In this episode of the War Room, host Stephen K.K. Bannon is joined by Luke Rosiak of The Daily Wire to discuss a new piece on the corruption at the African Development Foundation, an agency run by the Department of Agriculture.
00:01:28.660Call me crazy if you're thinking the idea that the social contract that we have here in this country, your government shouldn't work to, I don't know, replace you, suppress your wages.
00:01:36.100And, I don't know, leave us less safe at home and abroad with an open border.
00:01:40.860But luckily, we have President Trump back in office.
00:01:43.580And through that, a wonderful conduit to expose so much of that aforementioned waste, fraud and abuse, obviously, has been doge.
00:01:52.220Though we're still waiting on some of those receipts.
00:01:54.320But I was going to say, I don't know if I'll hold my breath.
00:01:58.580But I guess the media has been picking up the slack there.
00:02:02.380Luke Rosiak over at The Daily Wire has been doing some wonderful investigations on a ton of verticals, but particularly on the African Development Foundation, which I think, as your piece is uncovered, is just rife with fraud and corruption.
00:02:35.660This is basically a USAID-like agency.
00:02:39.060And I never even heard of it until I saw these pieces in the left-wing media that positioned it as brave resistance heroes for standing up to doge.
00:02:47.940The Guardian called it the little agency that could because what happened is when Doge went in to audit its books, its staff locked the doors and physically would not let them see the finances of this foreign aid agency.
00:03:03.860And that went on for a few weeks, and ultimately the U.S. Marshals had to come and forcibly take control of this building, this government agency.
00:03:13.040Finally, the president of the United States got to control the – it required basically almost military force to seize control of this building.
00:03:19.940And so people are positioning its resistance as principled, and they had all these reasons why they didn't think Trump should be in control.
00:03:28.300And I wondered what the real deal was, and it didn't take me long to figure out the place is basically a crime scene.
00:03:35.080That's why they didn't want Doge coming in.
00:03:37.960And so I talked to employees there who almost uniformly kind of acknowledged this place was so corrupt.
00:03:45.820And what they were doing was they were sending money to Africa like they were required by law to do, but then they were forcing the Africans to send the money back to them under the table.
00:03:57.000I literally have a receipt of a $17,000 wire going to like a low-level assistant in D.C.
00:04:03.820They had other people who were being paid by grantees like Africa 24, which is a news outlet in Africa, that were then paying D.C. bureaucrats.
00:04:14.360So it really does seem like essentially a money laundering scheme that's designed to trick Congress into thinking this is a low-overhead charity that's just sending all its money to Africa without realizing a lot of that money is coming back right here to D.C.
00:04:31.120It's quite interesting because you hear from MSNBC, right, the idea that, no, no, we support getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse, too.
00:04:39.520We just think maybe Doge isn't the proper blunt force instrument to actually be, you know, the batter and ram to go after a lot of this.
00:04:47.100But then, of course, they never actually cover stories like this.
00:04:50.100Can you sort of give our audience maybe some of the contours, flesh them out, of who exactly these people are who are working in these agencies?
00:04:57.040You know, I would take it they're sort of career appointees.
00:05:43.380And then he became head of this this group, the African Development Foundation.
00:05:49.880And then you also have basically some bureaucrats who are pretty heavily implicated in serious misconduct, potentially criminal at this agency, who just have really no background at all.
00:06:04.060In fact, the chief financial officer had declared bankruptcy and had his house foreclosed on.
00:06:09.520And then they make him the chief financial officer of a government agency.
00:06:12.880So he can't even manage his own finances, but we're putting him in charge of millions of dollars.
00:06:17.800And so there are all these cases where it really seemed so sketchy.
00:06:22.620And in some in one case, I found this chief financial officer, Matthew Zahieu.
00:06:29.040He was steering money and contracts and grants to a friend of his that was supposedly this African.
00:06:35.580But really, it was a guy he worked with at the Department of Veterans Affairs, who was himself a contracting officer.
00:06:41.040So this guy is in charge of giving out contracts and then he creates his own company and it receives the contract from his friend.
