In this episode, Logan Sekulow dives into the latest breaking news from Minnesota, where another wave of fraud has emerged. We discuss the ongoing congressional hearings surrounding this scandal and what it reveals about the larger issue of governmental transparency. Our conversation unpacks the stakes involved as lawmakers navigate the fallout from these events, and how our legal system is stepping up to tackle the issue of fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars.
SPEAKER 01 :
We got breaking news once again. I hate to tell you, new problems in Minnesota.
SPEAKER 02 :
Keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever. This is Seculo. We want to hear from you. Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110. And now your host, Logan Sekulow.
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome to Sekulow. Phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110. I want to hear from you. You know, every day we have a meeting. We talk about what we’re going to talk about. We’re going to go through new shows. What’s the segment’s going to be today? What’s the topic’s going to be? In the beginning of today, we said, you know what? Enough with the Minnesota. We got to take a pause. We’re wearing people out on Minnesota. Not everyone is this involved in what’s happening in Minnesota. And we said, okay, well, there’s nothing new to talk about. That’ll be fine. And then about 10 minutes before we go on the air, of course, something new has to break. And it’s once again. Another instance of potential fraud and really the fallout from the immense fraud scandal that has rocked Minnesota.
SPEAKER 08 :
That’s right. So as of right now, there’s a hearing happening for the U.S. Congress and the House of Representatives about the fraud here, about the fraud situation in Minnesota. Right now, it’s members of the Republican State House and things of that nature that are going over this, members of the DOJ that are testifying before Congress about this situation but at a time when all eyes are on Minnesota and everyone is concerned and in some ways justified in other ways maybe it’s gotten hyperbolic in some ways because of how the left has responded in things saying like no we already took care of it years ago there’s no big deal here but then there clearly was something there there because even tim walsh himself had to drop out of his next election due to the scandal but you would think that optics would be something that people care about at this time making sure that they’re not doing anything that could either raise tensions or cause scrutiny Maybe they can get it settled down and get back to a positive for their state. But what we’re seeing now is we know that this budget fight is coming once again. Remember, at the end of January, we could potentially see another government shutdown. Ilhan Omar, the representative from Minnesota, as well as the two senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, have earmarked a million dollars. So in the grand scheme of things, not a ton in terms of earmarks for non-government agencies and things of that nature in Minnesota, a million dollars. that would go to a nonprofit that works to create a better, safer, more connected community for individuals experiencing drug addiction and substance use disorders in the greater East African community of the Twin Cities metro area. They have a single line item earmark for a million dollars in the next round of funding that is going to go before a fight that people have now been like, wait, why now? Why is this million dollars so important now? And for them, the devil’s advocate… Why would they think it’s a good idea? Let’s raise a spotlight on one single organization at the time when all this is going on. It raises questions not just about how things work in Minnesota, but also the use of taxpayer money in this way, the special interest, the earmarking of special projects like this. It’s showing the American people they’re fed up at the way that Washington has been operating for a long time.
SPEAKER 01 :
It has very little to do with the actual root of this, which is, of course, if funding is going to things like addiction recovery, fantastic. I think that that is a necessary expense if you are to expend money like this. If you are going to be spending money like this, sure. Now, there’s some odd… Issues that have come up now with this organization. It’s not to say this organization is fraudulent or having any issues, but there were at least some moments where it make your ears perk up, where at least the discussion happened of what’s going on inside of this one. And again, like you said, it may be paranoia and maybe more than that. We’re going to keep the discussion rolling. Phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110. Rick Grinnell is going to be joining us later today. We’ve got a pretty packed show, but we’ve got plenty of time for calls, and I’d love to hear from you. That’s at 1-800-684-3110. That’s 1-800-684-3110. We’ll be back with more on Seculo. Don’t go anywhere. Welcome back to Sekulow. Phone lines are open. We had a bit of a glitch there. I think we lost some of those calls. So there’s about five lines open for you right now. 1-800-684-3110. Give us a call back. 1-800-684-3110. Got to restate what’s going on. Which if you’ve seen the headlines, the headlines read something to the effect of Democrats steer a million dollars to an addiction group operating in Minneapolis in a Somali restaurant amid the fraud fallout. Now again, I want to make sure that we don’t suggest things. Like, hey, this was meeting in a restaurant. Yeah, if you look at the organization’s website, which does exist, they’ve got a little bit more background than maybe some of these organizations. They say, yeah, we meet in this restaurant and along with other different places. And look, I’m not playing devil’s advocate here, but I’m also saying we gotta make sure that we also are playing by the rules here and we’re fair. And but you understand when you look up, oh, where’s this one million dollars going to right now? And that is earmarked from some of these leaders in Minneapolis. And you realize it’s going to a addiction recovery center that may or may not be actually in a restaurant that you at least would question the authenticity.