about the details. They just know that if they feed him boiled chicken, he stays alive. So his roommate at that house also gets the same diet, boiled chicken. And they feed him, uh, you know, the, they're often making the food that is, um, you know, that they culturally desire and feeding it to them. They're not celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving, which might seem like a small thing. But these are people who are, again, they're living their entire life.

• 2:43:39Shawn Ryan?

  They have nothing.

• 2:43:40Speaker 01

  In residential care, they have nothing. You give them this routine. You put out the Christmas tree. You make them feel happy and special about what's happening. And that's what they had previously when they were in homes run by Americans who spoke English. Man, that is sad. The people that I've talked with, all of them come back to that there has to be, at some level, state not just approval or turning the blind eye to this, but a directive to make this happen. Because some of these individuals are wards of the state. They're, they have no family on the outside. They're disabled and they don't have someone on the outside who's going to come to that residential home and take them out to, you know, go to the

• 2:44:24Speaker 01

  mall or something and just check on them, see how their quality of living is. Those were the ones who were targeted in 2023, 2024, removed from their homes that had, they'd been in for, in some cases, six years, they're run by Americans, and placed with these new startups.

• 2:44:46Speaker 01

  Against their will, in some cases. Some of them are, are verbal. They, they were able to say, I don't want to. This has been my home for six years. I don't want to go. And now they're capable of saying, my, my residential caretakers don't speak English, they don't do Christmas, they don't do Thanksgiving, I don't like the food, I want to be here. And there's a list that circulates amongst residential care providers. When is it, when one of these disabled adults says, I want a new arrangement, I don't want to live here. It's their money and the Disability Rights Act requires you to honor their wishes. These aren't prisoners, right? They're not like, you know, slaves of the autism care operators. People have no advocates, huh?

• 2:45:26Speaker 01

  None. And the, and the ones that they're supposed to have are failing them. The government, taxpayer-funded advocates, there's the, the people who are supposed to advocate for them are failing them. Uh, but on this list, if they say they want to be moved, that list is supposed to be circulated amongst all the residential home care operators. I'm told that that list is not being circulated amongst the ones run by Americans.

• 2:45:55Speaker 01

  And again, this is, we're talking about like moving these people out of a home, that list, the Adult Protective Services, the Long Term Care Ombudsman, the Guardians, the taxpayer money, all of this, there are so many points where someone in the government should be able to step in and be like, "This is fucked up. What are we doing?" And people are dying, and the police are being called all the time to these homes, and having to deal with this, they're finding severe neglect and abuse that is just so, I mean, I was like mixed, talking to some of these people, I'm filled with just a mix of homicidal rage and just like, "Why is this happening? Why, why aren't people talking about this?" It's a very hard story to get into and to tell and to really figure out what's going on.

• 2:46:40Speaker 01

  But also just horror at the levels of abuse and neglect that will be happening in these homes that we'll never know about because the victims can't advocate for themselves. You know, your testimony as someone with the cognitive capacity of an eight-year-old, if you say you were sexually assaulted, as some of these individuals have alleged, I've seen the police reports, they don't never stand up in court, that'll be just settled. And they've got, and these autism home operators, they have the cash to go settle these.

• 2:47:11Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:47:12Speaker 01

  And it's, I mean, just, just the residential care facilities that the Section 21 operators control, hundreds, if not thousands, easily thousands when you add the additional properties that they're buying in order to rent to their non-English speaking employees.

• 2:47:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:31Speaker 01

  So they've got them, they're billing for them 80 to 120 hours a week in these homes, and they're kicking them out and they stay, you know, eight to an apartment in Lewiston or Auburn.

• 2:47:42Speaker 01

  Talked with a mortgage professional who said, you know, she's seen, just last year, she saw 200 applications come in from these Africans who are direct support professionals. And they say that they work 90 or 100 hours a week in these direct support jobs, which are decent paying, but not super lucrative jobs. And they're buying their third or fourth property on a mortgage. And they have no Schedule E to report rental income for all the other properties they have. And when you ask, what's going on with that? Jeez. The language barrier rears its ugly head and they can't explain what's going on.

• 2:48:23Speaker 01

  So you've got, yet again, another, what I would say is fairly described as a conspiracy to exploit the people of Maine, our most vulnerable disabled population, to enrich yourself from the taxpayers that, for whatever reason, the powers that be are just turning a blind eye to. And maybe they don't know that it's happening and they will now, but it's infuriating. I mean, I've interviewed so many people who have worked in these houses and have said, we tried to blow the whistle on this, we tried to complain. And we were told, if you want to keep your license in whatever field you're in, Are you serious? You'll stop talking about this. Yes.

