Verdict with Ted Cruz - May 14, 2026


BONUS POD： CA Fraud Explosion 'Shooting Fish w Dynamite' plus 'Fauci Shaped COVID Narrative' Whistleblower Claims


Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

155.92812

Word count

2,629

Sentence count

168

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.580 Guaranteed human.
00:00:04.920 800 hospices that last year charged the federal taxpayer $1.4 billion will no longer be paid.
00:00:11.860 Mr. Vice President, if your core business was shut down by the federal government, would you call?
00:00:16.600 You would call. Crickets.
00:00:21.500 We have less than 20 who have complained.
00:00:24.280 We're not even sure those are legitimate.
00:00:26.080 800 hospices shut down and we're not hearing much.
00:00:29.300 You're listening to the 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson.
00:00:34.600 Good Thursday morning. Nice to have you with us on the 47 Morning Update.
00:00:37.880 And we've got two big stories for you.
00:00:39.820 First up, J.D. Vance making government fraud a front and center issue.
00:00:43.920 And the numbers being uncovered are staggering.
00:00:47.120 Vance not only is saying that the Fraud Task Force has found hundreds of thousands of dead people getting food stamp benefits.
00:00:53.460 And now also shocking numbers of massive Medicaid fraud.
00:00:59.300 going to home health care and hospice providers.
00:01:03.160 Also, there was a major hearing from a CIA whistleblower on Capitol Hill,
00:01:09.240 and not a single Democrat was there for the testimony.
00:01:13.860 What are they running away from, and what did the whistleblower have to say?
00:01:17.440 We have it all for you.
00:01:18.700 I want to take a quick moment and talk to you about an incredible organization,
00:01:22.740 and it is called Compassion International and how you can get involved.
00:01:27.260 Love, generosity, and compassion.
00:01:29.880 We say those words all the time, and they sound good.
00:01:33.060 They feel good.
00:01:34.020 But here's the truth.
00:01:35.680 Those words don't mean anything unless they turn into action.
00:01:39.880 And right now, not later today, not tomorrow, there's a child in the world who doesn't know
00:01:45.980 if they'll eat, if they'll have a chance to learn, or if there's any hope at all.
00:01:51.820 And while we're all busy, life keeps moving forward.
00:01:56.100 but that child is waiting.
00:01:58.200 This is where you come in.
00:02:00.200 With Compassion International, you have the chance to change a child's future,
00:02:04.620 not just with words, not with promises,
00:02:07.460 but with real help that provides food, education,
00:02:10.920 and hope through local churches and people already in their community.
00:02:16.640 Put your words into action and join me.
00:02:20.000 Introduce a child to a loving Heavenly Father today at Compassion.com.
00:02:26.080 That's Compassion.com.
00:02:28.720 It's the 47 Morning Update, and it starts right now.
00:02:32.580 Story number one.
00:02:33.800 When Donald Trump got elected, he made it very clear that waste, fraud, and abuse were going to be something he was going to focus on.
00:02:40.320 Then he brought in Elon Musk and Doge.
00:02:42.380 Well, they're not done.
00:02:43.520 In fact, apparently, they're just getting started.
00:02:47.120 Now, J.D. Vance is now leading the Trump administration's anti-fraud crackdown.
00:02:51.960 And we've got major new developments, including the fact that Vance now says the administration's fraud task force has found already 186,000 plus dead people allegedly still receiving SNAP food stamp benefits.
00:03:11.380 now to be clear we can't crawl back this money these funds are being stolen and they're being
00:03:18.380 used by people that are clearly not dead but alive and they're using dead people's identity
00:03:24.820 to get the funds now that obviously should make you angry and they're expecting to find more than
00:03:31.160 the basically 200,000 dead people who are getting money every single month from you the taxpayer
00:03:37.600 Now, the task force also says that more than 400,000 people were actually defying the government receiving duplicate SNAP benefits at the same time, meaning that they had two applications that were approved, double dipping, getting twice as much as they should normally get.
00:03:58.380 Now, if you are double dipping, shouldn't you go to jail?
00:04:01.740 Shouldn't you lose SNAP benefits indefinitely?
00:04:04.400 Shouldn't there be a major consequence for stealing from the U.S. government?
