Combating Illegal Marijuana

You know, in other Maine political news, and one of the other stories I had on my list that I was probably going to get to when we came back from our last break, and then I had to, of course, call an audible, was about Susan Collins and Kash Patel. Senator Susan Collins on Wednesday told the heads of two federal law enforcement agencies that Maine needs more federal help. combating illegal marijuana grow houses. At a hearing to review budget requests from federal law enforcement agencies, the Republican Senator for Maine asked FBI director Kash Patel what the Bureau is doing to address the dangerous grow house operations in Maine, Oklahoma, California, and other states. A leaked federal government memo in 2003, excuse me, connected illegal marijuana growhouses in Maine to Chinese organized crime, estimating. at the time the presence of 270 grossites in Maine linked to China that could provide more than $4 billion. $4 billion in revenue. I guess if you are Bobby Charles and you're looking for your $4 billion, there it is. $4 billion. $4 billion. $4 billion. Thank you. I can connect to anything, right? I can. About 60 properties were searched in 2024. At the end of that year, an assistant U.S. attorney estimated that well below 100 such properties remained in the state. Susan Collins said that federal agencies have been helpful in the past to track money laundering, which is often linked to these grow houses, and provide interpreters to question suspects who are arrested, who may have been trafficked and forced to work and live at the illegal operations. Quote, last year you tested. testified that the FBI would be sending more resources to the field, specifically to Maine, to combat these dangerous operations. College said, adding that local sheriffs have reported some improvements in federal interest and participation. Kash Patel said that many of the Chinese citizens running the illegal grow operations have severed their ties with their home country. In response, he said the FBI is working with Homeland Security Task Forces to reverse engineer the connections through banking records in an effort to shut down the financiers of the U.S. operations. Asked by Susan Collins if a connection existed between the grow houses and the fentanyl trade. Kash Patel said that revenue from the sales of the illegally grown marijuana, quote, always goes back into the drug trafficking trade, into the drug traffickers' pockets, but that federal officials have not been able to confirm a direct connection to the Chinese government. Quote, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, Kash Patel said. What we're not seeing yet is the money directly being shipped back over to mainland China and the CCP from these grow house operations. But you see, therein lies the rub, right? Let's pause for a second and just do a little mini analysis, shall we? It doesn't have to go back. I mean, if the Chinese government is...

sponsoring, supporting, and otherwise lifting up, or at the very least excusing and allowing this kind of operation to happen. You know, the entire goal of it could actually be domestically American. Like there does not necessarily have to be some sort of a ship of cash back to the Chinese government. And in fact, if I was them, and part of my goal was fostering chaos, drug addiction, social problems, etc. in the United States. You know, you wouldn't need it to. There's no reason to and all it would do would be put your fingerprints all over it and you want plausible deniability, right? I mean, do I think like a criminal in that I'm thinking like this? It's like you want to have the ability to deny it. You want to not have a connection on paper. You want to be able to kind of have a distance so that if anybody catches anybody else, they don't lead anyone to you. Seems logical to me, right? But that doesn't mean that this stuff isn't at the behest direction or otherwise orchestration of the Chinese communist government because I have to imagine there is a significant involvement in this. Because when you look at what else they do, What do we talk about? I think even with Craig Peterson yesterday, right? I mean, I know we talked about Russians more than the Chinese, but he did mention the Chinese. Like, we have geopolitical adversaries that we compete with militarily, economically, socially. We compete with them a lot. And we're not friends. We just aren't. And they are constantly trying to do us harm. You know, the Russians have been the more famous of the two because they're... I don't know, dumber or worse at it, so they get caught more often. But they have operations, which are intended to sow social discord in the United States. Like, when you go on Twitter and you find really stupid arguments about, like, racial politics, I mean, you probably are not aware of this, but about 50% of the things that you're seeing there aren't even real people. That is, I mean, this is not even up for debate. This has been shown to happen, right? Where by these bots that the Russian government sponsors has the goal of social discord. And so they go into places that sow it, oftentimes social media, you know, the Twitters of the world, the Instagrams of the world, the TikToks of the world. And they try to sow that division. They try to inspire it and stoke it and poke the bear. And so they, you know, a lot of the. the most ridiculous statements and fights and whatever else that you've seen have obviously been at the behest of foreign governments that are just trying to screw with us. And so you're expecting me to believe that the Chinese government and the Russian government does that. But in the case of sponsoring more social discord, sponsoring more social degradation, more economic loss, more problems and crime, they wouldn't be interested in doing that?

Really? Really? Really? I think they would be. And that's what I think we're ultimately getting at here. And that's what Susan Collins was getting at by the question, right? It's like, is there any sort of direct link proven? Not yet. No, we're not seeing the money flow directly back to mainland China. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a connection. It is, right, and that's the other part of this, is that you can hide it, and by its very nature, it's sort of obfuscated a bit. So, a little obscured from public view. So I don't, I'm not surprised that you haven't been able to put those fingerprints on anything. And I doubt you will be able to. And we'll see, I mean, if it is indeed, if it has gone from like 300 of these down to 100 or less, that is progress, obviously. But I can tell you, they are certainly still there, and they are certainly still a problem. So any sort of federal involvement in the law enforcement side of things to tackle that would be a good thing. Vis-a-B Trump and Xi Jinping right now. Xi Jinping. Very good point. Yes, that is indeed a other story I might be getting to today, but let's take a break.