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

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Marty sits down with Steve Robinson to discuss his year-long investigation into massive Medicaid fraud in Maine, exposing how politically connected migrant NGOs have been exploiting taxpayer-funded programs with virtually no oversight or consequences. Steve on Twitter: https://x.com/SteveRob The Maine Wire: https://www.themainewire.com/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/4pOv2L4 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://joincrowdhealth.com.tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Steve, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Marty. Appreciate it. I know you're a busy man, especially in the last couple of weeks. I think you've hit the scene. I mean, you've been on the scene for a while, but I think your conversation with Sean Ryan is going pretty viral right now. As we were just discussing before we hit record, Nick Shirley, his on-the-ground reporting in Minneapolis definitely caught the eye and the attention of the country and has spawned a bunch of copycat sleuths, if you will, which I'm all in favor for. But you've been sleuthing on this particular Medicaid fraud ring in Maine specifically for the better part of a year. And so I think you, out of anybody, considering your investigative journalism skills and how long you've been on this beat, understand this story more than many others out there. And so I think maybe just to jump off, how you caught the scent of this particular story, why you decided to chase it, and what's unraveled over the last 10, 11 months.

Yeah, so we got some documents leaked to us that pointed toward Medicaid overbilling issues at a host of left-wing NGOs. And these are documents that aren't routinely published, but they are public records. They should be published, but for political reasons, the power zippy kind of sweep them under the rug and don't, you know, they don't brag about the fraud that they found within Maine's Medicaid system. We had these documents leaked to us. It showed this one NGO in particular, Gateway Community Services. It's been described as a nonprofit, but it's not. It's just a business. It's an LLC, and they have a 501c3 filing for the purpose of taking taxpayer money that could only go to 501c3s. C3s. So it's not a nonprofit in any sense of the term. It's a migrant services agency that's totally taxpayer funded. And the documents that we had showed that they were audited in around 2018 for reimbursements that they had submitted in 2015 to 2017. And the government found, hey, like 35% of the claims we've paid you for, you don't have the documents to substantiate

these. So they give them an opportunity to come back and show the paperwork and essentially prove that the claims they were paid for are legitimate. Based on that, we began digging into Gateway Community Services. And what we found was an organization that wasn't just some podunk nonprofit, you know, like do-gooder liberals trying to, I don't know, you know, fix poverty or teach people English. What we found was a really politically connected organization. The CEO, Abdullahi Ali, was photographed at all kinds of events with the governor of Maine, with top-ranking Democratic politicians from the state. Representative Deka Dallak, a former assistant executive director at Gateway,

is on the Appropriations Committee in the state legislature, and she's the former mayor of South Portland. Representative Yusuf Yusuf is a former employee of the organization, also a former roommate of Abdullahi Ali, and he's now making his way up the legislature. And Eklis Ahmed, who is a Sudanese refugee, is running the Office of New Americans, which was just recently created here in the state of Maine. So you have an NGO that's really punching above its weight in terms of its political connections, the influence it has over policy. And as we dug more, we found additionally that on top of the $5 million a year of Medicaid money that was flowing into this organization, it was also receiving no-bid contracts. And these no-bid contracts were for

things that really looked a lot like campaign activity. We found that before the 2022 election, which is important here in Maine because that's when Governor Mills was standing for re-election against former Republican Governor Paul LePage, Gateway Community Services and some of its allied NGOs received no-bid contracts to create what were called CHAUs, or Community Health Outreach Workers. And you didn't have to have any qualifications in order to be a taxpayer-funded CHAU.

All you had to do was be able to knock on the door of a migrant or a non-English-speaking resident of Maine and sign them up for Medicaid, sign them up for food stamps, and even buy them household supplies. Literally walking around money is what the Chows were doing is going door to door in migrant neighborhoods and signing people up for welfare and giving them money, food, supplies, whatever. And under federal law, you are required to offer assistance registering to vote anytime you sign somebody up for a federally funded benefits program, which is Medicaid, which is SNAP. So what you effectively had was this politically connected

migrant services organization run by a Somali refugee, staffed by multiple Somali refugees and asylum seekers, was getting no-bid contract government money piped into it in order to go out and register high-propensity Democrat voters and collect information on them that was available to political groups that were all operating out of the same offices in Lewiston and Portland. So for us, that was highly interesting. Anytime you see taxpayer money being used to tip the scales of an election. That's something that's interesting and newsworthy, I think. And then on top of all of this, I guess after the 2022 election, an emboldened Abdullahi Ali is running for president in Jubiland, Somalia, which I didn't know about. I learned about Jubiland

through the course of this reporting, but it's the semi-autonomous state in southern Somalia, largely controlled by al-Shabaab. And Abdullahi Ali was running as one of three candidates in a tumultuous election where the incumbent was supposed to be term limited out, but he just kind of decided, nah, we're not doing elections. I'm going to do my own election and I'm the only one you can vote for. And the other two guys held their election. But the central government in Mogadishu said, well, we're not recognizing your election. So we wouldn't recognize it as democracy or elections or anything like that. And what it boils down to is whoever has the most guns is the one who wins the election. And Abdullahi Ali, while he's the CEO of Gateway

Community Services, while he's taking $700,000 in PPP loans, $5 million a year in Medicaid money, millions of dollars in no-bid contracts, all funded by U.S. taxpayers, he's in Kenyan media doing Somali language interviews, bragging about how he has fundraised in America to bankroll a paramilitary group in Southern Somalia that he's going to use to depose the incumbent president. And so after learning all of this, we're just like, why the hell are Mainers paying for this? This is crazy. You know, what's going on here? So we did some reporting on it and that set in motion a series of sources coming to us, including whistleblowers who had worked at the company for five plus years who talked to us about a pattern of systemic fraud that they witnessed,

that in some cases they helped facilitate. And from there, we started looking at other organizations who were doing the same kind of Medicaid billable work. And it was like every time we flipped over a rock, there was a new Medicaid business that had an address, a PO box, an address that's just a ghost suite in some office building, and it's billing $500,000, $1 million a year, and there's no discernible employees, no discernible clients. And so the Medicaid fraud just keeps growing and growing and growing here in this state, and there seems to be no oversight of it whatsoever. The question that has been coming into my mind since everything it's popping off in minnesota and now obviously the reporting you've done on maine over the last

year is like how was were these medicaid programs identified by these somalis or anybody who's leveraging them to just commit fraud blatantly like how are they identified why maine like how like what is the root of these fraudulent networks that have really spawned over the last couple of decades, because this has been ongoing for well over a decade at this point. And as an American citizen, until the last year, I've been completely unaware of this. In fact, I've been told my whole life that Medicaid, Medicare are third rail political topics that can't be broached. We can't cut Medicaid, Medicare, because it would lead to a bunch of older Americans being on the streets in their older age because they need to be federally subsidized

with medical assistance. And I naively believed like, okay, that sounds right to me, but it's becoming abundantly clear that these systems are wrought with fraud. And how did this all start? And how did they identify where to exploit the fraud? So I guess the first thing is to make a distinction between Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare is the program for the elderly. there is lots of provider side fraud happening in Medicare. Normally, you're looking at doctors writing fake prescriptions or billing for services that they haven't provided. And you do see some high dollar, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud in Medicare. Medicaid is a totally separate program. And I think it's a little bit more susceptible to fraud in part because of how

it's designed and how it operates. Medicare is more centralized and it's administered by the CMS, a federal bureaucracy. Medicaid is more decentralized. It's distributed through block grants. So the federal government gives each state a big bucket of money and allows them to administer their Medicaid programs. And so you have all the state lawmakers getting together and deciding the ins and outs of how they want their Medicaid programs to function. A good example of that is medicaid at the federal level won't reimburse for services provided to non-citizens but some of the blue states like maine california and illinois have decided that they're so generous and wonderful that they're going to cover health care benefits for non-citizens

so they have to create little carve-outs like some like maine covers uh to age 21 and under pregnant women and their children for a period of time. Some states cover 55 and older non-citizens, but they have to pay for that with their own money, not federal money. But that's just an example of how the Medicaid programs, we've got, you know, 57 different Medicaid programs that are all operated differently based on how the state or the territory decides to run it or administer it. So within the programs that they create or allow, that kind of creates the landscape for the fraudulent opportunities that creates the weaknesses and the niches that can be exploited for fraud. And the reason I think that the home health care agencies were picked is because unlike traditional health care where you go to a doctor's office or a dentist's office or a hospital, there's a central location where the health care is being provided. So a government inspector can show up and sit and see, okay, yeah, this place is clean. It's obviously a doctor's office. There's patients coming in and out. With home health care, it's provided at a client's home. So it's distributed in nature. And the office that a home health care agency has can literally just be a one room suite in a abandoned warehouse filled with office complexes.

