The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline by J. David McSwane

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline by J. David McSwane Propublica.org

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. My friends, welcome to the big podcast circus tent in the sky. I don't know what the hell that means.

We don't have lions and tigers and bears, but we do have brilliant minds that come on the show and myself. I'm excluded from the brilliant mind column, obviously. Anyway, those of you who have been following the show for a number of years are like, yeah, he's pretty much gone. We are glad to have you

on the show. Be sure to go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, for the show to your family and friends. The downloads have been exploding. Like, people have been just referring the show, I guess. We were just kidding about that multiple-level marketing. You have to have five people in your download, downline or whatever, to subscribe to the show. We're just kidding, folks.

That was a joke, eh? But some of you took it to heart, and I think we doubled we're going to quadruple our uh traffic this year it's kind of crazy we double and triple every year since 2020 and it looks like we're going to triple this quad ripple this year anyway guys uh linkedin the linkedin newsletters exploding go see that as well on youtube.com uh today we have a returning author on the show. He was here earlier for his book, Pandemic Incorporated, Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick.

And he's got a new article out on ProPublica.org called A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled with Thousands with Debt as it Built a Family Empire Including a Pot farm, a bank, and an airline. It's a huge, massive expose that they published there on ProPublica.org. And we have the co-author of that, J. David McSchwain, on the show for us today. He'll be talking about all of his insights and everything that goes into him. And he's been with ProPublica and been a journalist for quite some time doing all his good stuff and work over there.

He's a reporter in their DC office. He worked in his investigative reporter for the Dallas Morning News where he reported on the state's outsourced medical, I'm sorry, Medicaid system. Get it right, Chris, which benefited companies that systematically deny care sick children disabled adults and spurred multiple legislative reforms uh welcome to the show david how are you i'm doing all right how are you there you go uh welcome back to the show and give us your dot com wherever you want people to look you up and get to know you on the interwebs oh uh go to propublica.org that's's where our work is featured. I have a bio page

there. You can also find some of my work, including my book at davidmcswain.com. There you go. So what motivated you to write this piece? You know, you came off of Pandemic Incorporated. What motivated you to write this piece and what was kind of the catalyst behind it? Sort of the classic story of the pressure you feel after landing a project such as a book or a big story. It's just desperation. You're looking for what's the next story. The next big thing. Yeah.

And my colleague, Ryan Gabrielson, and I just wanted to look a little bit more closely at nonprofits. It's really not a very well-reported space. These are organizations that are tax-exempt, and there are some records out there, but they're kind of squishy. Just having reported for years and years, you just sort of see there's always something going on in the space. So we thought we'd more deliberately take a look. And we were thinking more broad, you know, strokes, we'd look at the regulation as a whole, and just started poking around, I was interested in looking at religious organizations, he was interested in looking at healthcare, and almost, you know, randomly sort of found the intersection of the two and landed upon an organization called Liberty HealthShare, which appeared to have just a ton of complaints online that are business bureau complaints and so forth.

And sort of seemed like there was smoke. I'm so sorry. I got something stuck in my throat. That's that happens on a Tuesday morning. Only when you're trying to talk continuously. That's true. That's what happens. So, you know, there were just things signaling that, okay, this is an interesting organization.

It's called a healthcare sharing ministry. I had never heard of this. And, you know, in a previous job down in Texas, I covered insurance pretty extensively and knew about insurance. And this is built as an alternative to insurance. These ministries are essentially faith based organizations of like minded Christians. You know, it sort of began with the Mennonites who essentially say, you know, we're going to work outside of insurance rather than pay UnitedHealthcare. And we all have a premium. We're just going to put money into this nonprofit. So when I get sick or I break a leg, you know, they'll just pay for it. So conceptually similar, but completely

unregulated. And right away, that just stood out to me as uniquely susceptible to fraud, which, you know, as you know, I've covered a lot of that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. What was interesting to me, and you guys documented in the article, and I think I remember hearing at the time, I think an Iowa senator or Iowa House member, was it Grassley? Put a provision in the original Obamacare, and Obamacare was a proponent that kind of maybe drove people to some of these uh these uh vehicles for funding insurance outside of the thing and I