00:04:09.380 Well, right now, apparently, there's not much of a deterrent at all.
00:04:13.840 Now, the White House is trying to change that, framing this as a massive taxpayer accountability effort.
00:04:19.800 They're also arguing that Americans are tired of seeing waste, fraud, and abuse in all of our federal programs.
00:04:27.040 Now, the vice president has now called the finding of fraud in the federal government like fishing in a barrel with dynamite.
00:04:35.260 The administration is now escalating beyond rhetoric.
00:04:39.000 They are now threatening as well to withhold Medicaid funding from states that failed to aggressively investigate fraud.
00:04:45.880 The biggest move came and it involved California, where the Trump administration has now deferred roughly $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements amid massive allegations of widespread fraud in hospice and home health care programs.
00:05:05.260 Just how bad is it?
00:05:06.940 Dr. Oz explaining it from Washington as they announced the new program initiative.
00:05:13.000 Unfortunately, we have a reality that, again, we've got to face a third of all hospices,
00:05:18.240 a third of all these programs in the entire country are in Los Angeles.
00:05:22.280 Ask yourself, how is that possible?
00:05:24.320 It's not.
00:05:25.080 There are not that many people dying in Los Angeles.
00:05:27.120 We're not talking about California, just Los Angeles.
00:05:29.720 So Kim and the team, with Janine Ugo and a bunch of other great folks,
00:05:33.940 went through the list of all the people,
00:05:35.540 and we believe that at least half of the hospices in the entire area around Los Angeles are fraudulent.
00:05:41.540 and today we announced 800 of those hospices have been suspended that's getting us you know close
00:05:48.120 to where we think we should be 800 hospices that last year charged the federal taxpayer 1.4
00:05:53.480 billion dollars will no longer be paid mr vice president if your core business was shut down by
00:05:59.160 the federal government would you call you would call crickets we have less than 20 who have
00:06:03.780 complained we're not even sure those are legitimate 800 hospices shut down and we're not hearing much
00:06:09.520 it's crickets out there. So we believe we're on the right path here. Next is a nationwide moratorium
00:06:15.380 on all new hospice and home health care. Why is that possible? Because when we squeeze the balloon
00:06:20.520 in California and slow their growth of hospice and now take away 800, the payments, 800 hospices,
00:06:28.280 we know what those fraudsters do. They move to nearby Nevada. Next door, Nevada has a sevenfold
00:06:33.120 increase in hospice already. Arizona, Texas, they're moving across the country. So we've
00:06:37.460 today announcing a moratorium nationally. There will be no new hospices or home health care open
00:06:43.220 in this country. If you have the program now, you can keep it. You can go to ones that already
00:06:47.740 exist. We're not taking away any services, but there will be no new ones, licenses granted
00:06:51.720 until we can figure out a better way of working across government. One of the most interesting
00:06:55.780 things you just heard there from Dr. Oz is the fact that he said, we're shutting it down
00:06:59.080 nationwide because we know that when they get busted in LA, when they get busted in California,
00:07:04.780 The people that are committing the fraud, they just go to another state and they open up there.
00:07:10.100 Now, Republicans, by the way, are arguing this is exactly what voters voted for, what they wanted.
00:07:16.240 Someone finally going through federal programs line by line asking where taxpayer money is actually going.
00:07:23.960 And we're finding out just how much fraud there is.
00:07:27.140 Democrats, however, are losing their minds right now.
00:07:30.720 Warning, the administration is overreaching.
00:07:33.540 Going to make mistakes and rushing investigations.
00:07:37.320 And then people are going to get hurt.
00:07:40.320 Now, the question is, where are the American people on this issue?
00:07:44.440 Well, politically, this is clearly a winning issue for Republicans.
00:07:49.000 Because in new polling, overwhelmingly, the majority of Americans agree that fraud should be rooted out, regardless of the party who's in charge.
00:07:59.900 Now, Vance is also trying to find more fraud.
00:08:03.480 Directly tying it also to border security and government spending.