We've found those in Maine. We've published video of them. It's similar to what Nick Shirley found with the daycares that are just addresses that nothing's happening there. There's no people there. There's no kids there. It's the same thing with these office suites. They're used just to check a box and create the appearance of an actual business, but

there's no activity really happening there. The home health care, I guess, services also has the weakness of all the employees are distributed, all the clients are distributed, and you really can't provide oversight on it. And in some instances, the government doesn't really want to provide oversight on it. A lot of the oversight that we've been able to determine has been happening are what are called desk reviews. So somebody sitting at a desk at the Department of Health and Human Services calls the CEO of Anywhere Care LLC and says, oh, do you have an operations manual? Do you keep records on your clients? Do you keep records on your employees? And then that's the sum total of

the oversight that happens. They create these LLCs as home health agencies. Their employees have to do a 50-hour online course, which there's no verification that their employees are actually the ones taking the course. Could be anybody sitting down behind a computer and just filling it out. They rarely have to meet someone in person before they get approved to run a home health care agency. And then they send invoices to the state and the state pays them. We found one instance of a 25-year-old named Mustafa Alamedi. He ran five stars home health care. He was in one of these buildings filled with ghost suites or zombie suites, just a one-room office suite that he was never at. And he was able to bill $700,000 over two years before he

came to the attention of auditors. The auditors send him a note and say, hey, this kind of looks dodgy. 70% of your claims lack any justification. Can you send us extra documents so we can get this squared away? And in the email chain, you can see that he strings them along and says, you know, well, he's sick. So he needs an extension. And then his entire family catches COVID. Very sad. They have to go to the emergency room. So he needs another extension. And then he sends the documents, but they get lost in the mail. It happens to all of us. So he needs another extension. And for a whole year, this goes on where he's just stringing along the regulators and he's continuing to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while he's doing this,

even though the Department of Health and Human Services knows that 70 percent of his prior claims were bogus. In the end, he ends up making a million dollars over three years and just walks away from the company. It dissolves. There's no criminal charges. There's no recoupment, as far as we can tell. This 25-year-old kid just makes a million dollars mailing invoices to the Department of Health and Human Services, and nobody would have found out about it if we hadn't submitted a Freedom of Access Act request for all of these documents, all of these notices of violation that were sent out to any Medicaid company, not just Gateway Community Services. They were the one that inspired us to start looking for these notices of violation. But no one would have known

about this. There would have been no government press release about this. And that's just one instance of a home health care agency that literally they just file an LLC, apply to be a home health agency, and then send invoices to the state, and the money comes out of the government machine. It's really remarkable what's happened. And I think that to answer your question, the reason why home health care is targeted is because very low barriers to entry you don't need uh you know uh you don't need a phd or a master's degree or you know you don't need to be a licensed social worker you can literally just be you can have arrived in the united states six months ago as long as you have work authorization documents you can start an llc and become uh you know

enabled to bill medicaid under one of these programs and it doesn't appear to be that there's any consequences for defrauding the program. There have been no criminal charges filed in Maine against any home health care agency that has engaged in this pattern of fraud. How, in Maine specifically, what's the scale of the fraud, if you had to estimate? Hundreds of millions of dollars easily. But it's a tricky thing, though, because as I said, no one's been charged. So how can you say it's fraud? Like with the example that I just gave to you, in a strictly legal sense, you can't say that it's fraud. You can say that these were overpayments, that he was erroneously billing Medicaid, which is what the HHS bureaucrats speak

would say. But because it hasn't been investigated as fraud and there's been no charges brought against this guy for fraud. You can't really truly in a legal sense, call it fraud when every normal person would look at this email exchange and the numbers and the fact that he's, you know, his LLC is registered out of a subsidized housing unit in Southern Maine and be like, oh yeah, well, very obviously this is fraud. And there are hundreds of cases like that where they're making off with 500,000, a million, $5 million. And then there are some even bigger ones that are doing residential care, like autism facilities. And those combined are probably 300 or 400 million over the last five years. But I mean, I would estimate at least half of the Medicaid program

nationally is going toward fraud. And we're talking about a program that's $1 trillion a year in welfare spending. It really has become not a healthcare program. It's become USAID. It's like bigger than USAID, except for it's all at the state level. And the states have figured out that they can siphon that money into their preferred groups. And in Maine, it just happens to be the Somali diaspora and some of the other migrant NGOs. It's infuriating. But to your point, like the states get to choose, like who are the people making this decision? Does the Somali diaspora get into Maine? Do they get on city councils? And then eventually the state legislator And they throw around their weight or are there the co-conspirators on the main side within within the government that for some reason or another think this is a worthwhile endeavor to funnel funds this way?

Well, it depends on how tightly your your tinfoil hat is fit on, because you can get really conspiratorial with this stuff. Going back to the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, there was this myth that Obamacare was some big technocratic program with lots of bells and whistles and moving parts. But all it did was expand Medicaid. It took the income threshold for Medicaid eligibility and raised it to, I think, 400 percent of the poverty line. So it just massively expanded eligibility for Medicaid and it allowed the states to opt into that program and it incentivized them to opt in by saying that for the entire expansion population, everybody who joins because you expanded eligibility, the federal government is going to cover it 90 percent and the states will only have to pay 10 percent. So for the states, it was a deal you couldn't pass up. It was like free money coming into your state. So you expanded this program that, you know, 10 years later just so happens to have become a slush fund for leftist NGOs. That's kind of weird. On the home health care side here in Maine, before Governor Mills came in in 2019 and expanded our Medicaid program, there were ballot initiative attempts by left-wing groups, 501c4 groups, some 501c3 groups, to create the home health care program.

So the very programs that are being abused for political purposes, that are having funds diverted into explicitly political groups, they were breathed into existence by leftist politicians and left-wing push groups. So it just seems like a little bit too much of a coincidence that you have Soros-funded groups lobbying for home health care agencies, and then all of a sudden the home health care agencies are being defrauded by a political and ethnic minority that the Democrats in Maine have captured and rely upon for street level activism, but also ballot harvesting every time election day comes around. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey.

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conspiracy you can call it you're looking at. I mean, the no-bid contracts probably were illegal. And the state auditor here actually did some accidental honesty when he was reviewing some of the spending programs and said that the no-bid contracts violated federal rules. So when the federal government under Biden passed the CARES Act and just dropped additional buckets of money onto the states, those all come with rules. Federal government has rules for how that money is supposed to be handed out. And even when you're doing a no-bid contract process, there are rules. But the Mills administration was doing things like kicking money out the door, giving the awards before any contract had been assigned, before anyone in state government had officially signed their name on a document approving it. So they were just shoveling the money out the door to their friends, not following the guardrails established by federal law or by state law. And the auditor himself noted in the last report that he issued that that could subject the state of Maine to clawbacks by the federal government. If the Trump administration wanted to be really vindictive, they could go back after this federally awarded money, both on the CARES Act side, but as well on the Medicaid side, and claw it back because it did violate the law in the way that it was passed out.

In terms of the individual-level frauds that are happening with false invoices submitted to the state, that's just straight-up Medicaid fraud. And in each instance that a fake claim is submitted, you have wire fraud, you have mail fraud, you have additional crimes that emanate out from the fraudulent activity itself. We also see tons of mortgage fraud to abet some of the residential care programs. So just briefly on the residential care, in addition to this home-based care where the idea, if you're a wild-eyed progressive and you think that these programs are really going to help, the idea is that a home care agency is going to go into grandma's home and she wants to live independently. She doesn't want to be in a nursing home, but she needs help showering or getting groceries or with the tasks of daily living. So once a day, you know, someone's going to show up and help her, you know, live in her own house. That's how it's supposed to work. In practice, there's just no, it's like all of your cousins are your clients and you just bill in their names and maybe kick them 50 bucks a week in order to be a client of your business.

And there's no real home health care being provided. But with the residential care, in some cases, there are actual patients, like disabled adults, autistic adults, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and they are staying in these two-bed, two-bedroom homes, and they're supposed to have 24-7 care, sometimes with a three-to-one staffing ratio. So these are people who maybe have the cognitive capacity of an 8-year-old or a 12-year-old, can't live on their own, and require pretty intensive support. These are the people that Medicaid was invented to take care of. And so the organizations mostly comprised of migrants, of African migrants who have arrived in Maine over the last five years, will buy up hundreds, if not thousands, of houses throughout the state of Maine and convert them into these residential care facilities.

And then they'll compete to try to get the waivers that are attached to each of the disabled individuals. And so they want as many disabled individuals in their care as possible because each one of them comes with hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medicaid funding. But the best way to be profitable running that kind of business is to cut corners with the level of care and the level of expertise that you're providing for the disabled adults. And what we've seen in our reporting is a lot of these residential care homes are operating together as a prohibitive collective and they're sharing employees across multiple companies. So we have huge numbers, thousands of asylum seekers who arrived here from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda

between 2019 to 2023. And they're the ones staffing these houses. And 70% of them don't speak English, which creates a lot of difficulties when you're taking care of somebody who is highly disabled, has a strict medication plan or a dietary plan. But they're working 80 to 120 hours a week. So super profitable if you're the guy at the top running the autism company. One of our top guys build $28 million in 2024. One of the newer ones built $17 million last year. It's very profitable if you have this workforce of non-English speaking migrants who don't have a lot of options and you can exploit them and make them work as long as you want. But it also results in hundreds of houses being taken off of the market. Houses that could have been available to middle

class Mainers are instead being kind of put into service as part of this autism industry. And in addition to that, the CEOs of these companies go out and buy multifamily units and duplexes so that they can rent to their workers for cash. So it's a sophisticated scheme. It looks a lot like organized crime. And all of the money is coming from John Q taxpayer. And just like with the home care agencies, there appears to be almost no oversight Or no one cares, or maybe they're intentionally looking the other way for some inexplicable reason. I mean, the economic consequences of this cannot be understated, especially in a day and age today in 2026 and obviously post-COVID with the destruction of the middle class. Obviously, economic pressures have been immense, stronger than they've been in many decades since the 70s, arguably.

