Show Notes
Massive welfare fraud in Minnesota by Somali immigrants was not supposed to happen because of government “guardrails.” Political violence by an Afghan refugee was not supposed to happen because such people were vetted before being allowed into the US. And voter fraud won’t be a problem because there are safeguards to prevent it.
Those three separate issues all prompt us to ask… What happens when those “guardrails” are missing, the “vetting” is left undone, or the “safeguards” ignored?
The plain truth is that those protections will be forgotten when political expedience requires it. This month, we learned that they cost Minnesota more than $1 billion in fraudulent welfare payments. The fraud was allegedly committed by several dozen Somali immigrants whose political support is critical to the state’s Democrat governor, Tim Walz, its Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Minneapolis’s leftwing congresswoman, the Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
Even worse, a similar failure to vet Afghan immigrants cost a member of the West Virginia National Guard her life at the hands of a deranged Islamist terrorist who was let into the country from Afghanistan.
On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers highlight what happens when government “guardrails” are ignored or swept aside. It happens more than you might think.
“Those guardrails we’ve been assured by the political establishment we’re going to prevent widespread welfare fraud, which happened in Minneapolis, is happening in lots of places,” Schweizer says. “We were told when we had this mass migration from Afghanistan, that we were going to be vetting people. Turns out, based on this terrorist attack that we had against the National Guardsmen, that vetting wasn’t really there.”
The Government Accountability Institute first reported on welfare fraud in the SNAP program back in 2018. GAI shared stories obtained from welfare fraud inspectors who had detected widespread abuse of the SNAP program within immigrant communities including the Somalis in Minneapolis. They also detected a web of money transfers made through “hawala networks” that traced to terror-supporting organizations such as Al Shabab back in Somalia. The guardrails that were supposed to prevent that activity failed as well.
In fact, the hosts note, a bipartisan bill in Minnesota to create an inspector general to monitor the state’s welfare programs for fraud was blocked by Gov. Walz. “That’s important because Democrats are in charge… The Democrat Farmer Labor Party has won every election statewide since 2006, so you’ve got one-party rule, rejection of law enforcement, embrace of the migrant population, and Minnesota is crumbling as a result,” Schweizer says.
Turning to the shooting in front of the White House two weeks ago, Eric Eggers notes the statements last week of Joe Kent, director of the federal National Counterterrorism Center, who said that that shooter was part of 18,000 people who are known as suspected terrorists in the United States.
Kent’s phrase summing up the situation was “the border is secure, but the country is not.” He said the security checks on Afghans admitted to the US after the end of the war were non-existent.
And again, just this past weekend, Australia was rocked by a mass shooting, targeted at Jews celebrating the start of Hannukah, by ISIS-inspired immigrants. The terrorists, a father who was born in Hyderabad, India and his native-born son, killed 11 people and wounded many more. Both appear to have been radicalized in Australia.
Eric Eggers notes that a large part of the problem is that these so-called guardrails “rely mostly on self-attestation.” The government takes your word for it when you say you are starting a program to help children with autism but lacks the time or the interest in checking up on you until something bad happens. “The Minnesota welfare system is basically an honor system,” Schweizer adds.
This self-attestation problem arises again with voter fraud in Minnesota. As Eggers explains, “they have a program called “vouching,” where if you don’t have your ID, you can bring another registered voter who says, ‘Yeah, I know Schweizer. He lives at this address.’ and then you’re allowed to vote.”
“If you work at a nursing home, you’re allowed to vouch for a certain number of residents,” he continues. “So, you can imagine how easily these things are exploited. The state senator Omar Fateh, who just lost the Minneapolis mayor election, had his brother-in-law charged with perjury for lying to a federal grand jury about how he mishandled ballots,” Eggers says.
“The feds were looking into allegations of voter fraud, but just to show you how challenging it can be to investigate and to prosecute these types of things, the election happened in August of 2020 and the allegations of voter fraud came in 2021,” he says., Federal investigators “didn’t show up until 2022, asking these Somali public housing people if they remember who they voted for 20 months ago?”
“Minnesota has major problems with enforcing election integrity, just as they have major problems enforcing integrity in their welfare programs,” he says. “And it’s because they have chosen not to embrace guardrails. And this is the result.”
