BENSON BYTE: Steve Robinson Breaks Down Maine's Medicare Fraud - and Why It's Not Being Covered

Now it's time for another Guy Benson, Guy Benson Fight, where we bring you the day's most interesting interviews in a bite-sized package. For the full episode, visit Guy Benson.com or wherever you listen to a podcast. Well, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the reason we had such a surge of federal resources in Minnesota. initially was because of the fraud scandal that was blowing up there and continues to be a massive issue, although I know the Democratic politicians who run that state would love to focus all of their attention bashing federal law enforcement and deflecting entirely from the billions of dollars stolen with their assistance, I would say, or at least their complicity through ignoring the issue. through defending the people in many cases who are responsible, looking the other way, falling victim to various tactics like extortion. If you investigate us, we'll call you a racist. The paper trail is all there. So the Tim Walz of the world are thrilled to have the opportunity to scream about ice and beating the bleep out of JD Vance, which is what... Walls just said in an interview, I believe, yesterday. Happy to talk about that if he's not talking about the fraud scandal, predominantly in the Somali community, but not exclusively in that state. But as we have covered previously on this show, it's not limited, of course, to Minnesota. I think we're going to find this on a vast scale in a lot of other places, in particular blue states, where, let's face it, a lot of these Democrats are effectively pro fraud. if it's their constituencies who are getting the money. We're seeing evidence of that emerging in Illinois, in California, in various other places as well, and also in the state of Maine. Maine has an interesting and very important Senate race coming up this year. I would imagine this will be one of the issues that is adjudicated in that race and other races in Maine. And Steve Robinson is the editor-in-chief of the main wire who has been doing some of the journalism on this because, frankly, the so-called journalists, right, the ones who would sneer at people like Steve Robinson, the legacy journalists in New England, they have precious little interest in this kind of thing because it's not helpful to the narrative preferred by their party, which is to say the Democrat Party, which is responsible for so much of this. Steve, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me on, guys. All right, so let's talk about your corner of the universe and what you have found so far up in Maine. I know that a lot of people out there who have press credentials and journalism degrees, and I have both of those things, by the way. I'm not saying those are inherently bad, but people who feel like they are the official journalists, they don't have much respect for you. They have great disdain given your political... alliances or bent, and yet you are doing a lot of the work in the public interest in Maine that they have been too lazy, too understaffed, too uninterested to do for years. If you could outline what you've discovered thus far in Maine, that would be great.

Yeah, so we actually started our reporting on some of the issues that are now hitting national headlines really a year ago. We obtained some documents that showed that a very well-known migrant services agency called Gateway Community Services, which is run by a Somali American refugee, Abdullahia Ali, who is... very politically connected. He's got all kinds of pictures with Governor Janet Mills. He rubbed shoulders with all the Democratic lawmakers. His offices are used as de facto campaign headquarters for Democratic candidates. Some of his former employees are current sitting Democratic lawmakers, including Representative DeKa DeLocq and Representative Yusuf Yusuf. So this is a very politically connected migrant agency. that is totally funded by taxpayer dollars, including $5 million a year in Medicaid funding. That nominally goes to things like translation, home health care services, autism care. Basically, if there's a Medicaid funding source, these guys have dipped into it. We received documents that had not been made public that found that the Department of Health and Human Services audited Gateway Community Services. and found that they had an error rate of around 35%. And so what that means is that the Department of Health and Human Services took a look at some of the claims that Gateway was submitting and getting paid for and said, hey, there's no documentation, there's no substantiation, you know, there's no client name, or we don't know who the employee was. So that's like one out of every $3, according to the state's own investigation? Exactly. And so that was just a preliminary audit of 250 random claims that they looked at. And what we found upon investigating further is that this was not the only time that Gateway had been audited. We filed a Freedom of Access Act request for all notices of violation that had gone out to any Medicaid provider for more than $20,000 in overbilling. So as we investigated, we found that this was really a spectacular story and more, there was more to it than just this organization overbilling Medicaid. It was overbilling Medicaid and these were being swept under the rug. By the way, can I just jump in, Steve, and I just want to make this point for the audience because you keep using the word Medicaid. Which, of course, is accurate to what you're saying. I just want the national audience, because of course we have an audience in Maine. But for those who don't live in Maine, or don't live in Minneapolis or Minnesota, or don't live in some of these other places, Medicaid is a federal program that we all fund with our tax dollars. This is a national issue. And in the big, beautiful law that's now implemented, one of the things that the Republicans did last year, in Congress, signed by President Trump, was to crack down on fraud in Medicaid and to say that they're going to make sure that there are more safeguards and guardrails when it comes to eligibility on Medicaid. And if someone is an able-bodied working-age person,

