Shawn Ryan Show: SRS #273 w/ Steve Robinson (Transcript)

Legitimate Maine absentee ballots.

And holy s*. I stayed up until 3 a.m. working on that story to break it and was powered by Vigilance Elite gummy bears. I was just crushing gummy bears and working on the story.

SHAWN RYAN: So that story was powered by gummy bears.

STEVE ROBINSON: We’ll load you up. We’ll load you up with gummy bears.

Accountability and Political Corruption

SHAWN RYAN: But, and then, you know, we got a Patreon account, subscription account, and we’ve turned it into a hell of a community. So we offer them the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from Samantha. “Steve, what is the likelihood that local politicians and national ones across the nation will be held accountable for the fraud that has been allowed to take place?”

STEVE ROBINSON: If you asked me a year ago, I would say very low. Now I would say very high. It also depends on what you mean by accountability. For Iman Osman having to resign and being forced out in disgrace, I would call that accountability. And he is facing two gun theft charges. You know, being forced out of office is a level of accountability.

You know, if you’re guilty of conspiring in some kind of a pay-to-play scheme to turn a blind eye to the fraud or to support the fraud or to introduce a bill that becomes the program that is defrauded, you know, when you’re forced out of office, that’s a—I would say that’s a level of accountability.

But to people who straight up took payouts and bribes, it’s very, very hard to prove a cash bribe. You know, these things are very, very hard to prove. And I think what we’re going to find is that the fraud is happening at a scale that is so far beyond what we’re capable of investigating through the traditional justice system that you’re just not going to be able to deal with it in that way.

Just putting an end to the fraud is probably the best accountability that we can hope for. I don’t know that the money’s ever coming back, but putting an end to the fraud and voting people out of office who benefited from it or turned a blind eye to it is really the best I think we can hope for, and I’m reasonably confident that we’ll get there. I think President Trump made it—

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

The Scale of Corruption

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, I guess I’m a little bit cynical. I think there is an element of that. There’s so much fraud and corruption on the Republican side that they don’t want to dig too deeply on the fraud and corruption on the Democrats side because turnabout’s fair play. You know, they’re kind of like, we don’t want to look too deeply in the Democrats’ closet because we don’t want them looking too deeply in our closet.

That kind of thing certainly happening. Trump, though, flips that because he doesn’t care about any of that. He doesn’t care if it’s Democrat corruption or Republican corruption. I’m sure on some level there’s some strategy and some horse trading going on, but he really, I think, just wants it to stop, and he’s very pro-American, so he’s the wild card in that. And the President and Stephen Miller, some of the people who are around him.

So it makes me optimistic that you will see some change. And the incentive that they have is this huge bucket of federal money that comes to these states. You’ve already seen him start to say, and the municipalities, by the way, he’s already started to say, if they continue to pay out these fraudulent programs, if they don’t crack down on this, we’re going to cut off the federal money.

And that is going to be devastating for states. That would be devastating for these cities that rely on huge amounts of federal money. It’s the way the federal government asserts control over a lot of states and a lot of cities is by getting them dependent on federal money and then saying, you’ve got to do X, Y and Z.

If you want to keep that federal money coming, you’ve got to put outhouses. This has actually happened in Bangor. You got to put, oh, you took the COVID money. That means you have to put public outhouses in these areas where all the vagrants are doing drugs in public.

There’s a number of ways where they exert power over smaller governments through the money, but that can work the other way around. And Trump is taking steps to say, we’re taking the money away. If you don’t do what’s right, if you don’t do what’s in America’s best interest, we’re taking the money away.

And I think he has every right to do that because the states have shown that they’re using the money totally irresponsibly. They’re not policing fraud, they’re using it to buy political favors.

Why Nobody Goes to Prison

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

STEVE ROBINSON: Because the fraud is so decentralized.

SHAWN RYAN: Not even a charge.

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s so decentralized. It’s so—there’s so many people doing it and the amount of—just think about what’s involved in a criminal trial from the investigation, charging. They get a defense attorney who’s going to come in and represent them, paid with daycare money. They get a little bit of that daycare money to buy the best defense attorney to sow reasonable doubt about what’s going on.

Well, do you have surveillance or are you just relying on Nick Shirley’s video? Like, do you have information? We all know what’s going on here, but that’s not the same standard that is going to work in a, you know, a trial by jury. And who’s the jury going to be comprised of? Think about that. You get one, you know, one Somali on a jury in Minnesota, you think they’re going to convict anybody?

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, aren’t they supposed to make sure that the jury has no interest?

STEVE ROBINSON: They’re supposed to. They’re supposed to. But I mean, maybe it’s a Somali who has a different daycare. You never know. Yeah, but I mean, we’ve already seen that the jury system is proven, that—

SHAWN RYAN: The corruption runs so deep that it’s almost impossible to get rid of it.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yes, I mean it’s—I just, I’m skeptical that you’re going to claw back that money or that the people who were running the individual level schemes are going to ever see any time in jail. I think there are definitely some people I know in Maine. There are people who aided and abetted some of these schemes.

There are, you know, Maine natives, for example, who worked at Gateway, white liberal women who put their clinical licenses on the line so this organization could bill Medicaid. They can probably have an investigation or a trial. They have more on the line. Maybe they don’t have, you know, a state in Kenya to bug out to, at least I don’t think so.

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

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

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, making an example out of somebody.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah.

The Two-Tiered Justice System

SHAWN RYAN: And pinning their ass to the wall, whether that’s politicians or Somalis or whoever it is, whoever’s involved, somebody needs to be made an example of.

STEVE ROBINSON: There are two.

SHAWN RYAN: You don’t make an example of it, then I know we’re going to get into it. We’re going to get into Rwandans. Right now you have all these other groups like, well, f*, Somalis are doing it, Rwandans are doing it. Maybe we should do it. Nothing happens to them.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: They got caught. They got a slap on the wrist. I mean, it’s just. I don’t know. I think people look at this. I mean, Polymarket says there’s an 11% chance that Somalians who defrauded government to fund terrorism will be deported. Only an 11% chance.

And that’s, I mean, this is the people. That’s the sentiment. And every time I look at Polymarket when it comes to accountability, low, low, low probability that the people think that anything is ever going to happen. Nothing, it’s just, it’s. I think people are more pissed off now that for not seeing any f*ing accountability than they are at the actual crime.

Because if you just allow the crime to happen over and over and over and over again and nobody’s ass gets pinned to the wall, then it is. I mean, it’s basically a recruiting mechanism.

The Real Nature of the Crime

STEVE ROBINSON: But that gets to the real nature of the crime.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

STEVE ROBINSON: Are we turning a blind eye to this or are we benefiting from it? The political system, the political system in power. And I know we’re getting closer and closer, I think, to the emergence of evidence in Minnesota that shows that Governor Tim Walz was aware of this, AG Keith Ellison was aware of what was going on and had struck a deal with the devil essentially to look the other way in exchange for support from the Somali political community.

I think that investigations in Maine will find that something similar happened there. And the more you look at the problem, the more it looks like not an independent scandal of we have the Minnesota welfare fraud scandal, the Maine welfare fraud scandal, the Ohio welfare fraud scandal. It’s just one scandal. It’s one scandal.

And it may have started out 25 years ago as opportunistic Somali diaspora migrants taking advantage of a welfare system that maybe was built on good faith and trust and didn’t have the right safeguards and protections. But it has become, in my view, a nation building scheme that is backed by political factions in Somalia.

The amount of wealth that they are extracting from the American taxpayer is, we’re talking about rebuilding whole communities in Mogadishu. We’re talking about their defense budget. We’re talking about the single largest economic factor in Somalia is money flowing from our pockets.

The claim that Somali Medicaid pirates put on the American paycheck, the American workers paycheck, that’s the biggest economic factor in Somalia. So why wouldn’t political actors there protect that and expand that and do what they could to support that and streamline it? And they have.

And I think we’re seeing evidence in Maine, you’re seeing evidence in Somalia of high level political actors who are involved in the Medicaid schemes. Whether that’s operating a home based care agency or a money transmitting service. This is in no doubt a deliberate scheme by Somalia, by Somali political factions to extract wealth for their own purposes for nation building.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, man. You need a podcast. Why don’t you have a podcast?

Investigative Journalism in an Adversarial Environment

STEVE ROBINSON: Well, we do, we have robinsonreport.subs.com and Maine Wire TV. We do a lot of podcast like episodes, but I’m crawling around Lewiston and Chinese marijuana grows all the time. It’s tough to do it really consistently. We want to as we continue to grow.

But I mean we’ve just, the reporting that we’ve done on the Somali Medicaid fraud is built on public records requests that take us somewhere between five to six months to fill, pay the government thousands of dollars to get these records, to show them where the fraud is that they’re covering up, to show the people of Maine where the fraud is that the Mills administration is covering up.

And we get massive Excel spreadsheets with payment data, get 8,000 page PDFs showing the audits that the Mills administration does and then sweeps under the rug like they find the fraud and then they just sweep it under the rug and never tell anyone about all takes a huge amount of time to go over and analyze.

And we’re a very, very small team, so we’d love to do the podcast. But I think for me, the most beneficial thing I can do for the state of Maine is to really understand from an investigative perspective what’s going on to get the information. And it takes a lot of time too, because we’re reporting in an adversarial environment.

In a normal state, you get the public records request, you get what you’re saying. You find.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re so f*ing.

STEVE ROBINSON: They’re in.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, they’re rooted in there.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yes. And they also, we’re the conservative outlet in the state, so they feel like they’re entitled to treat us hostilely, like the Obama administration would treat Fox News. They feel like they don’t have to talk to us or respond to our questions.

But we get 8,000 pages of documents from them and we’re going through them and we see something that looks like, it looks like you guys identified a million dollar fraud here and then never recouped the money or just walked away. It just looks really strange. We have some questions about this.

Rather than coming in, just answering our questions and telling us what we’re looking at, they ignore us and give us the silent treatment in the hopes that we’re going to go out and say something that’s just a little bit wrong. And then they can go to the liberal newspapers or to CNN.

When CNN shows up and does like the, what they did to Shirley, basically trying to say, how do you know you’re true? How do you know you’re true? Which I don’t even know what. When they give that treatment to us, the Mills administration is hoping that they’ll be able to say, well, they just didn’t know what they were looking at. They just, they misinterpreted the facts. They don’t know what they’re talking about. And they’ll have this secret cubby of information that they didn’t make available to us.

So when you’re reporting in an adversarial environment like that, it takes so much more time. The number of people you have to talk to, you have to do very careful due diligence on the documents that you’re looking at. It’s like reporting out of North Korea. You don’t know exactly what’s going on. And they’re always trying to f* with you, they’re always trying to undermine you, and they’re always trying to make you look bad.

But you’re right. I would love to have a podcast. Maybe someday we can have a podcast that talks about the economic miracle, the turnaround, the Maine miracle, that it’s right around the corner. Oh, yeah, I’ve got this. I mean, we, I think, have exposed Chinese organized crime in Maine to the highest possible levels.

Talking with you to Tucker, I mean, there’s nobody in Maine, there’s nobody in the country who doesn’t know that there’s Chinese organized crime growing pot in Maine. And since we talked, it’s only gotten worse. Really, it’s only gotten worse.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s happened now?

Chinese Organized Crime Gets Worse

STEVE ROBINSON: I got some public records yesterday that shows that the change, as far as I can see, is that the state has gone out, they increased the tax on adult use cannabis. And as they did that, they also went out and hired a translation service so that they can communicate better with the Chinese growers who they’ve licensed now. Oh, so we’re paying to.

SHAWN RYAN: So we’re paying for a translation service so that don’t get rid of them.

STEVE ROBINSON: Just legitimize them so the Chinese can lie, cheat and steal better. Is essentially why we have the new translation service. And they just approved a license in Green Maine for a 20,000 square foot marijuana grow.

That one of the guys on the lease for the space is an illegal alien from China who caught two felonies for drug trafficking in Washington state in 2022, wasn’t deported because President Biden was in office. And this is okay under Maine law because his name is just on the lease, not on the marijuana license that got approved with the help of a big time lobbying firm in Maine.

So there’s just so much money. So I’ve got this weird dystopian dream that I’m going to be in my 60s and I’m still going to be like the Somali Medicaid fraud or Chinese marijuana. It’s like these problems, as much light as you shine on them, they’re intractable, man.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t really like lobbying firms. Maybe I need to get to know one because it seems like they can make anything happen.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been saying the same thing about maybe somebody will use.

SHAWN RYAN: One to actually do the right f*ing thing for once. Just kidding. Yeah, I doubt it.

STEVE ROBINSON: Lobbyists for America. There’s not a lot of money in doing the right thing.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve noticed.

STEVE ROBINSON: Which is sad. That’s why you see those Polymarket views is people are so cynical. I think there’s a part of the American soul that just longs for justice. And after seeing it denied over and over and over again, you become cynical.

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

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you, I mean, you believe that?

STEVE ROBINSON: Do you believe that things are on the level? No.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

The Role of House Oversight

STEVE ROBINSON: No, no, there’s, of course, I mean, we just, this week we saw the Clintons skip out on hearings with the House Oversight Committee. And I’ll say Representative James Comer has done a great job with the House Oversight Committee. I think that the Clinton stuff is a little bit maybe for show. Did anyone really think that they were going to show up?

But it’s still good to do that. It’s still good to show that there is this two tier justice system. Moments like that help crystallize it for the normies who aren’t paying super close attention.

But without what the House Oversight Committee is doing both in Minnesota and in Maine, you wouldn’t be seeing this. I mean, it was their investigations that push this thing over the edge. Everyone had been talking about Somali fraud rings in Minnesota for a long, long time.

I mean, when you go back and you look at the news reports and what whistleblowers had attempted to say, it’s like, man, this was really, really obvious for a decade or more what was happening here. But it just got pushed to the side. And if you talked about it, you were racist and whistleblowers got fired. People got punished if they pointed at it.

So it took someone with courage and lack of financial interest, maybe in what was happening to come in and investigate and expose what was happening. But without House Oversight just being ready to put facts on the record, which has the effect of enabling media outlets to have something tangible to grab onto.

Because if you don’t have a fraud agency in Minnesota saying, this is what happened, this is the audit result, this was how much was overbilled. These are the people who were in charge. These are the people we held accountable. If you don’t have something for a media outlet to grab onto, it becomes very difficult for them to report on it.

But if the House Oversight Committee or any investigative body says, this is the amount, these are the programs being defrauded, this is the dollar amount we think is being defrauded, these are the actions we’re taking, these are the people we want to talk to, then you get media stories, it becomes much easier for the national media to tell the story of what happened.

Gateway Community Services: A Politically Connected Fraud Network

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

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

SHAWN RYAN: You regularly scoop corporate media, disrupting the journalism status quo and reveal the harsh reality of life in rural New England. All right, let’s get into it. We’ve heard about the fraud in Minnesota. We kind of scratched the surface. Little more than scratch the surface on what’s going on in Maine. But how long have you been looking at this? Because I have family in Maine.

STEVE ROBINSON: In Portland.

SHAWN RYAN: There’s, I mean, there’s entire neighborhoods of, it looks like Somalia.

STEVE ROBINSON: It wasn’t always that way.

SHAWN RYAN: And that sounds like Lewiston is Somalia. Am I wrong?

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, I mean, it was a, there was a choice made to embrace migrant resettlement. Eventually it became forced migrant resettlement in some of these communities. This is something that I’ve been following for, I mean, more or less my entire adult life, just because it’s a part of Maine’s story now.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, they’re bringing a lot of violence to the state. Correct.

The Violence and Transformation of Lewiston

STEVE ROBINSON: I mean, I think we’ve, I’ve sent to Jeremy the plot of gun violence in Somali Lewiston. You can plot on a Google map the shots fired incidents. And these are not shootings with a victim. Most of them are unsolved. They’re just lots and lots of gunplay. Lots and lots of gunplay.