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, and I think this goes to the larger discussion of what we’ve been saying since Doge was a thing, right? Is that it’s waste, fraud, and abuse. Not all mismanagement of government funds is fraud, where someone is stealing it. No use that is going towards the alleged consumer. explanation of the use like just stealing money disagree with right then there’s waste spending money on things that shouldn’t be spent on that’s just a complete waste of taxpayer money and then there’s abuse which is abusing the system to get more money into places that maybe it shouldn’t be or there’s abuse of the mechanisms that govern that so there are kind of these three categories of spending that’s that’s frowned upon, I think we would say, by a majority of Americans at this point. And so when we talk about these things, it doesn’t necessarily mean, and we firmly believe in America, you are innocent until proven guilty. That is the basis of our legal system. That is a benchmark that we don’t ever want to lose. But you would think that the political ramifications for, you saw how Tim Walz denied that there is even a fraud problem as it kept growing and all of a sudden he has to not run again, that the senators and Ilhan Omar would think maybe, At a time where this debate is raging, so much so that our preferred person as governor of the state, because he was also the nominee for the vice presidency of the United States just some months ago, maybe… We shouldn’t be earmarking, it’s not even like it was an earmark for addiction recovery in Minneapolis to go to the state agency to then dole it out. This was an earmark for a million dollars of Department of Justice money to go to this group. And I think a lot of people in American consciousness may think of if an individual group gets a grant, of a million dollars, which is so funny that we’re sitting here thinking a million dollars. Isn’t a lot of money because of how widespread the fraud that has been uncovered is that we’re like the billion dollar words start throwing around.
SPEAKER 01 :
And then the million dollars is like, yeah, it’s nothing.
SPEAKER 08 :
Right. But this group and we say, you know, it’s shared an address with a restaurant, all these things. That doesn’t sound like the groups that in your head are the ones getting million dollar grants directly from the federal government. It doesn’t say that we’re not trying to say they don’t do good things. They don’t have it together. But it just sounds like I would think that the groups that are getting a million dollar grants are ones that have a building and have a track record of dealing with these issues that they’re getting, that there is a stewardship involved. when the federal government is making a direct grant. But we know that’s not the case. And I think that’s why this goes even beyond fraud. It shows how broken the system is when it comes to how Congress spends your money. This is federal dollars. And it’s just, we’re going to do this and we don’t care about the optics. We know it’s going to be elevated because it’s potentially another shutdown fight coming. Of course, they’re going to scrutinize everything they can, but they’re going to name a group and not just the representative, but co-sponsored by both senators from the state is going to be in this budget. It’s shocking how brazen they are just to fly in the face of everything that’s going on in America right now.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, and right now we are following. There’s a hearing on it right now. There’s also right now happening as we’re live, the first White House briefing since the Maduro arrest. We have our team monitoring it to see if there’s anything worth going to, anything that’s breaking news items. Probably not. They usually just kind of go over the basic facts. But it is interesting that we are there. I also see some confusion in the YouTube chat. about the funding saying hey why are we funding other countries addiction recovery and you clear that up uh i know it’s confusing because it’s specifically aimed to the somali community but we are talking about the state of minnesota we’re talking minneapolis which yes has a very large right community it is the greater east african community of the twin cities metro area so it is the somali community within minneapolis st paul yeah i just want to make sure we cleared that up because we are talking about communities within the state. And that’s why I said, if it’s addiction recovery, I have no problem with that being where the funding is going. I understand where you may have problems with that being funded in general, but that’s just a political mindset. That’s just how you feel about federal and state funding in general. But let’s take that aside and go, okay, humanitarian needs, feeding people, taking care of people who are on the street. Great. No problem with it. Do I think there should be double checks on it? Sure. Do I think when there is a moment where there is this intense fraud being uncovered in one of our states? And look, we’re going to find out, I am sure, that Minnesota is not alone in this. I feel like it’s a college football scenario. You know, back in the day when they’d be like, well, you know, these players came here and who is paying what players what is it’s like well all of them are probably doing it it’s just who gets caught i feel like we’re probably going to learn that some of this was commonplace in american politics where uh whether it was intentional or whether it was someone who just kept their eye off the ball and fraud was um you know abused obviously fraud was abused but the federal government the state government funding was abused
SPEAKER 08 :
