On this week's episode of RUMBLE, the crew is joined by Mike Benz, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology at the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFIO), to discuss USAID and the massive fraud that has been going on under the guise of providing aid to some of the most impoverished people in the world.
00:00:00.000*music* Our technological advancement as a society has outpaced our system for handling finite resources because now we are approaching infinite resources.
00:00:40.000I'd be like one of those baby geniuses from the movie President.
00:00:46.000I wonder if there's a sale of Forever 21. Click Rumble Premium and join now for $99 annually or $9.99 a month to get the entirely ad-free experience and exclusive content from Lotter with Crowder, Nick DiPaolo, Mr. Guns and Gear, Donald Trump Jr., and an ever-expanding roster of content,
00:02:10.000We do have on the show special guest Mike Benz.
00:02:13.000He is the, this is a very long title, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Technology.
00:02:19.000And he is currently the executive director for the Foundation for Freedom Online, and he is the expert on USAID and the fraud that has been taking place and the money being funneled to things that you have known.
00:02:30.000We are so far beyond the scope of the legitimate role of government.
00:02:34.000I would imagine that every single libertarian has had a seizure in the last 24 hours.
00:02:44.000USAID specifically, and laying out the case as to where your tax dollars are going and why this is completely under the legitimate purview of the President of the United States.
00:02:55.000We'll be talking about how passports now, you can no longer label X. It's M or F or D or P or P or V. I believe.
00:04:26.000There really isn't nearly as much enthusiasm as it was his first term as it relates to the protesters.
00:04:32.000That being said, there are still some people who are incredibly performative and this gentle thing wants to remind you that everything Is...
00:05:44.000Here is a black trans protester letting you know that trans people will not be separated from the LGBT umbrella, but I'm not entirely sure what this person is saying because it makes no sense and it's revolting.
00:07:16.000Anyone there at that protest, I will pay for your ticket and all expenses paid for you to go to Palestine for two weeks and set up a protest.
00:08:33.000With just hours to go before U.S. tariffs were set to take effect at midnight, news of a last-minute deal to delay a potential trade war for at least one month.
00:08:43.000Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Donald Trump spoke twice by phone today.
00:08:48.000Trudeau says proposed tariffs will be paused for at least 30 days while we work together.
00:08:53.000He says Canada is implementing a $1.3 billion border plan with a list of specific measures to improve border security.
00:09:04.000And I'm not even Bill Kristol, and I got it right.
00:10:22.000I'm not going to try and pronounce the name.
00:10:24.000Agreed to a pretty unique arrangement as it relates to housing illegal aliens with the United States.
00:10:32.000Here's Rubio, who I think has an unreceding hairline.
00:10:36.000The president, in an act of extraordinary friendship to our country, knowing the challenges we face in the U.S., has agreed to the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world.
00:10:51.000He has agreed to accept for deportation any illegal alien in the United States who is a criminal from any nationality, be they MS-13 or Tren d'Aragua, and house them in his jails.
00:13:45.000Donald Trump, President Trump, has made it very clear with this administration, and now it extends to passports, that there are only two genders.
00:13:54.000And again, there will be a time in history when people look back and say, from like 2015 to like 2024, there was like 57 genders, I guess.
00:15:28.000We're saying, they're only allowing you to have two genders on your passport now!
00:15:32.000We're not going to find common ground if you think that fact is horrifying, and I find it heartwarming.
00:15:37.000In the Washington Post, published an editorial by Ms. Frizzle and Pierre Poiliev love child, Darren Rosenblum, and they wrote this, why the X on my passport matters.
00:17:37.000Down in the city of broken schemes Where banks prey on our heartbroken dreams But I found a light so pure and clean
00:18:04.000American financing gave me a chance to be seen No hidden fees, no hidden fees
00:18:16.000lines to find Just honest words That ease my mind In a world of shocks Where shadows lurk They gave me hope They did the work They saved my hope Just
00:18:49.000one clear goal To bring the dream To every heart A place to live A brand new start USAID!
00:19:43.000USAID! Not to be confused with you said.
00:20:59.000I'm going to, and we're going to have Mr. Mike Benz on the show here in just a little bit, who's really an expert in this, and he's broken a lot of these stories.
00:21:07.000What you're hearing from the media is that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are trying to, I guess, tyrannically take over data.
00:21:15.000No, what's happening is we are looking for fraud in government.
00:21:20.000And people's work computers, the stations where they work, those offices that may be engaging in said fraud or wasteful activity, Should be examined and should not be wiped before people can go in.