And the fact that our own government is siphoning taxpayer dollars towards these programs for immigrants, asylum seekers, which maybe we should dive into that. Like, what is the definition of asylum seeker? Like, how low is the bar to to claim asylum and come and exploit all these things? Yeah, I mean, I think that's that's an incredibly important point because asylum seeker is just a made up word. It's just a language game that the left has played to tug on your heartstrings. There's no such thing as an asylum seeker. There are paroled illegal aliens. You're an illegal alien. You enter the United States illegally. And then when you encounter an ICE officer, you send a letter to the Justice Department saying, I hereby declare asylum.

And you get a letter back saying, all right, get in line with the other 5 million people. Magically, you're an asylum seeker. You become this magical, untouchable, you know morally praiseworthy category of immigrant you're no longer an illegal alien in the eyes of the left and and most of the media you become something more more noble the asylum seeker in fact you're you're an illegal alien and you're on parole and you've claimed to be an asylum seeker but historically if you look at the records uh even under obama and biden somewhere between 50 to 80 of asylum claims will be rejected so you're like you know schrodinger's illegal alien. We haven't opened the box yet and we're not going to open the box until an

immigration judge hears your asylum claim. So we can pretend like you're a refugee until that box is opened. But 80% of the time when we open that box, you're just going to be a fake asylum seeker. You're an economic migrant who is claiming persecution but can't prove that you're being persecuted at all. And in fact, some of the people that we find claiming to be asylum seekers here in Maine have ties to the governments in their home countries. There's the individual I talked with Sean Ryan about who's running an autism facility, multiple autism facilities here in Maine. He was a government contractor in Rwanda. I mean, he ran like a software company in Rwanda and had government contracts. There's no evidence whatsoever of him being persecuted in his home

country. And his Twitter feed is filled with positive comments about Paul Kagame, the guy who's been president for 25 years. So there's no indication whatsoever that he is a persecuted minority fleeing Rwanda. He's just here pretending to be an asylum seeker to take advantage of the weaknesses of our asylum rules. And just to your earlier point about the, you know, the costs of the economic distortions that this creates, just in Maine last year, at the beginning of the legislative session, the wonks in Augusta and the state government came out and they said, surprise, we have an $18 million structural deficit. No one could have seen this coming. It's all Medicaid. Medicaid was way more expensive than we thought it was going to be.

What are we going to do about it? And you know where this story is going. It wasn't, well, let's get rid of all the fraud or let's reduce some of these programs that have grown explosively in five or six years, they raised taxes. They raised taxes on hospitals, on adult use cannabis. They increased the fee to become a licensed arborist in the state of Maine. They put a new tax on Netflix. So, you know, it couldn't be more obvious, you know, what's happening here in order to pay for programs that are being defrauded by the new Mainer migrant community that Democrats have brought into the state very intentionally. Taxes are going up on people who work in the state. So that's just a small example of the cost that Mainers pay as a result of

Medicaid fraud. But even Medicaid generally increases costs for everybody in America who uses health care because the reimbursement rates for Medicaid are so low that every hospital that accepts Medicaid patients has to make up the cost by jacking up rates for the privately insured. So it's like a hidden, sneaky tax that you're paying. Every time you pay your private health insurance bill, your commercial health insurance bill, you're paying for Medicaid through inflated private insurance rates. You wonder why the cost of private insurance or employer-based insurance has skyrocketed. It's in part because we took the most dysfunctional, bad, defrauded program that America has ever created, and we quadrupled it. And then we added in a bunch of non-citizens after Obamacare was done. It was exactly what you would do if you were trying to destroy a health care system in a country. And it's comical to an extent because the left will point at the Trump administration or conservative-leaning solutions to this problem.

So I know this is why the problem exists in the first place is corporate greed and terrible health care policy from the right. And it's not to say that corporate greed doesn't exist and that there aren't bad policies put forth by the right. But I think it's objectively clear that there is a massive amount of fraud. Like you said earlier, $500 billion a year in Medicaid, just simply fraudulent. That is creating these distortions that are throwing the pricing mechanisms for housing, health care, a bunch of short food costs in the local area. if you have this diaspora coming in and competing for relatively scarce goods and it's just comical that the uh the backlash to the unearthing of all this fraud has been what it what it is i mean obviously what's happening in minnesota people are getting very um very triggered by it particularly

on the left and well i understand i understand that though marty i mean if i was if i'm 25 years old, and I'm making a quarter million a year just sending invoices to the health department. And then all of a sudden, some YouTuber shows up and screws that off. I'm going to be a little angry. If I've been making a quarter of a million sitting at home playing Xbox with my friends, yeah, I'm going to be upset when you take that away. So that, in part, I think explains some of the anger amongst the community that was engaged in the fraud. But I think there's also panic by the co-conspirators, the people in the political class, the people like Tim Walls or Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, Keith Ellison. I think that there's some panic there because they

know that if you have a real, real good investigation that digs into how this was allowed to happen and who was involved, that it's going to point to them. And the same thing is true in Maine. I think you have some people, politicians, elected officials, appointed officials, as well as their staffers who know that they have some level of complicity in allowing this fraud to happen because it was politically advantageous. And so they're freaking out not because the money's going away, but because it might take away their political advantage. It might threaten their political victories in the future. So I can understand the freak out that they're having. And I'd also say that you're 100 percent right that Republicans, conservatives have

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the suicidal empathetic individuals out there on the street so those are being triggered by rhetoric a lot of which was put out by governor walls and and others to go protect the the model asylum seekers from from the gestapo that is uh the immigration crimes enforcement agency. And it's just scary looking out at it. And it doesn't seem like many people, particularly your layman voter on the left, your layman left-leaning voter, can't see through this at all. I can't see that they're being used as greater fools to, in my opinion, in my observation, to protect this fraudulent system. And I guess it's also, it's a dynamic that underlies almost every contentious political or social or cultural dispute that we're having these days, which is the

siloing of information. If you go and you look at X right now, there's a different conversation happening. If you go and you look at like Mommy Blogger, Instagram, there's all these communities where people have been able to silo themselves off and only get access to information that reinforces their own emotions, their own beliefs, which is really dangerous. And I think even people like you and me who try to consume information from diverse sources, you've gotta be really diligent about going out

and making sure that you're not trapped in an echo chamber of your own making. You have to do a good job of curating your own information sources so that you don't become the mirror image of what you're seeing in the suicidal empathy woman out in the streets ready to die for, you know, a Somali daycare operator. And it's just not happening. I don't know exactly what the answer to it is. Hopefully, there's some technological

solutions that can help improve the news consumption. But right now, it seems like these echo chambers are just working to radicalize people, really on both sides. But I think right now, you know, maybe I'm maybe I'm biased. Again, maybe I'm a victim of my own echo chamber. But right now i look at some of the people who are out there you know huffing on their whistles so that drunk drivers and child molesters don't get deported and i i can't sympathize with that i can't empathize with it i'm like i i have no idea what what would bring you to do that what would motivate you to do that well it seems like it's very coordinated too i'm not sure if you saw cam higby uh piece of reporting on the signal groups that he was able to get access to and it

seems like a sort of paramilitary militia operation. It does. I mean, it seems it seems like a state sponsored insurgency. I think that they've tied some high ranking Minnesota officials to the group, or at least they're, you know, correlating signal names with staffers to the governor or the lieutenant governor. And there has to be a way that they're able to run license plates. As an investigative reporter, I know a thing or two about how you can use license plate data. And it's not just anybody who can Google a license plate and figure out who the registered owner is. There's a select group of professions who are allowed to run license plates. Private investigators, for example, can query license plates. Some insurance companies can do that.

But also there's a fair number of government employees who can query license plates. So the fact that they have an Excel spreadsheet with 5,000 vehicles in it with their license plates and indications that they've been queried against government databases suggests that at least a few government employees are involved in helping them figure out who's driving these vehicles. And of course, they claim that they're trying to determine which of these vehicles is being operated by ICE or the U.S. Marshals or some some federal immigration authority. But here in Maine, we the secretary of state just last week terminated the confidential plate system for undercover law enforcement. So before she did this, if you were an FBI agent in an undercover vehicle who was staking out a child predator or a fentanyl dealer, whatever the undercover investigation was, if that guy's got a buddy who's a private investigator and he suspects you and runs your plates, it'll come back not on file. Now, if you run those very same plates, it's going to come back a U.S. government or Department of Justice or Federal Bureau of Investigation, depending on how they've registered those vehicles. So what the secretary of state in Maine has done is tee up and make it easier for leftist agitators, if the chaos in Minneapolis comes to Maine in the same way, tease it up for them to be able to dox and identify ICE agents, some of whom I know and know that they live in these communities. So you're setting up a scenario where these people are going to be followed home to their families by left wing agitators who have shown that they're totally unhinged, like they don't want to have conversations.