well and once again these are are deeper philosophical questions that come out of when you see how badly it was abused the the safeguards that are supposed to be there that were abused those were abused by fraudsters to defraud the the taxpayer and i think that’s that’s a bigger philosophical question of things like addiction recovery that is being outsourced by the federal government, by the state government to NGOs. You know, a lot of the times, and we’ve talked about this, is that the work that traditionally we held as that of the church, the people of faith that would go and reach the least of these, go to the people that need help, whether it be feeding the needy, clothing the needy, and things that church groups do, great work. When the mindset of, especially in ideology politically, replaces the state with the church. And when you think about even the separation of church and state of the concept that Thomas Jefferson was writing about wasn’t what the left tried to make it. It was that he didn’t want the state to corrupt the church. And that’s what we’ve seen is that the state has replaced the church in the minds of many politicians for sure. But that work is like, this is the duty of the state. So we are going to take your money and we are going to dole it out. And what happens when you get to states like Minnesota or California, where they have a lot more of the social programs, they take a lot more of the citizens’ money to spend on these things. What you start to see is that the guidelines, the restrictions, the safeguards of protecting that and being good stewards of that, something that a lot of churches are very mindful of, the state doesn’t necessarily have that. And a lot of times the bureaucrats are just making sure that they are meeting quotas. And they are doing things or you even see in Minnesota where the bureaucrats were what we see trying to warn the state. This is out of control. We’ve got to do this for over a decade. And they were doing nothing about it. And a lot of that is because what happens when the safeguards are ignored and the communities that benefit from it happen to be a special interest group that gets certain types of politicians elected. then, oh, those politicians want to make sure that money keeps flowing. Not necessarily because they think it’s being stolen, but because they think it’s making the populace of their constituents that vote for them happy with the work they’re doing. And so it becomes a vicious cycle and it gets out of control like you saw in Minnesota. And those safeguards then, when they get tried to put in place, become a political fight instead of a decency fight of protecting the hard-working taxpayers of Minnesota. and protecting their investment in their state through their taxpayer dollars, it becomes a, how dare you? You’re a racist Republican if you think that we shouldn’t be helping the needy when that’s not what this is about.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right, we get back. We’re going to take some calls and comments. I want to hear from you at 1-800-684-3110. Look, the ACLJ is on it as well. We’re going to let you know how we are getting involved in the next segment in the entire situation in Minnesota. And if you want a little bit of a… A little bit of a sneak peek on what that is. Go to ACLJ.org. You can go ahead and sign our new petition that just launched. Again, we’re not just talking about the fraud. We’re taking action. And we need you to take action alongside us. That is at ACLJ.org slash sign if you want to go directly to the petition. Or just go to ACLJ.org. You’ll find it there and on the app. When we get back, again, I want to hear from you. Whether you’re in Minnesota or not, 1-800-684-3110. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to SECULO. Phone lines are being, a few of them are being screened right now, so stay on hold if you’re on hold. Give us a call at 1-800-684-3110 if you want to be on the air. I teased earlier that the ACLJ is going to get involved, and there are many ways we are going to get involved. But to start today, as the hearings have begun in Congress about the Minnesota fraud situation, the ACLJ is filing six different Freedom of Information Act requests, FOIA requests. to expose and defeat the what they call this industrial scale fraud and again we’re going to do our best to uncover these crimes a great way to start it’s a great way to get involved early on and we have a petition also that you can sign uh will’s gonna tell you a bit about it i’m gonna pull up the wording from the petition so you can uh you can hear it from from us directly that’s right so right now our
SPEAKER 08 :
We’ll be right back. Keith Ellison of Minnesota. One is going to the office of the governor of Minnesota, currently Tim Walz. One is going to the Minnesota Department of Human Services. That is the department that all these whistleblowers have come from. We’ve got one going to the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families, and another one is going to the city of Minnesota. And they’re all worded differently, asking for different things, obviously, because different records would be at different places. So obviously the federal level, different than the governor’s office, different than the Department of Children, Youth and Families. So. The entire impetus of this is to try to get to the bottom of what kind of records already exist in some of these exposed previous fraud investigations or ones that maybe were not investigated, but there are red flags of because of the reporting that we’ve been seeing coming out. So this is the ACLJ’s take from the outside of the government. We know that Pam Bondi has dispatched more prosecutors to the state right now to be going over things. We know that that assistant U.S. attorney said that it was the tip of the iceberg, industrial level fraud. We are also doing what we know how to do best outside. of trying to get more information as well. We use the FOIA process. We know how to litigate these things when they stonewall us. So we are starting now. We’re getting these out as quickly as possible. And we are going to move forward to try to see what we can uncover ourselves, knowing the terms to use, knowing the different levels to go through within these state agencies and with the federal government to find out what we can to expose more of where the balls were dropped by the state government in protecting the taxpayer dollars in Minnesota.