00:21:36.000We can find no common ground if we don't all agree that it's a problem, irrefutably, that the government, the federal government, loses $233 billion to $521 billion a year in fraud.
00:21:54.000That's not just wasteful spending, that's...
00:22:01.000Half a trillion dollars a year in fraud.
00:22:05.000Even if you're a big government democrat, I would imagine you don't believe it's the government's job to engage in fraud.
00:22:12.000But if we can't even start examining that, well then we end up with a demagoguery that you see with USAID. So, half a trillion dollars annually in fraud.
00:22:35.000You may not have been super familiar with USAID until this weekend, but I would imagine you've heard of it by now.
00:22:43.000It is the essential programs that USAID provided that kept my family and I fed.
00:22:50.000As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms.
00:22:59.000AID is an essential instrument of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. national security policy.
00:23:08.000This is a real bureaucratic mess, the USAID.
00:23:12.000The money is being spent and shoveled to countries all over the world, countries that hate us, for programs that, I mean, you have countries where people are starving and they're focusing on, you know, DEI.
00:23:23.000At the point at which you don't merely, like, if you've got an apple and it's got a worm, you can take the worm out.
00:23:27.000But if you've got actually just a ball of worms, it's hopeless.
00:23:36.000Really quickly, Elon Musk actually tweeted something out this morning, guys, if you can look at it, either last night or this morning, where he said he thinks the number's actually higher than the $521 billion.
00:23:45.000I think he said it's as high as like 10%, which I think came out to about $700 billion.
00:23:48.000And then he put another one plus trillion on waste on top of that.
00:25:40.000So here is, by the way, USAID's 2023 year-in-review video hosted by Fraggle Rock Elizabeth Warren.
00:25:49.000As this year comes to a close, I want to share some of the progress we have made with partners around the globe to build a more equitable, resilient, and humane world.
00:26:00.000This year, we rushed aid to tens of millions of people in 76 emergencies, including the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, the conflict in Sudan, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
00:26:13.000We built coalitions to support countries experiencing democratic openings.
00:26:19.000Drawing in $110 million from private sector and philanthropic partners to bolster reform efforts.
00:27:53.000According to Elon Musk on X, again, he's biased, he said, all Doge did was check to see which federal organizations were violating the president's executive orders the most.
00:28:03.000Turned out to be USAID, so that became our focus.
00:28:16.000He says, talk to a friend who has connections within the Democratic Party, and he said the level of panic over Trump and Elon shutting down the USAID is unlike anything he's ever seen.
00:28:26.000That's what Elon is responding to, and it's like, Democrats are freaking out.
00:28:30.000They didn't freak out about LGBTQ stuff.
00:28:33.000They didn't freak out about anything like they're freaking out about this.
00:28:41.000And Elon's like, We just simply were looking for the place that was doing the most, and it turns out it's USAID! Right.
00:28:47.000And by the way, this is an organization.
00:28:49.000We're not even talking about just citizens.
00:28:50.000We are talking about the organism that is government and its function.
00:28:55.000When people say, oh, tyranny, if I were to come in, and I do, on the weekend, right, I'll go to a moment, hey, where's this sketch that we were working?
00:30:49.000Do you, hey, the government has the right to audit you, but you don't have the right to audit the government in any capacity, 500 billion, half a trillion in fraud.
00:31:00.000You realize the government, it is no longer, it's nothing.
00:31:05.000If not an abusive relationship, if the government can audit you, whatever it wants, and it can never be audited.
00:31:13.000These public servants Are taking a stand against you because they believe they are above you.
00:32:40.000The very first one, and we will get to all of the crystal clear examples, and you can come and let me know if you think it's a legitimate role of government as we get to them.
00:32:48.000But of course, the left has been in an absolute meltdown ever since they have faced any kind of accountability here.
00:32:55.000Whoever is here at AID, or at least witness firsthand, What is happening with this Elon Musk attempted takeover which will not stand?
00:33:06.000This is something that's just going to make our country less safe and really shows the undermining of rule of law in our nation.
00:33:11.000There are people right now who have HIV who are alive only because the United States is making sure of that.
00:33:38.000We cannot find common ground if we're saying the exact same thing with an entirely different visceral reaction.
00:33:47.000He, Chuck Schumer, is saying if they go after an audit The USAID, USAID, they could possibly look at auditing with the IRS or the Post Service.
00:34:03.000And I'm going, hey, maybe we can audit the Postal Service or IRS. Think about how much they hate you.