00:06:48.140And they pretend it's an African company or they say it's an African company.
00:06:53.540But at the same time, this is a guy who's living in the D.C. suburbs, who's working for the federal government and who's receiving actually COVID funds intended to save U.S. jobs at the same time that they're claiming it's an African company receiving charity funds from this U.S. aid outfit.
00:07:11.580And so there were all these people telling U.S. aid to like this is just one of any number of things that like seem like a basically a criminal enterprise at this U.S. at this foreign aid agency.
00:07:23.280And it turns out U.S. aid actually, U.S. aid inspector general looked, sees this guy's, the CFO's phone, looked at his bank records and found sure enough he was receiving payments, secret under the table payments like kickbacks from his friend when he steered government funding to him.
00:07:41.260And so that kind of explains why this African Development Foundation was giving contracts for travel during COVID when nobody was traveling.
00:07:51.740And so you have basically, you know, about forty five million dollars a year of money going out the door, supposedly to Africa.
00:08:00.700But it's just a complete financial house of cards.
00:08:04.560And everybody on the inside will tell you that.
00:08:07.500And nobody on the left really talked to these employees.
00:08:10.300And most of them to kind of circle back to your point, I mean, most of them, yeah, of course, they're like Democrat voters who work at these these foreign aid agencies.
00:08:18.880But they were some of the first to tell me, like, this is a bad idea for the left to make this liberal agency like the face of the resistance against Doge because they know that they're locking the doors actually because they're hiding criminal or, you know, that kind of terrible conduct.
00:08:38.200And so they're actually worried because they are Democrats.
00:08:41.180The Democrats are stepping on a rake by, you know, holding up this agency as like this little noble Goliath, noble, noble David, like slaying the Goliath of Elon Musk.
00:08:52.780But it really is funny because I don't know that Doge even knew about all this stuff that's coming out in this four part series that's running all this week in the Daily Wire.
00:09:03.120They just kind of had this, which almost makes it worse, right?
00:09:06.280Because it's almost like you could just throw a rock anywhere in D.C. and hit a hit a federal agency and find this kind of terrible misconduct.
00:09:12.380Either that or they just have a really good instinct for it, for kind of sensing where something's not right.
00:09:18.820But this is what Elon Musk has said time and again, is when people resist that basic accountability, like let me see your books, it's usually because they're doing something wrong.
00:09:28.900And that's actually exactly what we found here.
00:09:31.540Well, yeah, and I think it makes the apoplexy over that, you know, what was it, 17 fired, IGs, purely performative.
00:09:40.260These people were not good at their jobs.
00:09:41.660They were not good at conducting oversight.
00:09:44.040They're probably, you know, in on the grift.
00:09:45.840But I'm curious, too, because another, I think, big refrain, strapline that you hear is by shuttering agencies.
00:09:51.240I'm sure this one would be an absolutely perfect example.
00:09:54.620You know, you're crippling American soft power abroad.
00:09:57.480I always say, well, if American soft power was so great, particularly in Africa, then tell me why, what, upwards of 90 percent of the countries there signed on to China's Belt and Road.
00:10:06.020And essentially every port or infrastructure project there has been seized, either, I guess, now or in the future by Beijing.
00:10:13.160But this sort of infrastructure is a microcosm for how the United States has advanced this term of soft power abroad.
00:10:20.140Do you think that this is sort of, again, just another death knell for that idea that agencies like these provide any demonstrable benefit to our standing in the world?
00:10:29.260Yeah, I mean, a lot of good points there.
00:10:32.360Your first one, USAID IG, knew about this for years.
00:10:35.700They found the secret payments to the CFO in January of 2024, and they filed a criminal, like a search warrant application laying it all out last year.
00:11:06.340And so now the idea that we should listen to them, I mean, they had basically years to reform this agency, and nobody did anything.
00:11:15.120And to the point about is this going to harm Africans or harm the U.S.?
00:11:19.580I mean, basically what I've seen in my reporting is government agencies oftentimes devolve into places that exist to pay the salaries of government employees, and their primary goal is to justify their continuing salary.