SPEAKER 01 :
And you can get involved, and there’s a great way to do it. You just go to ACLJ.org, hold Governor Tim Walz accountable for the fraud scandal. That is at ACLJ.org. We’re trying to reach 50,000 signatures here by the end of… of this campaign really hopefully by the end of today because just launching today we’ve had over 70 almost 7,700 people sign on to this petition again this is a huge scheme a huge scam that we have heard about for years or not for years we’ve heard about it’s been happening for years we’ve heard about for the last few weeks and of course every time I think we’re going to move on to another topic this ends up being one of the leads it was not for the plan it’s not even something we necessarily we do care about fraud and corruption but it’s not like we’re sitting here going over what’s happening in Minnesota What’s happening in Minnesota? But it keeps growing and growing and growing. And again, I think it opens up, as Will talked about in the last segment, a much bigger discussion, which is beyond how the fraud was happening. It’s how the federal government and how the state governments spend your taxpayer dollars. And is that what we want? And as Will said… A lot of these kind of programs, addiction recovery and these kind of things, I think are incredibly necessary and important. A lot of those were funded by the church. A lot of those were funded by charitable organizations, were funded by the community directly because they felt like it was necessary. They weren’t taken from your taxpayer dollars and just divvied out. Now, if you’re more on that sort of social train you think that’s the way the government should run and that’s how they should spend their money look i think there are social programs we can all get around we all want streets that are safe we all want uh you know to to have a lot of these things that are social programs if you will um but when it comes to stuff like this When at least, like you said, had the guardrails up and have better control over where the money is going, how the money is being spent. And of course, if it is being spent on people who are actually doing the good work that they say they’re doing. Again, that’s not to say this one specifically was not. There’s just things that feel like red flags. And those red flags become a bigger issue now that we know there has been so much corruption. When you say an addiction recovery center is actually at address to a restaurant, that’s not to say that they aren’t meeting there. That’s not to say that that isn’t legitimate. But at least… optically gives you a reason to question it. But again, that’s the small picture. The big picture is, does this need to be where your federal funding and state funding is going in general, where your taxpayer dollars are going? Is that what you want out of your government? Maybe you call me, let me know, 1-800-684-3110. You may be right because the church maybe has slacked off. I don’t see that. I see it more as the church maybe doesn’t get as much publicity as they used to in terms of the way that they would handle these kinds of crises. And a lot of times they do it without the pomp, without the circuit, without the circus behind it, without the press coming. You know, if they’re feeding the hungry, they’re not also calling channel two to come down to show let’s feed the hungry. Or of course, a lot of the times the government is going to do that. They want to show off. Look, look, we’re spending your money helping people, but the real people who are doing the job often are not the ones who are in it for the fame. We’re going to take a phone call real quick. Let’s go to Mike who’s calling in Minnesota on line one. Go ahead, Mike. He’s an ACLJ champion. Some of the gives on a monthly basis. We appreciate it, Mike. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hey, thank you so much for taking my call. You guys are doing a wonderful job for our country. There was a news article that just came out with Alpha News, the one newspaper that tells the truth and deals with issues in our state. But the Office of Legislative Auditors audited the Department of Human Services. And they have found out, this is just breaking yesterday, that the Department of Human Services is creating new documents and they’re backdating other documents and they’re trying to cover their tracks. And my opinion is that people that are put into government should suffer twice the penalty because they’re put in a position of trust. And we need to get some teeth in the prosecution of these guys uh send a few of them to south america they’re their prisons and this would stop we we’re tired of losing we had a billions of dollars of surplus in minnesota and now we’re billions of dollars in debt people are getting tired of it
SPEAKER 01 :
I think you’re right. And look, Minnesota has been through a lot over the last few years. Look, right now we’re watching a breaking news item that’s coming out of the police responding in Minnesota to a shooting that involves ice. You know, there’s a lot. There’s a heaviness that seems to come upon certain areas at certain times. I don’t really know why that happens. It could be spiritual. It could be just political. There’s a lot of reason that rot happens. um starts to be exposed or comes out of certain areas and i love minnesota i spent a little bit of time there great people uh interesting food uh you know what it always seems to be but but real human beings and people who are are sweet and i’ve had nothing but good experiences there and i i hate it when this stuff starts happening i think you’re right that that to build trust out of the chaos There needs to be accountability. What that accountability looks like is sadly maybe a bit different for you and for me than what it would be for the people of Washington, D.C. or the people in politics. And I think we have to know that’s just the truth. But the ACLJ team is hard at work. And we’re going to get involved where we can. I’m going to ask you to sign that petition right now at ACLJ.org. Let’s get these Freedom of Information Act requests out there. Let’s do it today. And let’s also go ahead and get your name on this petition. We’re trying to hit 50,000. We have already had close to 8,000 of you sign up already. Let’s go to aclj.org slash sign. We only got the second half hour of the show left. We’re halfway done. Can you believe it? But you may not get it on your local station. Find us broadcasting live, aclj.org, YouTube, Rumble, however you get your podcasts. We’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 02 :
Keeping you informed and engaged now more than ever. This is Sekulow. And now your host, Logan Sekulow.