• 2:49:06Speaker 01

  I have an interview that we'll release with a clinical professional who said she tried to complain about this and she was told that you'll lose your license if you press this. And she knew of four other people, she said, that were told similarly. So the people have tried to complain about this, but it boils down to the disabled individual who's upset about the quality of care they're getting? Well, they're just racist. That's the only reason they're complaining. Yeah. Or the social worker, or the clinical professional, or the supervisor, the direct support professional, whatever it is. Like, if you complain about this idea that Maine's most vulnerable disabled people are

• 2:49:46Speaker 01

  being thrown into the maw of a non-English speaking 24/7 residential care setting, you're just racist. You can't, it's not that you have just like common sense and you see the language gap would degrade the quality of life and the dignity of these people. You have to have some evil motive for not thinking that that's okay.

• 2:50:10Speaker 01

  And it's, again, all these people are driving Mercedes G wagons.

• 2:50:15Shawn Ryan?

  This is fucking crazy, man.

• 2:50:17Speaker 01

  You know, if, if I was, we're funded through donations. Main Wire is part of a nonprofit. If I was driving around in a Mercedes G wagon, I think people would have some questions. People would want to know, geez, how much money is, is going to the main wire? Like, are you, are you using that money effectively if Steve's driving around in a G wagon? Well, hold on a second. Everybody at the main wire has G wagons? Well, what's going on here? So I think it's totally fair to ask questions about this. And the fact that they're expanding and they all have ties to Arizona. And one of them is a lawyer for Catholic charities. The very group that shepherded the Central African migrants into Maine for 2019 to 2023. And Catholic charities, by the way, also has an office in Tulsa, in Arizona,

• 2:51:02Speaker 01

  where the sober homes orbit,

• 2:51:06Speaker 01

  where the sober homes were and where the, I guess, the indictment of Happy House Centers and where that church is that was wiring money back to Rwanda.

• 2:51:27Shawn Ryan?

  What do you suggest people do? I mean, this, this, I mean, that just, what do you do about this? Nobody of any importance seems to give a shit. I shouldn't say importance with any power and with any, with any ability to actually fucking do something.

• 2:51:49Speaker 01

  You know, I, I don't really know. And this one is, this is hard because every, at every institutional level, and we have a, an independent ombudsman, the long care ombudsman is supposed to be writing annual reports about what's going on and blowing the whistle. But we have a, a child welfare ombudsman in Maine, too. And every year, the child welfare ombudsman comes out and says, hey, kids are dying. And this is, this is corrupt and it's broken. That's, that's broken down. Adult Protective Services doesn't want to pay attention to this, doesn't want any attention drawn to it. The Office of Aging and Disability Services, which runs under the Health Department, they don't want to do anything about this. And the federal government, I don't know if they have the ability to come in and investigate this. But again, you could turn off the money. You can turn off the money.

• 2:52:33Speaker 01

  You know, these businesses, they can have the money turned off. But unlike the fake daycares and the fake home healthcare agencies, because you have real patients, that adds another dynamic to it. There needs to be a plan in place to take care of these people. And we're talking about between 3,000 and 4,000 disabled adults who have these waivers that unlock this residential care. So you've got to accommodate that. You've got to take care of these people. And again, a lot of them don't have family on the outside. They have no one. They have no, they have no one, except for a small group of providers who have talked to me or have sent me emails or caring for them. Sometimes at their own financial loss, you know,

• 2:53:17Speaker 01

  sending them Christmas presents in their new homes. They have, they have nobody. And these are the exact people that the Medicaid program is supposed to help. Yeah. This is like the quintessential social safety debt need. Is there are people in our society who can't go out and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Because it's like a shit luck, bad roll of the dice. They were born into a situation where they are disabled and they can't just go out and work 50 hours a week or start a company or something. And so we have a social safety net to take care of them. And we are failing big time. And there are people taking advantage of that. There are people turning a blind eye to that.

• 2:54:00Speaker 01

  And the money has to be turned off to people who aren't following the rules, who are tolerating this abuse and neglect because it's better for their margins. They turn the money off. And you have to be ready for what happens after that. But again, this is a very complicated one because it's less, it's less blatant that there's Medicaid fraud happening. You know, if there's no kids in the daycare, boom, that's fraud. Let's claw that money back. Well, if there's actually, if there's actually a patient there, well, you can say that they were providing substandard care, non-English speaking care. I think you got to find some family members.