They want to have physical confrontations. They want to be violent. They're looking to martyr themselves in the name of protecting Somali Medicaid pirates. So at least that example shows from the highest levels of state government, a woman who is secretary of state, who runs our elections, by the way, and is currently running for governor in the state, is doing everything she can to use her official state power to help leftist agitators identify federal agents. And at the same time, we have Graham Plattner, who's running for U.S. Senate right now, wants to beat he's going to beat Janet Mills in the primary and then we'll have a chance to run against Susan Collins. He's the one with the Nazi tattoo who was a national celebrity for a little while. He's out there literally stoking armed insurrection against the government. He's talking about like actual confrontation with ICE agents, really, really getting belligerent at rallies. it has all the all the echoes of uh you know civil war uh they're they're turning this insurgency they're turning the temperature up on it for political purposes they obviously think that

this is going to help them win elections and grow their power and grow their own money well that's the really scary thing is if accountability if these people aren't held accountable and they're allowed to get away with it yeah like how many more election cycles will be necessary before they have complete control and they can just dominate because they've created this infrastructure via medicaid fraud and essentially buying votes and uh importing immigrants giving them money to buy more votes like that could be codified and it could be very hard to to unwind obviously what we've seen in virginia um since the democrats took uh to control that legislator uh and the governorship there um they've gone full bore almost immediately uh

in making it harder to um audit this stuff and making it harder to have certain perspectives uh and it is quite scary to think if accountability isn't brought forth if these people aren't held accountable that this this will be codified and there's no escaping it rather you know i'm optimistic though i mean the virginia is a pretty dark example uh you know they did move really i mean everything about the way that election unfolded is really dark uh given what the attorney general nominee was quoted as saying and the speed with which they moved to implement some of the most radical left-wing policies that is scary but i think that the um The large language models, sometimes called AI tools, if used properly, will empower journalists in ways that are unimaginable.

And one thing that we at The Main Wire spend a lot of time doing is figuring out how we can leverage these tools in order to help our journalism and do journalism in creative ways. And I'm not just talking about like, you know, prompting Grok, write me a story about Medicaid fraud, talking about, you know, designing programs that allow you to scrape government records, analyze government records, you know, look over voter rolls for duplicate voters or multiple voters registered at the same address or identify patterns of, you know, Medicaid fraud. Like, you know, for example, we obtained through, we actually had to sue in order to get these records, but we got all of the Medicaid spending record, cost me like $2,000 under the Freedom of Access Act here in the state of Maine. We get all of the provider payment data from 2019 to 2024. So we could go through and we can look and see who's making money. How is this program changing over the last five years now that we've expanded Medicaid? What kind of new businesses are coming into existence and how are those new businesses faring? And we did find a pattern of startup Medicaid agencies that go from zero to 17 million in three years.

And anytime you see income growth like that, it merits further investigation. But we also find clusters of Medicaid agencies at the similar addresses. And so what Nick Shirley found when he was out with a whistleblower walking around and looking at these different places, we were seeing this last year just by looking at the records, looking at the Medicaid spending records and seeing where all these office buildings were, where there were clusters of Medicaid agencies that just so happened to be there. be engaged in similar activities and just so happen to be run by you know quote unquote new mainers one for example that we found was on anderson street in portland there were five home health care agencies in one building along with a dahab shield which is an emirati money transfer company that is blessed by the central bank of somalia and actually the winner of the the 2024 Somalia Excellence Awards. I'm sure you pay very close attention to that award ceremony, but Dahab Shiel has that honor. And I went into the building and I tried to send $40 to my friend's mom in Mogadishu, but I wasn't able to do it without giving the Somali guy my social security

number, which, you know, I'm willing to make some sacrifices for journalism, but I don't know if I was willing to give my social security number to the guy. So I had to I had to back out. And my mom's friend or my friend's mom was disappointed that she's not going to get my 40 bucks. But when we're leaving this building, which, again, has five Medicaid funded agencies and a Somali money transfer office, as we're leaving it, the Brinks guy is walking out with bags of cash and getting into his armored truck. And I just couldn't help but look at it. This is the full cycle. This is health care in America. The money goes into these Medicaid companies, which may or may not have any patients or even employees. It goes to the Dahab Shield and then out the door

on the brakes truck. And it ends up in Mogadishu building luxury apartments or funding AK-47 purchases from Azerbaijan or something like that. But that was what we were able to see on the data end. Just looking at some of the data and using some of the large language model tools, including some custom tools that we've built just for looking at this stuff, we were able to, I guess, come up with an asymmetric solution to just drowning in the data that allowed us to pinpoint what we would do and streamline what we would do in terms of on-the-ground journalism. And tools like that and use cases of Grok or Gemini or ChatGPT make me optimistic that journalists, if they use and understand these tools can become smarter and more sophisticated than the government

bureaucrats who are trying to you know hide what they're doing because it's very difficult to hide where the money is going ultimately yeah i think it's inevitable i don't think the politicians can keep up with the the autists who have been handed these powerful tools i agree i think that's part of the reason why they become so desperate i think you've seen a big like they're uh especially with of Elon coming in with Doge and closing up the USAID. Now this is applying to Medicaid. I think at least the smarter ones see the writing on the wall that stealing taxpayer money to fund political schemes is going to be a lot harder. And that's in part why you're seeing the level of desperation you are in Minneapolis, in Portland, Maine, because they know the easy

money days are over. Yeah. Well, you were explaining to Sean, in case anybody's listening to this, hasn't watched that episode yet, how you use Grok to sort of guess URLs that would give you documents that the government was refusing to hand over. Yeah. I mean, this was fun and kind of funny. I mean, I've had people message me since then who listened to that and were like, oh, can you send me the program so that I can do this? And I'm like, it really wasn't that spectacularly brilliant. It was just on a whim getting Grok to design a simple Python script that would scrape documents off of government websites. But the origin of the story is that when the state spends money through a no-bid contract process,

so usually when the state spends money, it's supposed to put out an RFP, a request for proposal so the the state says you know i want to buy a bunch of boats so they put out the rfp and then everybody who wants to sell the government boats submits a proposal that says well here's our boats here's the price here's why you should buy our boats and then they debate amongst the proposals and the competition for that rfp ends up producing in theory the best value for the taxpayer but for some reason you can subvert or skip that competitive rfp process which is transparent and you can do a no bid process instead. And sometimes there are legitimate reasons for this. Like if you're in, you know, down East Maine where you need the prop on your

boat fixed, uh, it's like some government research vessel. And there's like only one dude named Randy in town who fixes boat props. Instead of doing an RFP, you just let Randy fix the boat. And then you fill out on the form, like Randy's the only guy in town who fixes boats. So we're going to give him $4,000 to fix the boat. So there are decent, normal, non-corrupt reasons for the RFP process. But what we found after looking at a bunch of them was that they were just being handed out to friends of people in the administration. They were going to left-wing NGOs. They were going to the groups that support transing five-year-olds in kindergarten. There's the panoply of leftist groups. We're getting no-bid contract money shoveled to them.

And it wasn't just $5,000. It was like, you know, $120,000. We even found $120,000 in no-bid contracts to the Portland Press-Herald, which is the biggest daily newspaper. They were actually paid to write positive articles about the Mills administration's education policy. We found no-bid contracts to the Bangor Daily News, the second biggest non-profit. They were paid for public Affairs work for a couple of different programs. So our interest was piqued in how the state was spending money through these no-bid contracts. But we found that because it was written into state law that they only had to publish these no-bid contracts once for a seven-day period, and then they disappeared from the state archives. So you've got a website that shows you the no-bid

contracts, but you have to log in within a seven-day window or it's going to disappear and not be archived anymore. I have no idea why they would set it up that way. I have some guesses as to why you would engineer a system like that. But they made it so that if you didn't get in there right in time, you would never see the justification for that no-bid contract spending. So we filed a Freedom of Access Act request for all of the no-bid contract documents. And they came back to us and said, we can't do it. We're just technologically, we don't know how. It's impossible for us to provide you with those documents. which I thought was fishy. But I was like, okay, there's really nothing I can do after they've

told me that. But then in looking at some of our older stories where we had linked to documents, no-bid contracted documents that by now were no longer archived on the government website, we saw that they were still active somewhere on a server. So we knew all of the documents that we were requesting from the government were still on a government server, were still available online. The PDFs were out there. They just weren't indexed anywhere and you couldn't figure out how to get to them and download them. So I copied all of the URLs from the NoBit contracts that we did know about and pasted them into Grok and asked Grok to find the naming pattern. What was the convention that was being used to establish names for all these