think there was you wrote in the article that there was an exception pushed into the Obamacare bill originally to to help these businesses that were religious based yeah you actually just gave me the perfect setup to pitch a story that's coming out next week that further delves into this. It's actually really fascinating. In that story, I got sort of an up-close view with the lobbyist who got that exemption in, a guy no one's ever heard of, was working for these ministries that most people don't know anything about. And when I discovered that the exemption, it's about 100 words in a thousand page document, you know, one of the biggest laws ever passed by Congress, is no one really

noticed it. And when I traced it back to Senator Chuck Grassley, veteran, like, famous for being a conservative voice against Obamacare, when I found out it traced back to his office, I was kind of surprised. And when I called his office, so were they. Wow. This was quite a while ago, 13, 14 years ago. And that institutional knowledge just sort of turns over. And folks couldn't quite remember what it was.

But, you know, essentially these ministries were pretty small, maybe 40,000 members around 2009 and obamacare is coming together and it's pretty clear it's going to have sweeping effects across the health care industry right and this is sort of the beginning of the you know the coordinated gop opposition to everything ob, especially the ACA. So they hire a lobbyist. They want to make sure that whatever happens in insurance regulation, they can survive. And there was a thing in there that probably the most controversial piece of the Affordable Care Act was the individual mandate, which essentially said, we all have to have insurance, whether it's through your job or you buy it on the marketplace.

That would have effectively killed healthcare sharing ministries because they're not insurance. So they wanted to stop that and appealed to Grassley's office saying, you know, we're religious, we're a group of Christians who want to help each other out. And what we're doing is good and it's cheaper. And we just want to make sure we can survive. So through some, you know, behind the scenes, you know, legislating that exemption slips through and healthcare sharing ministries are not just saved, but they're really exempt from all of this new sweeping regulation that had a profound impact on actual insurance. So it really just created an opportunity for people to take advantage of this space.

Wow. Now, I'd heard about these, and we were talking in the green room beforehand. I couldn't remember where I'd heard about these collectives. I don't know if that's the right word, but that's what I'll use. The collectives of health insurance where it was based upon, you know, I'd seen one version where it was based upon you know i i'd seen one version where there was it was based upon like jesus teaching of helping each other and so the the insurance company would collect i think premiums but anything that was due like above that people

would sometimes have to write additional checks to support uh was this one of those collectives or was it a more like an insurance company? Well, so collective wouldn't be the legal term. But yeah, it's essentially what they were doing. They were saying instead of giving our money as a monthly premium to a corporation, essentially, that has profit motivations, we're going to give it to a nonprofit, relatively small. Maybe there's a few hundred of us. And, you know, we're all religious. We share the same faith. But it looks and acts like insurance.

Insurance regulators would tell you this. They pay a monthly share. That share is just a premium. And the nonprofit holds on to that. And insurance, we call that pooling. And once you start pooling money, you're an insurance company. They've managed to really sort of sidestep that regulation by arguing they don't pool members' money. They just kind of hold onto it for them, which is one and the same, right?

Yeah, if you send me a million dollars, I will hold onto it for you. Right, yeah. I'll pull anyone's money. Let me know. Let me drop my cash app really quick here i'm sorry go ahead yeah i'm just saying they look and act like insurance but that religious bit uh was sort of their way out and lawmakers uh you know not a lot of people were in these things people are reluctant to do anything that might look like religious persecution. And that's essentially what the early health shares argued is, you know, this is us practicing our religion in a way.