And you can see the concentration of the little dots for shootings around public housing buildings that have been taken over largely by the Somali diaspora. And that’s the same with overdoses, by the way, too. So Lewiston, the city of Lewiston, I think you can say, is not safer as a result of the migration trends.

The problem is no place in Maine is doing particularly well. But even if you look at Lewiston in comparison to, say, Bangor, which is a somewhat comparable city in size demographic prior to the Somali migration, but hasn’t had the same forced migrant resettlement yet, you can see that the economic stats are way different. It’s like something like 20% of Lewiston households speak a language other than English at home. And it used to be that that was French because it was a big French mill town. It has an interesting history as a town with migration, but it’s scary.

We got the shooting data and the first thing I did was just drive to Lewiston because I wanted to go see these neighborhoods and walk around them in the middle of the day and see what’s going on.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you have videos of what they look like?

STEVE ROBINSON: I do, yeah. Yeah. Actually, I took—

SHAWN RYAN: Put them up right now.

STEVE ROBINSON: I took, yeah, I’ll share them. I’ll share particularly this video I took this summer. This was before the fraud stuff, bro. Now myself and some of my reporters are a little bit infamous in little Mogadishu. It’s not safe for us to be walking around there. But I walked around just kind of observing, taking things in with a video camera, just kind of hidden camera.

When I was looking back at it, I was scrolling through and there was guys with guns hanging out of there. My situational awareness was sh*t because I didn’t even notice this at the time. But there was a guy who walked right by me with a 9 millimeter hanging out of his waistband. People getting arrested in broad daylight. Fences, security cameras. There’s no white picket fences and swing sets and kids playing out there. There’s people in the beekeeper suits scurrying along the street.

It’s not recognizable from Maine of 20 or 25 years ago. And then there are people in the state who will say, “Oh, you’re racist. How can you say that? Lewiston is a booming city right now. A booming city.” That’s what Representative Deca Delac said. That was her quote, that Lewiston was a dying town before the Somalis came. Really?

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

STEVE ROBINSON: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Massive job opportunity.

STEVE ROBINSON: There’s a lot of home health care agencies.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, okay, that bill Medicaid.

STEVE ROBINSON: There’s a lot of lucrative business to start from what I’ve been told.

The Medicaid Economy

STEVE ROBINSON: There’s a lot of halal markets on Canal Street and Lisbon Street that have EBT machines. There’s an economy that revolves around taxpayer funded programs for sure, but private industry, not so much. And I couldn’t help but note the irony in Deca Delac saying that there was, that Lewiston was a booming city thanks to the Somali migration.

Because those comments came out like a week after there was a shooting in Lewiston at a migrant event that caused it to shut down. So yes, it’s booming with the sound of gunshots ricocheting off subsidized housing. Like it’s nice, things. What’s the population there roughly like 33, 35,000?

SHAWN RYAN: Is there any in, I’ve never heard of a 35,000 person town booming. But what is it legitimately though? Is there any industry there or is this just somebody just talking out of their a?

STEVE ROBINSON: Industry? No, I wouldn’t say industry is a great word for it. There are some businesses that are trying to open and trying to start there. It’s got an interesting history because prior to the arrival of Somalis in Lewiston in 2000 is basically right when they started to arrive, the population of Lewiston had declined.

So it’s a town where in the turn of the century, there’s a famine in Quebec and the bad farming season. And so you see this huge wave of French Canadian migrants come down into Lewiston. And that was the first kind of migration crisis in Maine. The first migrant crisis in Lewiston, Maine was French Canadian Catholics. Maine was predominantly a Protestant place. So you had some conflict between the French speaking Canadian Catholics and the English speaking Protestants, the locals.

But it became a mill town. And the French Canadians, the Irish migrants who were there as well, very industrious, building canals, built a cathedral, built these huge mill buildings. And that had kind of petered out during the 90s thanks to globalization and the offshoring of American manufacturing. This is a story that you see in almost every Maine town. There’s a big bustling manufacturing hub that supports the town. This is true of where I grew up, in Dexter, Maine, where we had Dexter Shoes until Warren Buffett bought it and offshored it.

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

So what we’ve done, we’ve done that experiment in Lewiston, Maine for 25 years. And this is where it got us, man.

SHAWN RYAN: You hear the same story over and over and over and over again. What was it that really caught your attention?

Uncovering the Medicaid Fraud

STEVE ROBINSON: Well, we obtained from a source these letters called notices of violation. And this is what happens when Department of Health and Human Services, Health Department, it goes by different names depending on what state you’re in. They will go through and audit entities that bill Medicaid.

And in the state of Maine, we expanded our Medicaid in 2019 hugely. Most of this, 90% of this is federal money that comes in for the expansion population. So you’ve got, I think it’s something like 350 or 400,000 Mainers are on Medicaid. And that’s of a population of 1.4 million. Depends on how many, whether you’re going with like COVID era numbers where there was basically no eligibility. Everybody was allowed on Medicaid, but they had to roll that back a little bit.

We have from 2019 to 2024, which is the data set that we got. We have 5,000, a little over 5,000 Medicaid providers. That’s what they call them. So these are businesses that are allowed to send an invoice to Maine and get it paid with Medicaid money. You would think this is supposed to be hospitals, doctors’ offices, dentists, people who are giving health care services to poor people. What you would think of when you think Medicaid providers, that’s not the reality, of course.

So these 5,000 Medicaid providers, DHHS takes 250 of the claims that they’ve submitted, 250 of the invoices that they’ve received from these providers, and they review them to see if they have documents to substantiate the billing, see if they follow the rules of the program, which are pretty specific and strict and exhaustive, and they calculate an error rate based on how many of those claims don’t follow the rules and don’t follow what it takes to actually have a legitimate reimbursement.

And one of the groups that we got a notice of violation for was Gateway Community Services, which I was familiar with because it’s an extremely political group, very political, almost an adjunct of the Maine Democratic Party. It has an office in Portland and an office in Lewiston. These offices host political events for Democrats all the time. All the time.

Representative Deca Delac was a former assistant executive director at Gateway Community Services. Representative Yusuf Yusuf worked at Gateway Community Services. Eklis Ahmed, the current lone employee of the Office of New Americans, used to work at Gateway Community Services. So this is not just a random one off Medicaid billing entity run by Somali migrants. This is very politically connected firm. So we started looking at Gateway.

SHAWN RYAN: Gateway Community Services. Is that like an umbrella company for a large network?

STEVE ROBINSON: Yes and no.

SHAWN RYAN: Everything under that, it’s a strange—

Gateway Community Services: A Strange Entity

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s a strange entity. Gateway Community Services is a migrant services agency. They initially provide translation. They’re founded in 2013 under the LePage administration. Governor LePage was a very conservative Republican, made welfare fraud a huge priority. Investigating welfare fraud had some successful convictions.

Actually, most of, I would say all of the successful welfare fraud and Medicaid fraud convictions of the last 15 years stem from actions taken when LePage was still governor. Anything that happened when Mills was governor was kind of a carryover of measures that LePage took, such as the notice of violation that we got our hands on. It was an audit that had started under Governor LePage, looking at their billing from 2015 and 2017.

So this was just kind of the inertia of a process already begun, continued on into the Mills administration. And we got our hands on a record that showed that they had an error rate of 35%. They couldn’t provide documents to substantiate translation services that they’d offered, or home health care services or various services.

Anyone who has worked in insurance fraud investigation, you look at the things that they’re finding with Gateway and you immediately say, “Oh, okay, so they’re just making this up.” They’re billing for services that they haven’t provided and they can’t document.

So we get curious about this because we have this leaked notice of violation and we want to know what’s happening. Obviously, the Mills administration won’t answer any questions about it. They won’t tell us, did you, what was the resolution of this? Did you finally figure out that they owed this money? Did they pay it back? How did they pay it back? Did they pay it back through a lump sum, or did they pay it back through set asides?

This is a great thing that we allow: if you’re an organization running a Medicaid fraud in Maine and you get caught defrauding the state government, they’ll allow you to pay it back through set asides. So rather than just giving the money back, you pay it back through a 5 or a 10% haircut on your future claims.

So we’re going to let you pay back last year’s fraud by a slight deduction on next year’s fraud. That’s allowed in the state under the premise that we’re assuming all these organizations are legitimate. We have to just assume that all these organizations are legitimate. We have to bend over backwards to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But that’s where our investigation starts, is with this DHHS audit that shows Gateway Community Services was overbilling Medicaid by a huge amount. They’re a politically connected firm and they’ve got immense ties to the Mills administration, to Maine Democrats.

SHAWN RYAN: How are they tied?

Political Connections and the Community Organizing Alliance

STEVE ROBINSON: Well, we’ve got pictures of the CEO, Abdullahi Ali, who is an interesting figure, as we’ll get into, but he’s been at political events. We have photographs of him with all kinds of political figures like Governor Mills, Secretary of State Shannon Bellows. Former employees have gone on to be state lawmakers.

As we just talked about, Deca Delac and Yousef Eklis Ahmed is now in the Mills administration. But the closest tie really is with the Secretary of State, Shena Bellows and a group that Gateway Community Services formed called the Community Organizing Alliance, which was an explicitly political group that had a fiscal sponsorship from the Maine People’s Alliance, which is your typical Soros funded dark money, left wing push group, paid protesters, paid activists, paid door knockers, that kind of thing.

But their political connections get to the heart of the fraud scheme in Maine, because it was very much a political scheme. People ask, do you see Somalis who are making money from home health care agencies or from Gateway turning around and donating money to the politicians? And it works a little bit differently than that. They’re donating boots on the ground and votes.

SHAWN RYAN: I was just going to say that they really don’t have to, because if they’re taking over the population, then that’s it. You just have to appease them and they will always vote for you.

The Somali Voting Bloc

STEVE ROBINSON: And you think, just like anybody else, you think that it has to be much bigger than it, like the population of voters has to be much bigger than it really does in order to get to the tipping point. Because if you look right now in Maine, where we have a Democratic primary for governor for the second Congressional District and for governor, there’s a huge Somali vote in each of those races.

And almost entirely, I mean, 95% of those people will be Democrat primary voters. So if you’re running in a competitive Democrat primary, your number one goal, perhaps the single most determinative factor in those primary elections will be who the Somali bloc votes for.

Because they’re going to vote in unison. They’re going to vote according to what the community leaders or the gatekeepers say, and they’re going to vote for who’s best for their economic interests. They’re not going to vote for someone who takes a hard line on fraud. They’re not going to vote for someone who wants Gateway investigated.

So the incentives in the Democrat primary right now are to downplay the investigation, to stand with the very people who are defrauding these programs as opposed to what’s in the best interest of Mainers. So the incentive structure is set up for the Democrat primary to nominate the person who represents the Somali interests as opposed to the interests of even moderate Democrats.

You just have to get to be a significant block of voters within the Democratic primary, and then you have incredible control. Because if you’re the one who picks the nominee of the Democratic Party, and then it’s even a coin flip that the Democrat wins the gubernatorial election, becomes the AG, wins a congressional election, then they know who buttered their bread. They know who to take care of.

And that’s what we’ve seen in the Mills administration is that, at a minimum, you can say they turned a blind eye. They swept these audits under the rug, and they did not publicize them in the way that these investigations should have been publicized. They should have been handled.

Nobody would know that this was happening at Gateway if we hadn’t gotten those notices of violation and publicized them. Just this week, Governor Mills comes out and says, “I support an investigation into Gateway.” None of that would have happened. She wouldn’t have admitted it. The records would have never been produced by the people doing the audits, by people who know what’s going on. None of it would have happened if we didn’t claw it out of the establishment’s hands and bring it to light.

SHAWN RYAN: They’re going to investigate him. Do you think it will be a legitimate investigation or will this be, is this a publicity stunt for Governor Mills?

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s a publicity stunt, yes.

SHAWN RYAN: So you don’t think there will be a legitimate investigation?

Federal vs. State Investigations

STEVE ROBINSON: I think there will be. I think that the U.S. attorney, Andrew Benson, will conduct a legitimate investigation. I think that he’s Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney. He’s been a judge, a LePage appointee. I think that he’s a man of integrity and will do a legitimate investigation there.

The House Oversight Committee will do a legitimate investigation there. And they can bring in people for transcripted interviews. They can bring people down to Washington, D.C. for interviews under oath. There will be an investigation, just not at the state level.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

STEVE ROBINSON: Maine is too far compromised to have a legitimate investigation. I mean, imagine this.

SHAWN RYAN: So that’s what I was getting at. I did not realize it was federal.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, but only, it’s only because we were able to shake loose the secrets of the Welfare Department that they even know there’s something to investigate here. But as a sign of just how far gone things are in Maine, last summer, Attorney General Aaron Fry, who’s like a nobody lawyer from Bangor, never really done anything or had a successful business, becomes AG under Mills because he’s going to be loyal to her and is going to do what the governor wants as opposed to having an adversarial system.

Going to do what the governor wants. We’ve reported now on the overbilling at Gateway, on the fact that Gateway’s CEO Abdullahi Ali was in 2024 running for president of Jubaland and admitting on Kenyan television multiple times that he is using money that he raised in the US to fund a militia that he wants to use to forcefully topple the incumbent president Madobe in Jubaland.

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

SHAWN RYAN: So how much money has this Gateway community, what are we looking at?

The Scale of Gateway’s Medicaid Billing

STEVE ROBINSON: Purely on the Medicaid side, through Gateway Community Services LLC, we’re looking about $5 million per year in Medicaid billing. And Medicaid billing, that’s what they billed, according to state spending records that we’ve obtained.

In addition to that, they got another over a million in no bid contracts handed to them from the Mills administration, which are a very interesting part of this story and get to, I think, part of the reason why Gateway was allowed to continue to exist and operate the way they were operating.

But just to close the loop on the Jubaland stuff. So he’s running for president, Jubaland. All this money, the fraud accusations, we’ve reported all this, this is all on the record. The whistleblower has come forward and said, “I was there for five and a half years. Here’s my name. I reported this to the state auditor and never heard back. I reported this to the Department of Homeland Security under Biden and never heard back.” That was a year before I met the guy.

And so all that’s out in the public record. And in the summer of last year, Aaron Fry, the Attorney General who sits in charge of the opioid settlement money, awards Gateway $400,000 through their nonprofit arm. So this is a group that’s been credibly accused of running a systemic Medicaid fraud.

And we know that the head of the group is trying to be a warlord in Somalia. And the attorney general gives them $400,000 in money that is going to be used for Narcan kits. Narcan kit money is what he sends to them. And these guys, they’re so bad they’re probably not even buying Narcan kits.

SHAWN RYAN: Are there a lot of Narcan kits up there in Maine?

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s good because they smuggled all the money to Somalia.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man.

The Attorney General’s $400,000 Award

STEVE ROBINSON: So that’s who would be investigating Gateway. And he declined to investigate them when the initial allegations came out. Instead, he gives them $400,000. So now the governor comes out and says, “I support an investigation.” Well, I support the New England Patriots. Great. It’s got about the same effect on reality. It’s just pure political posturing.

Nothing happens at the state level. These people are going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming to see reality and have reality imposed upon them. And I think that the Trump Justice Department will do that for some of these, for some of the most egregious ones, yes, they will do it.

But the fraud is so widespread and decentralized and diverse that we just do not have a Justice Department that can handle it. Even if you put every single one of every single fact on record and you lined up every single defendant, all the fraudsters, you lined them up and put all the facts right out there in public, which would be circumventing an enormous amount of investigative effort that is required to do that, you still don’t have the energy to take all those cases, to process all those criminal cases, to deal with the defense attorney and the prosecution going back and forth.

We just don’t have the attorneys, physically the people in those jobs with the man hours to prosecute these cases. We don’t have it. That’s how big the fraud is. And it’s not just me saying that. It’s people, high level people I’ve talked with in the Trump White House have said that that’s the problem that they’re dealing with, that the amount of fraud is so staggeringly large, we just can’t deal with it with the mechanisms that we have in place to deal with it like we have dealt with the benefits fraud in the past.