PDFs? Because they had numbers and they kind of looked like they were in order. And Grok very quickly found what the naming convention was and then a little while tinkering around with it i created or asked it to create a script that would randomly guess at urls following the pattern that we'd identified and if there was a pdf there to download it and now so then i had to say like you know assume that there's up to a thousand per month and search within these different parameters and everything and we had to tinker around with it five or six times but then when we we got it the way we wanted it to. I let it run for 13 or 14 hours and ended up downloading over 5,000 documents that were all no-bid contract documents. Each one of these documents pointed to an instance

where a government bureaucrat said, I'm going to spend money in a non-transparent way without justifying it. Sometimes the money goes out the door before the contract's even signed. And we found just crazy stuff, enough to write a whole year's worth of stories on, including no-bid contracts to abdullahi ali who was running for warlord in jubilant like while he's in jubilant running for office with his militia he's getting no-bid contracts and the justification there's like a little form on these documents to justify like why why are you doing this no-bid contract and they literally just copied and pasted his biography into the justification section where it says, Abdullahi Ali is a Somali refugee. As if that's enough reason to hand

somebody $500,000. He's a refugee, so give him $500,000. All kinds of different no-bid contract abuse. People handing contracts to NGOs that they would later end up working for. NGOs for huge sums of money to cover up mistakes that the government had made. Just really some inexplicable stuff and all of it pointing towards corruption. And in hindsight, it's like, yeah, you could have found these. You easily could have found these documents. I didn't have to go all Grok pirate on your ass and pull these. You didn't want me to find these because you knew that there was something bad happening here. I mean, we found one where the guy in charge of the office of procurement in Maine, so the guy in charge of making sure that all of these contracts are on

the level, ended up signing off on a contract for his brother's company to mow the lawns around the state house grounds. And they told us it was totally on the level and he, you know, didn't exert any pressure on the process. He just happened to resign right after we published our story on it. It's like some of it's just like small ball. It's like, is it really going to change the world when, you know, the guy's given $800,000 to his brother's company? No, probably not. But all that petty, small corruption, it's like Banana Republic stuff, and it adds up. And when you turn a blind eye to these little, teeny, tiny examples of corruption, it gives license and emboldens the people who would do bigger and bigger forms of corruption. And last week, we, the federal

government, the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services released a report that showed that there was $46 million in overbilling in one autism program in Maine in 2023. So one year, one program, $46 million in overbilling. And it just so happens to be the program that was abused so thoroughly in Minnesota and the same program that Gateway community services was overbilling so you know when you start to look for and examine the fraud in serious ways with like adults and accountants and people who know what they're looking for it's everywhere uh so that's why i i mean half half of medicaid might even be an underestimate when it comes to the like the total amount of fraud that's happening i would not be shocked at

it was somewhere around 80 percent it's it's it's madness and and i you know elon actually retweeted me the other day when i asked where are all the parents in minnesota who have lost their daycare you know if you if because those are the daycares have all been shut down now but not a single parent has come home come forward and said well what am i supposed to do for child care now but if you actually you know destroyed the child care for tens of thousands of families i think you'd be able to find at least one parent to come forward but you haven't found any of them and it's the same with all these home health care agencies as the funding gets turned off you don't see patients coming forward and being like well you know grandma's not getting her home

health care anymore because all these agencies went away because they're just they're total frauds it was like the second video that nick shirley put out when he went back with uh his uh this cracked out boomer david it was i mean they went to the one daycare center it was like three somali men in their 40s and 50s and it's like who's dropping their kids off with these guys and they were wearing very nice clothes sure they had nice cars but it's like and that's like the frustrating thing is like since all this has been unearthed over the last year really since usaid was um was sort of pilfered by by doge um it's like we're expected to have like a polite conversation about this but it's like hey this is like so obvious like don't tell me not to

believe my lying eyes like this is overt fraud i don't need i don't need people to be charged trials to happen years to go by before uh accountability and justice is served like We've got to stop this right now because, again, going back to the economic pressures that hardworking Americans who truly believe that there is a social contract in this country where if you work hard and you produce things and are a productive member of society, you will be able to climb the economic ladder. And that has been ripped out from under tens of millions, probably over 100 million Americans over the last really 15 years since the 2008 financial crisis. And it's insulting. It's humiliating. And the fact that we're being asked just like, hey, wait, we'll do the investigations or we'll be charged. It's like something's got to give.

We've got to stop this as quickly as possible. Yeah, I mean, that's that exact problem is something that I've been wrangling with myself for 10 months now, because there's part of the American character that wants, you know, you know, guilty or innocent until proven guilty, you know, give them their day in court. You need to have a defense attorney. You know, what does the evidence say? But the evidence now is just so overwhelming and it's one community. And it's like, well, how stupid do we have to pretend to be to our own detriment in order to uphold these legal traditions that these people don't even believe in and don't even care about? Very obviously. Uh, and one of the things that I wanted to convey to Sean and to you is that in my conversations with Trump administration officials and with people in the justice department, we do not have the resources to give all of the fraudsters the, the, the full American criminal justice experiment we experienced. We just, we just don't have enough lawyers.

Like you could, you could have every single person who ran a daycare or a home healthcare agency, every single person who's done Medicaid fraud can stand forward and come raise their hand and say, yep, I did a fraud. And then we're going to start the criminal justice process with trials and everything. We just don't have enough lawyers. We don't have enough man hours. We don't have enough defense attorneys. We are physically incapable as a bureaucracy of handling the magnitude of fraud before us. So it's either some of this goes totally unpunished and just gets, We hope we make an example out of a few of them, and then the others know not to do it anymore. Or you come over the top, and you have a solution that is, in my view, kinetic or military.

You have mass, mass deportations and denaturalizations. You have to be able to respond to this in a way that is overwhelming and is proportionate to the amount of fraud that's happened. I told Sean, I believe that this is economic terrorism. I believe that this is state backed. I believe that state actors or at least political factions within foreign states are encouraging this, aiding, abetting this, are protecting these pipelines of money. If you look at Somalia, it's some absurd percent of their national GDP is remittances coming from the US. Some of their most profitable companies are companies that exist solely to suck wealth out of the United States. And so if you're an elected official or a clan leader or a reigning warlord in Somalia, it's pretty important to you to keep that money flowing. So you're going to do everything you can to keep that money flowing. And that would include having agents in Minnesota

and in Maine to protect that flow of money, to give advice and coaching and counseling on making sure that that money's coming back. And we have actually identified an individual who is prominent in Maine's political scene, whose name is Hussein Hirsi Ahmed, who was the finance minister for Jubaland and is a member of Somalia's parliament. And he owns a large commercial building in Lewiston, where the Somali diaspora is concentrated. And his tenants include home healthcare agencies, halal stores with EBT card machines, left-wing NGOs that advocate for new Mainers in the Somali community. You can't help but wonder if all of these connections that you're seeing between the UN ambassador for Somalia who had a daycare in Minnesota? Are these just

random? Are these accidents? Were they opportunistic and trying to make money? Or is it, in fact, part of a plan that was designed for nation building, for enriching them? Just like people would say, George Bush invaded Iraq so he could suck the oil out. Well, could it be that Somalia is invading parts of the United States to suck that Medicaid oil out? I think the evidence points toward yes. And I also don't think that the Somalis are the only nation or only ethnic group that are engaged in this kind of behavior. I think that a lot of Central American countries are doing it as well. And I think that Rwanda and some other Central African countries are doing it as well.

Yeah, we're being taken for fools. And again, that's the – going back to the suicidal empathy that exists across large swaths of our population, it's – I mean I think that's the biggest hurdle to actually having this kinetic response that you described. Because you've seen Ilyan Omar and others in the Somali community that have risen to the ranks of U.S. political seats in the House of Representatives, whatever it may be, state and local legislators as well. And they openly go to rallies filled with other Somalians and claim claim sort of what's the word I'm looking for to claim victimhood. Well, not victim. No, they claim that they openly admit that they are where they are because they want to make Somalia stronger. Oh, yes. Yeah. The Somalia first. Yeah, we've we have we have some some Ilhans of our own in Maine. I think I mentioned her earlier, Deka Dallak. This woman is on video at least five or six times in Somalia and in English saying, Somalia is our number one priority. We should be focused

on Somalia. Focus all your resources and all your money on Somalia. We need to bring our money back to Somalia. I'm Somalia first. We have video of her deplaning in Puntland, Somalia, and she gets like a kardashian greeting you know there are people lining the the airstrip celebrating her and like losing their minds it's like you know the beatles landing in the united states for the first time and she's a state lawmaker you know like she's making 21 000 a year as a state lawmaker with really not that much power but back in somalia for some reason she's she's hailed like princess di uh and you have to wonder well maybe there's something we're not seeing maybe there's some money that she's bringing back to Somalia. After all, she has said multiple times over and

over again, Somalia is the number one priority and we need to bring money back to Somalia. But yeah, they are. They're openly saying it. And there's a constituency of white liberals who say, well, yeah, that's what we should do because American imperialism has destroyed these parts of the world. We've been so bad to Africa and Central America. I think we should be allowing them to steal our money and take it back to their countries yeah as their neighbors are struggling and and not only that that they're struggling too which is the funny thing they'll complain about groceries and the cost of schooling daycare um health care and not recognize like hey there's a glaring core of this problem is staring you right in the face and you have this inability

to actually confront it because of feels yeah i'm glad i'm glad you you brought that aspect of it up because i had the experience so we both worked at barstool i i you you got out before i did but after i uh got done at barstool my wife and i did uh we bought a camper van we drove all around the country it was like peak covid lockdowns and we were just sick of society and wanted to just get away and go travel to free states and be in nature. And we had the benefit of just going through all these back towns and seeing a lot of just getting between the coasts, seeing parts of the country that aren't doing so hot. And after that, we settled back in Maine. And one of the first big investigative projects I started was looking at Chinese organized crime in Maine and