00:11:33.840And so what happened here is they were actually – we think of Africa as being predisposed to corruption, but here you had government employees for America who were pressuring the Africans to be corrupt.
00:11:47.700And so we would tell them, all these foreign aid agencies on the American side, we tell, like, Africans, don't just, like, give out contracts to your friends.
00:11:56.380You've got to advertise it publicly and compete.
00:11:58.040We were actually telling them, look, we're going to give you the contract, but it's on the condition that you give a – we're going to give you a grant, but you have to give a contract to my previous employer or to my friend, or you have to put my employees on your payroll.
00:12:11.260And so there are employees at this agency who acknowledged it was actually undermining America's role as if we want to be regarded as like a beacon of morals.
00:12:23.560I mean these were not – they were not doing that.
00:12:25.460They were out to get money for themselves.
00:12:28.040You know, another example that's kind of funny is they were pushing a pyramid scheme on poor Africans.
00:12:36.060They were – you know, Herbalife, it's like the multi-level marketing scheme that had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:12:42.420They were pushing Herbalife on Africans?
00:12:46.680Because their board member, John Aguanabi or something, he was the vice president of this government agency, and he was also CEO of Herbalife.
00:12:55.780And so they start pushing Herbalife onto Africans.
00:12:59.420So we're told if you cut this government agency, you're cruel and heartless and you want poor African orphans to die.
00:13:06.120But they were in – when they were in charge, they were like, how can we make a buck off of these peasants?
00:13:11.820How successful was that attempt at a pyramid?
00:13:20.560Well, this guy, John Aguanabi, was actually appointed to this African Development Agency, first by, I believe, George W. Bush and then reappointed by Barack Obama.
00:13:29.780And right after Herbalife had to pay a fine for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and then also a fine for being a pyramid scheme, they tried to go into Africa and build their brand there.
00:13:47.000And they said, we're going to give some money to Africans and then we're going to give them free products and we're going to provide a Herbalife employee as a mentor.
00:13:55.920And so I don't exactly know what happened after that because there was a lot of secrecy around it.
00:14:03.540But the first thing they did is they pretended that it was a partnership with the Herbalife Foundation, like some sort of 501c3 counterpart.
00:14:15.080And so they were just trying to build their brand in Africa.
00:14:17.980And this is a firm that had to pay money because basically it tricks people into thinking you're going to get rich by selling Herbalife and you wind up poor.
00:14:28.940That truly may be one of the most outlandish stories that I've ever heard on the show.
00:14:33.420And that is a pretty high or I guess low bar.
00:14:35.820But to your point, the fact that you can't even, no knock on you, but necessarily answer my question because the information is not readily available to speak to sources and methods as to how you sort of produced this story.
00:14:47.980If you were able to have access, you know, replicate this agency by agency or at least to some of the, you know, sub-whatever foundations under the USAID umbrella or purview, do you think that, you know, from your perspective, having done a lot of reporting on agencies like this, that you would find similar waste, fraud, and abuse, take your pick of which one it exactly is, how it, you know, gets sorted out, but that you would find this across the board?
00:15:13.220Yeah, I think this is one of the more over-the-top examples.
00:15:16.320I think when you look at the tiny little agencies, it gets way worse because there's not like layers of accountability.
00:15:22.560If you get a couple of corrupt people, there's nobody looking over their shoulders.
00:15:26.460So honestly, I mean, obviously, I think there's waste, fraud, and abuse, a lot of it in every cabinet department.
00:15:31.660But one of the things I've done a number of stories of over the years is these little agencies that nobody's ever heard of, they go completely off the rails.
00:15:38.280And I guess you could say that is government, when left to its own devices, if there's not checks and balances, that's what they're going to do is devolve into things that exist to pay the government employees above all else.
00:16:04.860So yeah, the little agencies, I mean, we're not going to balance the budget by cutting off, cutting, cutting, you know, these little agencies.
00:16:11.040But they are pretty telling about whether, you know, this idea that people are mad about Doge.