So you’re going to have to come up with things like ending the temporary protected status for Somalis. You’re going to have to keep the money.

SHAWN RYAN: You think that’s a legitimate excuse?

STEVE ROBINSON: I do. From what I’ve seen. Absolutely.

SHAWN RYAN: Shouldn’t even tackle any of it.

The Fraud Response Strategy

STEVE ROBINSON: No, no, no, you do. All of it. You do. I don’t think it’s an excuse for inaction. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying it’s a motivation to think creatively and come up with an asymmetric response.

I think that you need to—first thing I would do is one, every single governor in the state, they can cut off billing to any Medicaid provider if there’s been a credible accusation of fraud. They don’t need charges, they don’t need an audit, they don’t need a criminal finding. They don’t need arrest, they don’t need any of that. All they need is a credible accusation.

That can be an email that comes in and says, I think Sean’s sketchy. Stop paying him Medicaid money. The governor could say, all right, we’re going to stop and we’re going to investigate and see what’s going on here. So right now, here I’m making a credible allegation. It’s all fraudulent.

Every single state should stop billing to every Medicaid provider and force them to re-enroll. Just force them to come and prove that they’re legitimate. Every hospital and doctor’s office in America can do this in 24 or 48 hours. They can come to the Department of Health and Human Services and say, yeah, we’re legitimate.

But these shady fly-by-night home healthcare agencies that have popped up three years ago and suddenly they’re billing a million dollars, they won’t be able to do this. They won’t want to do this because they’ll think that there’s criminal liability. They don’t want to show their face around the health office or anywhere where there might be some accountability.

So they’re just going to say, nope, we’re going away. That’s going to end the funding. So you turn off the money that’s flowing into these organizations without any kind of having to go through the investigation or the criminal process.

But also if you’re sending a half a million, a million, 5 million to this home healthcare agency and you stop dead and then they never say anything—that’s a pretty good clue, isn’t it? It’s a pretty good clue about what’s happening. And you never hear from patients saying, oh, my healthcare has been cut off. My vital healthcare services that I rely on has been cut off. It’s a pretty good clue as to what’s happening. And that allows you to further investigate.

Only the ones who are legitimate are going to come back in and go through this re-enrollment process. And that could happen now under existing law. Every governor could force these people to re-enroll through a more legitimate process. They just have to exercise their power to do it.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I think I’m just going to play devil’s advocate. I think the hesitation could be maybe that, and I could understand this, if they cut one off and somebody dies, a condition gets worse, they were probably held liable maybe.

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

SHAWN RYAN: Tons. Tons.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah. How many people are dying of the economic desperation in my state because they’re being looted so that Medicaid pirates can go run for office in Somalia?

SHAWN RYAN: Don’t get me wrong.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah. I’m playing devil’s advocate to your devil’s advocate. But we’re not talking though. We’re not talking about—

SHAWN RYAN: But 24 hours. I mean if they can—

STEVE ROBINSON: We’re not talking about life-saving healthcare. We’re talking about a wiping. This is what these home healthcare agencies do.

SHAWN RYAN: Transportation, translation.

The Nature of Home Healthcare Fraud

STEVE ROBINSON: Exactly. This is transportation, translation. Home healthcare agencies, SNAP benefits at the halal markets. We’re not talking about life-saving care. No one’s going to shut off the Medicaid reimbursement for cardiac surgeons. Anyone involved in life-saving care is going to be a big enough organization so that a temporary stop in Medicaid billing is not going to cripple the organization. They’re going to be able to re-enroll very quickly.

And you could even honestly, if you wanted to, you could say, okay, we’re not going to do hospitals because the hospitals, there’s a lot of funny business in American hospitals, but they’re not the ones submitting completely bogus claims. So no one is going to die.

To the extent that patients, there are actual patients at these home healthcare agencies, they’re the family of the person listed as the CEO of the home healthcare agency. They’re allowed to do that. You can start a home healthcare agency and the employees of a home healthcare agency go to your home and they assist you with the tasks of daily living, which is groceries, shower, cleaning your kitchen, wiping your butt.

And you can start a home healthcare agency. You can hire your family, your cousins, and they can also be patients of your home healthcare agency. So your home healthcare agency can be just a total family operation with Medicaid money flowing in both as a benefit to your family members, but also as the money that pays your family members.

We see this in the notices of violation where the investigators, to the extent that they’re trying to figure out what’s happened at some of these home healthcare agencies, say, was this person receiving services from, insert home healthcare agency, at the same time that they were being paid to provide these services.

So even the stuff that follows the rules looks fraudulent from an outside perspective because these programs are almost designed to be exploited and defrauded. But I don’t think anyone’s going to die if you turn off the billing. No one.

SHAWN RYAN: Doesn’t sound like it.

STEVE ROBINSON: There will be—and there’s a good excuse.

SHAWN RYAN: I have to look for a legitimate excuse on why they—I’m just trying to think like Janet Mills did it to something legitimate.

STEVE ROBINSON: Janet Mills did it to Gateway, by the way. She turned off the billing finally. She did, yes. This was nine to ten months after we reported on it. The national media firestorm kicks up and she just says, it gets to 1.6 million is the amount that they’ve been—HHS has alleged that they’ve over-billed according to their arcane audit process, which is a drastic underestimate of what actually happened. But she’s shut off their billing.

So this is a mechanism that works. This is not controversial. It’s a way to protect the integrity of the Medicaid system. All you need is an allegation and you can shut off billing. And so make the allegations, folks. Go out there and make the allegations.

And governors too can use that in red states. This fraud’s happening there too. You can use this authority very brazenly, I would say, to combat the problem.

Economic Terrorism and National Security

But to your original point about how you deal with it or the scope of the fraud, how we prosecute people, it’s such a massive problem and so decentralized. You’re going to have to think asymmetrically.

And I think if you, the more you investigate this as a journalist or the more the law enforcement investigates this, you find more and more these connections to political actors in Somalia or Central Africa. You find more and more that there are high-level political figures in Somalia who are benefiting from this scheme.

On the money transmission side, they have their own daycares or healthcare businesses in Minnesota or in Maine. And you can’t help but view this as a form of nation-building for Somalia, but also economic terrorism against the middle class in Maine, in Minnesota.

I think this is economic terrorism. I think it needs to be treated that way. They are systematically defrauding the American taxpayer at the nation-state level in order to build out their country in Somalia. And it is economic terrorism.

And the victims are the people who are dying of overdoses in Lewiston. The victims are the people who those benefits could have been spent on. The victims are the people in northern rural Maine, the working-class people, guys I went to high school with who are seeing half their paycheck go away in taxes so that Abdullahi Ali can drive a Mercedes and have an estate in Kenya while he’s running for warlord of Jubaland.

Those are the victims of the economic terrorism that the Medicaid fraud is wreaking. And once you start treating it like economic terrorism, it becomes a national security problem.

So I think you need to unlock national security level responses to stop the fraud, to prevent it from happening in the future. And if you’re ever going to get some semblance of justice for what’s happened here, it has to be at the national security level. There has to be a kinetic response to remove this, to stop this.

The Lewiston Shooting Donations Scandal

SHAWN RYAN: Geez, what happened to the Lewiston shooting donations for the families?

STEVE ROBINSON: This is an unbelievable one. I mean, how many people were killed? 18.

SHAWN RYAN: 18 people were killed.

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

So the short version is the same people who are defrauding the Medicaid system came and looted the shooting donations. Somali NGOs came and were given money from the money that was raised for the victims.

SHAWN RYAN: Were the victims Somali?

STEVE ROBINSON: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, then how do they get the money?

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s a very good question, John. It’s a question that the Maine—I do. It’s a question that the Maine Community Foundation won’t answer.

So just to set this up, there’s a huge amount of money raised after the shooting. People from all over the place are sending in money. They want to help. There’s an outpouring of support in true American fashion. There’s a coming together of what can we do to help these people.

People are sending money, checks made out to the city of Lewiston, to the chamber of commerce. GoFundMes are popping up all over the place. There’s just a groundswell of support to do anything we can. Because these people—18 people, plus the people who were wounded and survived, people who have the psychological or mental injuries from that night still dealing with therapy, the families that now are missing a caregiver and are going to have to deal with the cost of that childcare going forward—it’s an immense financial burden on these people.

And people came out to say, how can we ameliorate that? How can we stop that?

At some point, because there was so much money being raised through these different funds, there was a decision made to centralize everything with the Maine Community Foundation. It’s a big 501(c)(3) organization. They manage like 600 million a year. They manage money, they give out money. They run charitable, multiple charitable purposes and do grant giving. This is kind of what they do, charitable giving.

So they seemed like a natural group, organization to bring legitimacy to the donations, rather than having GoFundMe here, GoFundMe here. How the hell do you know if the GoFundMe is actually getting where it’s supposed to go?

Turns out those GoFundMes might have been more legitimate than what the Maine Community Foundation ended up doing. This MCF, by the way, was blessed by the Mills administration. You go to the Lewiston shooting website that they put up, and it was like, if you want to support the victims, go here.

At the beginning, all the representations made by the Maine Community Foundation were that 100% of the money that was given was going to go to the survivors and the victims’ families.

At some point there was this splintering where they conceived of this idea of a “broad area recovery” is what they called it. Someone conceived of the idea that you’ve raised, I think it was like 6.9 million. Well, some of that money should go to NGOs.

So they split the funds and they started treating it like it was two separate funds. Holy s*. They’ve never been very clear about how those payments were separated because so much of the money came in before this decision was made. A lot of it was just like, chamber of commerce, here’s $100,000. Some company in Maine, here’s $100,000.

SHAWN RYAN: How much money was there?

STEVE ROBINSON: 6.9 million.

SHAWN RYAN: 6.9 million divided by 18 families? Not that much.

The Lewiston Shooting Fund Scandal

STEVE ROBINSON: No. It ended up being they came up with a pretty complex formula for who would get the money. And there was also a lot of private charity, I’ll say. There were a lot of Maine employers stepped up and covered the costs of their employees who were wounded that night and survived. Some of the hospitals in Maine did a good job of basically saying, “No, you’re not going to have medical costs as a result of this.”

So there was a lot of private charity that wasn’t encompassed by the Maine Community Foundation, but $1.9 million was set aside for these NGOs and these organizations. This $1.9 million was allocated by a steering committee the Maine Community Foundation created, which included at least four NGO heads who steered money to their own organizations.

So this is blood-drenched money raised in the aftermath of Maine’s worst mass murder. And these NGO heads, most of them explicitly migrant NGOs, many of them run by Somali community leaders, saw it as an opportunity to steer money into their NGOs, their own NGOs. There was no conflict of interest policy. Somehow they were just allowed to steer money to their own organizations, which is just gobsmacking, you know, the level of… it’s just heinous that they would even think to do that.

But then once you get these members on the steering committee, all these other little NGOs that are kind of related and they have the same office building, some of them are in the Gateway Community Services office building. By the way, Gateway Community Services is on the steering committee. Gateway Community Services steers… yeah, they’re non-profit. They have a 501 filing that’s basically the same thing, just allows them to take money like the Lewiston shooting money that’s only available to 501C3s, or government money that’s only available to 501s.

But Nathan Davis, who is the son of State Senator Jill Dusan, he runs the nonprofit arm of Gateway Community Services. He’s on the steering committee. He steers money to Gateway Community Services from the Lewiston shooting fund. Each of these NGOs got over $65,000 and there were a ton of them.

Actually, Iman Osman, who was the Lewiston city councilor who just resigned, he’s facing two gun theft charges. He also faced allegations that he lied on his campaign finance documents to pretend he lived in the Somali district in Lewiston to run for city council. And one didn’t live there because the building he listed was an uninhabitable condemned building owned by his brother.

And then after his election, he was charged with… a grand jury indicted him with two gun theft charges. And then he lied on his bond documents saying that he lived at that address again and then resigned after that. And I don’t know if the Lewiston police have been able to find him for a bail check yet, but he ran the Lewiston and Auburn Youth Foundation. Lewiston and Auburn Youth Foundation got $65,000 from the Lewiston shooting money.

So we actually took money raised for victims of Maine’s worst mass shooting and gave it to multiple people actually who had been or would be indicted for gun crimes. And again, I mean, the list goes on and on of the Somali organizations that held their hand out for Lewiston shooting money.

And I talked with… I actually, for my Substack, I interviewed four victims, survivors, family members who were there that night, including a woman who was shot multiple times and was still dealing with the consequences of that. And she talked about having medical bills, like $85,000. At the same time, she’s learning that the Lewiston Auburn Youth Foundation got $65,000, that Generational Nor got $65,000, that Gateway Community Services got $65,000, that the Somali Bantu Association got $65,000, that, you know, the IFCA Situ, you know, AK Health and Human Services, like, all these Somali organizations, which some of them don’t even exist anymore.

Some of them maybe never existed. Some of them are just like Facebook groups. It’s unclear. None of them have given the money back. But like, you see, these women are… these victims are like, “Why did the Maine Community Foundation give the money that was raised based on our suffering to these Somali NGOs that did nothing?” Nothing. They’re not even pretending now that they did anything for the victims.

And it’s so f*ing infuriating because the governor won’t acknowledge it. AG Fry says that he’s looked into it and everything was done on the level. There’s nothing for a criminal investigation. The mayor of Lewiston won’t acknowledge it. Nobody on the establishment is saying that there’s something wrong with this.

And I mean, God bless Governor LePage. He grew up in Lewiston, was poor and homeless in Lewiston, didn’t even speak English until he was 11, French speaking. And he came in having just lost an effort to become governor again. He came to Lewiston, he raised a half million dollars. Somehow he figured out how to give that all to the shooting victims. It doesn’t seem like rocket science.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

STEVE ROBINSON: Seems like, you know, that somewhat a victim comes with a medical bill. I mean, create a trust. Create a trust, have a trustee. Victim has a medical bill, you pay it. Why do you have to have a steering panel formed of all these, you know, progressive hard leftists and Somali immigrant activists?

Yeah, I mean, how do you get that money back? But the big picture takeaway of that is if you have gotten to the point as a Somali NGO head where you’re okay showing up, you know, stepping over the dead bodies of Mainers who have just been gunned down and taking $65,000 for a charity, Medicaid fraud is not that big of a deal, is it? Right. If you’re willing to do that, of course, you just send an invoice to the Department of Health and Human Services.

And I’ll say that a lot of this has only reached the level of attention that it has because Amy Sussman, whose nephew Max Hathaway was killed that night, has just been a bulldog on it, just been like an unsleeping advocate for the victims and their families. Good for her. And has chased the Maine Community Foundation to the ends of the earth to try to get some kind of change, some kind of justice.

And so far, the Maine Community Foundation just thinks that they can stick their heads in the sand, that they’ve got enough money, they can wait this out, that there aren’t some serious questions about their integrity and how they handled this. You know, a lot of the organizations that they gave money to through the Lewiston Shooting Fund were organizations that they had previously given money to and had previous relationships with.

They haven’t really said anything about how they’re going to rethink the way they handle charitable giving through the foundation. I can tell you though, that there’s, you know, 70, 80% of the state are going to be rethinking their relationship with the Maine Community Foundation, if they had one.

Yeah, I’ll bet. It’s up that story. So many national reporters, my friends in the national media have… I’ve gotten text messages over the last three weeks, “Did this really happen? Like, Gateway actually took Lewiston shooting money? Like, Iman Osman got Lewiston shooting money?” Yeah. And again, this is one… we report on this 18 months ago. We report on this when it happened.

SHAWN RYAN: Nothing.

STEVE ROBINSON: Nothing. Nothing. The… actually, the mainstream outlets, the corporate outlets in Maine came in and reported on it and said, “No, the AG says everything was fine. All these are upstanding NGOs. What are you talking about?” MCF, Maine Community Foundation, they gave us a statement and they said that everything that they did was above board. So why would you question the statement that the Maine Community Foundation has put out?