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome back to Sekulow. Like I said, phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110. Second half hour coming up right now. Of course, we are talking still about the news out of Minnesota. There’s a few things, sadly, right now. There’s a potential shooting that’s happening right now. We’re covering that. But mainly what we’re talking about is, again, more fraud, more potential fraud, as we see more being uncovered. And now we start to get to this bigger issue. And the bigger issue is how do you want your federal government and your state government to be spending your taxpayer dollars? The world has shifted. And we had a call that came in just a moment ago. We see the fraud for what it is. They said the local news was reporting on this, and Will did some diving onto when some of these organizations are audited, what happens. And not necessarily audited even financially. They’re audited for their work product, audited to see what they’re actually doing. And we know it’s been fairly easy for them to figure out their ways around it.
SPEAKER 08 :
That’s right, because the state legislature is now doing their own investigation, not just the U.S. Congress, into a lot of these fraud claims. And there was a hearing in the state legislature about the Office of Legislative Auditor who was tasked with looking at some of these things. They were focusing on the management of taxpayer-funded grants. And that legislative auditor said there was a systemic effort to cover up what’s been going on, that the audit focused on management of the government grants. And they found, this is just an instance of where an organization received $672,000 for a single month of work, but it could not provide the auditors with detailed invoices, program participant data to support that work. The total grant was only $1.6 million. They got more than a third of that in one month for one month of work, and that the auditor found that department staff, so the people that are supposed to be the gatekeeper of these funds, these taxpayer dollars, backdated or created documents that didn’t exist before the auditors got in there to try and cover up the mismanagement. And one of the the House Speaker of Minnesota said that it proves once again, those running our programs expect no repercussions or accountability from Governor Walz or Democrats in power, even when they fabricate documents or ignore basic procedures. This goes back to what I was saying, and I’m glad that caller called in, is that it’s not even just that there are people out there that are stealing money. It’s the people that are supposed to be the stopgap to make sure that doesn’t happen. They’re not even doing basic due diligence.
SPEAKER 01 :
They’re just writing checks. I want to take a quick call before we go to break. Dan’s calling North Carolina. Dan, you got about a minute. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 06 :
Your point about the church giving way to the state, God made the family first, and we’re supposed to be able to take care of ourselves, or we can’t help anyone else. So it’s family, then church, then the state. And we’ve gotten so far away from God’s design that it’s a mess.
SPEAKER 08 :
And Dan, I would also jump in and say, and you know what another problem is? It’s what we’re also fighting here at the ACLJ. In California… The state’s trying to take $1.2 million from a church that could be going to do things in the community. In Colorado, they’re trying to criminally cite churches for doing the work that the state wants to do, that feeding the needy, clothing the needy, outreach, programs that would get a million-dollar grant in Minnesota. Colorado’s trying to criminally cite them.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right. Hey, we’ll be right back with Rick Grinnell, but I want to go ahead and get you on hold for the final segment of the show, which will be coming in just about 10 minutes. So we will take as many calls as we can in that final segment. That’s at 1-800-684-3110. We got three lines wide open right now for you. 1-800-684-3110. Of course, I want you to get involved in the work of the ACLJ and a great way to start that journey with us or to get engaged. Go to ACLJ.org. Sign the petition right now. We are taking action right now and filing six Freedom of Information Act requests today. As hearings begin in Congress, we are going to get involved here directly in what’s happening in Minnesota. Sign that petition to show your support. That’s at ACLJ.org slash sign. Now we’ve got one line open, but you know what? Some won’t make it through. So give us a call. 1-800-684-3110. Rick Grinnell is joining us in just a moment. Back to Seculo. As I said, phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110. We’re now joined by Rick Grinnell, Senior Advisor for National Security and Foreign Policy here at the ACLJ. And we’re excited to have you on, Rick, today. Because, look, the LA Times had an interesting article. We’ve been talking a lot about Tim Walz. We’ve been talking a lot about Minnesota. And, look, we’ve said, I am sure, Minnesota was not the only state playing by these sort of shady rules that maybe were a part of some of this fraud that’s happening. Maybe we’re going to find out. It’s just like, yeah, they got caught. But who else could be there? And of course, we see now the L.A. Times saying, you know who may be next? Your favorite, Gavin Newsom. So I want to get your thoughts on maybe just the whole scandal in general. But that obviously leads to what will be a bigger issue for the country, which is what happens in California.
