“Everyone wants to fight fraud, right? Right?” asks investigative reporter and author Peter Schweizer.
Perhaps not. The California legislature wants to criminalize citizen journalists who try to expose massive fraud in the state’s “migrant services” programs. AB 2064, dubbed by its critics the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” would classify asking questions at migrant service centers in the state as harassment and expose the journalist to a $10,000 fine and possibly a year in jail.
Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers explore how politicians from California to Minnesota are not trying to fight fraud — but instead go after journalists who do.
“The question is, ‘What are they doing to prevent fraud from being exposed, and why are they doing it?’” Schweizer asks on the most recent episode of The Drill Down. “We’re going to argue it has something to do with the constituencies.”
“The people committing the fraud are actually constituencies of a certain political movement in the United States,” Schweizer says. The politicians “don’t want the fraud exposed because it hurts their constituencies,” he says. “It also affects them because it could be that some of these fraudulent dollars end up in their campaign coffers as well.”
Eggers, who recently penned an op-ed on the subject for the New York Post, adds, “It’s what we like to call perverse incentive structures.”
Nick Shirley is the citizen journalist whose YouTube channel became a sensation when he exposed blatant welfare program fraud in Minneapolis being committed, mostly by Somali immigrants, who billed the state of Minnesota millions by setting up sham daycare centers that Shirley exposed in his video reports. Shirley has done similar work in California, exposing sham hospice centers in the Los Angeles area and other fraudulent uses of state taxpayer money by NGOs that claim to be doing “migrant services” work.
Those exposés have embarrassed both states’ Democratic-ruled governments.
On a previous episode of The Drill Down, Eric Eggers interviewed Republican Minnesota state senator Steve Drazkowski, who has been trying to blow the whistle on welfare fraud in his state for a decade. He told Eggers about a discussion he was having with a Democratic colleague who had legislation to establish an independent inspector general to investigate welfare fraud there. During their discussion, her phone rang. “It was Governor Walz,” she said, and left to take the call. When she returned, she told Drazkowski, “He wants me to pull my bill.”
Citizen journalists have exposed not only the rampant fraud in welfare programs but political contribution fraud as well. Journalist James O’Keefe reviewed the donation records of ActBlue, the largest fundraising platform for Democrats, after finding donors who were recorded contributing multiple thousands of dollars in small amounts. O’Keefe interviewed several of them, who told him they never made those contributions. That story turned into an investigation of ActBlue, which led to the resignations of most of its top leadership and allegations the organization was laundering money, possibly from foreign donors, which is illegal.
Staff from ActBlue were brought before congressional investigators, and the New York Post reported just this week that ActBlue employees invoked their Fifth Amendment right at least 146 times in depositions with congressional committees investigating alleged donor fraud on the fundraising platform.
“Yeah, we know that citizen journalists got the ball rolling on this by simply knocking on doors,” Schweizer says.
“There is a key difference in what’s happening with these ActBlue citizen journalists and the ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act,’ Schweizer points out. “So, in the ActBlue case, someone’s making these small donations on behalf of somebody else. The ‘Nick Shirley’ act wouldn’t stop that.” The ActBlue fraud involves Democratic donors.
The reason why Minnesota fraud continued unabated for so long is because it primarily involves one group,” Schweizer says. “And that’s migrants.”
“In Minnesota, it was Somalis. In California, they specifically say you can’t harass people providing migrant services. So, it’s very narrowly focused on that constituency,” he says. “The point would be: why? Because they are a core constituency of the Democratic Party.”
Schweizer continues: “And this is truly bizarre: This gives migrants added protections that ordinary American citizens don’t have. One thing we know from history… if you migrate into a country you vote as a bloc. People who have been here longer will tell you whom to vote for. And the Democrats love this.”
Finally, the hosts pivot to an eye-popping election fraud story, also from California. During the 2020 pandemic, there was a strange case of dog voting stemming from California’s decision to mail ballots to every registered voter.
“This lady gets all these voter registration forms in the mail,” Eggers says. “She registers herself, her husband and her dog, Maya the boxer, to vote. Maya, her dog, gets sent a ballot and she decided to send in a ballot on behalf of the dog. It’s a silly thing. She called the registrar in Orange County, trying to let them know, ‘Hey, I did this.’”
She didn’t hear back from them for five years. Then, “she hears from the Orange County registrar saying, ‘Thank you for contacting us. You’re now being charged with five felonies for committing voter fraud.’”
“This is silly,” he continues. “So just recently they dropped the charge for the five charges against her, but it’s part of a larger pattern of people who are attempting to expose potential flaws… and they’re not rewarded and told, ‘Thank you for trying to make elections safer.’ They’re stopped and hindered and fought at every turn.”
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