00:16:28.080It's the left-wing employees who work there who are the first to say, this agency was so bad, and now it's, you know, it's, in their mind, unfortunate that it's being used to, that it makes all the foreign aid industry look bad.
00:16:41.900But to be honest, nobody did anything about this for years.
00:16:45.460And there's all this documentation where these, some of these grants were being run by the CFO, which is not appropriate.
00:16:52.820They have people that are supposed to be figuring out which Africans to give it to.
00:16:55.940But the CFO was doing all these sketchy things.
00:16:58.580They were paying employees through random LLCs to keep the money under $10,000 so they didn't have to report it to Congress.
00:17:06.420They were literally just having people that worked in the headquarters in D.C.
00:17:11.040who are just getting paid by random African companies.
00:17:14.160The whole thing was unbelievably corrupt.
00:17:16.640And then, meanwhile, the top people, they would abuse the staff, make them cry, oftentimes make them work without pay when they couldn't get the secret LLCs to pay them.
00:17:27.980And so the whole thing is hypocritical.
00:17:31.500I mean, the idea that they would be lecturing conservatives that you're callous and cruel and you want Africans to die.
00:17:38.280We gave these people $50 million a year to help Africans since 1980, and they didn't really use it.
00:17:45.220They were using it more on themselves.
00:17:47.060They were buying first-class travel and $1,000-a-night hotel rooms in violation of federal rules.
00:17:53.560They let the NBA players choose who taxpayers were going to give money to in Africa so they could hang out with celebrities.
00:18:02.440And then, ultimately, they used federal money to this guy, C.D. Glynn.
00:18:08.480He was in charge of this agency, and he would use the money to build his own brand, paying government money to speak at conferences and to serve on prestigious boards and so on.
00:18:17.700And now he's president of the PepsiCo Foundation.
00:18:20.600So this is a guy that fell upwards, and now he's managing $70 million, and he's giving out all these DEI grants through Pepsi.
00:18:31.020Well, Luke, I think you've successfully outraged.
00:18:33.420I guess I'll speak for myself, me, and probably our audience, too.
00:18:36.780So naturally, if they want to keep up with the rest of your reporting, you really do great work.
00:18:40.940Where can they go to follow you and read everything?
00:18:59.040And I think our next guest, Brian Kennedy, you're going to have a tough time beating that.
00:19:04.060A bunch of our tax dollars being used to, I guess, buttress Herbalife pyramid schemes in Africa.
00:19:10.320I think every word in that sentence gets crazier.
00:19:13.260Maybe it just should have gone on in Ukraine, although I don't know at this rate if we audit that, what we're going to find.
00:19:18.380Still waiting for my comprehensive full-scale audit.
00:19:21.640Brian Kennedy, I wanted to have you on, though, speaking of other things that we need to audit, and frankly, I would wager deport all of them.
00:19:27.540That is Chinese international students who are all essentially beholden, if not outright controlled by the Chinese Communist Party per, as you well know, Article 7 of China's national intelligence law.
00:19:39.460I want to get into this really explosive story about what's been going on at Stanford.
00:19:44.220It's not just run-of-the-mill, you know, Chinese Students and Scholars Association stuff or Confucius Institutes.
00:19:49.400It shows you, really, I think, the whole-of-society approach that they have taken, even, you know, so boldly on American college campuses to sort of recruit spies.
00:19:57.980And I think intellectual property theft is too nice or euphemistic a term, just straight-up stealing military and trade secrets.
00:20:16.460Yes, but probably there will be some scheme like that somewhere.
00:20:20.200But, look, Communist China spends annually in the United States $16 billion on intelligence and influence operations.
00:20:29.120So they're going all around the country trying to find every piece of intellectual property they can steal, every person they can compromise,
00:20:38.440and every method in this country by which we have become prosperous.
00:20:43.940They wish to extract from us our wealth via our intellectual property and the methods that we use to learn and to produce things.
00:20:58.180One of their targets is the modern university.