So if you regulate us, you know, you're coming after Christians. Yeah. And that was kind of a backlash of, well, I don't know if it was directly a backlash of when Obama kind of went after, you know, went after with the IRS basically saying, what was it, you know, if you're preaching or using your religion to infiltrate politics, you have problems. It seemed like there was a lot of backlash that came out of that. And of course, the GOP using Obamacare and Obama as a boogeyman and saying, you know, oh, he's coming after your religion, you know. And it seems like a lot came out of that. And, you know, for years you heard the whipping of what,

almost 10 or 20 years or something. How long has it been? I don't know, 10 years? Yeah. Last 10 years of, you know, the GOP is like, we're going to stop Obamacare, which came down to McCain and McCain's seminal vote. But yeah, it's interesting to me what was going on with these companies because they act like the people who pay into them feel they're normal consumers of an insurance policy

that when they have claims, when they get some sort of thing, they have issues. You tell a story beginning in the article about a lady who that ends up happening to. Yeah, yeah. So there was a lot there. So it was fascinating. It's sort of a theme throughout our story that there's this family, the Beers family of Canton, Ohio, and some associates who started.

They almost invented health shares back in the day uh they got uh busted committing some fraud and kind of disappeared but it was that whole uh stew of things happening that you just referenced of the gop coming after everything obamacare the act itself are shifting politics that allowed them to just sort of slip under the radar and collect billions of dollars um so i found it fascinating because most people don't know about these things uh but it was just our political atmosphere allowed it to happen and then no one was looking at it so you have people like bonnie Martin, who you mentioned how we beat into the story, who it appealed to her. The Liberty Health Share appealed to her because she didn't get health insurance through her job, which is millions of Americans.

The Obamacare marketplace has gotten really expensive. Yeah. So she sort of fell through the cracks. And here's this Liberty Health Share is offering something that looks the cracks and here's this liberty health shares offering something that looks like insurance and it's much cheaper so she bought into it as uh hundreds of thousands have in this space by now and it's fine until she needs something um and she's you know she's diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and some of her bills are paid early on. This is when Liberty's sort of healthy

and they're bringing in more people and more money. And that we're not yet seeing the house of cards. And she goes into remission. She gets sick again. And now they just stop paying her bills. Wow. And in her case, she's told her illness is terminal and she doesn't really want to believe it.

She's fighting back against that. So we found these emails and notes, like handwritten notes, where she's pleading with liberty to fund these for-profit corporations and buy properties and things that are all connected to one family in Ohio. Yeah. And the sad part about this is, I mean, it's all sad when you really look at it. These people pay in premiums and they believe in it. But on top of that, you know, they believe in the institution of religion and Jesus and that, you know, these people are going to do good by them because they're religious and other people aren't. You know, I'm an atheist now, but I grew up in the cult and grew up in religion and all that sort of stuff. And so, you know, I, and so, you know,

I understand how people, you know, they believe in it. You know, I have family that still believes in religion and, you know, and, and they believe that the,

the, the, I call it a cult, their entity that, uh, that, uh, that they send their money to,

uh, uh, is, is, you know, has goodwill from a Jesus sort of standpoint of, of, you know, we're, we're, we're going to do right by you um recently the cult was uh was fined by the irs the sec for hiding hundreds of billions of dollars or into a fund you'll probably know which one i'm referring to but they believe

deep down you know they have a trust uh i'm trying to say of of that these these these religious institutions that are financial are going to be above board than say a a gentile sort of institution if you will i don't know yeah i mean one thing that i found interesting is that the audience to whom they're marketing is a devoted audience, as you pointed out, through their faith. You know, and I also grew up in the church, so I understand it. And, you know, these folks are talking. They had their own little communities. And there's this sort of broad crossover we're seeing more recently with, you know, the right and things like CPAC and these other things. And

they found just a really great audience to sell to people who wanted an alternative for what they, you know, viewed as sort of a scourge of Obamacare, who may need health insurance when it's really expensive. And, you know, they had a lot of devotees and, you know, they used faith to market themselves. You know, and I did find that a lot of people who weren't Christian, Bonnie Martin wasn't a Christian. It was just practical for her. It looked like a good deal. And it turned out too good to be true. There you go. In fact, you mentioned CPAC. One of the pictures in your article shows one of the infamous photos, I'm going to call it infamous, of Trump plagiarizing and hugging the flag,

which I don't think you're supposed to do. And Liberty HealthShare is one of the sponsors of CPAC. This is 2019, it looks like. Tell us a little bit about Warren and that kind of incestuous relationship with politics and the company. Yeah. I was talking to a source earlier today who, as a conservative, he said, I didn't really love that you included that photo because a lot of us are conservative.