We’ve checked this out. All the mainstream outlets just gave it a good leaving. Not even a leaving alone. They gave it like the stamp of approval that they delegitimized Amy Sussman’s complaints. They delegitimized Governor LePage’s complaints. Any of the victims, their family members who were concerned about where the money went, the mainstream media came in and said these people are just fringe wackos.

Like, don’t pay attention to, you know, the fact that they’re dealing with five-figure medical bills while Abdullahi Ali is cashing $65,000 checks. Don’t pay attention to that. Yeah man.

SHAWN RYAN: This stuff is just so infuriating.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, let’s take a break.

The Migrant Services Ponzi Scheme

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Steve, we’re back from the break, and this sh*t gets heavy. But you’ve described the migrant services industry as a Ponzi scheme. How so?

STEVE ROBINSON: In order to continue to operate, you need a constant flow of migrants. You know, a Ponzi scheme, you’re paying your old investors with new money coming in. You need a new flow of migrants in order for the migrant services industry to stay afloat.

So eventually, the migrants who come in, they learn English, hopefully, they become assimilated, and they no longer rely on 501C3s, NGOs, the Office of New Americans. They no longer need these. So if you have, you know, if you speak English and you’re assimilated, you don’t need the Office of New Americans. You can use all the offices that the Old Americans are using.

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

SHAWN RYAN: What is happening? Is it a program? What’s going on? I mean, this is a little different than people coming up through the southern border. How are they getting here? I mean, this is a country with extreme poverty. How can they even afford an airline ticket to get to the US? How is this happening?

STEVE ROBINSON: I assume you’ve seen Black Hawk Down.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah. So that’s kind of where it starts. Multipolar civil war in Somalia in the 90s. Madness. Families fighting families, clans fighting clans. Just total anarchy. And that creates the… I guess the pretense for mass migration or asylum seeker refugee migration from Somalia into the United States. And they come into Atlanta. Atlanta’s a big Delta port. And then that was…

SHAWN RYAN: Wasn’t that all… that was back in ’93, right?

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah. But their temporary protected status has endured until Trump just shut it down from that. From that moment until when Trump decided this week to end that, it’s endured. And the level of migration has, if anything, increased.

And what you see happening is it’s a program. At first, yes. There is a deliberate effort to resettle the Somali refugees by groups like Catholic Charities. So Catholic Charities makes a huge amount of money moving people, migrants around to places in the country that don’t necessarily vote to have that happen.

You might, by one lens, you might consider Catholic Charities to be a human trafficking organization, because that’s what they do. They get paid, they make huge amounts of money to take people who’ve crossed the border illegally and distribute them throughout the United States. This is great.

SHAWN RYAN: Steve, I’m Catholic. I didn’t know this.

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

SHAWN RYAN: How big is the business?

STEVE ROBINSON: Billions.

SHAWN RYAN: Billions.

The Migrant Industrial Complex

STEVE ROBINSON: Billions. Billions. I mean, tens of billions of dollars. I mean, during the Biden administration, the amount of money that was dumped into these, I mean, it starts to be mind-numbing amounts of money that are dumped on these organizations. And it’s to take and process migrants who cross the border and fly them, distribute them to little communities like the Springfield, Ohio.

You know, those 15,000 Haitians don’t just show up in Springfield, Ohio. That’s coordinated by NGOs that have huge amounts of government money. That’s what happened in Maine. Beginning in early 2000, you have organizations relocating the Somali refugees from Atlanta to Portland. And eventually from Portland they figure out that Lewiston has more vacant large family housing to accommodate the families that are moving there.

And from 2000 to 2003, you’ve got maybe 300 Somalis who are in Lewiston proper. And eventually once you form that little bit of community, I mean, Somalis are like anybody, you go to another country, you want to be with people who speak your language. They can help you figure out the lay of the land. They can help you figure out how to exist.

And you start to create a magnet and a draw for other Somalis who are fleeing the civil war. And they want to come and they want to be with people who are like them, people who have gone through this experience of arriving in America before because it’s more comfortable, it helps them. It’s a natural human thing, you can understand that.

But once you get to that level of a diaspora or a refugee settlement within your American city, it becomes its own draw. And when you add to that a very easy generous benefit system, which is what Maine initially had, was a level of general assistance, which is a welfare program administered by the cities. And then you have the SNAP TANF EBT cards that are administered by the state but funded by the federal government.

And then you have Medicaid, which is the big healthcare benefit, and you have all these benefit programs that kind of wrap around and surround a Somali refugee. Once they arrive in Maine and then you have the free housing, it becomes, why would you go to Texas? You know, if you’re a Somali refugee who just shows up, why would you go to Texas or Tennessee? Why would you go to any of those states when you know you’ve got family, you’ve got cousins, you’ve got friends, hundreds of them in Maine, and they’ve already got the forms printed out for you.

Actually, my friend I met, Abdi Iftin, who’s a Somali author, he lives in Maine and he wrote a book that was super pro-American. He lived through the civil war, and he talks about having arrived in Maine as a refugee and being given these forms. It was just like a matter of intake processing. As a Somali, you show up and they give you the free housing forms.

SHAWN RYAN: Did he get here through one of the NGOs? How did he get here?

The Somali Cowboy

STEVE ROBINSON: He has a complicated story in that he grew up in Mogadishu and his family attempted to flee and came back because there’s nowhere to flee to. So he kind of lived through this chaos and anarchy and eventually hooked up with a BBC reporter or an NPR reporter and started doing reports for NPR on this little tin cell phone, basically.

So he gets the experience of journalism giving these reports and a little community developed in America, like Team Abdi, essentially, who were reading his reports from the front lines of Mogadishu, from his cultural perspective, because he spoke English, because he learned English watching Schwarzenegger and Stallone bootlegs in Mogadishu.

And so his process was a little bit more, it wasn’t part of this mass migration. He ended up getting a ticket in the diversity lottery after he’d snuck into Kenya or traveled into Kenya. So he wasn’t a part of the mass migration pipeline that a lot of them come through. And he came here legally.

But he talks about this culture which he’s called out and has faced death threats from his own community, like torrents, torrents of death threats. Because he’s got a huge TikTok following. And he reports on, he calls out fraud and he reports on what’s happening with Somalis in America to 800,000 TikTok followers. And that’s the biggest social—

SHAWN RYAN: He is a Somali.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s his account handle?

STEVE ROBINSON: Somali Cowboy at Somali Cowboy.

SHAWN RYAN: I got it. Yeah.

STEVE ROBINSON: You won’t be able, he doesn’t do very many posts in English. He does Somali language posts and he’s done some of the interviews I’ve done with him, some podcasts that I’ve done with him. He posts, I better brush up on my Somali or whatever they say.

But his perspective has been really, really interesting as a member of the Somali diaspora, a genuine refugee who didn’t take that turn down the path to government benefits and really embraced assimilation. He made it.

SHAWN RYAN: He made it. He came here and he worked his a off, and he made it.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, and he works in, he does translation. He wrote a book that sold a ton of copies, and now he works as a writer and a journalist and a translator.

SHAWN RYAN: So you guys worked pretty close together, and he fills in the blanks.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, we have become, because he actually reached out as part of some of our reporting on the Medicaid fraud. And so there’s an interesting event that ties into a lot of this.

SHAWN RYAN: That would be an interesting interview. Can you connect me to him?

STEVE ROBINSON: Absolutely.

SHAWN RYAN: That would be very interesting.

STEVE ROBINSON: He’s just seen some dark sh.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ll bet he has.

STEVE ROBINSON: You should listen to his audiobook. It’s like, that’s when I wanted to interview him is after I listened to his life story. I was like, wow, you are remarkably upbeat and happy for the sh that you’ve lived through.

The Azerbaijan Connection

STEVE ROBINSON: Part of this story is we’re looking through 2024 financial disclosures for all of the state lawmakers, and we see that Representative Deqa Dhalac, Somali refugee, big figure in this story, Mayor of South Portland, now on the Appropriations Committee, pretty powerful, influential figure in the Maine Democratic Party. She took this weird trip to Azerbaijan. It’s kind of weird. Paid for by the Azeri government. Okay.

And Representative Mana Abdi, also representative from Lewiston, also Somali, took this weird trip to Azerbaijan. And we keep looking through these financial disclosures, and we see that Senator Jill Duson, whose son Nathan Davis works at Gateway Community Services, she was also on that trip.

And we start looking for other information about it, and we find this torrent of Facebook pictures. And Abdullahi Ali is on that trip, the CEO of Gateway Community Services, who later in the year after this trip to Azerbaijan would be running for warlord of Jubaland with, he said, a militia that he financed with money that he raised in the United States.

Also on that trip was Tarlan Abadov, an Azeri official who came to Maine, worked for Catholic Charities and was running the Office of New Americans for Governor Mills.

SHAWN RYAN: The Office of New Americans.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah. If it sounds Orwellian, it’s because it is. It’s just a migrant resettlement office. It’s about helping that pipeline that Abdi didn’t go down. It’s about facilitating. It’s like a superhighway to welfare dependency and being a controlled voting bloc for the progressive left and for the permanent government interests.

But we see this junket that, why is the Azeri government paying these people from Maine who really have, seriously, when you think about it, not that much power?

The Voting Bloc Strategy

SHAWN RYAN: You know what’s fing crazy, man, is this is all orchestrated. And it sounds like what you’re saying is the voting bloc is a big thing and you know, why don’t they just do what the citizens vote them in to do? Maybe they are so that they can get voted back in instead of going rogue and then just fing importing voting blocs. Like what—

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s less—

SHAWN RYAN: Because they wouldn’t be able to be—

STEVE ROBINSON: I mean, you don’t get the all expenses paid junkets to Turkey and Azerbaijan if you’re—

SHAWN RYAN: You don’t get to participate in the corruption.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, you know, I mean, there’s, I can’t think of any legitimate reason why this huge cohort of Maine lawmakers, by the way, Eklas Ahmed, the policy researcher at the Office of New Americans, she was also on this junket and so was Cumberland County Probate Judge Paul Aronson. Kind of sticks out in that dynamic.

They’re all on this junket to Azerbaijan. We can’t really figure it out. None of them want to talk to us about it. And we start reporting on it and eventually we discover Tarlan Abadov has this long history of wildly anti-Armenian statements, like posting the kind of things about Armenians that would, you know, if you post about Jews or any other ethnic group, you’re just going to be drummed out of polite society.

And eventually he is fired from being the director of the Office of New Americans. But this kind of ties into the Gateway story. It’s this weird junket like why are they going to Azerbaijan? Why does it happen right before, right while really Abdullahi Ali is saying he wants to raise money for munitions and troops in Jubaland. And then he loses his election eventually.

But it’s this weird geopolitical game that they’re playing with American taxpayer dollars has nothing to do with what’s best for Mainers, what’s best for people in Lewiston. You know, we actually looked up the trade with Azerbaijan in Maine just because we thought maybe there’s some niche like toothpick industry or something. You know, trees are getting exported from Maine to Azerbaijan. It’s like $60,000 a year in trade between Maine and Azerbaijan is nothing. It’s like there’s no plausible reason.

So what other game are you playing sending this huge delegation of all these people who have ties to Gateway Community Services, credibly accused of running this elaborate Medicaid fraud for five and a half years, and then you’re running for president of a foreign territory? It’s just so far removed from what the government of the state of Maine should be doing.

And it’s like, I’m a Maine reporter. Why the f* should I have to know about Jubaland or these elaborate games that they’re playing with our money? But this is another part of, I guess, the scheme that was being cooked up that kind of orbits Gateway.

The Gateway Network

STEVE ROBINSON: Because we talked earlier about the amount of money that’s flowing to them purely on the Medicaid side. About $5 million a year for translation services, personal support services, which is, again, wiping aes. Maybe they’re wiping aes. Maybe they’re just saying that they wipe aes and billing the state for it.

But they also, you start to look at the businesses that are in and around the addresses where Gateway has its headquarters. There’s one on Canal Street in Lewiston, which is right in Little Mogadishu. And there’s one in kind of rundown area of Portland on Forest Avenue.

And you look at the other businesses that are registered at these locations, and you start to see, geez, why are there so many home healthcare agencies registered right at the same office as Gateway? Why is there this weird transportation company registered right at the same place as Gateway? Why are there these explicitly political NGOs registered at the same address, both the same addresses? This is like the—

SHAWN RYAN: It sounds like the exact same footprint as Minnesota.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yes, it is.

SHAWN RYAN: How many states do you think this is happening in?

STEVE ROBINSON: To a greater or lesser degree? All of them. I mean, Medicaid is such a, I mean, that’s the program we’re talking about, is Medicaid is being defrauded at a scale you just can’t even imagine.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m talking just Somali fraud.

STEVE ROBINSON: Just Somali fraud.

SHAWN RYAN: Just Somali fraud.

The National Scope

STEVE ROBINSON: Definitely Ohio, Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, probably Georgia. But, you know, I’m just, yeah, I’m a Maine reporter. But I would say any state where you’ve had the combination of a set apart refugee minority has come in. Then you have an establishment Democrat, you know, political coalition has leveraged them for their own political gain. You’ll see this, because this is what happened.

It was never baked in the cake that the Somalis who arrived in Maine were going to become fraudsters or in Minnesota. That was never, you know, predestined. I’ve seen, you know, a lot of people who, I guess, talk disparagingly as if that’s the only thing.

SHAWN RYAN: We f*ing get them into jobs.

STEVE ROBINSON: A lot of them are.

SHAWN RYAN: You know what I mean?

STEVE ROBINSON: A lot of them are.

The Pathway to Welfare vs. Success

SHAWN RYAN: Why is there no, why is it always a fing pathway to welfare? Why is there never a pathway to success? I mean, when you pull somebody out of a country like that, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a fing third world country like Somalia, but when you pull some… They’ll do anything to get out of that shit.

STEVE ROBINSON: But I mean, if you…

SHAWN RYAN: And they’re still going to fing vote for you because you pulled them out of that. So, like, why, why is it… Why is it the commonality? Why is it just a pathway, a funnel to welfare? It makes no sense to me. Like, it just destroys our fing country. People on welfare, like, that’s… That should be a temporary fix for Americans, not… You shouldn’t live your entire life on welfare, especially if you’re an immigrant or you shouldn’t.

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

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, they have work ethic. It’s not like they’re…

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what I’m getting.

STEVE ROBINSON: They’re not…

SHAWN RYAN: They don’t come here lazy.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, they come here…

SHAWN RYAN: I would imagine they come here ready, ready to make a living, ready to contribute, ready to… Ready to live the American dream, right? But instead we… We give them a pathway to welfare, to free living, free medical, free everything. Nobody stops it.

STEVE ROBINSON: Like, it’s political. This isn’t a…

SHAWN RYAN: Some of it is political. Some of it is. I mean, okay, but I mean, it’s…

STEVE ROBINSON: Just, man, I think that, like, nobody’s…

SHAWN RYAN: F*ing stopping this is what I’m saying.

STEVE ROBINSON: Like, it’s…

SHAWN RYAN: That’s the fix. Give these people a pathway to jobs. There’s a ton of jobs that nobody wants to do.

STEVE ROBINSON: There’s job…

SHAWN RYAN: Just do it. Incentivize them. Why isn’t nobody… Yeah, like we can bat this shit back and forth. Oh, fing Democrats, oh, Republicans. But neither one of these fing parties have fixed a damn thing. It’s… It’s just… It… You know what I mean? Yeah, it’s the same shit.

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s the same.

SHAWN RYAN: We bat the same fing things back and forth. You know, it is all political. It’s like, hey, we don’t have anything to talk about. Let’s bring up abortion. Have we ever solved anything? Have we ever come to a fing conclusion? No, let’s talk. Let’s bat immigration back and forth. But it’s just f*ing like nobody solves anything. There is no problem solving that happens here anymore.