00:21:00.560They chose in this really excellent piece in the Stanford review, Stanford, and going to all the students that are there and making sure that they were going to the most high-tech parts of the university or the parts of the university that were teaching the most important engineering and other scholarly methods of both learning and then building the technologies of the future.
00:21:29.300And so the story lays out how they interviewed all sorts of students and faculty on campus, and many of those faculty were afraid to talk about it, as were many of the students.
00:21:42.060But it was clear that there were Chinese operatives on Stanford campus working with Chinese students to learn various methods and various personnel on campus.
00:21:55.860Now, I would say, Natalie, that Stanford was known as a place that is certainly excellent.
00:22:02.740It's an excellent university just at the level of rankings nationally.
00:22:09.760But Stanford has also been a place for over 20 years that has rejected the teaching of Western civilization on campus.
00:22:19.220Quite famously, conservatives were arguing about this back in the 90s and in the 2000s, that Stanford had taken out from their core curriculum the teaching of Western civilization.
00:22:32.900That might have been a signal to the communist Chinese that Stanford was a place that they could penetrate and that there would be receptive people on campus to at least friendly relations with communist China.
00:22:47.000The article talks about some $64 million that the school receives from communist China in various ways, whether it's tuition or direct grants through cutouts that may be influential.
00:23:02.680And so once a university receives $64 million, they're less likely to want to kick people off of campus.
00:23:08.740Now, the essay concludes with the idea that America has to be competitive, and it's not going to be competitive if communist China steals all of our secrets.
00:23:25.900It doesn't say that all the students should be kicked off of campus, the Chinese students, but that's certainly part of it.
00:23:33.160I would say when it comes to these Chinese students on American campuses, they contribute roughly, and this is one of the reasons they're still on campus, they contribute today roughly $30 to $40 billion in tuition paid by their families or the Chinese Communist Party or certain Chinese organizations that fund their tuitions.
00:23:57.480But almost all of these students are children of the Chinese Communist Party, and their parents are members of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:24:08.120And so it's not like this is some poor student from Shanghai who just gets to come to American universities because of just how good they are.
00:24:15.460These are part of the elite in communist China, and they're coming here, unfortunately, to not learn, but to – they do learn, of course.
00:24:24.940But they come to extract from America the knowledge and expertise we have and bring it back to communist China.
00:24:36.320And with that comes the fact that they have to report to handlers in their consulates.
00:24:44.900There's 230,000-some students in America who operate this way.
00:24:50.440Communist China also has something called their Thousand Talents Program, I should add, where they're really targeting their university professors and people within the American academic community more broadly who they think can be instrumental in providing such knowledge and resources to the Chinese Communist Party.
00:25:12.600So it's a very corrupt system, but it's also intentional.
00:25:17.020I mean, you have corruption in Washington that your last guest described.
00:25:49.200Well, and to that point, Brian, I think it's interesting what was it, the principal deputy assistant attorney general, Pamela Carlin, obviously a paramount impeachment witness, but someone who I think led a lot of the kind of anti-election integrity threats for prosecution was Pamela Carlin, who was a very high-level Stanford law professor.
00:26:08.060Of course, you have the Hoover Institution there as well, and obviously significant research that I think was sort of overlapping with the, you know, transgenic mice manipulation stuff they had going on at UNC and ultimately at Wuhan.
00:26:19.260So it's certainly an interesting place.
00:26:20.800Brian, I've got to have you bounce because we've got another very packed, I guess, second half of the show.
00:26:25.740But in the meantime, if people want to follow you, stay up to date with everything you've got going on, where can they go to do that?
00:26:47.200And interestingly enough, Brian Blaze, for those of you who watched the show yesterday, Laura Loomer was coming after him, so we wanted to give him a chance to respond.
00:26:55.500I look forward to you guys getting to decide.
00:26:57.280We'll be right back after this short break.
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00:31:14.860As you guys probably watched the show yesterday or you've seen the reporting, Laura Loomer, we had her on to talk about what I think is an issue very near and dear to our hearts here in the War Room.
00:31:25.380That is the Medicaid, kind of Medicare cuts, the ongoing big, beautiful bill, the tussle back and forth.