And it seemed like a jab. And I was like, that's interesting that you thought of it that way. I actually did. And what I saw that as here is an organization that founded out of allegations of fraud comes completely out of obscurity to the highest stage they can really get to next to the president of the united states as a lead sponsor of cpac uh which you know coincides with them wanting to preserve certain policies that allow them to exist but also there is no better advertising for what they were selling you know they went from nothing to one of the biggest sponsors of CPAC within like four years. So it was significant to me to see, you know, I don't think the president understood what Liberty Health Share was when he took that photo. And, you know, I doubt a lot of people who've seen the photo

thought twice about it. But that gave them a significant stage to sell their wares and bring in more people and more money and ultimately to you know to wreak a little more havoc on people's finances yeah there's another brand on here dragging canoe pigeon 400 what the hell that is it sounds like something i'd find on on the new advertisements on twitter it's like the bottom basement of advertisers over there but what's interesting is the cpac sponsorship that they paid to get on that board, they spent more than $200,000 a year, according to your article,

between 2017 and 2021 to be a top sponsor at CPAC. Well, meanwhile, not paying folks like this ladies' bills who ended up dying of cancer. Right, and that's the thrust of the story i mean what what we really found was you know they had some really clever marketing they had a really devoted audience uh and they had people who were trusting and sending their money and what happened is they set up you, this family set up for-profit corporations that charged the nonprofit and secretary of state and so forth is dozens of companies that appeared to be shell companies that don't do anything, but move money and hold assets and all this stuff moving around.

And we traced it back and we found all of this interesting, these interesting properties, a weed farm in Oregon. The family had purchased a controlling stake in a boutique airline uh outside of canton that you know used to ship people from canton to atlantic city for a gambling weekend uh but just happened to be hired to move migrants to martha's vineyard for ronda santos political stunt so like the deeper we went the more we realized like you know this family that controlled this uh thing um you know members of this family had had moved money through an array

of assets and accumulated incredible wealth uh in just a few years and uh you know that money originated from people who might have been at cpAC and decided they were going to buy their product. I do remember from reading the Bible when I was young that Jesus did say, Thou shalt buy an airline and a pot farm. I'm pretty sure that was in Leviticus. Yeah, those might be their extra religious endeavors. But you basically document this whole almost Rico-like organization of like you say shell companies and and the pooling is of the of the insurance funds is clearly being uh redistributed and and uh and

uh used and these guys are getting rich and living with it on top of that i love how you document it goes back to uh it goes back like three, what, two generations, three different iterations that they've done of this scam around were already sort of infamous from something that happened more than 20 years ago uh in the 90s but it started much earlier uh a reverend named bruce hawthorne took the idea of a health share which was really just like mennonites like hundreds of mennonites might band together and like someone breaks a leg they'd pay for it right takes that idea and scales it and learns to monetize it and people are paying each other's bills back then through snail mail and by the mid 90s and into the 2000s the ohio attorney general sort of got wise to what was going on here investigates this non-profit which was called the Christian Brotherhood newsletter

and that Brotherhood uh you know when they looked into it was moving millions and millions of dollars out of the nonprofit and into a company controlled by one of the members of the family Daniel J Beers and from there they bought motorcycles and land and a family ranch and a jet and a bus and and all these other things so we saw that pattern and the ohio attorney general recommended dozens of felony charges be filed against members of this family wow and it just didn't happen there was a new da who was elected and some other things but we found the original my colleague ryan gabrielson found the original referral to to um you know the law enforcement referral that detailed this in which they allege members of this family were engaged in money