00:34:22.000You cut the clip short, he went on to say, and who knows, they might even look into Senate spending.
00:34:30.000They might want to know what we're doing in the Senate House.
00:34:33.000They might go in the waxing maze and find out it's just corn.
00:34:37.000Yes, yes, I think the agency that has audited Americans needlessly and just welcomed 78,000, sorry, not agents, employees, I think that one audit of the auditing agency is entirely reasonable.
00:35:36.000That it's illegal for President Trump to shut down USAID. As my colleague said, it's not only a gift to our adversaries, but trying to shut down the Agency for International Development by executive order is plain illegal.
00:36:04.000They're trying to roll U.S. aid under the State Department, cut funding in the workforce if there are inefficiencies, if there is some kind of waste, which we know there is, and for it to remain pretty much exclusively a humanitarian agency.
00:36:42.00010,000 people were told to stay home from work on Monday because, you know, I don't know, bleach, whatever the Hillary Clinton thing did to the servers.
00:36:49.000We don't want you going in there when we're investigating you and deleting everything.
00:36:53.000So that's all that's happened right now.
00:36:55.000Here's exactly what happened with USAID. If you have a child, okay, and you said, you ever gone through this situation?
00:39:11.000It's like, you know, you're jack of all trades, master of none.
00:39:14.000I don't know, but it seems to me that if you are really good at countering terrorism extremism, probably not a specialist in fighting diseases and opening up export markets for commodities.
00:39:37.000She doesn't want you to find what's under the very first rock that we have turned over.
00:39:44.000Like Toolman said, the department has become this rogue actor, to be clear, working against, not only being inefficient, but actively against American interests.
00:39:53.000As Marco Rubio, most improved player, I would say, this last year, he laid it out quite clearly.
00:39:59.000I mean, my frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress.
00:40:03.000It's a completely unresponsive agency.
00:40:05.000It's supposed to respond to policy directives of the State Department, and it refuses to do so.
00:40:12.000USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that and deciding that they're somehow a global charity separate from the national interest.
00:40:20.000I'm very troubled by these reports that they've been unwilling to cooperate with people who are asking simple questions about what does this program do?
00:40:29.000And that sort of level of insubordination makes it impossible to conduct the sort of mature and serious review that I think Fournier writ large should have.
00:40:50.000Rubio also posted this, I believe from the White House website.
00:40:53.000He said, For decades, the United States Agency for International Development has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous and, in many cases, malicious pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats with next to no oversight.
00:41:07.000And now that we see what's going on, it makes sense that they changed their original logo.
00:41:20.000Yes, and this isn't just hearsay, okay?
00:41:23.000We're going to go through some examples, but Caroline Levitt did a great job.
00:41:27.000She did a great job laying out just a cursory list of ridiculous USAID funding projects.
00:41:36.000And here's the reason why Elon Musk and others have been taking a look, because if you look at the waste and abuse that has run...
00:41:43.000Through USAID over the past several years, these are some of the insane priorities that that organization has been spending money on.
00:41:49.000$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia's workplaces.
00:41:55.000$70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland.
00:42:00.000$47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia.
00:42:04.000$32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.
00:42:07.000I don't know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don't want my dollars going towards this crap, and I know the American people don't either, and that's exactly what Elon Musk has been tasked by President Trump to do, to get the fraud, waste, and abuse out of our federal government.
00:42:20.000Let me give you a few other line items that they may not want you to know about, and all references are available.
00:44:14.000And you know what's so interesting, too?
00:44:15.000This is a guy who I just really can't stand because he does the whole, I used to be a Republican butt thing, and I don't understand what purpose he serves.
00:44:21.000And I don't want to question God's judgment in creating a human being, but...
00:46:09.000My opinion, you can comment if you think that this is too hardline, is that whether directly or indirectly, no taxpayer dollars should go to Bill Kristol in any capacity.
00:46:36.000In August of 2024, USA-funded activists to topple the Bangladeshi Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina.
00:46:44.000And this person was replaced by Clinton Global Initiatives' Muhammad Yunus.
00:46:49.000It just seems odd to me, and it's kind of odd when you go, all right, so there was basically some kind of a coup, and I see the Clinton name, and Bill Kristol's making money off of the same organization.
00:47:00.000All right, and they won't let us get an audit in.
00:47:03.000They won't let us see an itemized receipt.
00:47:05.000So former State Department official Mike Benz talked about this at length, and we're going to have him on.