00:31:30.900We had Laura on who was, I think, picking up on some kind of left-wing media coverage of essentially a dear colleague letter that had been sent around talking for reforms for Medicaid.
00:31:43.520Obviously, there's some problems with that program, but I think our audience, maybe they have a little bit of PTSD just making sure that those reforms are not going to touch the people who actually need it.
00:31:54.960We are, I would say, no amateurs when it comes to waste, fraud, and abuse in D.C., but the CEO of the kind of, or I guess the guy behind the letter, which I believe was added through metadata on the PDF that Congressman Chip Roy had posted, like I said, was in the crosshairs of Laura Loomer, is actually joining us now.
00:32:13.820We believe our audience should be informed with information to make their own decisions about issues that are obviously as important and, you know, integral to them as health care.
00:32:20.980So, Brian, Blaze, I'm honored to have you on the show. Thank you for coming on.
00:32:25.860I guess I'll read a headline just to kind of give maybe those of us who are late to the story.
00:32:30.800Coke-funded group authored House GOP letter demanding Medicaid cuts.
00:32:34.600I want to get into that. Like I said, we'll let our audience decide.
00:32:36.960But if you can just maybe give us a little bit of background exactly who you are, how you kind of ended up in this fight.
00:32:44.560Sure, and thanks for having me on, Natalie. I appreciate the opportunity to respond.
00:32:48.700I am president of Paragon Health Institute.
00:32:53.660I started, I worked in the Trump administration during term one.
00:32:58.040I started on day one. I was at the National Economic Council, and I led the development of President Trump's health care agenda,
00:33:07.140really implementing his vision for health reform based on choice and competition and taking on a lot of the waste and corporate welfare that's in federal health programs.
00:33:18.020So I was there for two and a half years.
00:33:20.900I worked on a variety of regulations to address problems with Obamacare, to expand options for families and small businesses.
00:33:30.040I worked on the price transparency rules, which were really groundbreaking Trump efforts to make sure that people knew prices in advance of receiving health care.
00:33:41.120I left the administration and really defended and supported a lot of what the president was doing and his accomplishments.
00:33:52.180I founded Paragon Health Institute to build off of those successes.
00:33:58.900And really, for the last three years, we've been leading the fight criticizing the actions of the Biden administration,
00:34:05.620which have led to lots of waste, fraud and abuse in these programs that led to enormous inflation in the economy.
00:34:13.300And then in the fall, I was selected to head the health and human services transition team for President Trump.
00:34:22.840So I did a lot of work putting together a second term agenda so President Trump could hit the ground running.
00:34:31.140And there's already actually been quite a few accomplishments that President Trump has had in health care that have come out of that work that I was doing in the administration for the transition.
00:34:41.000So I think some of the coverage of it, maybe where some of our audience and perhaps it's a mischaracterization, we're always open to hearing both sides.
00:34:49.500But the idea that it was cutting people who deserve or need to be on Medicaid, which I think is a lot of the MAGA base, I'm sure a lot of our audience.
00:34:58.500But the idea that this letter was something that was spun up, that you were sort of the architect behind a lot of it.
00:35:05.000I think the fact, too, that they had linked your organization to taking, you know, Coke money, not necessarily someone that's super hardcore MAGA,
00:35:13.160given that what right now they're busy, you know, suing President Trump over his slew of tariffs.
00:35:17.880So how would you sort of pitch that letter?
00:35:21.760How can you ensure to our audience who may be a little skeptical when they hear, you know, cuts and Medicaid,
00:35:27.380that the cuts that you're pursuing or advocating for are not going to infringe upon people who desperately need those services with the political corollary and ramifications,
00:35:37.620you know, as we approach midterms, that just be a woefully unpopular issue.
00:35:44.800You know, President Trump was elected to represent the forgotten man and to take on the swamp in D.C.
00:35:54.660And nowhere is the swamp more powerful than in our health care industrial complex.
00:36:01.140So there is waste, fraud and abuse throughout these government health programs and particularly in Medicaid.