laundering and racketeering uh and conspiracy to you know to steal and when we read through all of those really old files, we noticed that Liberty HealthShare and the companies that were pulling money out of it seem to be echoing something this family knew a lot about from more than 20 years ago. So, you know, we sort of walk readers through the origins of that. And you see how it sort of evolves where, you know liberty healthshare now has the internet and facebook for marketing and and all these other tools to get even bigger but functionally the operation looks a lot like the first operation wow and they're

just they're just hopping from different things they're they're going on you have pictures of them going on bear trips uh evidentidently, one of the guys loves to gamble. Is that correct? Yeah. The patriarch of this whole thing who was involved in the Brotherhood and is also involved our sources and documents show in Liberty, though his name's not on anything

because he owes a $10 million judgment. He's quite a character. I had a chance to meet with him um where he sat down and answered questions about companies he claims he doesn't control or know anything about um but they like to have fun he he likes to gamble uh he's he's pretty good at poker from what we were able to find uh he's one he's placed in some tournaments and uh you know the family you know as they amassed all of this wealth at the same time liberty members weren't getting their bills paid and were being sent to collections

uh you know they were having a good time they bought a piece of a hunting and fishing lodge in alberta canada and um you know they weren't really hiding it they posted photos of you know five bears they'd killed as a family and some deer. Just in the course of us doing our due diligence, we found those things. Actually, the hunting lodge was one of the harder things to find because we weren't looking in Canada. Oh, wow. They have a different public record system.

It was just sort of mentioned to me in passing by a source like, hey, did you know about the hunting lodge? Then the photos confirmed it you know this is this is what i love about having journalists on the show and having you guys come on uh from from reputable sources i don't think i claim fox news is a reputable source of any re-came on from them i don't think we have anyone on from fox news but it's been interesting

to see what dominion the dominion lawsuit is exposed but the work he did on this piece is is amazing and huge and probably and probably just the beginning of peeling the onion maybe um but you know i was reading the other day about uh i forget who the texas pastor is but he was the guy who wouldn't open the church to the houston hurricane victims. And then he finally relented after some public backlash, but I was reading about how much money he has, how many cars he has and different things. And it's just extraordinary. Some of the games that are played in the name of religion and Jesus that end

up, you know, enriching some of these dudes and fleecing a lot of people, in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, frankly, it's an American tradition. And that's not to discount people's faith or religious institutions that do a lot of good. I've talked to a lot of people in this space who, you know, they're upset. They want this stuff exposed because they want to do it right.

They believe they're following biblical teaching and they want a cheaper alternative that provides some sort of faith based community. And they're true believers. And then, you know, as with anything, you know, there's always somebody trying to take advantage. And when you add, you know, sort of the trust that comes along with, you know, I'm giving money to take advantage and when you add you know sort of the trust that comes along with you know oh i'm giving money to a fellow christian or so forth that's when it feels um i think that's when you know people feel even yet more upset like they were taken advantage of on on a more spiritual level yeah they pray on these people i mean you see it in the nigerian emails you know they'll bring up god and you know all sorts of religious sayings and they do it to establish trust or find people that are that are you know they're willing to give their faith over a little bit more to people who speak

that language and and think they're more trustworthy and really it's it's it's just preying on these people which is sad and. And why is there a chance that, I mean, hopefully what you're documenting is going to get covered. Is there a chance the justice department is ever going to look into this stuff or is it like you mentioned earlier in the show, it's, it's a thing where you get in religion, then, you know, you get the political backlash from the, from the right wing, uh, GOP. Right. Uh, yeah, those political those political conditions uh haven't quite changed i mean um talk to some folks who are irs experts or had worked at the agency uh they're just not very good at policing non-profits it's not i mean the irs is a tax collection agency that's their primary goal

uh and objective and these organizations don't pay taxes so it's they're not really hunting around for this sort of thing they find things here and there and they'll ping you but they just don't have the capacity for that we're told and then on top of that you have the perception largely perpetuated by conservative media that you know the irs was attacking religion um so i think there may be a reluctance there. I don't have anyone who's explicitly told me that. But I certainly think there's a lot there that law enforcement may choose to look or to follow up on, or maybe even the Ohio attorney general's office,