SPEAKER 11 :
Look, one of the things that I’ve said here before is that transparency is not political. And transparency should be the taxpayer’s friend all of the time. We need to demand sunlight. We need to demand transparency. And that’s actually one of the great things about ACLJ is that we do demand transparency through the courts, not through just talking about it, but through court action, legal action, and pressure. And what we see in states like blue states, that the media, which are also blue and left, they don’t hold blue state governors to account. Now take that to a red state, and I wanna see transparency in red states as well, but the media plays important roles there because the media is all lefty. And so they are holding aggressively the red state governors and leaders to account. That does not happen in blue states where the media is blue, the media is left, the leaders are left, and you take Sacramento and you see that Gavin Newsom has been able to do whatever he wants with very little pushback. I just saw this big story that goes around from Republicans and sports lovers in California, where Gavin Newsom was caught years ago, pretending like he played on a baseball scholarship and was recruited by a major league baseball team. None of that is true. He retold that story for so long, the public was screaming about it. It took the media forever to kind of hold him to account on it. And they never really have done that. But that is just one example When we look at the fraud that’s happening in Minnesota, of course, there’s massive fraud in California. We’ve been able to document some of it. The train to nowhere. We’ve got the homeless problem in California that gets worse and yet Billions of dollars have been spent. Gavin has asked taxpayers to do bond initiatives to spend money on homelessness. That money has been wasted because homelessness is still a problem. We see fraud constantly and it’s never going to be outed by the media. We need the federal government, we need the Trump administration to come forward and hold these blue state governors to account. I think it’s only just about transparency. Why wouldn’t you want transparency that’s not being done?
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, and I think, Rick, one, we see that for some, there’s probably this shark circling the water because it worked. The pointing out that not only was there massive fraud, but that the institutions within the government made it easier for fraudsters. There was no desire for the government of the state to protect the citizens, the taxpayers of that state from their money being stolen. And then the ignoring of it and just trying to wish it away and say we dealt with it. And I even asked for more power from the legislator was the undoing of Tim Walz. I mean, months ago, he was the candidate for vice president of the country. And now he is not going to run for what he was calling a historic third term as the Minnesota governor. That happened. Gavin Newsom, much better communicator. No one has ever denied him that compared to Tim Walz. This is a fact. This is not a bias here. But Gavin Newsom also has a state with a much larger budget. much larger programs and probably much larger fraud when you have a columnist from the la times not typically a place that you would think would try to hold him to account based off what we’ve seen historically saying waltz isn’t the only governor plagued by fraud newsome may be the target next and the sub headline saying Republicans and Democrats alike will probably come at Newsom with critiques of the state’s handling of COVID-19 funds, unemployment insurance, and community college financial aid. Do you think that this is one that he can wiggle his way out of? Or do you think Teflon Gavin will try to skirt any sort of accountability on this as well?
SPEAKER 11 :
Well, first of all, shame on the L.A. Times for knowing exactly where the fraud is taking place. They listed it, but they’ve never covered it. They knew exactly where the fraud was. Oh, it might be in the community college system. It might be in this, that, or the other. They know exactly the problems, but they have refused to cover it. Make no mistake, the guy who owns the L.A. Times pretends to be bipartisan, and he’s not. And we need to… be very aggressive about outing all of this fraud and waste. Let me just say one thing. Remember, somebody like Gavin would not say that it’s fraud because he’s so comfortable in his ability to take taxpayer money and give it to his friends who then feel like they don’t need to perform because they weren’t selected because of their merits. They were selected because they’re Gavin’s friend. And so therefore, they don’t need to perform. So Gavin just thinks, I’m just giving money to combat problems and my friends are the ones who are combating the problems. It’s fraud because he’s selecting people that are ill-equipped and not doing the job. And they only got the contract, the millions of dollars, the tens of millions of dollars to combat some sort of problem because they’re friends of Gavin or the Democratic Party or friends of the unions. And so this is the scheme that becomes fraud. I will say that I think Gavin will get away with it. if we only rely on the media in California. The media have demonstrated through Kamala Harris and through other national leaders that they don’t know how to vet the California crop of politicians that somehow decide to go onto the national stage thinking that they’re gonna be national heroes or national candidates. And they only believe that because they’ve never been vetted or tested by the current California media. That’s why the Trump administration, DOJ and the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office in Southern California doing their job of trying to bring forward all of these schemes and be transparent to the taxpayers. I think that this is going to be celebrated by the California taxpayer when they see the scheme.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, and I think, Rick, this is exactly what had the the American people excited at the beginning of this term was seeing the work of Doge getting into federal departments and pointing out things that it was waste, fraud and abuse. So those three buckets of things were happening everywhere. And something may have not been fraud in the criminal term of stealing directly under a fake guise, taking it and using it for something else. But it’s wasteful and abusive of the system and the mechanisms that are supposed to stop these type things What we see is that Minnesota was not very savvy, their government, at letting it get away with this. And we see now reports of backdating things from the government to try and cover it up. Unfortunately, California, it seems, has had a lot longer at getting more savvy at this kind of government malfeasance, if you will.