00:36:07.660The Medicaid program has been abused by a lot of left wing states.
00:36:13.860You know, last month we did an article that highlighted how California was enabled to develop this scam that was approved by the Biden administration.
00:36:23.780That resulted in $10 billion going to the state that the state then used to expand Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants.
00:36:32.900That has happened in other states as well.
00:36:35.320Like we're targeting a lot of the waste, fraud, abuse and really bad incentives that is hurting the average American
00:36:43.040and rewarding a lot of these crony interests of big insurers, big hospital systems have made a lot of money off of Medicaid.
00:36:52.100You know, the letter that you're talking about, what Paragon does is we provide, so I provided principles for reform to a wide array of Republicans in Congress.
00:37:06.440You know, mostly stuff with all stuff that we do publicly as well.
00:37:10.140We put out tons of information about problems in the program and how the program is not working for those who it was intended for, you know, the truly vulnerable and really is being taken advantage of by these corporate interests.
00:37:26.120So they adopted some of the principles in that letter that they then sent to the House Republican leadership.
00:37:33.100I would say with respect to Paragon's funding, you know, we're funded by a broad range of foundations and individuals, but Paragon accepts no corporate money.
00:37:45.520We really think it's important to produce unbiased policy research that informs the debate
00:37:52.700and it helps really implement what the president's vision is to weed out all of this waste, fraud, abuse and corporate welfare throughout these programs.
00:38:04.840I think this is a really important conversation to have.
00:38:07.520Obviously, there's going to be, you know, ongoing back and forth between the probably more MAGA populists, right?
00:38:12.140That is maybe the home of the war room and some of the more traditionally fiscal conservatives.
00:38:16.740And I'm just curious, too, on like the financing of your organization.
00:38:20.600I think there was probably a jump scare to seeing, you know, Coke or whatever the entity I know rebranded since they gave what was about $2 million in 2021.
00:38:30.880But I know Laura Loomer had also brought up one of your old tweets, which I'll just read for the audience in March of 2016.
00:38:36.380This is why we can't have Trump entitlement reform is the most important issue, especially for fiscal conservatives.
00:38:43.500So I think maybe just help our audience sort of square, you know, as you could imagine,
00:38:47.160I think there's a lot of, you know, PTSD from sort of Trump, one of people who didn't necessarily back him ending up in, you know, supreme or superior positions of power and not necessarily implementing his agenda.
00:38:58.440So, you know, I know you probably don't want to disclose your donors, but, you know, if we want to believe you that you're out here advocating, you know, for the forgotten man, like you said, President Trump does.
00:39:09.600Can you shed some more maybe perhaps, you know, insider sunlight on who exactly is is funding your outfit?
00:39:16.160You know, whose interests you represent and how maybe you've you've reformed or maybe just explain that tweet.
00:39:22.720Sure. So, I mean, that tweet was almost 10 years ago and obviously a lot has changed since then.
00:39:30.560And I've learned a lot since then. And I like I said, I was proud to enter the White House on day one of President Trump's first term and serve him to the best of my ability and serve the country to the best of my ability for two and a half years.
00:39:45.940You know, I got to take my children into the Oval Office before I left and have a very special moment with the president.
00:39:52.540Like, I think the president did enormous good in his first term to promote positive health policy.
00:39:59.240And I probably wrote more about than anybody in the country about the positive impact that President Trump had with his health policy agenda to help people that have been harmed by government policies and to take on corporate interests.
00:40:14.000And I've continued that work, again, focusing on the problems with the Biden administration, criticizing their wasteful spending and the corporate interests that so controlled the Biden administration and led to rampant inflation.
00:40:30.680And then working, being selected to lead the health and human services policy transition team and devoting enormous time to trying to help the president hit the ground running with a winning agenda in in the second term.
00:40:46.420And one of the things that we worked on in that transition was what we could do with all of the fraud that is in Obamacare and is really benefiting a lot of insurance companies because they're getting enrollees who aren't eligible for the program.
00:41:02.280And the administration proposed a month and a half ago to address this problem.