Political Solutions and Voter Manipulation

STEVE ROBINSON: You know, I would kind of… I would disagree. I mean, I think that the Democrats in Maine have solved the problem. You know, their policies aren’t popular with rural working class Mainers. Bring in new voters, they solve the problem. You know, the problem is that they’re going to get voted out of office if they continue pursuing policies that aren’t popular with rural working class.

SHAWN RYAN: Are they going to get voted out of office? I mean, you look at, look at, look at a place like, I don’t know, pick, pick politicians. 10% approval rating, 90% reelection rate. Are they going to get voted out? Look at some of the shit going on down in Texas. Look at their politicians. Do you like any of them?

STEVE ROBINSON: I think part of understanding how the, you know… You know, yeah, I understand exactly what you’re saying, but I think that the… Part of understanding the Medicaid fraud and the Somali fraud has unfolded is understanding how the Medicaid program is administered because it localizes the distribution of this money.

So it’s not that your member of Congress doesn’t really have much say over how your Medicaid program is administered. The Medicaid program is, I think, the most recent year for which we have numbers, a trillion dollars in spending.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m not saying these people have the power to stop this immediately. What I’m saying is they could introduce a bill. Somebody has to come up with an alternative, a work requirement before they just have to come up with an alternate, put it into a f*ing bill and introduce it.

How Medicaid Fraud Operates

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, I mean, we’ve done it. We have like, the ideas are out there to stop welfare dependency. Governor LePage introduced those reforms in Maine. Groups like the Foundation for Government Accountability advocate for the dignity of work and policies that will reduce welfare dependency. Those ideas are out there. It’s not lifting off a starship rocket booster. It’s very, very basic. They know what the ideas are.

They’re rejecting them on purpose because they want to build dependent political coalitions to protect their own political power. And we see this in the administration of these programs in the records that we found just at the local level in Maine.

But what I was saying about Medicaid is this is unlike Medicare, which is for older people and is centrally administered in Washington, D.C. and your senator, your representative, they have a big say over stuff happening with Medicare. Medicaid is block granted to the states. So the federal government takes a whole bunch of tax money and they just give a big bag of cash to the state legislature and say, here you run a program for poor people. That’s how Medicaid operates.

And each state gets to determine little different programs and how they’re going to operate. And they’ve got to kind of color in between the lines that the federal government sets out, but they have huge latitude. So with all this federal money coming in, a little bit of state money, and what are politicians going to do when you give them a big bag of money? They’re going to try to spend that in a way that makes their constituents happy, makes them look good, protects their power.

And the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, you know, it gets… You know, people think it’s some complicated technocratic policy, but all it did was just make Medicaid bigger, just made the bag of cash bigger. That’s basically what Obamacare did. Took Medicaid, this huge, dysfunctional, bloated welfare program, made enrollment of it much, much bigger. So more people could be on this program.

And Maine, like Minnesota, is an expansion state. We expanded it in 2019, 2020, so more people are eligible. The bag of cash grows. All this money’s coming into Maine and the governor and the legislature, they’ve got all this money to play with, to decide, you know, where it’s going to go. And then you add Covid into that.

And they’re spending this money in a way that is going to protect their political power and accomplish their ideological mission. And the dependency of the Somali community is just a byproduct of that. It’s, you know, they are rewarding the Somali community with taxpayer money and turning a blind eye to the fraud in order to protect their own political power.

And the, again, the byproduct, the consequence of that has been a Somali diaspora that is dependent, that kind of orbits these fraud programs, these schemes. It’s like if you’re a young Somali guy and you see all your peers are starting home healthcare agencies or daycares, getting rich, buying mansions and opening day, you know, driving Mercedes Benz G Wagons. Are you going to go work at L.L. Bean? You know, are you going to go get a job and work for $15 an hour at Dunkin Donuts when your friend is making a million dollars a year doing fake health care stuff? No.

So the incentives are all misaligned because you’ve turned a blind eye to fraud. You’ve designed a system where fraud is far more profitable than doing the right thing. That’s what we have. And you’ve done it, I think intentionally to protect political power.

Uncovering No-Bid Contracts

And we found, I guess getting back to some of our boots on the ground investigations, there’s a contract process in the state where you’re handing out money. Usually if you’re going to spend a whole bunch of money, you do a request for proposals and you have to have competing proposals to see who’s going to provide that service. Transparent gets the lowest price for taxpayers.

You can also do no-bid contracts, which is somebody in the government just picks who the best person is to get this money. In Maine, for whatever reason, we have these forms that you have to fill out when you do a no-bid contract and they’re public on the state website for seven days and then they disappear. That’s the transparency we have. That’s how the system was designed, for seven days.

If you check the website during that seven day period, you could see the form could be a million dollars, could be $10 million, could be $5,000 because some guy in Hancock County needs like a new prop on a boat or something. But you have to check it during that period of time you’ll find the no-bid contract for money that’s being spent. It’s the most corrupt and least transparent way to spend money to reward your friends, to reward your political allies.

And we requested through the Freedom of Access Act all of the no-bid contract documents. We wanted all of these documents because just because they’re only public for seven days doesn’t mean they’re not still a public record subject to that record request. And the Mills administration came back and told us they couldn’t do it, wasn’t technically possible, they weren’t able to provide us with those documents.

So I was looking back over some older stories that we did and I found links to old no-bid contracts. I was like, hold on a second, these are all still on a government server somewhere. And so I used… I used GROK to write a program that would guess at the URLs where those documents were and download the documents if it found them. And ran it for like 15 hours on my home computer and scraped from the government servers 5,000 documents that they told me they couldn’t give me, all pointing towards no-bid contracts.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit. Did you send it to them?

STEVE ROBINSON: No, I didn’t. If they want it from me, they’re going to have to pay me.

SHAWN RYAN: Send it to them.

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

Covid Money and Community Health Outreach Workers

STEVE ROBINSON: In those no-bid contract documents… Again, this is a huge trove of scanned documents. You can’t search. You can’t text search through them. It’s just this mountain of raw material that you have to search through just like until your eyes bleed. Looking to figure out what the hell’s going on here. We find no-bid contracts to Gateway, particularly.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, boy.

STEVE ROBINSON: No-bid contracts to Gateway for… Funded by federal Covid money that came in in February of 2022, right before Governor Mills is running for reelection up against former Republican Governor Paul LePage. And if you pull the contracts, which we did and read them and the funding agreements and everything. This money went to create what were called CHOWs, Community Health Outreach Workers.

I’m willing to bet that this happened in a lot of states because it wasn’t just the Somali groups, it was the Hispanic groups, the New Mainer Public Health Initiative, like all of the who’s who of the left wing NGOs got CHOW money to create these community health outreach workers. And you didn’t have to have…

SHAWN RYAN: Is this Covid PPE loans?

STEVE ROBINSON: Some of these groups did. Gateway got $700,000 in PPP money. Yeah, but this is separate from that. This was CARES Act. This is like the various big supposedly…

SHAWN RYAN: I just read that Palantir has developed some program that’s going to go through and basically find all the fraud from the PPE loans.

The Community Health Outreach Workers Program

STEVE ROBINSON: That’s what we need. We need asymmetric solutions. And I could talk a little bit about some of the things that we’ve done to try to process all these documents. But I think that the chows are important because one of the things that I hope some other people listening to this will take away is going into their state and trying to figure out if the same patterns were replicated.

Because it’s a state by state program, whether it’s Medicaid or state administered Covid spending, they just take the same playbook and they run it in a little bit of a different way to a different beat in every state. And so journalists who are working in other states, you know, Nick, Shirley, anybody who’s in Minnesota or California or Ohio, they can say, “Huh, geez, they found that in Maine. I wonder if that’s happening in my state.” It is. You just have to find it.

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

But the community health outreach workers are tasked with signing up migrants for Medicaid, for food stamps, an EBT card. They were allowed to give the migrants walking around money. They were allowed to buy household supplies.

SHAWN RYAN: Walking around money they were given?

Voter Registration and Political Connections

STEVE ROBINSON: And in the contract, it doesn’t say walking around money, it says you’re allowed to buy household supplies. I’m sure that there was a lot of policing of how that household supply money was handed out. They’re also tasked with keeping a database on all of the people that they’ve just gone around and bestowed these patronage benefits on.

And under federal law, if you sign somebody up for an EBT card or Medicaid, you are required to provide them assistance registering to vote. So any program that requires NGOs to go out and sign people up for welfare benefits is a de facto voter registration program.

So we took no bid contract money funded by the federal government, handed out through this opaque process, gave it to Gateway Community Services and other groups operating in the same community, and turned it into a taxpayer funded voter registration and ballot harvesting program. And so who did those people vote for when they know where their household supply money came from? Who did those people vote for?

And I’ll give you a clue, because right after they get this no bid contract money, Gateway Community Services, Abdullahi Ali creates an organization called the Community Organizing Alliance. It’s run by two of his staffers who worked at Gateway, Sofia Khalid, who was a Lewiston city councilor and a former special assistant at Gateway Community Services, and her brother Mohammed Khalid. They’re working for him.

But they work at Community Organizing Alliance now, which isn’t the same office building. So it’s got a new name, but it’s in the same office building. It’s like the political arm of Gateway Community Services. And it’s tied in with the top Democrats from the state of Maine, non-Somali Democrat political activists.

And this is an explicitly political organization that is existing in the same building at the same time that these taxpayer funded chows are going out and sprinkling money over the community and coming back with a list of potential voters who are living in these households.

And Sophia Khalid now is still running the Community Organizing Alliance and she did a fundraiser just, it was like maybe a month after our last episode. She did a fundraiser with the Secretary of State of Maine, Shana Bellows, who is right now refusing to turn over the voter rolls in the state of Maine to the Trump Justice Department. They’re investigating how many non-citizens or migrants could potentially be voting in the state of Maine.

And Shana Bellows says, “No, I’m not turning over those voter records.” And Shana Bellows, Graham Platner, I’m sure you’ve seen about him. The guy who’s running for Senate in Maine and just a who’s who of Democrats go into Lewiston and do a rally in support of the Somalis after this fraud stuff starts breaking in Minnesota. And who is running it but Safiya Khalid, who’s former Gateway employee running the Community Organizing Alliance. No bid contracts from the Mills administration.

The Non-Emergency Medical Transportation Scandal

And yesterday Nick Shirley released his reporting on I guess the second batch on the non-emergency Medicaid transportation money. And we found, also registered at the Canal Street address of Gateway Community Services is a company called Careway Express, which is a non-emergency Medicaid transportation provider that is registered in the name of Muhammad Khalifa, who’s Safiyyah Khalid’s brother.

The reason why I bring up this transportation money is because this is massive, massive money. This is a $750 million, $750 million contract over 10 years that was awarded to a publicly traded company called MotiveCare. And then they distribute it to subcontractors.

And it’s the subject of a lot of controversy in Maine right now because MotiveCare went bankrupt after this contract was awarded through an RFP. That was an RFP, Request for Proposal. So the state of Maine says we need non-emergency medical transportation, which is paid for by Medicaid, by federal dollars. These are car rides for methadone patients.

Like you’re Sean, you live in Lewiston, you need a boofing kit, you need a ride to go get the kit. Literally you need a ride to the needle exchange clinic through non-emergency medical transportation or the methadone clinic or your doctor’s appointment, whatever it is.

So there’s this huge need for rides, transportation for Medicaid patients. The state does this on a 10 year basis. They’ve got a big bucket of money for it. And they say we need transportation for all of these regions. This had been provided by some nonprofits like Panquist Cap, Waldo Cap, some 501(c)(3)s that are left leaning. They run their own vehicle fleets, whatever.

Three years ago Motive Care bids for it and they get it. The contract for the whole state. And their model is different. They’re just like a call center and a ride processing organization. They subcontract to all these little tiny, like 35 different subcontractors, many of which in their more urban areas are Somali businesses like run the Somali cab services.

And we don’t really know. You don’t have a lot of transparency about how they operate after the money flows through Motive Care to them. One of them is Muhammad Khalid’s Caraway Express, operating out of the same office as Gateway Community Services. But this is $750 million over 10 years.

SHAWN RYAN: $750 million?

STEVE ROBINSON: Yes. For rides in Maine. Disproportionately weighted towards the districts with the most people. That’s how the funding formula gets it. The funding formula is complicated, but it’s a huge amount of money.

Panquist Cap sues because they don’t like how the RFP turned out and they think it was sketchy. It comes out during the RFP process that the people evaluating, deciding to give this money to MotiveCare and therefore their Somali subcontractors, can’t really explain why they did that. They’re like, “Yeah, you know what? That wasn’t really fair. We copied and pasted some stuff from some other areas. We can’t really explain how this all worked out. Terribly unfair.”

The people who are evaluating it, RFP giving this money away said, “Yeah, it was an unfair and flawed process,” but it hasn’t been resolved yet. And a bipartisan group of lawmakers last week sent a letter to Governor Mills saying, “Just rebid the contract. You have the authority. You just rebid the contract.” And she won’t. She won’t do this.

For more than a year now, they’ve been saying, “Just rebid the contract. You can do it.” The company, Motive Care, has gone bankrupt. Now they’re not providing the rides. There’s been this breakdown in service means, poorest, most vulnerable people, people who actually should be on Medicaid and get these rides, who want legitimate health care services, not made up daycare services or made up home care services. They’re not getting transportation, they’re getting stranded. The system is failing them.

So just rebid the contract and it solves all the problems. The contract can go back to the Maine based company that has been handling it forever. And it’s this mystery, why won’t she rebid this contract? Because it’s hurting poor people. Democrats say they want to help poor people. Formerly a Democrat NGO had that contract anyway. She’s like a big nonprofit, like a legitimate nonprofit that plays by the rules. It might be left wing, but plays by the rules. Why won’t she just rebid that contract?

As of today, she has not responded to Democrats and Republicans, an overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republican lawmakers coming out and saying, “Just rebid the contract.” She won’t do it.

SHAWN RYAN: And this is over a year?

STEVE ROBINSON: Over a year ago. This has been, I think, three years now, three years since Motive Care has been bankrupt. So MotiveCare gets the contract. They’re not super financially healthy company. They go bankrupt. They’ve gone into penny stock satisfaction. They now say that they’ve come out of the other side of bankruptcy. Bigger, stronger, leaner.

They’re lobbying lawmakers very hard to keep that contract. Obviously. Why wouldn’t they? Any company would. But their model is not to hire the same people, the same cars or to operate fleets. Their model is to give the money to subcontractors like Caraway Express. They just happen to have a disproportionate number of contractors in these urban areas are Somali run companies who are co-located with the most notorious Medicaid fraud right now in Maine.

And you see the same exact thing in Nick’s second video when that guy David is taking him around, he’s like, “Let me show you, let me show you the second biggest fraud. Non-emergency medical transportation.” I’m like, ding, ding, ding. We have a winner.

It’s like home care services, non-emergency medical transportation, SNAP and EBT fraud where you take the EBT card and you swipe it and you get cash back at a discount for the amount of benefits that are taken off your card. There’s all these different programs that are being scammed. But the thing is, so why won’t Janet Mills just rebid the contract?

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think she won’t?

The Political Calculus Behind the Fraud

STEVE ROBINSON: Because she knows who it’s going to, right? She knows that it’s benefiting the Somali contractors. It’s the only possible way that it makes sense is if she understands the amount of the no bid contracts, the Medicaid money, the non-emergency medical transportation money. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars that’s flowing into this political community which is very, very active, tends to vote quite a bit.

You’ve got your activist base which are funding your door knockers and your ballot harvesters. You’ve got this captured political community that you’re pumping tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into, then they’re turning out and they’re voting for you.

And again, it might not make a determinative difference in general elections because a lot of people are coming out to vote and the Somalis aren’t going to tip the scales in a general election, but in the primary elections they will. And Janet Mills is now running against Graham Platner, this hard left progressive and they’re all going to Lewiston to compete for the Somali vote.