who's getting our dollars, ostensibly at least for their health care, we saw a lot of the fraud also related in Obamacare subsidies, they would at least have to be working, seeking work, studying at some school or volunteering for a nominal period of hours per week. And these... modest reforms to crack down on the type of fraud that Steve is describing here, that was referred to in shrieking hysterical terms as Medicaid cuts that were going to hurt poor people and pregnant women and children and it's cruel and the cruelties the point. It was just trying to limit the fraud. and to have some bright lines about eligibility that are totally sensible. I just want that in the background of this whole conversation, Steve, because it's important to remember this is a national issue being funded by the money that we earn. Go ahead. I think that's... Cheers to America's 250th birthday. Get 20% off your first purchase at Fox Newswineshop.com with code FN Radio 20. 20%. 20% discount excludes wine club offers and cannot be combined with any other promotion. Expires July 31st, 2026, must be 21 older to order to order. Please drink responsibly. Important to start out with, and we should have really started there, that it's a $1 trillion a year welfare program. And what I've said is that Medicaid is $USAID times 10,000. It's more money. It's in every... state, it's block granted to the states. So rather than being centrally administered like Medicare, which is for older people, there's a big bucket of money handed to each state, and then the state lawmakers get to decide how they're going to allocate it to buy off their favorite constituencies. So they say that it's for things like, you know, hospital visits and health care, and there's a little bit of that going on, but there's also soft services like home health care services, mental health services, drug rehab services, which are wildly prone to abuse and very difficult to provide oversight for. And these are the exact services that Gateway was providing. So as we dug deeper into Gateway, we found that Abdullahi Ali, in addition to running an organization that had been audited three times and found to have overbilled Medicaid by $1.6 million, which is a very low-end, rounded down estimate. A whistleblower came forward to us and who had been submitting main care or Medicaid claims for that company for five and a half years. And he detailed it to us how the system worked, how they would log in to the back end of an electronic verification system, and they would invent hours from thin air. The whistleblower told us, by name, by the way, Christopher Bernardini is his name. He's talked with multiple other news outlets. He's highly credible. The Gateway hasn't denied that he was an employee or that he had the position or access.

that he says he had, but they were inventing fake invoices, sending them to the Department of Health and Human Services, and getting paid. At the same time, Abdullahi Ali was able to get a $700,000 PPP loan, and then he began traveling extensively to Kenya and Eastern Africa. In 2024, he ran for President of Jubiland, which is the semi-autonomous region of southern Somalia. He bragged in Kenyan media interviews, Somali language media interviews, about funding a militia. So I think it's reasonable to infer that the money that he took fraudulently from U.S. taxpayers was used to bankroll a militia that he, in his own words, intended to use to depose the sitting president, President Madobe in Jubiland. So U.S. taxpayer dollars, the fruit of fraudulent schemes, were being used to fund a wannabe warlords campaign to take political power in southern Somalia. Yes. And what we found when we, obviously, our curiosity was peaked. So we went after more of these notices of violation. And we found more and more instances where auditors. at the Department of Health and Human Services had been doing their jobs, auditing these home health care agencies. a lot of which have started within the last three or four years since Governor Janet Mills expanded Medicaid eligibility in this state under Obamacare. And remember, it's very cruel and mean-spirited if you're against Medicaid expansion, right? And the only explanation is you must hate poor people and women and children. That's the Democrat talking point. And then we see where the money is going and being stolen. And the other thing is, Steve, there are. needy people in the country who meet the requirements for Medicaid. And with this program being depleted by all of this fraud and billions of dollars flowing to criminals, basically, including overseas, that is depriving actual Americans in need of the dollars and the services in a program that is designed for them. That's the other thing that always has to be underscored. You're talking about this one organization, how it sort of branches out into all these different tentacles. I saw that there was also a huge autism, fraud, ring. What's this about? So this is what we discovered as we investigated further because we obtained the notices of violation and started looking at other companies that had been audited and had been found to have these enormous error rates or fraud rates. None of these became public as a matter of course. They were all swept under the rug. There were never any criminal referrals. Someone from the Department of Health and Human Services told the legislature the other day that there had only been...

two criminal referrals in seven years, but we have 8,000 documents, 8,000 pages rather, of documents showing audits where they can't substantiate any of the billing that they're being paid for under the Medicaid program. So there's a little bit of oversight happening, but there's no follow-up. There's no punishment. Why? Because it's politically disadvantageous. for the woman who expanded Medicaid and is still right now bragging about having expanded Medicaid. to be talking about fraud within the program. They don't want to talk about it. They want to cover it up. She wants to face Susan Collins. She's got this other guy in the race, the communist tattoo or the Nazi tattoo communist guy, right? And then there's Janet Mills, the sitting governor, who wants to be the U.S. Senator. This is probably not a great story for her. So is there a sense or is there proof that her administration is deliberately sweeping this under the rug? So I think it's even worse than that guy, because in addition to the Medicaid money that flowed to Gateway, what we found were also no-bid contracts that the Mills administration had funneled to Gateway, including while he was in Africa running for president of Jubaland, by the way, over a million dollars in no-bid contracts were funneled by the Mills administration into Gateway for activities that very closely resemble campaign activities. They used federal COVID money to fund what they called community health outreach workers or Chows. These were migrant workers at Gateway and other left-wing NGOs who went door to door in migrant neighborhoods in Lewiston and Portland. And their job, it's a lay route right in the contracts, the public documents that we've published, their job was to go door to door and sign people up for Medicaid. signed people up for food stamps. They were required to keep a database on the names and addresses and identifying information of the individuals at those households, and they were allowed to keep that information for whatever purposes they saw fit. And at the same time they received these no-bid contracts, all of the NGOs involved got together and created an explicitly political organization staffed by the same people, the same employees with the same board members. that was like a C4, that was deliberately harvesting ballots, registering voters. They used Biden-era COVID-Money to fund Democratic-Political. This is a partisan slush fund. And by the way, I saw a video recently. You might have in fact shared it. That's maybe where I saw it on Twitter, where there was a Somali migrant who showed up at some public hearing or town hall meeting. And he warned. the Democratic elected officials in front of him not to pursue the fraud issue, not to investigate his community because they vote for Democrats. And he basically made a very clear quid pro quo threat saying, we've been voting for you all the time. But if you cause any problems or ask any questions about our gravy train, we're going to have to maybe reconsider who we vote for. That's just saying the quiet part out loud in public.

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