SPEAKER 11 :
And I wouldn’t use the word savvy. I would use the word lazy because they became very comfortable knowing that no one was going to push back. You have a state like Minnesota and a state like California, both of them very blue, both of them covered by reporters who are very blue. And so everyone just kind of let their team do whatever they wanted. And it was a comfortability. It was fantastic. Gavin didn’t have to be very savvy to somehow distract the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle from looking at his schemes because they love Gavin. They celebrate Gavin and they’ve never held him to account on anything he’s ever done. He’s wasted so much money. His COVID leadership was a disaster. And so there’s plenty there. LA Times knows about it. They’re just not covering it.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, we’ll take it from there, Rick. And I think there will be hopefully some accountability there. We know in Minnesota, we are taking action. Like you said, the ACLJ, we don’t just sit back and just report what’s going on. We are filing today six different freedom of information requests in the state of Minnesota. And who knows, maybe California should be next. We’ll talk about that off air and see what we can come up with. But with that, we are going to take your calls and comments. And, of course, you can sign that new petition if you want to get involved as well at aclj.org. Thousands of you have already. Let’s try to hit that goal. Let’s try to do 50,000 by the end of this week. Do it right now at aclj.org. Again, we have one line open. We’ve got, other than that, a pretty full bank of calls. We’re going to take as many as we can coming up. If you want to maybe make it on the air, though, one line open, 1-800-CALL. 1-800-684-3110. That’s 1-800-684-3110. Get in line. Hey, if you’re in the comments right now, let me know where you’re watching from. Be right back. All right, last segment of the day, and we got pretty much a full bank of calls right now, and I want to make sure we get through as many as we can. Some of you have been on hold for a very long time, and I’m sorry about that, but we had some news to cover, and then, of course, we had what was going on with Rick Grinnell. Now we’re going to head to your calls. Let’s go to Nico. Nico started off. Nico’s been on hold for 28 minutes. I appreciate it. Who is watching in New Jersey and also watching on Rumble? Go ahead, Nico.
SPEAKER 07 :
Hey, thanks for taking my call. Hey, you guys remember when Trump ran that fake university, Trump University, scammed people out of money? Isn’t it great that he’s fighting all this fraud?
SPEAKER 01 :
You know, Nico, thank you for lying to our phone screeners. That’s fine. I mean, look, you can say whatever you want to say. Again, I’ve never been on here to be either way a Trump, you know, someone who is their apologist or defender at every cost. But that one we know was certainly one of the more political ones. Go find how many other, I’ll be honest, I’ve always thought that one was ridiculous. Go find how many other organizations run institutes or universities or whatever you want to call it and call it that. Look, I understand there are issues with that in terms of calling something you or whatever it may be. And look, I think they learned their lesson on that. But you’d be shocked. Check in your own business. I bet they’re running something similar in their training program. With that, though, thank you for calling. I appreciate it. I appreciate someone who calls, lies, waits on hold 30 minutes to try to get in a lip jab. I actually liked what his fake comment was. It was pretty good. Unfortunately, you’ll never hear it. Let’s continue on. Let’s go to Kim in Texas. Kim, you’re on the air.
SPEAKER 10 :
Hi. Hi, thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to put out there that I feel like I’m speaking for a lot of Americans who appreciate all the investigations, this Doge and all that’s gone on. But we want to see some action. We really want to see someone being held accountable. We want to see some imprisonment, some indictments, some arrests. You know, it’s just not happening enough and soon enough.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, I mean, Kim, I think there’s a lot of frustration and you certainly speak for a lot of our listeners, a lot of people that call, especially a lot of people who got involved in politics over the last couple of years, maybe the last five years. They don’t see the speed that they would like. We understand. Look, we’ve all been through these issues where, of course, it feels like they lay out every crime or issue that had and then there’s no accountability. Now, that being said, it may feel like there’s less accountability than there is. Remember, there have actually been quite a few instances where people have been taken down or there have been, you know, they’ve had to owe a lot of money. Now, to say that it’s not a perfect system, absolutely not. Should we see more? Absolutely. But we also live in a country where there is due process and we have to go through all of this. It’s not something that can be done overnight. We also know that there are people who were some of the initiators of some of the fraud in Minnesota who have already been involved. We’ve talked about that before. I’ve already had some convictions. Now that’s to say that everyone, clearly not everyone, because this is growing and growing, but we’re going to find that out in multiple states. We’re going to find it as we keep going. That’s why we got these FOIAs.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, and once again, we know that the Attorney General has sent more prosecutors there. We know the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Minnesota actually had really good comments about what he was already uncovering. Let me just say that real quick.