Because you’re talking about 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 votes. And then you’ve got the adjacent people who are in the migrant services world who are funded by the migrant services Ponzi scheme. This constant churn of migrants coming in who need welfare checks and dependency and translation services and this whole industry that gets developed around the borderless welfare state.

They’re the voting block that’s going to decide who the Democratic nominees are. So you either got to pander to them or you’ve got to pump taxpayer money into them if you want that vote. That’s what’s going to decide who the primary nominees are. From Maine, from Minnesota, from whatever state where this phenomenon is happening, this phenomenon of migrant services industrial complex. That’s what it is.

SHAWN RYAN: Man. Let’s talk about.

The Immortal Somali

STEVE ROBINSON: The immortals, the immortal Somali. Yeah, this is something I kind of thought about, but never really dwelled on it because I didn’t know how you would design a journalistic investigation to figure out if there’s a story there. But I was talking with Liz Collins from Alpha News, who is fantastic. I mean, this is the moment for Alpha News. They’re covering, they’re based in Minneapolis, they do state level news and they’re actually willing to report the truth and challenge the regime out there.

And she just says something to me. She’s like, “Have you ever looked at cardiac arrests involving Somalis?” It’s like, I kind of groked what she was getting to and I was like, “You mean like, are Somalis dying of natural causes and being reported?” And she was like, “Yeah.” She’s like, “I was talking with Minneapolis police officers and none of them ever remember responding to a cardiac arrest, aneurysm, stroke of an older Somali person.”

Just looking at the actuarial tables, you would think 100,000 people out there, the odds say that some of them are going to have heart attacks, they’re going to die, and then the police or the emergency services are going to be called to respond. None of the police officers ever remember going to a Somali DOA.

And so I go to some of my sources in the Lewiston Police Department and ask, “Do you remember ever responding to Somali DOA’s cardiac events?” They start laughing like, “You know, we were just talking about this at the station and no one really remembers responding to Somali DOAs.”

So what’s happening, you know, based on that sample? You know, it’s not totally scientific, but we know. So there’s some natural deaths happening from medical events within the Somali community that are not being reported to the state, to the medical authorities, to EMS.

Now, why is that? So what happens if grandma’s got subsidized senior housing, an EBT card and Medicaid benefits, and you report that she’s passed away? Okay, so those benefits get shut off. Everybody can understand. Yeah, you just keep the benefits going. This is how you end up with Social Security or more so the EBT cards, benefits going to dead people.

But what are they doing with the bodies?

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what I was going to ask.

STEVE ROBINSON: What are they doing with the bodies? I don’t know.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting when they find that.

STEVE ROBINSON: I don’t know, man. That’s…

SHAWN RYAN: Man, we’re just turning into a third world country.

Security Camera Footage

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

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

STEVE ROBINSON: The guy, he’s sitting down. You see that thing he sets on the ground when he comes out?

SHAWN RYAN: Hold on, I had to restart it.

STEVE ROBINSON: He comes out and sets something on the ground. Yeah, that’s his arm.

SHAWN RYAN: What? His arm?

STEVE ROBINSON: What do you mean? That’s his arm? That’s like…

SHAWN RYAN: It’s his arm. And it became no longer connected to his body. And he’s walking out of the back room of the market to go get medical help.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy…

STEVE ROBINSON: And this was reported in the news that this had happened. They never really figured out what exactly happened. He claimed that he was chopping up meat at this market and fell into the saw and chopped his own arm off. This is just one of the many mysteries that come with being a police officer in Lewiston, Maine. Guy’s still in Lewiston, by the way. He’s the one with one arm.

That market, by the way, is affiliated with a group that got Lewis in a shooting movie. The AK market had AK Health Services. Yeah. My mind goes to when all these bodies need to be accounted for, my mind goes to the facilities that they have for processing meat. Right. You know, if they’ve got the band saws that can hack somebody’s arm off just in an accident like that.

I don’t know how do you… I mean, as a younger man, I jacked deer before and so have dealt with the problem of trying to make a large carcass disappear. It’s hard. It’s not as simple as you might think.

But yeah, that’s something where a Republican governor could come in and look at the age of people getting Medicaid benefits or EBT card benefits in low stimulus. Like, holy sh*t, we’ve got a bunch of people who are 110 years old getting EBT card benefits. What’s going on here? Can we just call them and see if they’re real people?

SHAWN RYAN: That’s all.

Basic Accountability

STEVE ROBINSON: A lot of this would require to stop is just calling, just like basic checkups, going to the offices. I mean, we’ve got my notes from we did. We visited some of these home healthcare businesses that have sprung up over the last five years. One building on Bishop Street in Portland has all of these businesses registered there. They’re not all home health care businesses. There’s some transportation businesses, but you’ve got, you know, AB Home Healthcare.

SHAWN RYAN: How many are there approximately?

STEVE ROBINSON: There’s 39 companies. We don’t know how many of them are real. How many of them have actually…

SHAWN RYAN: 39 companies in one building?

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah. And they’re all… We actually have video of it that we’ll release in conjunction with this episode. We went in, we knocked on all the doors and nobody’s home. They’re one room office suites. They all have matching signs on the door. They’re checking the box of having an office so that they can unlock the Medicaid money, but no one’s there.

And if somebody from the government just knocked on the door, they’d figure out pretty quickly or just like walk, did what we did, just walk around the building. We visited twice in December and then in January to see what was going on. And it’s clear what’s happening. They just like someone figured out, here’s this empty office building, go get a suite. You check the box, you unlock the Medicaid money. You look like a legitimate business.

But you’ve got AB Home Health Care, Bright Star Home Care, Bright Star LLC, Bright Star Residential, Bright Stars USA, Bishop Star Residential, Coastal Care LLC, Fable Home Care, Greater Portland Home Care. That one has billed $2 million. Maine Home Care, Noble Transportation, which is a Medicaid transportation company. Prestige Home Care. That one’s billed $2.5 million. Knocked on the door, nobody’s there.

Southern Maine Home Care. That one is $4.3 million. Supreme Choice Home Care, $1.1 million to Zolana Personal Care.

The Five Stars Case

Five Stars is an interesting one. Five Stars is one we found audit documents for. The guy who runs Five Stars Personal Care is his name is Mustafa and you can see in the emails that they audit his spending and he gets a million dollars from 2022 to 2024. And at the beginning of 2024 they flag him, they audit his transactions. He has a 70% error rate.

So 70% of the time he sends paperwork to Medicaid to get money, something doesn’t stack up. There’s not documents to substantiate it. He doesn’t pass the straight face test. So they send him a letter, notice of violation, we’re going to be auditing you. We need some additional documents.

If he had those documents, all he would have to do is send them to the Department of Health and Human Services and they’d say, “Okay, you check out, you could continue billing Medicaid.” You can see in the emails that he strings along the process where he doesn’t respond to the letters at first. And then he says that his responses were getting lost in the mail. And then his family is sick, and then his family is sick again. They all have COVID really, really bad. And this is all delayed him.

So he gets extension after extension after extension throughout the audit process and he’s allowed to continue billing hundreds of thousands of dollars while he’s under audit, while he’s making up these excuses, while he’s living in public housing, by the way, and running this business out of public housing as a 25 year old in Maine.

And finally in February of 2025, they shut off billing to him after this whole process. So he’s made a million dollars doing this home health care business. They shut off the money. He never complains. As far as we can see, no one dies, no one loses their health care. He just gets to walk away from the business. The business entity folds and he goes on his life, you know, goes and starts a new enterprise.

We’ve even seen instances of the same person corresponding with the state about one of these audits for a firm that gets shut down because they can’t substantiate their care, going out and starting a second Medicaid business, running it parallel while they’re doing the delay game on the audit process and they’re starting another business that runs.

So you can do this scheme, get your Medicaid billing shut off and you’re not going to be barred from starting a new Medicaid business. And don’t even think about criminal charges or a criminal investigation for any of this and don’t even think about making it public.

This all just gets swept under the rug unless someone does a public records request, finds it, pours over these documents that they make it as hard as possible for you to read and interpret and understand. And there’s no way you find out about what’s happening here without some kind of outside agent bringing transparency.

And it’s been a huge process for us to disentangle what’s happening. Like why are these companies, why do we have fraud investigators at the Department of Health and Human Services who are investigating all this, finding it, teeing it up and then nothing happens. The money’s not recouped, there’s no charges, there’s…

SHAWN RYAN: This is just the commonality with everything.

The Political Protection Racket

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s just swept under the rug because they don’t want to upset the community, they don’t want to upset their voters. They’re pumping money into a community that they want their political support.

And we actually had when Iman Osman resigned from the city council for his gun charges, there was a member of the Somali community who came up at the city council meeting, which we were covering, and said bluntly, I think Elon Musk actually retweeted this video. He said bluntly, “Hey Democrats, we vote for you, you need to protect us.”

That’s the play, that’s the trade off, that’s the pay to play that’s happening in Maine and in Minnesota. The Democrats protect the money making schemes that the migrant communities are running and in exchange they get political support.

And the migrants are taking large amounts of money out of this country in some cases because part of them I think knows what they’re doing isn’t sustainable. So they’re trying to pad their nests for when they have to leave the country. But it’s not for the benefit of the people of Maine, American taxpayers.

It’s so totally destructive to the fabric of society and it does build this animus between the communities. Like the progressive left wants this vision of a totally harmonious “diversity as our strength” multicultural society. But then they do everything they can to prop up these tribal differences and create privileged communities based on race and ethnicity that build this enemy.

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

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s go into, it’s not just the Somalis.

Nation State Connections

STEVE ROBINSON: But wait, it gets worse. It does. I’ll say this so we have some stuff that we haven’t reported that we saved for you. Really totally exclusive. This is the first time people will learn about it.

One is just to put a bow on the Somali conversation. I said I believe that this is backed at the nation state level by political factions in Somalia. We have a major player in Little Mogadishu in Lewiston, who is right now the sitting finance minister of Jubaland Somalia, the same nation state, semi-autonomous region where Abdallahi Ali tried to run for president.

His name is Hussain Hirsi Ahmed. And through Ahmed Management LLC he owns a commercial real estate building in Little Mogadishu. He rents to halal markets with EBT swipe machines, healthcare agencies, left wing pro-migrant NGOs. He runs a money transmitter business.

And he got his foothold, as far as we can tell, in Maine by opening up the main branch of a Minneapolis based money transmission service. So he’s got, he also has some transportation businesses. He’s into all legs of the entrepreneurial worlds that the Somalis inhabit in Maine. The health care, you know, renting, the landlord jobs, the home health care agencies, transportation.

But the big one is money transmitting. If you’re transmitting money through whatever scheme back to Jubaland, you get a skim on that. So that’s where the real money comes from if you’re back in Jubaland. And apparently that’s how you become the finance minister.

So he arrived in, as best we can tell, he starts getting Maine driver’s licenses in Lewiston in the early 2000s and he builds this money transmitting business. Eventually he buys the commercial real estate that becomes a very important building, renting to other Somali groups and now he’s the sitting finance minister.

SHAWN RYAN: Is wild.

Investigating the Money Trail

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, that’s why I say that it’s backed by at the nation state level. Like what is your job if you’re the finance minister of Jubaland? You’ve got all these money transmitting businesses.

You know, we—sorry, I don’t want to delay you before we move on, but these are the healthcare companies that were based on Anderson Street. 203 Anderson Street in Portland, Babylon Beacon. Oh, you know what, sorry, scratch that. This is a different place on Bishop Street, not the one I was talking about. Also a scam. Bunch of Somalis there, no one at the offices.

But what I’m talking about at 203 Anderson, there’s four home health care businesses at this office along with a Dahabshiel, which is the preferred money transmission service of the Central Bank of Somalia. Also the winner of the Somalia Excellence Awards in 2024 for wiring money specifically back to Somalia. This business exists specifically to send money back to Somalia and it’s co-located with a bunch of Medicaid funded businesses in downtown Portland.

When we were there to visit, I tried to wire $40 to Abdi’s mom in Mogadishu. They didn’t let me. But as we’re leaving, we see the Brinks truck guys walk out with bags of cash and get in their truck and walk away. And it’s like this is the full cycle. This is the life cycle of the Maine taxpayer dollar. It goes into the government, it goes down through Medicaid, into these companies, it goes to the Dahab Shield, and then it goes on the Brinks truck and eventually finds its way back to Jubaland, Somalia.

So the money transmission service is just a huge part of this. And it’s backed at the nation state level for Somalia. But also I think about the people we’ll talk about next. I think that other countries are taking advantage of the American welfare state in a systematic way. It’s economic terrorism backed by nation states. It needs to be treated just like you would treat any act of terrorism like they are.

Whether it’s for their own benefit or to weaken the United States, they are systematically exploiting American largesse, the welfare system. And it’s having a punishing, punishing effect on the American middle class. It’s breeding the cynicism. It’s destroying us financially, creates all these perverse incentives in our economy. But it’s 100% backed by political actors in these other countries. And until they pay a consequence for it, until it’s treated like economic terrorism system, it’s going to continue. Yeah, yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, this is depressing. Let’s take a break. We come back, we’ll get into Hotel Rwanda.

—

SHAWN RYAN: All right, we’re back from the break. You ready? On to the next.

STEVE ROBINSON: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I’m always ready.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, it the next.

The Harpe Tool: AI-Powered Investigation

SHAWN RYAN: Tell me about a tool on the break that you were using to sift through all these documents.

STEVE ROBINSON: So, I mean, actually you brought it up on the last segment.

SHAWN RYAN: Yes.

STEVE ROBINSON: First during the Chinese organized crime reporting and then during some of the Medicaid fraud reporting, we have this problem of huge amounts of data, whether it’s Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, huge bodies of government records. We need to figure out how to process this. And it’s more than one journalist can handle. We need this asymmetric solution as a journalist to be able to deal with all this large amounts of data.

And over the last three years, as we’ve been having this experience coming up, butting up against this problem, all these AI tools have come out and GROK has been useful in developing some Python script to like take the no-bid contract documents off of the government server. And I started thinking about can we develop a program or use these AI tools to be like a force multiplier for journalists.

And I had a programmer reach out to me. Actually what ended up happening was we put all of those no-bid contracts, we made them public, we went through them and tried to find as much as we could, did our reporting. We just dumped them on the Internet and said, hey, anybody who wants to see these, the government won’t make them public, we’ll make them public. Here’s transparency for you. And generated a lot of attention in Maine politics.

And someone reached out to me who was a programmer who in like two seconds came up with a script that took them all and made them machine readable and searchable and used like some Google AI, the Gemini AI, and really easily made them so much simpler for a dummy like me to understand. And so I started talking with this guy and he was conservative, Mainer based, maybe a little bit autistic. And I ended up paying him to develop a program that we call Harpe. And it’s named after the blade that Perseus used to cut off Medusa’s head. It’s a good analogy, good imagery for fighting corrupt government.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

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

SHAWN RYAN: And then you put thousands and thousands of pages.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yes. Yeah. And it goes a little bit beyond what you can do with just ChatGPT or Grok or Gemini alone in that you can give it instructions for how to handle information, you can create some projects within it, and then it will do link analysis for you so you can find patterns in the data that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

So we can take the 5,000 pages of audit record, 8,000 pages of audit records that we have, and put them into Harpe and it will analyze them with optical character recognition and then it will do link analysis on it and spit out a web of the interrelationships between these people. So when we find addresses like the ones that we’ve visited, where there are 30 or 40 different healthcare LLCs registered, it’ll spit up boom, boom, boom. And you’ll see it’ll take, weeks and weeks and weeks of reading through these documents and condenses it into a three hour project.