which has in the past, like has some familiarity with, you know, with this organization and with this family. And it seems like regulators on a state and federal level have just not really wanted to regulate them. They're kind of like, well, they're kind of over on their own thing. So just, just let them do that. But if you're in, I think if you're in the normal insurance regulation business or business, you have tons of regulations, right? Yeah, absolutely yeah absolutely i mean i think it was a pretty clever pitch early on um really beginning in the 90s into the early aughts you know the industry argued you know we're this religious group we're really small you shouldn't really

worry about us we're not insurance and insurance regulators have a ton of you know they're policing you know 100 billion dollar corporations and it's different state by state. It's really complicated stuff. I think they were more than happy to just say, okay, we don't need more homework. Yeah, it's really interesting what goes on in this world, you know, between stuff, the SCOTUS rulings, of course, as the court's gone more right wing, you know, uh stuff the scotus rulings of course is the court's gone more right wing you know improving different things uh citizens united and different uh features of rulings where you can just buy politicians you can lobby like hell to get what you want it seems like businesses can just go do almost whatever they want and not really uh face many penalties

the mormon church which i referenced earlier, they just recently, earlier this month, paid $5 million to resolve the SEC case for stockpiling $100 billion in total holdings, hiding it from the IRS, hiding it from other places. They were hiding it mostly, they claim, from their members because they were worried that their members would stop sending in money. And I have members of my family, then I i'm like why are you sending money to um you know i think they were exposed years ago being one of the top 10 real estate holding uh companies in in the united states they have they probably have so much money you know no one can uh put a finger on it but so much money you're just like why would send that? And they're literally getting off now with $5 billion over hiding $100 billion.

And they're just going to get off on it. And it's just crazy that people can, these businesses, and it is a business, the Mormon Church is filed as an incorporation, as are its shell companies. It's just extraordinary. These people can walk away from it. Yet, I think if personally one of us did that, we'd definitely be doing some jail time. Yeah, it's just practically, it's easier for law enforcement or a regulatory agency to go after individuals that are easier to prosecute and sort of seek a deterrent effect make an example out of someone uh and there's also you know a culture of accepting settlements

because litigation is you know tedious expensive takes forever and you know there's only so much capacity you have so i think it's just kind of a human thing that makes a lot of sense. And, you know, in a way it's job security because the last line of defense often is journalists who, you know, we obsess over things and, you know, can get to the bottom of it. And it's not our job to make a case. It's our job to just point out what's happening and then let let others act yeah without the fourth estate reporting this stuff you know people don't let's say appreciate a journalist journalism as much as they uh should because without it we

wouldn't know about a lot of these abuses and and some things get resolved some things don't but uh you know, it's, it's really important that we find out about this stuff and there needs to be more outcry. I mean, people need to, to, to go, this is bullshit. Um, you know, I, I, I've constantly read and a lot of it's between the lines that the reason they don't go after billionaires and rich people and stuff is because they kind of hire 50 million attorneys to to fight them for decades you know um there's still i guess a hundred million dollar refund that's still unresolved with the irs and we're still trickling out with trump as to how uh he you know he abused he used to abuse the irs and in fact to look at his own files that came out

so the you know it's really interesting what you you've put in here. What else have we teased out or covered in the article that people should read? Oh boy, it's a long article, admittedly. We've gotten a lot of engagement with the story online. It's still up on the homepage. I'd encourage people just to check it out. There's a really cool animation that walks you through the logistics of how money was sucked out of this nonprofit. One thing I found really fascinating is,

as we were tracking all these companies and following the money, pretty journalism 101 stuff, so it took a while, came upon a bank that members of the family purchased in the Missouri Ozarks. And I just thought, why do they have a bank? And we found that it's central to their next business venture, which, you know, it's complicated, but they're essentially trying to make sure they have an end run around insurance regulation forever because they could not you know they could get around pooling money um and the bank is central to that in the moment right in the months after you know members of the family purchased the bank there's been an exodus of of