SPEAKER 01 :
The fact that we’re even talking about it shows you more than what was happening in most administrations. The fact that we even know. that there is billions of dollars of fraud in the state of Minnesota, that this isn’t just a local news story, actually shows you have an FBI doing their job.
SPEAKER 08 :
Well, and once again, the Department of Justice, if they’re sending resources there, sending prosecutors there, if there are things that have been uncovered, well, then they have to make a case, present it to a grand jury, get an indictment, take those people to trial, and get a conviction. That’s how the process works. We don’t want… what the Democrats want to do to everyone, and that is send FBI to spy on Christians in churches. We don’t want them to go target parents who went to school board meetings and say, hey, we don’t like what you’re teaching our kids. Those are intimidation tactics that are bad for America. We don’t want intimidation. We want rule of law. We don’t want fake impeachment trials that are just political shams to try and persuade the American people of one thing or the other. Yeah, we do want accountability. We do want justice, but we do want it to be done the right way so that it’s not just overturned by a political decision or by a bad indictment that is easily overturned on appeal. We want it done the right way. And we’re just now finding out about this. Yeah, we’ve been talking about it for a few weeks, but they’ve got to get in there. They’ve got to do it the right way or else it’s all pointless and everything is pointless at that point.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right, let’s try to get through a couple more calls. We’ll do our best. Let’s go to George first. George, watch it on Salem News Channel, California. Go ahead quickly, George.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, well, thanks for taking my call. I think history is a great teacher, and I’m just shocked that nobody’s mentioned history The political machine in New York City in the 1800s, Tammany Hall. And that’s where they basically exchanged immigrant support votes for fraud. They ran New York City for 100 years. And I see the same scenario in California, the same scenario in Minnesota.
SPEAKER 01 :
There is nothing new, George, in politics, as we’ve learned. A lot of times history very much repeats itself. So thank you for bringing that to our attention.
SPEAKER 08 :
Logan’s not going to let me talk because whenever someone brings up some fun fact like that, I go on a diatribe. Well, we only got three minutes left.
SPEAKER 01 :
I know. Keep going. You know, you have to save your 18th century or 19th century news and history for tomorrow’s show. We got a little more time. Let’s go to Larry in California watching on the Salem News Channel. Go ahead, Larry. Quickly.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, I just wonder, all these investigations, never have I heard, we’ve found this money and we have it now in our coffers. They always go so close and then you never hear any more about it. We had the senator from San Diego, San Jose, go to San Diego. Ask the lady, well, you got a check for COVID here for $2 billion. Where did it go? Well, we have different organizations and different people.
SPEAKER 01 :
Larry, I’m only cutting you off because we’re running out of time. I understand the frustration, kind of like the caller from a few callers ago. We understand the frustration. We’ve got a new FBI in town. Things are getting done. Things are happening. It’s also why we have this FOIA request happening right now. Six different ACLJ FOIA requests, Freedom of Information Act requests. So you can follow up on that as well and be part of the team that is looking into that. You can sign the petition at ACLJ.org. Last call of the day, Ann in Pennsylvania. Go ahead, Ann.
SPEAKER 09 :
Oh, guys, can you hear me?
SPEAKER 01 :
We can hear you. Go ahead.
SPEAKER 09 :
Oh, I’m so sorry. Yeah, so I just wanted to say you guys are the action, action, action. You’re the real definition. And also, I had a college radio show many years ago, and I was perturbed about the fact that illegals were getting a free education. So I’m talking 10, 20 years ago, okay? So now we’re revealing and investigating and exposing all the real numbers of of this financial abuse taken, you know, being inflicted by illegals and not just illegals, but by people who aren’t necessarily not abusing the system. And we have an America first president. And I don’t understand all the negativity on the right. And I just want to just throw this in here. You know, you guys are absolutely right. We’re not seeing and we’re not seeing what’s going on behind closed doors. I do believe Bondi needs to act quicker, but I am not going to throw that woman under the bus because right now things are happening. There are things that are happening. Look at with Medora. Look at on a national security level. Look at on an economical level. Guys, you are the best, and I’m sorry I had to throw those things in there. I’m so sorry.
SPEAKER 01 :
i agree with you wholeheartedly actually that there are a lot of things happening and i do believe it is people like you said you’ve been doing this for 10 20 30 years of following it there’s a lot of people who are brand new to this world and that’s okay all are welcome but you have to understand that some things take longer than you want and you kind of want that in america you want due process you want things to happen at a speed that you know isn’t going to be overly corrupt that they actually will have their day in court that you are innocent until proven guilty. It’s what we preach here as well. I encourage you, join us at ACLJ.org. Sign that petition today. Be a part of the thousands who have already done it. Of course, we will also be filing those FOIA requests on your behalf. That is at ACLJ.org. Sign the petition. Almost 9,000 of you have done it already. Let’s get that to 50.