Wow. And so we’ve, it’s been pretty successful for us using this product. And at some point, really, when Jeremy started asking about coming on with you, I was like, it would be really great if we could find a way to allow other people to come and have access to this tool. I mean, it’s like I don’t want to—so this is free. So we’re putting out a list for it. We haven’t decided what we want to do with it yet. I think that there will be some costs we’ll need to recoup with it because I paid the developer to make it.

But people can sign up for like a beta tester list at Get Harpe. We’re looking for some people to help us break the program and figure it out and test it and sign up for it to figure out what the uses for it will be. Because I’ve been telling my just the programmer what I want out of it and it’s been designed to fit my needs as an investigative journalist. But we think that it would be useful to some of the lay investigators who have been just decided like, I want to figure out what’s going on in my community.

And they start looking around and they find 100 trucking companies are registered at one address in Ohio. And people there are voting. A bunch of people there are voting. They find these weird things. There’s so much data out there you can drown in it. So you need a solution to help see the signal through the noise. That’s what we hope Harpe will be. And if people—what’s it called? It’s Harpe. Harpe, like the blade. It’s Getharpe. H-A-R-P-E.com. People can sign up and we’ll be—we’ve got to work out some kinks for it because again, we just—we made it as a tool for me to use and never intended it to be something that we would share.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, yeah, shoot me the link. We’ll put it in the description. I’m sure a lot of people will be interested.

STEVE ROBINSON: I think in the hands of the right people, you could create a journalistic revolution in the country by giving them this asymmetric solution. Because everybody is drowning in data. There’s a lack of transparency and overwhelming transparency. We published the bill. Oh, we have government. Usaspending.com, all the spending data is public. But because there’s so much of it, people can’t really interpret it for themselves.

SHAWN RYAN: And the smart people deciphered.

STEVE ROBINSON: Exactly. But we have the AI tools now that make it really, really gives us—finally gives us the opportunity to make that data meaningful and then tell stories about it. And so that’s what we hope to do.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

STEVE ROBINSON: My shameless plug for Get Harpe.

SHAWN RYAN: We’ll put it in the description. So let’s move into Hotel Rwanda. What’s going on here?

The Central African Migration and Autism Care Fraud in Maine

STEVE ROBINSON: For about two years, I’ve been hearing stories about autism homes, residential care facilities in Maine, and they line up with the refugee trends that we started seeing in 2019. In 2019, there’s a mass migration to Maine. Thousands of Central Africans, primarily from Angola, but also from the Democratic Republic of Congo and from Rwanda. Very distinct from what was happening with the Somali migration.

The mass migration to Maine got so severe that it caused crises twice. I guess you could consider it an ongoing crisis, but the Portland Expo building where the Maine Celtics play turned into a de facto refugee camp twice. Once in 2019, once in 2023, was filled with hundreds, if not up to a thousand people just sleeping on cots because so many people had arrived.

It got so bad that as in Lewiston in 2000, in 2023 in Portland, the mayor had to say, “We just can’t do it. The strain on our public services, the strain on our general assistance, the strain on everything. We’re just, we can’t accommodate this flow of jobless, homeless refugees. Just can’t happen.”

And no one really explained why this was happening, like why this flow of Central African migrants were just showing up in Maine, of all places, where we didn’t have the housing to accommodate these people. Yes, we had a generous welfare system, but was that it? Was that the only reason they were showing up?

And I know there were other migration crises happening across the country, particularly under Biden, with an open southern border. It’s like every small town was dealing with some variation of this. But all of a sudden, in 2023, the emergency rental assistance money, which was federal money that had been funding the housing for a lot of these people, to the extent they could find housing or have housing, that goes away, and it just kind of disappears.

All these people who didn’t have homes and didn’t have jobs just kind of faded or drifted away. And I think we found where they went and what happened to them, because they moved into the residential care industry in the state of Maine.

Following the Medicaid Money Trail

And we found this by looking at the Medicaid spending data. And this is an Excel spreadsheet. Spending by provider from 2019 to 2024. So you can see all 5,000 people who are billing Medicaid in Maine. And we filtered out people who had billed in 2019 and 2020 to find just the startups we wanted to look at. Who are the people who just started billing Medicaid in Maine from beginning in 2020. And who are the people who are doing it really, really well.

And what we found right away was the top company was a company called Legends Residential. Legends Residential is an autism home operator. And they start billing in 2021 at like $3 million. And in 2024 they billed $17.34 million. So this is a company that has grown very quickly operating autism homes. And there hasn’t been a surge in autism in Maine.

So this company grows very quickly. And we find this pattern of all of the fastest growing newly created Medicaid providers in Maine are MaineCare Section 21 residential home operators. These are people who operate two bed homes for autistic or developmentally and intellectually disabled individuals. These are adults who can’t live by themselves and they require 24/7 care.

These are people who can and in some cases have harmed themselves just by eating unsupervised. So these are the most vulnerable people in our society. These companies have all been created in the last five years. They’ve taken over a huge share of these Section 21 waivers for the disabled or autistic population.

They’re growing in terms of the money that they’re bringing in through Medicaid. I mean, almost exponentially, from $3 million to $17 million in the span of three years. That’s very, very great growth for any business. Medicaid is usually not rich in high profit margins. Most businesses that depend on Medicaid are barely getting by because the reimbursement rates are low. But these guys are only getting Medicaid money. There’s no other money coming into these businesses.

The Rapid Rise of Paul Manura

So start looking at Legends Residential. And the CEO is a guy named Paul Manura who I’ve interviewed, and he has an interesting history. I found an interview that Paul Manura did in 2019 with a Maine TV news outlet. And this is when he just showed up in Maine. And it was your classic thing of he’s come from the Congo, he’s a refugee. He’s just happy to be there for his family. First Thanksgiving ever. And, you know, poor starving refugee.

Fast forward from 2019 to now. He’s driving a Mercedes Benz G Wagon. He also has a Dodge Charger. He’s got an $800,000 home. He’s got multiple other properties in Maine. He runs this big business. He’s also got businesses in Arizona, he’s got businesses in Massachusetts. And it’s all happened since then. It’s kind of weird. Like, how did he, you know, just, that is what caught my eye. Just the rapid, rapid success.

The huge amount of money that’s coming into these autism home operators. Like, why is there so much profligate wealth being displayed by Paul Manura? And Paul’s number two, Joe Shambusho, also has a Mercedes Benz G Wagon. I photographed it last week in front of a Legends residential care office.

And so we start looking down at all of these companies and digging into them. All of the CEOs or directors of these companies appear to have historical ties to Rwanda or to be of Rwandan descent. And they all have previous addresses or LLCs or business filings that tie them to Arizona.

The Arizona Connection

Arizona. It’s weird. From like the 2019-2023 period, they all have these businesses in Arizona. Some of them are also Arizona. That’s what we tried to answer. Tried to figure out, why do the people who have the most successful autism care businesses in Maine all have ties to Arizona?

To give you an example, we go to visit Paul Manura’s office, the office of Legends Residential Care in South Portland. It’s in an office suite. Unlike the home health care offices that the Somalis are running, this is attended. This appears to be an actual business. And there are people there.

The first time I’m there, I notice right across the hallway is Golden Home Group Services. Does the exact same thing. And they’re like, right in the same building. Like, that’s weird. It’s the number two business on my list. Kind of jumped out at me. And I asked the secretary, I was like, “So are you guys the same business or what’s going on here?”

The secretary says, “Oh, I think the founders are related or something.” I’m like, “Well, that’s interesting as a journalist.” And later when I talked with Paul on the phone for a phone interview, he said that they’re just friends.

But the founder of that Golden Home Group Services, Michel Canyonbo, has a sober home in Arizona in addition to being an immigration lawyer for Catholic Charities Sober Home in Arizona. And I thought that that was weird.

The Happy House Indictment

So we start looking into it, and what we discover is in 2023, there was a sensational indictment that came down of sober home operators in Arizona. This was another Medicaid fraud scandal. I don’t know why it didn’t make more national news, but there was this elaborate scheme where people were operating sober homes like Minnesota daycares, except for they had real patients, they had Navajo, Native Americans, and they were patient brokering.

That’s what the allegation is in the indictment that is still pending. It’s actually been in 2025, it was expanded. They indicted another 20 individuals and entities. And so it’s a criminal, there’s multiple criminal trials that are playing out this year and next year for this huge Medicaid fraud scandal that revolved around these sober homes where they would take Native Americans and say, “Give us your Medicaid benefits, we’ll bill the taxpayer as if you came here for rehab, for treatment for drug addiction or alcoholism and we’ll give you a cash kickback and then you can go to the next one and the next one and the next one.”

So you’re just generating huge amounts of money by providing fake services. Again, is the allegation in the indictment. All of the people who are indicted in relation to this Happy House was the name of the sober home. All of them are from Rwanda or have historical ties to Rwanda. It’s weird.

And in the new indictment, I guess the newly added entities in 2025, they added a church in Tolleston, Arizona that is alleged to have wired money by the millions back to Rwanda. There’s, in the indictment, there’s listed a $2 million money transfer back to Rwanda. And I’m thinking, you know, I’m looking at the finance minister of Jubaland and then money by the millions going back to Rwanda. That’s really, really weird.

And I discover more and more ties of all these guys. They’ve got previous LLCs, none of them are directly connected to the Happy House fraud. But at least one of them runs a sober home in and around where all these sober homes were busted for running this model.

But it looks like there was this indictment that came down in 2023. They got their hand slapped, they got caught and they kind of moved to another state because that’s when the mass migration starts to Maine. You see, the Angolans and the Congolese and the Rwandans show up in Maine and then slowly they disperse into the jobs at these residential care facilities.

The Business Model

So they’re currently living in and working in these residential care facilities and billing is being submitted to Medicaid in their names for inhabiting these autism care facilities in Maine. It looks like the pattern is moving from state to state trying to figure out what is the best way to extract money from a Medicaid program in a given state based on their laws, their rules, whatever the facts are on the ground.

And the people who are at the top of these organizations, we’ve gone through and we’ve pulled their TransUnion reports. They’re all driving G wagons. They’re all driving G wagons. They all have multiple properties, multiple mortgages, they’re expanding.

I mean, this is a group of companies together, their CEOs and their number twos and number threes, the people in control of these organizations. They own over a thousand easily properties in Maine because they’re buying the homes, the two bedroom homes to convert to residential care facilities and then they’re also buying duplexes and multi-family housing to rent for cash to their workers.

So it’s like they’ve got this, you know, it’s a comprehensive money making operation that they have. And again, it’s based on the flow of migrants over an open border. In order to sustain it, we start talking with people who are, who know these organizations, who have worked for them, who have worked in these houses, who have worked in the industry, people in the real estate industry, like mortgage brokers, who have done some of these financial transactions to try to learn more about what exactly is happening here.

And I also, I interviewed Paul Manura and he insisted that I come into his office and talk to him. But then he stopped responding to my emails when I started asking him some hard questions. He didn’t want to talk about his Mercedes G wagon. He said he was doing everything he does to help the community. I was like, “Well Paul, I want to help my community too, but how does a G wagon help that?” And he was like, “How do you know what I drive?”

The Informal Collective

So we started interviewing people who had worked for the company and we get a picture of what’s happening here. On the surface, if you look at these records, they look like they’re discrete entities, discrete corporate entities all running their own businesses. But they’re effectively one informal collective sharing employees.

A former supervisor told us about a WhatsApp chat where the CEOs of this company arrange how they’re going to move the employees around. And so you have Central African migrants who complete a 50 hour online training course in order to become qualified to care for a disabled adult at one of these houses. 50 hours online, no one checks to make sure you’re actually the person taking it. You don’t have to speak English and they’ll put you in charge of the care of another human being.

SHAWN RYAN: Don’t even have to speak English.

STEVE ROBINSON: No. In fact, Paul told me 70% of his employees don’t.

SHAWN RYAN: How do they communicate with their patients?

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s a very good question.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s not important, is it?

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s a very good question. But that gets to like, that’s the fundamental baseline issue is that the, are there patients? It would be better if there weren’t really like that’s what, having been working on this investigation and then seeing what’s happening in Minnesota and the daycares don’t have people. I’m like it would be better if the patients were fake because the level of…

SHAWN RYAN: So there are patients?

STEVE ROBINSON: Yes, we’ve door knocked some of these facilities. We’ve confirmed that there are patients.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh man.

STEVE ROBINSON: The people that we talk to, patients, there’s, I mean there’s ethical issues.

SHAWN RYAN: More than the f*ing fraud and the money is the actual human being that’s going through this, are they being cared for?

Systemic Neglect and Abuse in Residential Care Facilities

STEVE ROBINSON: Do you know the people who have been inside these facilities say that there are staggering levels of neglect and abuse happening. We know of at least two instances of patients dying. I’ve seen a police report of an adult whose dietary instructions were, you know, you’re supposed supervised eating. He choked to death in a facility where he’s supposed to have 24/7 residential care. Someone awake? A healthcare professional. He choked to death eating his breakfast. I’ve seen the police report.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn.

STEVE ROBINSON: And it’s happened. I talked with Lewiston police officers, Bangor police officers, Portland police officers from the big agencies. They’ll find disabled adults wandering the highway. They go and they grab them. They know where they’re supposed to be. They bring them back to their resident, their taxpayer funded residential care facility. And it’s supposed to have a 3 to 1 staffing ratio which means they’re high need. You know, they need a lot of care. 24/7, three people.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s going on in Portland?

STEVE ROBINSON: Everywhere, you know this.

SHAWN RYAN: There’s a section of Portland with those high rise brick buildings. Those are what I’m talking about.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yes. You’re talking.

SHAWN RYAN: Is that run by them?

STEVE ROBINSON: That’s subsidized housing. Those are just projects. These are mostly two bedroom residential houses because that’s specifically what this program is supposed to do is give disabled adults a feeling of normalcy. Like it’s their home, they’re paying for it with their Medicaid benefits. There are professionals who are supposed to be coming in and taking care of them in their own home.

What’s happening though is that these employees are treating it like it’s their home, it’s their space, it’s their spot to go watch TV or play Xbox. And the patient gets, you know, hides in their back room or in the basement. But the law enforcement who finds these people out wandering around, grab them, bring them back to their house. There’s nobody there. Supposed to have three people there to look after this one person and there’s no one there. And how long has that been happening? And are they still billing for the 24/7 care in the name of three people? Well, you bet your ass they are.

The Autism Home Conspiracy

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

Yeah, I mean residential. The records that Paul Muniera testified to the state legislature in January of 2025, he said he cares for 40 plus individuals with autism or intellectual and developmental disorders. That same year he gets, or the year prior he got $17.3 million. So make that math work for me. You’ve got 40 plus people, you’re caring for $17.34 million and the state has 44 section 21 waivers for him or something like $400,000 per patient. It’s a lot of money.

And he could be, maybe there’s another Medicaid program that he’s dipping into like section 29, which is not residential care. It’s a different level of autism care. But there’s so much money flowing into these organizations that it doesn’t make sense. And if it’s the first thing that I find looking at the spending data, you have to imagine that we’ve got this whole department of fraud, we have this whole department of Adult Protective Services who are supposed to take care of disabled adults who are supposed to be the people that are called when there’s abuse of adults happening or neglect of adults happening and they are being called by the people I’ve talked with who have been inside these houses, they are being called and nothing’s being done about it.

It’s so infuriating. I talked with a clinical professional who worked with these disabled adults before and after this all happened from about 2018 to 2023 is when it really kind of blossomed. And so she’s seen the quality of life and the, I guess how these people are doing in terms of their mental health. Some of them have the cognitive ability of an eight year old or they’ve got different disabilities. But she’s had a stable relationship with them over a period of years and cares for them and provides them clinical care. And she’s seen their quality of life just go.

Talking about there’s neglect that’s happening in the form of sleeping. The residential care professionals are not supposed to be sleeping. So they’re showing up and they’re working 120 hours a week because they’re being shuffled around all these different LLCs in this informal autism racket, you can call it. And sleeping is condoned. There’s just this kind of, like, banal neglect. It’s just sit there, yes, be a.