particular these cannabis houses that had popped up all over the rural parts of the state and I mean we racked up you know at least 10,000 miles driving to all these places in rural Maine. Maine's a bigger state than than people think and I got to see a lot of the state and a lot of the conditions that people are living in and I'd see you know middle of winter double wide trailers wrapped in saran wrap with their wood stoves going just so that they can, you know, stay warm through the winter. Lots of dilapidated places that looked like, you know, 20 years ago they were dilapidated, didn't need a new coat of paint, but now they're just derelict. And you would see the poverty and the suffering that people were enduring in rural Maine. And it's not right in your face because

it's not New York City or Boston. You know, the media cameras, they're not there. It's distributed out into the woods of rural Maine, but it's still human suffering. It's still poverty. It's still people who are being neglected and forgotten by their governments. And we'd go into the homeless camps as well in Bangor, Cortland, Rumford, Sanford, all these towns that had once had prosperous manufacturing sectors. But now their biggest manufacturing sector, and this isn't a joke, their biggest manufacturing sector is cannabis and breweries because our economists classify that as manufacturing, but we'd see these homeless camps and go into, we'd interview these people to try and figure out, you know, why are you here? You know, what circumstances led you

to be, you know, in this camp where obviously everybody is using fentanyl. And so to see that all of the very real suffering that's happening throughout Maine in these rural communities and even in the urban communities and old buildings that used to employ a thousand people collapsing in on themselves. And then to look at these guys making a million dollars a year doing a Medicaid fraud. It's like, holy cow, have we misprioritized our resources? And it really just makes me angry more than anything that we've got a government that is so distorted in how it allocates resources that we've totally forgotten about the people who have lived here for five or six generations and are now living in misery, poverty, and squalor. But the people who

came here six months ago can go get the luxury apartments that were built for them because it was trendy to build out refugee housing. How have Mainers reacted to your reporting? Is there positive momentum in the right direction? I mean, I think so. When I took over the main wire we had i think like 2 000 followers on facebook and we're up to like 23 000 24 000 now i've gone from 25 000 hits a month on the website to usually like half a million to a million hits so growing in traffic and an interest across the board and you know i think even even the The incumbent politicians who are reluctant to acknowledge us as, you know, real media like that, you know, the governor and the secretary of state won't take questions from us at press conferences and, you know, don't invite us to stuff. But, I mean, it doesn't matter. It just helps us. It forces us to be creative.

They're increasingly forced to acknowledge the reality of what we're reporting on. And the governor, after ignoring our reporting on Gateway Community Services for 10 months, when the national media started picking it up and piling on, all of a sudden she decided that she was going to suspend funding to Gateway, which is important for two reasons. The first is that, you know, finally, you know, if you if you jump up and down and scream at a problem long enough, even the people who don't want to pay attention to you will be forced to pay attention to you eventually. But it also points toward what I think is a solution that every state can avail themselves of to crack down on Medicaid fraud. And that is that every governor in their health department have the ability to suspend payments to any Medicaid provider based on an allegation of fraud or wrongdoing. You don't need a criminal conviction. You don't need an audit finding. All it needs to be is a credible allegation.

That could be an anonymous email that says, I believe, you know, legit home health care is defrauding the government. they have huge discretion over how they allow those funds to go out. So every single governor could right now disenroll their Medicaid providers and force them to go through a more rigorous process of re-enrolling. And what that would look like is you stop payments to everybody who is getting Medicaid money and say, you need to come in here and you need to sit in front of a panel of five people, maybe it's the program integrity expert, the auditor, just some people who are maybe a little bit skeptical and have a brain, and you need to explain that you're a real organization and prove it. 60% or 70% of these entities wouldn't even show up for that, and they

certainly wouldn't be able to prove that they actually have customers and they actually have employees. That's something that every single state could do. You could immediately kick them out of the program, force them to re-enroll. You could do that with EBT cards, by the way. All those EBT card terminals, those are being abused. People are swiping their EBT card and then getting 80 cents on the dollar. They get the cash back in exchange for the benefits so that they can spend the cash on drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. All of those welfare programs, you could just basically unplug it and plug it back in. We have that. You don't need Congress to pass a law. It's already contained within the Medicaid infrastructure. You could just

disenroll everybody, force them to justify their existence and prove that they're legitimately providing health care for poor people, because that's what this program is about. It's about providing health care for people who, through just a shit luck of life, aren't able to provide care for themselves. And so the fact that it's become bastardized by fraudsters so that people can drive Lamborghinis in Kenya, it should be offensive to progressives that the social safety net has been abused in this way. But there's a solution. There are plenty of things that the governors could do, plenty of things that they could do at the congressional level that would stop this from happening. But you have to have the political will to do it. And you have to have

politicians who aren't benefiting from the very schemes that we're trying to fix and reform. Completely agree. And you just answered what was going to be my next question. What can we do about this because at the state level obviously at the federal level we talked about it a bit like the bureaucracy is such it would be impossible so you need some sort of outside of the box solution to this which i'm in favor for personally but then like individual citizens i think it's just imperative to make sure that these stories don't go away and i think more importantly recognize that there are entrenched interests that are trying to put forth rhetoric that riles people's up, gets them in the streets and pushes things to a violent level and recognize that you're

being manipulated to protect these programs that are just pure fraud. That's what I worry about most moving forward, obviously, with what happened over the last few weeks in Minnesota with the confrontations with ice agents and um the uh the two individuals that were shot and um it's really disconcerting to see um because you could see how this could escalate really quickly and then if it does escalate and things really heat up it's going to get to a point where people don't remember what they're fighting for in the first place yeah i mean we may have already uh gotten to that point, frankly. I mean, there does seem to be an element of cost playing amongst some of the left-wing agitators here. I mean, we had last week, there was some hoax spam caller from Canada

was placing fake bomb threats to schools, banks, businesses all throughout Maine at the same time that the ICE activities were ramping up. So schools were going into lockdown, banks were going into lockdown, caused a lot of chaos and confusion. And there was a police department in central Maine that was responding to what they thought was a person of interest in relation to a threat

that had been made against a high school there. As they're responding to this person of interest, this 60-year-old woman stops her car in the middle of the road, jumps out with a whistle and a blow horn and starts screaming at the cops and getting in their face and trying to physically stop them from investigating what they thought was something related to an active shooter case, a school shooter case, had nothing to do with immigration whatsoever. And this woman thinks that she's going

to be a hero by jumping out of the car. And there was no indication whatsoever this was ICE. It was just like local police department chasing a tip or a lead. I mean, this woman, fortunately, is going to be charged. They're going to throw the book at her. But it just gives you an example of how they're it's like the facts don't matter. I mean, they're they're stopping SUVs with white men in them that look like they could be ICE agents and demanding to see their papers. I mean, it's like darkly hilarious that they've become fascistic in their approach to fighting fascism. You know, they're like racially profiling people and demanding to see their papers out in Minnesota. And I'm sure it's coming to Maine as well and really any state where they try to, you know, enforce what's happening here.

But like I said, I have to remain optimistic. You know, I do think that the the tools that are coming online, you know, they're I'm sure there's going to be great evil that will be permitted with authoritarian governments when they have, you know, the likes of Palantir or the Chinese social credit system. There are some really malevolent things that they can do when it comes to tracking you or controlling you with large language models. But I think if you use the tools effectively as a journalist or a citizen activist, you can become much more much stronger, much more powerful. You can enhance your investigative efforts and you can become more efficient at finding the truth of what's going on, of what your government's doing. Yeah. Well, thank you for doing what you're doing. That's another reason to be optimistic is individuals like you out there actually doing legitimate investigative journalism, which seems to have gone by the wayside in our society in recent decades. I mean, actually diving into the numbers and doing the hard work of sifting through all these documents and unearthing all this data.

Again, it seems like it was a lost art for a while there. We have fun doing it. It's I think it's exciting for me and for me, the it's it's thrilling to come up with a good scoop and be able to share it with people, especially, you know, the the more unlikely a scoop is the further fetched a story is if you can connect the dots to it and show that it's that it's true. I think it's fun and I enjoy doing it. But one thing I'll give a shameless plug for, we've actually tried to make one of our AI tools available for other people to use. We call it Harpe. And we named it Harpe because that's the blade that Perseus used to chop off Medusa's head. And we think Medusa is like a good analogy for what the government has become. But I paid a developer to create a program that would turn these no-bid contracted documents that we scraped so that they were machine searchable and machine readable because they were really just like scans of actual documents.

So you couldn't search through them for dollar amounts or the names of bureaucrats or the names of agencies. They weren't really usable. and then I had him tweak it to give it some other purposes and it became a useful tool for sorting through big batches of documents and doing link analysis on them. So you could look on the other side after you've processed the documents like, oh, okay, so what addresses do we keep seeing in these documents and what entities are related to those addresses?