00:08:07.560 Arguing Americans shouldn't be asked to pay more taxes while billions may be lost through abuse and corruption.
00:08:14.800 Dead people shouldn't be getting food stamps.
00:08:17.380 And the American people agree with that statement.
00:08:19.840 Taxpayers are finally asking where the money actually went.
00:08:22.980 And there should be people that go to jail.
00:08:24.700 This is clearly a war on fraud, waste and abuse from the Trump administration.
00:08:30.360 And the reality is, Washington ignored this for years.
00:08:34.080 Why?
00:08:34.860 Because many of the people that were getting the money 0.95
00:08:37.120 were giving kickbacks to the political campaigns of those that looked the other way.
00:08:42.040 And that would be the Democratic Party.
00:08:44.140 Thank goodness J.D. Vance is betting Americans care more about protecting taxpayer dollars
00:08:49.980 than protecting bureaucracies.
00:08:52.840 And, politically, that might be an extremely smart move ahead of the midterms.
00:08:58.560 Now, story number two.
00:08:59.760 CIA whistleblower went before Capitol Hill yesterday,
00:09:03.680 revealing that despite a majority of CIA scientists concluding overwhelmingly that COVID leaked from a lab in Wuhan,
00:09:14.640 Anthony Fauci was able to convince high-ranking intel officials to change their assessment from a lab leak to a neutral idea.
00:09:26.600 Why? Because they need to cover up the narrative that the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:09:32.900 which was tied directly to Anthony Fauci, was actually involved.
00:09:37.540 What's even more shocking than that is the CIA whistleblower also said
00:09:41.980 that the CIA is still blocking full declassification of COVID documents.
00:09:48.460 Why? Is it to protect Fauci or is it to protect China?
00:09:52.440 I want you to hear the back and forth from Senator Rand Paul and the CIA whistleblower
00:09:58.060 explaining exactly just how bad it really is.
00:10:02.140 But what I think is of importance that's new today is that your testimony is that the CIA
00:10:10.320 scientists were concluding that it was lab, but then with this, there was a 90-day study
00:10:15.400 in 2021, and this study was done by NIC, led by NIC. Tell us what NIC is again. It's the National
00:10:23.240 Intelligence Council, and individuals responsible for writing various WMD and bio-related issues
00:10:30.920 led to that. So when they had this study, they had CIA scientists telling them, look, the evidence,
00:10:36.840 the scientific evidence looks like it came from the lab, but then they brought in Anthony Fauci,
00:10:41.860 And is it your opinion that Anthony Fauci was able to overrule the scientist
00:10:47.520 or get NIC to conclude somehow that there wasn't a conclusion to be had here,
00:10:53.120 we're going to be neutral, contradicting what the scientists were telling them?
00:10:57.000 So there's two questions there, and I want to break them up into two.
00:11:00.060 One is, where were the injection points, Dr. Anthony Fauci,
00:11:03.840 where did Dr. Anthony Fauci and when did he inject himself into the IC?
00:11:08.080 And the other half of that question, and I don't want to extrapolate too much here, is, okay, what happened with why was there a change in analysis?
00:11:18.340 So I'll start with the, if it's okay, Dr. Paul.
00:11:20.700 Sure.
00:11:21.120 Senator, I'll start with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
00:11:25.200 There were two instances.
00:11:27.080 On 3 February 2020 and 4 June 2021, Anthony Fauci had contact with the interagency.
00:11:34.460 And how to sort of broadly generalize this is that that contact was happily pursued within the IC.
00:11:44.760 They wanted that contact.
00:11:45.900 And he provided a curated list of subject matter experts, which coincidentally wrote The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.
00:11:54.960 So it's not like he came in and said, you have to do X, Y, and Z.
00:11:59.140 He provided recommendations.
00:12:01.000 It's when you look at what has already been publicly released about Dr. Fauci
00:12:07.900 and then what you're seeing under the curtain at the IC where you realize,
00:12:11.520 okay, there is a narrative that was being generated by his contact,
00:12:16.040 not just with experts here in the United States, but experts in Australia and the UK.
00:12:21.440 And that's the public-facing piece.
00:12:23.520 And, you know, he had tried to sort of keep his hands clear of,