SHAWN RYAN: Body in a house, do whatever the f* you want. We don’t care. We do not care.

Language Barriers and Dietary Neglect

STEVE ROBINSON: Exactly. But you’ve got the baseline. You’ve still got these disabled adults that you have to keep alive if you want that money coming in. And these are people with feeding instructions, medication instructions written in English. They don’t read. 70% of them. The founder of the company admits 70% of them do not speak English. And, you know, he recommends English language instruction, but it’s not mandated by the state. It’s not a requirement to become a direct support professional. It’s not a requirement.

And that results in so much just like callous depravity of, like, one individual, I’m told, is fed boiled chicken, only boiled chicken, because they figured out he’s got some dietary restrictions, and they’ve just got it like, it’s kind of complicated. But they don’t care about the details. They just know that if they feed him boiled chicken, he stays alive. So his roommate at that house also gets the same diet, boiled chicken.

And they feed him. You know, they’re often making the food that is, you know, that they culturally desire and feeding it to them. They’re not celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving, which might seem like a small thing, but these are people who are, again, they’re living their entire life.

SHAWN RYAN: They have nothing.

STEVE ROBINSON: Residential care, they have nothing. You give them this routine, you put out the Christmas tree, you make them feel happy and special about what’s happening. And that’s what they had previously when they were in homes run by Americans who spoke English.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, that is sad.

State Complicity and Forced Relocations

STEVE ROBINSON: The people that I’ve talked with, all of them, come back to that. There has to be, at some level, state, not just approval or turning the blind eye to this, but a directive to make this happen. Because some of these individuals are wards of the state. They have no family on the outside. They’re disabled, and they don’t have someone on the outside who’s going to come to that residential home and take them out to, you know, go to the mall or something and just check on them, see how their quality of living is.

Those were the ones who were targeted in 2023, 2024, removed from their homes that they’d been in for in some cases six years. They’re run by Americans and placed with these new startups against their will. In some cases, some of them are verbal. They were able to say, “I don’t want to. This has been my home for six years, I don’t want to go.” And now they’re capable of saying, “My residential caretakers don’t speak English. They don’t do Christmas, they don’t do Thanksgiving, I don’t like the food, I want to be here.”

And there’s a list that circulates amongst residential care providers. If one of these disabled adults says, “I want a new arrangement, I don’t want to live here,” it’s their money. And the Disability Rights act requires you to honor their wishes. These aren’t prisoners, right? They’re not like, you know, slaves of the autism care operations.

SHAWN RYAN: They don’t have no advocates, huh?

Failed Advocacy and Systemic Corruption

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

And again, this is, we’re talking about like moving these people out of a home. That list, the adult protective services, the long term care ombudsman, the guardians, the taxpayer money, all of this. There are so many points where someone in the government should be able to step in and be like, “This is f*ed up. What are we doing?” And people are dying and the police are being called all the time to these homes and having to deal with this, they’re finding severe neglect and abuse that is just so.

I mean I was like talking to some of these people. I’m filled with just a mix of homicidal rage and just like, why is this happening? Why aren’t people talking about this? It’s a very hard story to get into and to tell and to really figure out what’s going on, but also just horror at the levels of abuse and neglect that will be happening in these homes that we’ll never know about because the victims can’t advocate for themselves.

You know, your testimony as someone with the cognitive capacity of an eight year old, if you say you were sexually assaulted, as some of these individuals have alleged, I’ve seen the police reports. They don’t ever stand up in court. That’ll be just settled. And they’ve got the, in these autism home operators. They have the cash to go settle these.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn.

Real Estate Schemes and Financial Exploitation

STEVE ROBINSON: And it’s, I mean just the residential care facilities that the Section 21 operators control. Hundreds if not thousands, easily thousands when you add additional properties that they’re buying in order to rent to their non-English speaking employees. So they’ve got their billing for them 80 to 120 hours a week in these homes and they’re kicking them out and they stay, you know, eight to an apartment in Lewiston or Auburn.

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

So you’ve got yet again another, what I would say is fairly described as a conspiracy to exploit the people of Maine, our most vulnerable disabled population, to enrich yourself from the taxpayers that for whatever reason the powers that be are just turning a blind eye to. And maybe they don’t know that it’s happening and they will now, but it’s infuriating.

Whistleblowers Silenced

I mean, I’ve interviewed so many people who have worked in these houses and have said, “We tried to blow the whistle on this, we tried to complain and we were told if you want to keep your license in whatever field you’re in, you’ll stop talking about this.” Yes, I have an interview that will release the clinical professional who said she tried to complain about this and she was told that you’ll lose your license if you press this. And she knew of four other people she said that were told similarly.

So the people have tried to complain about this, but it boils down to the disabled individual who’s upset about the quality of care they’re getting. Well, they’re just racist. That’s the only reason they’re complaining. Or the social worker or the clinical professional or the supervisor, the direct support professional, whatever it is. Like if you complain about this idea that Maine’s most vulnerable disabled people are being thrown into the maw of a non-English speaking 24/7 residential care setting, you’re just racist.

You can’t. It’s not that you have just like common sense and you see that the language gap would degrade the quality of life and the dignity of these people. You have to have some evil motive for not thinking that that’s okay. And it’s, I mean, again, all these people are driving Mercedes G Wagons.

SHAWN RYAN: This is f*ing crazy, man.

Follow the Money

STEVE ROBINSON: You know, if I was. We’re funded through donations. Maine Wire is part of a non-profit. If I was driving around in a Mercedes G Wagon, I think people would have some questions. People would want to know, geez, how much money is going to the Maine Wire? Like, are you using that money effectively? If Steve’s driving around in a G wagon? Well, hold on a second. Everybody at the Maine Wire has G Wagons. What’s going on here?

So I think it’s totally fair to ask questions about this and the fact that they’re expanding and they all have ties to Arizona. And one of them is a lawyer for Catholic Charities, the very group that shepherded the Central African migrants into Maine from 2019 to 2023. And Catholic Charities, by the way, also has an office in Tolleston, Arizona, where the sober homes orbit. Where the sober homes were and where the, I guess the indictment of Happy House centers and where that church is that was wiring money back to Rwanda.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you suggest people do? I mean, this, this.

STEVE ROBINSON: I mean that.

The Challenge of Institutional Failure

SHAWN RYAN: Just what do you do about this? Nobody of any importance seems to give a… I shouldn’t say importance, with any power, with any ability to actually do something.

STEVE ROBINSON: You know, I don’t really know. And this one is hard because at every institutional level we have an independent ombudsman. The Long Care ombudsman is supposed to be writing annual reports about what’s going on and blowing the whistle. But we have a child welfare ombudsman in Maine too. And every year the child welfare ombudsman comes out and says, “Hey, kids are dying. This is corrupt. And it’s broken.” That’s broken down.

Adult Protective Services doesn’t want to pay attention to this, doesn’t want any attention drawn to the Office of Aging and Disability Services, which runs under the Health Department. They don’t want to do anything about this. The federal government, I don’t know if they have the ability to come in and investigate this. But again, you could turn off the money. You can turn off the money.

You know, these businesses, they can have the money turned off. But unlike the fake daycares and the fake home healthcare agencies, because you have real patients, that adds another dynamic to it. There needs to be a plan in place to take care of these people. We’re talking about between 3,000 and 4,000 disabled adults who have these waivers that unlock this residential care. So you’ve got to accommodate that. You’ve got to take care of these people.

And again, a lot of them don’t have family on the outside. They have no one. They have no one except for a small group of providers who have talked to me or have sent me emails or caring for them sometimes at their own financial loss, you know, sending them Christmas presents in their new homes. They have nobody.

And these are the exact people that the Medicaid program is supposed to help. This is like the quintessential social safety net need. There are people in our society who can’t go out and pull themselves up by their bootstraps because it’s like a s* luck bad roll of the dice. They were born into a situation where they are disabled and they can’t just go out and work 50 hours a week or start a company or something.

And so we have a social safety net to take care of them and we are failing big time. And there are people taking advantage of that. There are people turning a blind eye to that and the money has to be turned off to people who aren’t following the rules, who are tolerating this abuse and neglect because it’s better for their margins to turn the money off. And you have to be ready for what happens after that.

But again, this is a very complicated one because it’s less blatant that there’s Medicaid fraud happening. If there’s no kids in the daycare, boom, that’s fraud. Let’s claw that money back. Well, if there’s actually a patient there, well, you can say that they were providing substandard care, non-English speaking care.

SHAWN RYAN: I think you got to find some family members. Yeah, if there are any. I mean, a lot of these people are probably solo, parents are dead.

STEVE ROBINSON: Yeah, they’re wards of the state, you know.

SHAWN RYAN: And so there might not be anybody. But man, if you could find somebody to blow the whistle on abuse.

Documenting the Abuse

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

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

STEVE ROBINSON: And there’s also, there’s other issues with the autism home operators that predate this, you know, they’ve run into some regulatory issues as well and they don’t want to be viewed as trying to take out the competition.

And the other thing is similar to the Chinese organized crime and basically every government corruption, fraud, organized crime story we report on in the state of Maine, there is this miasma of fear that hangs over the state that you’re going to be retaliated against. If you blow the whistle on wrongdoing, if you speak out against government corruption, the state is going to come in and f*ing ruin you.

If you’re a cop and you’re two or three years away from having your pension vest, the state’s going to come in and they’re going to f* with you. Like the attorney general, he does all the police involved shooting, whether it was a justified shooting or not. You’re going to criticize the attorney general when he might hold your fate in the palm of his hand doing all those investigations.

Rick Savage of Sunday River Brewing Company, he goes on Tucker’s show back when he was on Fox and criticizes the COVID lockdowns. State comes in and takes his liquor license away.

SHAWN RYAN: No s*.

STEVE ROBINSON: He’s forced to sell his business. They sent agents into his restaurant to like measure the plexiglass and see like if they were forcing people to put their masks on. Took his liquor license away. He’s forced to sell his business. He’s running a new one in New Hampshire now.

Dr. Meryl Nass goes on the radio. She’s a left wing doctor, by the way. Goes on the radio and criticizes vaccine policy, COVID lockdowns. They hunt her down and take her medical license away.

A Culture of Fear and Retaliation

So those are just some discreet examples. But this culture of fear that the state is going to come take away your livelihood and ruin you if you speak out is very real. And it hangs over everything we do. Everything.

I was trying to figure out how much a stamp cost in Maine if you send out a government letter because Janet Mills sent out checks to voters before the 2022 election instead of doing just the electronic benefit transfers. It was supposedly COVID stimulus, but she sent them checks with a letter that was like, “Hey, I gave you this money.” You know, wink and a nod, vote for me.

So I was trying to figure out what was the added expense of doing that snail mail as opposed to just the electronic deposits. And the guy I’m talking with who runs the post office is like, “You trying to get me fired, man? I got a, you know, an ex-wife and four kids.” I was like, what? He was scared to tell me how much a stamp costs because he knew the implications of having information he provided embarrass the regime in power.

But that’s just like that hangs over the Somali welfare fraud. The whistleblower, Chris Bernardini, who came forward, the only reason he did is because he’s in Florida, moved to Florida and worked remotely. And when he came out, instead of contacting him to hear his allegations, he got a letter from Maine Revenue Services. They audited him.

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

Everyone who speaks out against corruption in the state, they find whatever lever of power they can have.

SHAWN RYAN: They’ve done anything to you?

STEVE ROBINSON: They have. I mean, they’ve tried. I mean, they’ve tried to come after me, you know, rhetorically and legally for sure, but it’s like, I don’t get government money and I don’t need a license to do journalism.

They actually just earlier, as all these welfare fraud scandals are breaking, my reporter John Featherston is trying to go into the statehouse to interview Decca Delac, former employee of the company. Big figure in this entire story, in this national scandal. And the sergeant at arms at the door tells him he’s not allowed. Tries to bar him from entering.

And then the, you know, the House speaker and the Democrats all lie and pretend like they didn’t, but three separate times told him he wasn’t allowed on the floor. And we made enough of a fuss so that eventually they had to allow him in because it’s open for press. It always has been. Fifteen years I’ve been doing this. The House chamber floor has always been open for press, but they do little things like that.

And they’re trying to create a credentialing process. They tried to kick us out of COVID briefings. They tried to limit your access to information and smear you. And there’s other, you know, legal things that they do, you know, subpoena you to try to hunt down your sources so that they can punish those people.

You know, there’s… But we’re in a privileged position because we’re not relying on government money. We don’t have government licenses. Almost everybody in Maine does because we’ve crossed an event horizon where everybody is relying on government money in some way. Whether you’re in the hospital and you’re relying on Medicare, Medicaid or you’re in a big construction company and you’re relying on Department of Transportation contract.

Everybody in our society has a pinch point that can be tweaked if they come out and say what they really say. And it’s this Orwellian control system that has been exercised, I mean, just taken to extremes in Maine for eight years in conjunction with the migrant based political conspiracies that we’ve been talking about, which has just turned Maine into a place that I am not familiar with. It’s not a place. It’s not the place I grew up in.

The Future of Maine

Do you think you’ll stay? I mean, we’ll see. It’s very much an open question. Depends on how the 2026 election goes. Never going to leave the fight. I’m never going to stop doing what I’m doing. But the cost of housing, in part because there’s so much money coming in to buy up the houses to either turn them into flop houses for Chinese cannabis farmers or African Medicaid autism home operators.

We’re talking about thousands of houses that have been taken off the market at a price way above what working class Mainers should be paying. So the cost of housing is extreme. The schools suck, taxes are really, really high, spending is through the roof, but nothing is getting better.

SHAWN RYAN: Better.

STEVE ROBINSON: The only thing that’s gotten better, honestly, Sean, is they’re no longer giving away free boofing kits because of you. Because of you. You embarrassed them. That clip went so viral that they…

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

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

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

STEVE ROBINSON: They are, but it’s hard. The sheriffs are popularly elected, so they’re not totally… They don’t have the same levers of control over them that some of the other law enforcement do. The state police definitely do. State police are the people ideally suited to deal with some of this. But they’re, you know, controlled by politicians. The local police in Lewiston or Portland, they’re controlled by politicians, you know, so they do. They want to do the right thing.

There’s so many people in Maine who want to do the right thing. And a lot of them, I have this experience every time I go into the field all the time, every week, going out and talking with people. And when they know that somebody wants to hear their story, their eyes light up because they’re like, “I’ve got a story to tell.” And you would be stunned by the stories that these people have to tell.

And we have… I mean, I could keep a team of 50 investigative reporters busy just with what’s happening in Maine. We have so much. We’re like drowning. We’re a triage unit, taking the stories that we think are the most important and focusing on those.

But it all goes back to the control of the political regime, the power that they wield over society by being able to pull your funding or pull your license or get you fired or sic a mob after you to get, you know, 51 one-star reviews on your restaurant because you did a social media post backing a conservative school board candidate or something like that.

There’s this crazy tool of system of control that they’ve created, and the migrant industrial complex is just a part of that. It’s a big part. It’s a significant part, man.

Closing Thoughts

SHAWN RYAN: Well, Steve, I appreciate what you’re doing, man.

STEVE ROBINSON: Thanks. I appreciate you having me in again. I wish someday I’ll come in here and we’ll tell a happy story about a turnaround in Maine.

SHAWN RYAN: Something tells me that’s not happening anytime soon, but I hope it does.

STEVE ROBINSON: I hope we can get there. I think there’s enough good people in Maine.

SHAWN RYAN: I do wonder what we will talk about next time.

STEVE ROBINSON: Have a few ideas.

SHAWN RYAN: What are they?

STEVE ROBINSON: Criminal conspiracies. Right on. You can bet.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, Steve, thanks for coming, man. I really appreciate it.

STEVE ROBINSON: It’s always good to see you. Thank you very much. Can’t wait till next time.

SHAWN RYAN: No matter where you’re watching the Shawn Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can.

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