00:47:12.000IRI poured State Department U.S. taxpayer funds into transgender dance festivals, into a whole slew of, you know, sort of woke identity events around minority rights and funding minority rappers sort of woke identity events around minority rights and funding minority rappers
00:47:36.000ultimately culminating in throngs of street protests that forced the democratically elected prime minister to flee the country in a helicopter.
00:47:46.000As a Clinton Global Initiative fellow, was named the new president, and they've canceled elections.
00:47:51.000Ooh, it's the canceling elections part, really.
00:48:42.000They aren't actually effectively carrying out said mission, and they aren't allowing an audit to be performed, and they're refusing to provide itemized receipts.
00:48:51.000And all of this is because they are taking their moral stand.
00:48:55.000But let's be clear, it's not against President Donald Trump.
00:48:57.000They're taking their stand against you.
00:50:47.000So, you've been talking about this at length.
00:50:50.000Let me ask you, what spurred you looking into USAID? I mean, I know, obviously, you were in the Trump administration, but you have been like a dog on a bone on this.
00:50:59.000Do you think this is even the most egregious example in government, or just one that is going to be pretty easy to prove?
00:51:05.000I do think it's actually the most egregious, or certainly in the top two or three in government.
00:51:12.000But we're still at the very tip of the iceberg as to why, I think, as this onion gets peeled more and more.
00:51:19.000What you're going to see is something that's actually central to almost all rogue aspects of the way American foreign policy has been run and the way that the foreign policy establishment has been weaponized against domestic politics.
00:51:34.000The big no-no is that there's supposed to be a firewall between what the CIA does abroad and what it does at home.
00:51:40.000This is the thing the CIA got in trouble for in the 60s and 70s.
00:51:43.000The Pentagon is not supposed to be doing stuff at home.
00:51:46.000The State Department is not supposed to be doing stuff at home.
00:51:49.000And USAID is not supposed to be doing stuff at home.
00:51:50.000Can I ask you about that specifically?
00:51:52.000Because some people didn't fully understand.
00:52:05.000The CIA liaises with assets of the U.S. government that are capacity-built in order to instrumentalize them for one of two purposes, to advance U.S. national security interests or to advance U.S. national interest.
00:52:20.000Basically, you can think of that like keeping us safe or making us wealthier.
00:52:24.000For example, if we need the oil in a country, we might do it out of national interest.
00:52:29.000If we need to topple a government to install a military base there because the prime minister is recalcitrant, then we would say that would be for national security purposes.
00:52:38.000But the point is that the CIA operates under a plausible deniability cloak.
00:52:45.000It was originally supposed to be parked at the State Department directly in 1948 when this was all being constructed.
00:52:52.000George Kennan's idea was to have, rather than a CIA operations division, have a State Department Bureau of Political Warfare.
00:53:00.000But that did not sync well with the UN Declaration on Human Rights, and so they made it a spy agency.
00:53:06.000And then the CIA started getting in trouble in the 1960s and 70s with all the scandals of what they were doing, and it moved a substantial amount of its operations into USAID, the humanitarian group.
00:53:19.000It was a sort of NGO plausible deniability layer for the intelligence world.
00:53:24.000And USAID is a swing player because it's an independent agency, so what it does is it capacity builds the assets that the CIA then works with.
00:53:34.000So you think of it as three stools when it comes to advancing U.S. national interests abroad.
00:54:25.00014 NGOs in the area, and they only have a little bit of money.
00:54:30.000USAID will find ways to funnel money so that we, if the State Department says we need 50, or if the CIA says we need 50, USAID will find a way to multiply those institutions, and it will run the money to them.
00:54:43.000And so they really are, you know, you can't have operations without financing for it.
00:54:47.000And so USAID plays that role for DOD, for CIA, and for state.
00:54:53.000And that's why they've become, Really the most important institution.
00:55:30.000You know, it's an unauditable black hole.
00:55:34.000This is the sort of thing that our former Trump-1 attorney general made his bones doing.
00:55:41.000When Bill Barr started his career in the CIA and then was put by the CIA through Knight Law School and then worked there for seven years, his marquee job was the CIA's liaison to Congress.
00:55:54.000In order to block congressional oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.
00:56:01.000And it was heralded by the CIA for blocking Congress's ability to oversee the agency.
00:56:07.000And that is what you see today inside of USAID. And one of the reasons that it's so impossible to get to what they do.
00:56:14.000And they run an unbelievable web of money laundering and shell companies.