executives who weren't comfortable with how that's going down so that's something we're going to be looking at see where that goes and and of course, they've now invited bank regulation, which is much heavier than the space they exist as just a healthcare sharing ministry. Yeah. And you talk in your article about how it took them much longer than normal to get their bank thing approved. But now they have access to borrowing money from the feds,

from the Federal Reserve, and doing their banking stuff and maybe i don't know maybe maybe some interest i didn't wouldn't wouldn't that if if the if the if a drug cartel is running that wouldn't that be called money laundering maybe i don't know you kind of worry about what they might be doing with that bank i don't think we ran into any drugs but uh we're eager to see um you know what banking regulators say about you know plans for bank yeah and i'm just using the example i mean if it was a drug it was a drug dealers doing it i mean definitely they're you know that the feds would be all over it but i think there's real big concern with what they do with the bank and you know trying to legitimize the money and and and i imagine all these companies you outlined these people bought with shell companies controlled by the family conveniently um none of the profit from those venues probably flows back to the

original uh insurance company pool that they they stole it from or took it from maybe it's a proper word yeah once money leaves the non-profit we have a very limited view wow because those records aren't public uh and you can find things in land records uh you know elsewhere uh and stitch it together but you know it would take uh you know law enforcement and subpoena power to really track everything yeah because they're they're private companies so they don't have to disclose all their open all their open stuff and and how much it's really interesting how they've you know there's no laws against this stuff it's crazy it's just freaking crazy or there's if there are there seems to be reluctance on prosecutors to go after it. Yeah, the Ohio Attorney General entered a settlement with members of the family and the nonprofit after accusing it of fraud.

And there are laws against that. For reasons we don't know, they didn't answer our questions. They didn't pursue criminal charges and instead went with civil litigation is there any indication that uh i mean your article is fairly new but uh some of the fallout might uh might uh motivate some people to uh might prosecutors to take a deeper look at what's going on there uh you never know i mean it's been my experience um you know when you throw something out there like this, some prosecutor somewhere follows up and wants to take a look at it at the very least. I don't know that. I don't have any confirmation of that.

But I think we've put a lot out there that might be of interest. Yeah. I mean, you guys have laid it out probably in a way that a lot of people have looked into it. You know, with the Mormon case, there was a whistleblower that was overseeing the funds that came forward and said you know this is wrong and ethical and and uh not really something probably jesus would pull off i read the i read the bible you know i'm an atheist but the bible is like still a good you know a good how-to manual it had to be a good person in life uh for the most part i don't know about the old testament maybe i don't know i have to revisit but you know the new testament kind of you know how to be a good person in life uh for the most part i don't know about the old testament maybe i don't know i have to revisit but you know the new testament kind of you know when jesus

comes around he's like hey you know don't lie don't steal you know be good to each other you know that's sort of the golden rule that's a that's a good way to do but of course i'm a i'm a i'm a gentile heathen of uh atheism so, I'll be worshiping the devil in her today. I guess there's something I do. Those are jokes. People were just kidding around. Um, anything more you want to touch on or tease out David to get people to read the article,

check it out and find out more about what's going on. Uh, no, that's it. Uh, check it out at pro publica.org. We have a newsletter where you can sign up and get updates on, uh,

on our other investigations as they come out. There you go. There you go. There you go. And people who want to join our double-worshiping cult, no, I'm just kidding. We don't have one. I'm just an atheist. We don't believe in anything.

Anyway, folks, so thanks for coming on the show, Dave. We really appreciate you coming on. And your insights in this are amazing. We've had a lot of authors that have come on that have exposed a lot of stuff going on in religion, the right-wing stuff, what put Trump in office, and a lot of this stuff that seemed to

come out of Obamacare and Obama and exposing some of the abuses that are on there. So it's good that you do this and do the great work of journalism for it. Yeah, thanks for having me back on. There you go. Please come back for the next book or whatever the next big thing is, David.

Thanks a lot for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com for just Chris Voss. Go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss. Go to goodreads or linkedin.com for just Chris Voss. Subscribe to LinkedIn newsletter. That thing is killing it over there. It's huge. It's public now.

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