00:41:10.200And I have been the most vocal person in the public sphere promoting what the Trump administration has done there.
00:41:20.460So I think, you know, my record of working for the president, supporting the policy agenda of advancing American health care freedom and taking on corporate interests.
00:41:34.340I've done it for my entire 15 year career and most of it working for the president or working on the outside to advance a lot of those policies.
00:41:44.080And feel feel free to push back if you disagree.
00:41:48.280But I'm just curious. This letter, I think, has now been spun up.
00:41:51.680Obviously, Politico covered it, a bunch of left wing media outlets talking about how, you know, it shows that President Trump is trying to come for Medicaid for these cuts.
00:42:01.040And again, perhaps that's media spin. But retrospectively, do you still stand by the letter?
00:42:06.960Do you wish it would have gone over differently? Or and if you do, can you say now, can you confirm for all that?
00:42:12.820I'm sure, you know, loomers, politicos take your pick on the media spectrum listening.
00:42:17.920That for the people who need it, for the MAGA people, the people who helped get President Trump elected, that if they need Medicaid, if they're on Medicaid, that that is not going to be stripped from them.
00:42:27.140Yeah. So let me say Medicaid is an important safety net program.
00:42:31.760We want to improve it for those who really need it.
00:42:35.620And the policies that I'm advocating for would be directing resources to the individuals that really need Medicaid and away from the corporate interests, getting rid of this scam that allowed California to get $10 billion of federal taxpayer money to expand Medicaid to illegal immigrants.
00:43:00.380And I think there are no like this is not about cutting the Medicaid program.
00:43:05.580This is about creating a more sustainable Medicaid program and dealing with Biden's massive spending increases in Medicaid because of Biden.
00:43:15.840Medicaid is projected to be more than a trillion dollars more expensive over the next decade.
00:43:21.680They kept people on the program much longer than they were eligible, and they enabled a lot of these corporate welfare scams that have made health insurers and big hospital systems rich but haven't helped Americans.
00:43:34.920Right. American life expectancy hasn't increased with all of this spending and corporate welfare that we've had from a massive expansion of the Medicaid program.
00:43:44.820I want Medicaid to work much better for those who need it.
00:43:50.280In terms of looking at the policies under consideration, the best description is this is slowing an unsustainable rate of growth.
00:44:00.200It is taking the rate of growth from 5% a year to 3% a year if you're able to enact these reforms.
00:44:06.980And I think we do need to have important reforms that take away the slush funds that have gone to left-wing states like California and New York for them to put so many people on the Medicaid program, including people who came into this country illegally.
00:44:24.080Brian, I really appreciate you coming on.
00:44:28.540We always like when we can share both sides of an issue here in the War Room, despite all the criticism that we get for being a deranged platform for the craziest of the crazy MAGA voices.
00:44:40.100Brian, we really appreciate you coming on.
00:44:41.540If our audience, I'm sure, I don't know how familiar you are with the War Imposse, but I'm sure they probably still have some questions for you.
00:44:46.680I'd love to get in contact with you or at least follow you.
00:45:01.300They can check out our research, and you can see how many of the policies and how many of the weekly newsletters that I put out have been supportive of President Trump's health policy agenda and critical of the policy agenda of President Obama and President Biden.
00:45:18.880Brian, thank you so much for joining us.
00:45:35.920We got about five minutes left that I want to, well, I guess before we get to Bradley Fair, we've had a very packed show all day today.
00:45:42.140You've got to make sure you're checking out birchgold.com slash Bannon or texting Bannon to 989898, as you can tell with any issue, health care.
00:46:07.100Dr. Thayer, I'm just reading the news where it was this morning, and it seems like one of the Pakistani jets that was used to down an Indian aircraft was Chinese made.
00:46:17.940I know they seized an island out in the South China Sea.
00:46:20.600I think it was Sandy K or the Philippines or Philippine Island, Sandy K not too long ago.
00:46:26.180It seems like they're escalating a lot of their conflict as President Trump's trade war, though I hate that term because they started it, not us.