00:56:22.000But, you know, just take one example of USAID's building of the fake social media website called Zunzanillo, which was at a time when Cuba, and look, I hate that I'm not a fan of the Cuban, you know, the Cuban government.
00:56:53.000And the U.S. foreign policy establishment was gassed up over the success of the Arab Spring and the ability of the CIA and State Department to use Facebook and Twitter to angry up populations and get them to form smart mobs and take to the streets and overthrow governments.
00:57:08.000So they wanted to do a Cuban Spring, but the problem was they had no social media there.
00:57:12.000So U.S. aid was tasked with creating a...
00:57:18.000And so they took, in order to do this, they took humanitarian funds that were earmarked for Pakistan and redirected them through a web of shell companies and outside contractors to two Cuban businessmen so it would look like it was coming directly from Cuba.
00:57:33.000And in the internal documents that were leaked at USAID, the explicit plan was to lure people in using algorithms favoring Sports, music, and hurricane updates.
00:57:43.000And then once they hit a critical mass of subscribers to the site, they would switch the algorithm to favor anti-government sentiment, street revolutions, and the forming of so-called smart mobs to take to the streets.
00:57:56.000At the same time, USAID was paying rap groups, one in particular called the San Isidro movement, was taking direct money from USAID, who was paying them to write anthems about how to overthrow the government so it could be played.
00:58:10.000Meanwhile, USAID's kissing cousin, the National Endowment for Democracy, was writing white papers in the background, doing their baseline assessment of the ethnic composition of Cuba, and what it figured out in a 2009 memo that USAID then carried over was that the Afro-Cuban community was underrepresented in the Cuban government, so they could be And also, they're not very good at it.
00:58:39.000If they were trying to lure people to Cuban social media, they did sports hurricane updates.
00:58:44.000They should have just shown them the women.
00:58:52.000People will say, I'm an extremist, where I say, look, the policy on Cuba should be either the United States goes in and liberates these people, or not.
00:59:00.000People who will say that's an extremist fear, I'm not saying that we do, I'm saying we need to be clear in our position, will at the same time defend what is obfuscated and what is opaque, which is effectively, like you're talking about, a soft coup and trying to foment, basically, racial hatred at that point, which wouldn't be the right way for them to go about it anyway.
00:59:18.000And no one in this office is hated more than Che Guevara.
00:59:21.000We were banned for a shirt, making fun of him.
00:59:23.000I know Gerald does have a question, and I know you have a hard out.
00:59:26.000I wanted to get to Brazil here because we have a lot of people watching, but Gerald, you had a question for Mr. Benz.
00:59:31.000Yeah, Mike, so I've seen a lot of people talking about different programs within USAID, and I'm not sure which programs.
00:59:37.000People that are posting are necessarily saying stuff that's true or if they're making some incorrect connections.
00:59:43.000And one of the connections that I've seen people trying to make is basically back through from U.S. taxes to U.S. aid to NGOs and then somehow finding its way back into campaigns, PACs, and Dems.
01:00:02.000Yeah, this is one of the ways that the foreign policy establishment manipulates domestic politics, is they take the huge glut of money that we have to manage the American empire abroad, but then if a domestic candidate or domestic political movement is threatening to change U.S. foreign policy, like Donald Trump has been and currently is, They redirect those funds almost like white blood cells in an immune system to descend on the internal.
01:00:30.000They call these the domestic drivers of foreign policy in order to root those out.
01:00:35.000So just a few examples off the top, you have the Tide Center.
01:00:40.000The Tide Center is basically the clearinghouse for Black Lives Matter.
01:01:05.000The group that not just the campaign, but the actual management of the prosecutors once they're in office, make sure they're in sync with the donor demands, including this group tells them who to prosecute, who not to prosecute, how to structure it, gives them the social media messages, writes their press releases, basically manages them like a talent agency.
01:01:25.000And that group's fiscal sponsor is the Tide Center.
01:01:31.000And some of these grants are incredible.
01:01:34.000For example, USA deputizes the Tide Center to, quote, secure concrete commitments from foreign governments on behalf of the U.S. government.
01:01:43.000So they are pumping up domestic political institutions and then deputizing them to act as a long arm of the U.S. government to actually negotiate U.S. foreign policy abroad, Economic empires abroad.
01:02:04.000is not just the Open Society Foundation, but it's the web of private portfolio companies that profit From the energy resources and economic engine in foreign countries.
01:02:15.000And all the while we have been told the danger of Donald Trump is he's sowing mistrust in institutions.
01:02:21.000I almost think it's the fault of the institutions.