• 2:54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:47Shawn Ryan?

  If there are any, I mean, a lot of these people are probably solo, parents are dead.

• 2:54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're wards of the state.

• 2:54:53Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and so there might not be anybody, but man, if you could find somebody to blow the whistle on abuse.

• 2:55:01Speaker 01

  We have, uh, we have interviews, we have interviews that will release in conjunction with this, with people who've been inside these houses. It's a tricky one, though, because we don't want to invade their privacy. We don't want to go try to interview these adults who it's, it's weird, it's a weird ethical issue. Can these people consent to an on video interview?

• 2:55:22Shawn Ryan?

  And can somebody with that mental, mental disorder, that handicap, whatever you want to call it.

• 2:55:28Speaker 01

  And there's also, there's lots of, um, there's other issues with the, um, the autism home operators that predate this. Uh, you know, they've run into some regulatory issues as well, and they don't want to be viewed as trying to take out the competition. And the other thing is, similar to the, the Chinese organized crime and basically every government corruption, fraud, organized crime story we report on in the state of Maine, there is this, um, uh, miasma of fear that hangs over the state that you're going to be retaliated against if you blow the whistle on wrongdoing. You're gonna, if you speak out against government corruption, the state is going to come in

• 2:56:13Speaker 01

  and fucking ruin you. If you're a cop and you're two or three years away from having your pension vest, the state's going to come in and they're going to fuck with you. Like the Attorney General, he does all the police involved shootings there, whether it was a justified shooting or not. You're going to criticize the Attorney General when he might hold your fate in the palm of his hand doing all those investigations? Um, Rick Savage of Sunday River Brewing Company, he goes on Tucker's show back when he was on Fox and criticizes the COVID lockdowns. State comes in and takes his liquor license away.

• 2:56:43Shawn Ryan?

  No shit?

• 2:56:44Speaker 01

  He's forced to sell his business. They sent agents into his restaurant to like, measure the plexiglass and see like, if they were forcing people to put their masks on, took his liquor license away. He's forced to sell his business. Business. He's running a new one in New Hampshire now. Dr. Merrill Nass goes on the radio. She's a left wing doctor, by the way. Goes on the radio and criticizes vaccine policy, COVID lockdowns. They hunt her down and take her medical license away. So those are just some discreet examples. But this culture of fear that the state is going to come, take away your livelihood and ruin you if you speak out is very real. And it hangs over everything we do, everything. I was trying to figure out how much a stamp cost in Maine. If you send out a government letter, because Janet Mills sent out

• 2:57:28Speaker 01

  checks to voters before the 22, 2022 election, instead of doing just the electronic benefit transfers. It was supposedly COVID stimulus, but she sent them checks with a letter that was like, hey, I gave you this money, you know, wink and a nod, vote for Janet. So I was trying to figure out what was the added expense of doing that snail mail as opposed to just the electronic deposits. And the guy I'm talking with who runs the post office is like, you trying to, you trying to get me fired, man? I got a, I got a, you know, an ex-wife and four kids. I was like, what? He, he was scared to tell me how much a stamp costs. Because he knew the implications of having information he provided embarrass the regime in power. But that's just like, that hangs over the, the Somali welfare fraud,

• 2:58:13Speaker 01

  the whistleblower, Chris Bernardini, who came forward. The only reason he did is because he's in Florida, moved to Florida and worked remotely. And when he came out, instead of contacting him to hear his allegations, he got a letter from Maine Revenue Services. They audited him.

• 2:58:33Speaker 01

  And you know what they found? Gateway was withholding state income taxes from his paycheck, even though he'd moved to Florida, which has no state income tax. So he's actually owed money by the state of Maine. And they audited him and then told him, we're not going to give you that money back unless you file next year.

• 2:58:52Speaker 01

  Everyone who speaks out against corruption in the state, they find whatever lever of power they can. Have they done anything to you? They have. I mean, they've tried. I mean, they've tried to come after me, you know, rhetorically and legally, for sure. But it's like, I don't get government money and I don't need a license to do journalism. They actually, just earlier, as all of these welfare fraud scandals are breaking, my reporter, John Featherstone, is trying to go into the State House to interview Deca DeLac, former employee of the company, big figure in this entire story, in this national scandal. And the sergeant-at-arms at the door tells him he's not allowed in, tries to bar him from entering. And then the, you know, the House Speaker and the Democrats all lie and pretend like they didn't, but three separate times told him he wasn't allowed on the floor.