00:12:28.280 I didn't have anything to do with the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.
00:12:32.160 But in the meantime, he's pushing those authors and individuals that have been in his orbit
00:12:36.940 into the IC as experts.
00:12:39.740 And I'll jump to June 2021.
00:12:44.200 We, as the IC at the NIC, happily pursued those recommendations.
00:12:52.020 And in one email, which I'll describe to you, the person in charge of leading the 90-day study,
00:13:01.020 you know, he introduced himself to the community on what they were supposed to be doing.
00:13:06.840 And then the community said, he said, listen, we've got these people we should be talking to.
00:13:13.780 And another very senior NIC officer sent a direct email to him saying, hey,
00:13:18.520 considering that Dr. Fauci is a public health expert, are you sure we should be relying on
00:13:25.780 this? Shouldn't we have a separate set? And in this instance, the individual responded, no,
00:13:32.120 in this case, Dr. Anthony Fauci is a subject matter expert. However, that's directly
00:13:38.120 contradicting his public testimony of being a subject matter expert.
00:13:41.240 Part of the job in intelligence when you interview someone is assessing their truthfulness,
00:13:46.060 their potential biases or conflicts of interest did anyone ever bring up that Anthony Fauci
00:13:52.920 approved the research that went on in Wuhan and that it might not be in his interest for the
00:13:58.000 conclusion to be that it came from a lab that he had funded that there might be a conflict that
00:14:02.300 was did any everybody ever bring up that he might not be an objective witness that was one example
00:14:07.900 of an email no one laid it out quite that clearly you're piecing it together we were piecing it
00:14:12.360 together from multiple emails, from multiple agencies, multiple documents. It was more subtle
00:14:19.920 than that. Nobody said, this is happening. And unfortunately, I think they probably should have.
00:14:24.760 It was all out there. But your conclusion is that changing from the scientific consensus of it being
00:14:32.820 from a lab to a neutral position by the CIA was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci?
00:14:37.920 It was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci's injecting himself into the IC.
00:14:44.640 And to go to the second part of your question about what happened, particularly during the 90-day study,
00:14:50.660 we have documentation that shows that as of August 12th, the CIA was considering calling this a lab leak.
00:14:59.000 August 12th of 2021.
00:15:00.960 And then that changed on August 17th of 2021.
00:15:05.300 Now, what's even more shocking about the hearing and what you just heard there is not a single Democrat heard any of what you just heard.
00:15:15.260 Why? Because apparently not a single Democrat showed up to the Senate hearing today where the CIA whistleblower was testifying about the covid cover up.
00:15:26.740 Could it be maybe because they were all involved in it to listen to how Fox News explain no Democrats in attendance?
00:15:35.300 In this picture, because just a few minutes ago, just shy of the top of the hour, you could see over the left shoulder of Senator Ron Johnson, the empty seats of Democrats.
00:15:46.460 And we can show I mean, look at that room. And even James Erdman, who is the whistleblower witness today, was asked about and I believe it was Senator.
00:15:57.180 Yes, Bernie Moreno, who asked him this. How does that make you feel knowing that those Democrats aren't there?
00:16:03.000 And he says that, of course, I wish that they were.
00:16:06.300 I mean, you want everyone to know what he has to say.
00:16:09.200 It really is amazing to know that you have a CIA whistleblower coming forward on the issue of COVID.
00:16:16.120 It involves Anthony Fauci, Democrats' God.
00:16:20.780 And none of the Democrats will show up to hear what the whistleblower has to say.
00:16:25.760 There should be massive accountability for that.
00:16:28.560 And also a lot more questions that should be asked of Democratic lawmakers.
00:16:33.000 of why you didn't show up.
00:16:35.720 Thank you for listening to the 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson.
00:16:40.120 Please make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening to this podcast right now.
00:16:45.400 And for more in-depth news, also subscribe to the Ben Ferguson podcast,
00:16:49.860 and we will see you back here tomorrow.