So we're trying to turn it into a tool that's powered by Gemini on the back end and has multiple applications for whatever investigation you're working on, but primarily things that involve huge amounts of data that you can't really understand just with your own brain. But if you leverage large language model tools, you might be able to make sense of them and sort the signal from the noise and find stories there. And we are still trying to develop it in a way that

I'm sure you've been involved in a number of software projects. We're trying to do it in a way where we don't create this huge honeypot of data that somebody could come hack. So we want it to be run locally on people's computers. So we're still working on a model that's not just custom built for me, but could be shared. But we hope to make that accessible to people and ideally, you know, journalists and other people who are trying to do public interest journalism so that they can replicate some of the things that we've done in Maine, finding really good stories and mountains of data. because, you know, a lot of this stuff is hiding in plain sight, like USA spending.gov. A lot of this data it's been sitting out there in public for a long, long time, but there's, you know, you can hide stuff through over-disclosure. If you just dump a mountain of data out there and

no one can really know what to do with it, no one knows how to process it. That's, that's a, it's almost like it's counterintuitive, but that's a way of concealing what the government is actually doing through over disclosure. Uh, and you, you just need other tools. You need an asymmetric solution in order to sort through that data. Um, so if people wanted to find out more about that, they can go to get heartbay.com and sign up for our mailing list. And we'll be sending out an email when we have a version that's ready for, you know, beta testing. Um, this is my first time doing a project like this. I basically just found the most autistic based programmer in Maine and told them what I needed. And so hopefully it becomes something that's, uh, useful for other

journalists. I'll have to link you up with my friends at Maple AI. We're running LLMs in secure enclaves so you can do confidential compute, which sounds like it could be beneficial for the particular use case you were describing. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we'd love to talk with anybody. We made this just for me to accomplish a certain set of tasks. But at some point, we're like, you know what? This is pretty useful and cool. I think other people could benefit from it um so uh we'll definitely have to connect on that yeah it's the uh the age of the double-edged sword these technologies are incredibly powerful in good ways and bad and it's again being optimistic i think more and more people are recognizing um that you can

leverage these tools and do things that were simply impossible only two years ago which is massive um broader point uh because i know we have a uh mutual interest in bitcoin i say one thing i just wanted to put out there too is like a lot of this fraud is enabled by the ability to issue debts and print money at will and absolutely part of the reason yeah part of the reason why i'm And so passionate about Bitcoin is it can sort of force the issue in terms of making it so the government has to explain why they're distributing funds the way they are. They can't just print money or issue debt willy-nilly if they have to answer to the confines and the frameworks put forward by sound currency in the digital age in the form of Bitcoin. It's all debt financed. I mean, all the Medicaid money is, you know, money that doesn't exist except for on an imaginary balance sheet.

And the COVID money, I mean, $15 billion was just invented from thin air and sprinkled on Maine. And our roads aren't better. You know, our schools aren't better. Literally no one knows where that money went. But when you start looking at the no-bid contracts, it's like, oh, okay, so it went to the people who were politically connected. It really was the cancel on effect of, you know, the people who were closest to the governor and the government benefited most from all the covid surplus money that was being pumped into the state. And you're 100 percent right that it's only like the fiat system enables this kind of fraud, waste and abuse. It's totally to blame for the rise of housing prices in Maine.

um you know we've got fraudulent fiat dollars pumped into the economy and all these medicaid entrepreneurs are out there and suddenly it's not a big deal for them to bid you know a half a million dollars on a house that should probably cost like two hundred thousand dollars and then the middle class mainers who are you know working on a lobster boat or you know working as a carpenter or something uh they're priced out of the houses that would be would have been you know maybe their second home or a starter home even. So they're the ones who are suffering from it. And there's another crypto angle to it as well, that I guess just like in Bitcoin, in remittances, there's all kinds of shitcoin already going on. I mean, this isn't just specific to Maine,

but we found dozens and dozens of examples of Somali fraudsters who are trying to come up with their own um cryptocurrency their own coin that's going to solve the remittance problem you know you're not going to have to rely on uh you know no more bank secrecy acts no more anti-money laundering rules you don't have to go to the dehab shield or the taj or the western union you can just use uh somali coin to transfer your money back instantaneously to your auntie's phone back in mogadishu and you know you know how that story ends basically every single one of them is a pump and dump scheme that ends up with a select few people getting extremely wealthy but that is not to say that the money transfer business isn't massive in somalia it's like you know there are

several large money transmitter firms western union and moneygram don't really operate in somalia they operate in kenya so you can transfer money that way into kenya and then someone can go into Kenya and come back to Somalia, but they have specific, uh, tailored money transmitter firms. They're basically digital Hawalas that will transfer money. And those are hugely influential in a political sense and an economic sense because whoever controls the end pipeline of that money gets, gets a skim. So if it's in Jubaland and it's coming into, um, Al-Shabaab controlled territory, well, then you have a radical Islamic terrorist organization that's getting a 5% to 10% skim off of all that Medicaid fraud money that's going into the country.

So the Medicaid fraud is literally funding terrorism. But even when it's not funding radical Islamic terrorism, it's funding a secular warlord or a less radical Islamic, but also still a warlord, or the government of Mogadishu. So there's incredible inter-clan strife to control where that spigot of money is going to be directed, because no matter who controls it they get a skim on it so it's like this entire you know clan warfare multipolar civil war anarchic version or territory in in africa that's all determined by you know spigots of money spraying american tax dollars in different directions uh it's really it's really fucked up it is but it's also hilarious but yeah like it affected the minneapolis mayoral campaign this

year hugely hugely and and uh i actually i have some somali friends who are pro-american and don't run medicaid businesses and i rely on them to help me understand some of the things that just look inexplicable like omar fata losing that election when everyone was like oh he's he's somali and the diaspora is going to vote for him that's a hundred thousand votes this is settled like not This is he doesn't stand a chance. But the Klan resentments are so strong that they endure even to people who are, you know, were maybe two or three years old when they arrived in the United States or maybe even their first generation, like their U.S. citizens. They were born in the United States, but they've grown up with these lingering class resentments so that, like, for example, in Maine, the Darud clan is the preeminent political faction. And I think it's the same in Minnesota as well. But Omar Fattah was not Darud.

I think he was like Hawaii or something like that. And so that's why he people voted for Jacob Fry, you know, a Jewish white guy instead of the the Somali candidate in that election. But those there's like four or five major clans. And then within those clans, there's sub clans that have resentments against one another. But those as a result of a lot of inbreeding, but also just the cultural legacy of how their societies were organized. Those clan resentments are much stronger than any attachments that they have to a regional government in Somalia, their national government, or whatever political body that they might live under once they immigrate to the United States. they're never going to have more fealty to the government of Minneapolis or Minnesota than they do to their own clan. And that's one of the reasons why the fraud became so big and so

endemic and everybody knew about it, but no one said anything about it is because their loyalty is to their clan and not to, you know, Uncle Sam or the taxpayer or to some higher ethical creed. Yeah. That was another illuminating thing from the on the ground reporting in minneapolis is just like asking people on the street like what are they like many people are like i don't know they don't talk to us yeah i mean it's it is a very uh insular society like the assimilation has not happened i mean you like the the practice the practical look at it in maine is beginning in 2000 you had legitimate refugees come to atlanta Georgia. And then you had a secondary wave of migration to Portland, Maine, through Catholic

charities and some other NGOs. And Portland, Maine didn't have as much surplus large family housing as Lewiston. And so Portland and Lewiston made a deal and Lewiston became the place that accepted the larger families of Somali refugees. And so by about 2003, you had 250 to 300 Somalis who were living in that community. And then over time, that grew to now probably 15,000 to 20,000 in Lewiston and the surrounding area. But it is very much a culture apart. It's very much still not integrated. And my theory as to why that is, is because the immigration industrial complex is like a ponzi scheme like most of the early medicaid businesses that the first generation of somali started were translation businesses so they would be the ones hired by the hospitals or

the schools or whatever um you know government office needed to have uh these translation services for like ada reasons or accommodation reasons so the translator the translation businesses were the first ones to tap into medicaid and become pretty profitable get this taxpayer money flowing in. And the translation services are also really, really easy to defraud because you can basically tack on translation to every single service that a Somali individual gets. Whether they need it or not, you can say there was a translator there and they needed the translation service. And there's been a lot of indictments and investigations around that. But in order to keep the translation services going, you need to perpetuate that need,

which means you need a constant flow of new migrants coming in who don't speak English because over time people are going to assimilate and they're not going to need the translation services. And that goes as well for the migrant services agencies that help people get housing or help them get Medicaid or help them get transportation. Like the entire NGO blob that exists to use taxpayer money to help migrants who don't speak English and don't understand American culture, it's sustained by this constant flow of new Americans or migrants, illegal aliens coming into the state or into the country. So that's why I think it's like a Ponzi scheme. You have to have this continuous flow of migrants in order for these migrant agencies to justify

their own existence and to justify the huge and growing amounts of taxpayer money flowing into these organizations. We just created the Office of New Americans. Why do you need an Office of new americans if you have controlled immigration i mean if you have a borderless welfare state yes you do need an office of new americans because you've got all kinds of people who don't speak english showing up at the country looking for welfare and this office is going to have you know bureaucrats out there helping them sign up for welfare but if you have controlled immigration into your country there's no need for that office because the people who come into the country can use the same offices as the old americans because they'll speak english presumably