• 2:59:37Speaker 01

  And we made enough of a fuss so that eventually they had to allow him in, because it's open for press. It always has been. In 15 years I've been doing this, the House chamber floor's always been open for press. But they do little things like that, and they're trying to create a credentialing process. They tried to kick us out of COVID briefings. They tried to limit your access to information and smear you. And there's other, you know, legal things that they do. You know, subpoena you to try to hunt down your sources so that they can punish those people. Damn. You know, there's... But we're in a privileged position because we're not relying on government money. We don't have government licenses. Almost everybody in Maine does. Because we've crossed an event horizon where everybody is relying on government money in some way.

• 3:00:22Speaker 01

  Whether you're in the hospital and you're relying on Medicare, Medicaid, or you're in a big construction company and you're relying on Department of Transportation contract. Everybody in our society has a pinch point that can be tweaked if they come out and say what they really think. And it's this Orwellian control system that has been exercised, I mean, just taken to extremes in Maine for eight years, in conjunction with the migrant-based political conspiracies that we've been talking about, which has just turned Maine into a place that I am not familiar with. It's not a place, it's not the place I grew up in. You think you'll stay? I mean, we'll see. It's very much an open question.

• 3:01:07Speaker 01

  Depends on how the 2026 election goes. Never gonna leave the fight. Never gonna stop doing what I'm doing. But the the cost of housing, in part because there's so much money coming in to buy up the houses to either turn them into flop houses for Chinese cannabis farmers or, you know, African Medicaid, you know, autism home operators. And we're talking about thousands of houses that have been taken off the market at a price way above what working class miners should be paying. It's the cost of housing is extreme. The schools suck. You know, this taxes are really, really high. Spending is through the roof, but nothing is getting better. The the only thing that's gotten better, honestly, Sean, is they're no longer giving

• 3:01:52Speaker 01

  away free boofing kits.

• 3:01:53Shawn Ryan?

  How is that better?

• 3:01:55Speaker 01

  Because of you. Because of you. You embarrassed them. That clip went so viral that they.

• 3:02:01Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we had a couple of people reach out. There was a there was a, man, a county, I think it was a sheriff's department here in Tennessee. Can't remember exactly which county. Maybe it was a police, but they're investigating all of the local dispensaries.

• 3:02:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you guys had a quick crackdown. That's that's how, by the way, a responsive, healthy, functioning government works. It's when a journalist reports on something, the law enforcement people say like, well, that's not right. That shouldn't work. Let's go see what's going on. And they go in and they do those kind of inspections.

• 3:02:35Shawn Ryan?

  Well, it sounds like your law enforcement is doing that. It just gets cut somewhere.

• 3:02:39Speaker 01

  They are, but it's hard. The sheriffs are popularly elected, so they're not totally, they don't have the same levers of control over them that some of the other law enforcement do. The state police definitely do. State police are the people ideally suited to deal with some of this, but they're, you know, controlled by politicians. The local police in Lewiston or Portland are controlled by politicians. You know, so they do, they want to do the right thing. There's so many people in Maine who want to do the right thing. And a lot of them, I have this experience. Every, every time I go into the field, all the time, every week, going out and talking with people. And when they know that somebody wants to hear their story, their eyes light up.

• 3:03:24Speaker 01

  Because they're like, I've got a story to tell. And you would be stunned by the stories that these people have to tell. And there's, there, we have, I mean, I could keep a team of 50 investigative reporters busy just with what's happening in Maine. We have so much, we're like drowning, we're a triage unit. Taking the stories that we think are the most important and focusing on those. But uh, it's all, it all goes back to the control of the political regime. The, the, the power that they wield over society by being able to pull your funding, or pull your license, or get you fired, or sick a mob after you to get, you know,

• 3:04:07Speaker 01

  50 one-star reviews on your restaurant because you did a social media post backing a conservative school board candidate or something like that. There's this crazy tool of, system of control that they've created. And um, the, the migrant industrial complex is just a part of that. It's a big part. It's a significant part. Man. Well, Steve, I appreciate what you're doing, man. Thanks. I appreciate you having me in again. I wish someday, someday I'll come in here and we'll tell a happy story about a turnaround in Maine. Something tells me that's not happening anytime soon. But I hope it does. I hope we can get there. I think there's enough good people in Maine.

• 3:04:51Speaker 01

  I do wonder what we will talk about next time. I have a few ideas. Oof. What are they? Criminal conspiracies. Right on. You can bet. Well, Steve, thanks for coming, man. I really appreciate it. It's always good to see you. Thank you very much. I'll wait till next time.

• 3:05:23Shawn Ryan?

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