yeah and the and the ngos you mentioned catholic charities like the these yeah i mean ngos play a big role and they need the money they need more of it so hugely i mean catholic charities is in my opinion a human trafficking organization they get paid to to um you know move migrants around to communities that uh never voted for that and don't want that um you know it's uh really it's a it's a bastardization of the catholic church to have charities like the catholic charities and even the lutheran uh organizations the lutheran ngos they are like prancing around in a in a christian skin suit claiming to be christians when what they're really doing is facilitating uh third world migrations to western areas uh but they are

i mean their effect on society has been extremely pernicious and the fact that they do it while uh uh preening and pretending to have the moral high ground is i think repugnant yeah they're building the tower of babel yeah contributing to it at least it's uh uh to fix a problem you have to understand that it exists in the first place and i think the work that you're doing is making it abundantly clear that the problem does exist and my hope is that we don't get thrown into a civil war and cooler heads prevail and we can can fix this because it's just straightforward again going back to don't tell me not to believe my lying eyes like there is overt rampant fraud going on with US taxpayer dollars and

debt that we're we're accruing which is going up exponentially it's been a big yeah and I I would say don't don't just don't believe what you're seeing on you You know, CNN or even Fox, you know, they get paid to show you the tear gas canisters exploding and, you know, the conflict and stoke this idea that a civil war is brewing in Maine. Poll after poll has shown it's like 80 percent of people support what ICE is doing. You're looking and, you know, in every state where there's these conflicts, you're looking at a tiny fringe minority that in many cases is being bused from state to state to state. in order to create this political theater that plays out on your TV screen. Like here on the ground, it's a tiny, tiny group of people who are huffing on their whistles and screaming at ICE.

But the vast majority of people in Maine support what ICE is doing. Like we had an example that I tweeted about earlier today. ICE is chasing these two illegal aliens. And the local Mainers are like standing out on the road going, they went that way, they went that way. like trying to help the ice agents track these guys down one mainer gives gives an ice agent his four-wheeler and so the guy jumps on his four-wheeler and chases down the ice the the illegal aliens that he was apprehending and you can see and uh someone supplied someone posted

their blink camera footage and you can see the ice officer gets them detains them but handcuffs them and then puts them on the back of the four-wheeler and drives off with these two guys apprehended on the back of a four-wheeler. That's Maine. That's real America. That's, I think, how the majority of Americans feel. They will give their four-wheeler and their sidearm. They will donate resources in order to facilitate what ICE is doing because it's God's work. These aren't starving refugees who escaped Nazi Germany that are being apprehended. You can look at the dhs's website they are publishing the the the uh criminal histories and backgrounds of these people and they're not people you want in your community they're scammers thieves child molesters

murderers abusers they're they're bad people and they're illegal aliens and i think everybody should celebrate the fact that we're finally removing them from our communities well that's been uh i'm sure you saw too but like the the way the media can manipulate people is never we have another example i'm not gonna say it's never been made clearer to me than this example but it's a great example of like tom homan getting a medal or some medal from obama in 2012 for deporting twice as many people as he did in 2025 it's like well it's the same guy in control here uh it was being celebrated a little over a decade ago now it's gestapo nazi fascism yeah i mean like i did a uh ride along with some ice agents in maine on friday

and you know we didn't glorify it i mean would i have liked to have seen some action some excitement you know some tear gas going off yes that would have been more exciting we just kind of sat outside of a subsidized apartment complex waiting for a drunk driving illegal alien to come out of his building and he didn't come out and so there was nothing there but hey they're not all going to be winners. But when we posted about it and just wrote a story about like, here's what we saw. We did an interview with the deputy director of ICE. Here's what she said. We just posted her quotes verbatim. And we get all these responses, Nazi bootlicker, like, oh, you're just like propagandist for ICE, blah, blah, blah. And I'm reminded that CNN just, you know, six or seven

years ago when Obama was in office, they did a ride along with ICE and it was just like normal run-of-the-mill television, like, hey, here's how the law's enforced. Sometimes there are illegal alien child molesters living near schools, and ICE goes and gets them. And there was never any controversy about it. And this was CNN, of all places. And it was like, yeah, Obama's tough on those illegal aliens. That's why we voted for Obama. He's tough. So opinions have just changed like on a dime. And really, it's all Trump. It's like Trump has, for whatever reason, so many people's brains just broke when trump became president and they haven't been able to critically think outside of if trump supports it it's bad if trump does it it's bad i mean it's it's uh it's a

mass psychosis that needs to be studied i think it'll be written about for centuries because it is baffling like seeing how deranged people have become just because trump has a particular perspective they immediately have to take the opposite perspective which in this case is like here trying to protect child abusers, murderers, drug dealers. Uh, it's like, how did we get here? They are, they're, they're out on the streets. All of our politicians, they're, they're ready to pick up arms and go to civil war in order to protect the rights of, you know, really, really bad people. I mean, there's one guy that just kind of sticks in my craw. I know there's probably worse offenses out there committed by illegal aliens, but there's a

Chinese national who was just picked up last week who was arrested for scamming an elderly man out of over a hundred thousand dollars and he'd convinced the guy it was like your classic telemarketer scam you know you can't trust your bank your bank is stealing from you you need to go buy gold bars and like I'm gonna come and you give me the gold bars and he actually got a hundred thousand dollars worth of gold out of this elderly man basically his entire life savings and the only reason he was caught is because he got greedy and thought he was going to come back and get another $100,000 out of this guy. And he was smart enough after a while to get in touch with law enforcement. So they laid a trap for the guy and caught him. That was like a year ago. The guy had

been arrested, processed, mugshot, everything, and then released. Somehow he's an illegal alien from China. And for whatever reason, they caught him. They knew what he'd done. And he was released and just now captured and processed for deportation but it's like you've ever had to deal with one of your grandparents getting scammed by a telemarketer uh you you might have an inkling of the homicidal rage that that can induce in you when you know that someone is picking on your grandma your grandpa and to to have these politicians standing up there and be like no he should he should stay here we don't want him deported he's just as american as as you or i like to stop stop uh stop deporting the people who are scamming our elderly uh i just don't know if they're living

in a different factual universe or if their moral judgments have concluded that the political gain to to be had from not deporting someone like that is worth it uh but it's just again it's alien to me you can't it's difficult to sympathize with people who feel that way yeah i mean i'm talking tim foyle's hat tim foyle hats earlier mine's on pretty tight like i think we're under a cultural revolution that's been going on since the 70s like weather underground any of that went away in fact it's only gotten stronger and if you look at antifa again how coordinated they are um the information they have access to the paramilitary nature of the coordination it's just like there's there's a a force out there that would like to turn

america into a communist shithole and they are putting their finger on on the scale right now Yeah. And I think that there's also undeniable foreign influences pushing it, urging it on. And again, tinfoil hat. But I know I've been deep down the Chinese organized crime rabbit hole after making the documentary about the cannabis trafficking in Maine. So it's top of mind for me. But in digging into a bunch of these individuals who are prominent within the fraudulent Medicare, Medicaid enterprises, we keep finding these weird connections between the Chinese and Somalis. Just these weird, weird connections that, you know, don't don't really make sense. connections or that's kind of that's kind of what we're thinking you know it's like beyond the remit of a local main news outlet but when you find for example the guy who is currently running gateway community services because the aforementioned ceos on the lam in kenya studied abroad at a university in mainland china that has had programs with american universities

that are severed now because the China committee warned of connections to the CCP's military, said basically these study programs are being used to conduct espionage and undermine America's interests. He says he's proficient in Mandarin, does work in China, and then he comes back to Maine and becomes a CEO at this dumpy Somali nonprofit. Weird. Just doesn't make sense. There's all kinds of stuff like that where as a journalist, I can't put my finger on it and just be like well here's the story it's just stuff that makes me go huh that's weird why would why would somebody with that kind of a resume come back and work at this like dumpy somali non-profit doesn't really make sense the tim wallace china connection to go spend that's what i'm saying it

doesn't you know what why why is there just continuously there are these connections uh between uh you know china and somalia and it's it's really really weird and the and the chinese aren't really known to work with other ethnicities they prefer to work with their own so that adds another interesting degree to it but they could you could see them using Somalis as a tool or something like that but there's definitely whether it's wealth extraction or subverting the American political order there are definitely external forces at work who are encouraging this fanning flames in addition to the uh you know the internal revolutionaries who uh you know are like cosplaying uh the civil rights movement all over again except for they're just you know

retarded marxists wearing you know furry tails yeah it'd be naive to think that there aren't external forces that are looking on with uh with glee with what's happening steve again thank you so much for all the work you're doing thank you for taking time out of your day to have this discussion with me. I think it's incredibly important, and hopefully more people pick up on the work that you and many others are doing and actually read the reports that you guys are putting out

and understand that we are getting got right now. We are being played for fools. And if you care about this country, if you care about your family and the future of your children, it's probably important to make some noise about this and make sure that we're not getting defrauded on the scale of trillions of dollars over the course of many years absolutely well thank you

very much for having me on marty i appreciate a long long time uh long time listener and i love your show so it's a it's a great honor to be on with you so thank you very much oh the uh the respect is mutual friend thank you and we'll do this again at some point anytime all right peace and love freaks okay thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like

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