Cut 'Em Loose Cooper and rampant fraud | Hour 3

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio and Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepekclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. As we do every week, at this time, we chat with Ap Dylan. She is a reporter at the North State Journal and she is also the creator of More to the Story, her newsletter. You can subscribe to it over at substack. Hey Ap, how are you? Hey? Pete doing good? How are you. Doing well as well? And so. You had to be a little bit, I don't know, vindicated, satisfied, happy when you saw all of the attention that people started paying to Roy cuttumloose Cooper's release of all of the prisoners during COVID, because I know you've written about it for a while and now the New York Post did a big story about it, and it has finally broken containment outside of North Carolina. So yes, how does that make you feel? Fox News also had a write up today about it. Oh okay, so they got and Stephen Horne I actually spoke with Steven on Friday. He created this searchable database which actually turns out to be way more than the thirty five hundred. The number he's got is like forty two hundred people that were on this release list. So real quick, for people who are not aware of what this release list and the release of all these convicted felons, what this was all about, give us the recap. Well, back in twenty twenty, after the George Floyd riots, several groups, the ALU and the LACP in North Carolina filed suit to try to get certain prisoners released early due to COVID, saying that their their rights were being violated, it was danger to have them in there and that kind of thing. And so this this lawsuit was filed and Cooper has maintained that he has bought the case. And you know, until a settlement was actually reached, and that settlement was kept secret, the list of names was kept out of the public. It was not released until this last year, and. That got remambered because yeah, because what state lawmakers forced the release. They did. They forced it. So on this list was you know, thirty five hundred people were supposed to like just early release folks. You know, they weren't supposed to be anyone who was dangerous or you KNOWPO was a dangerous society or whatnot. But as it turns out, there were over fifty of them where it had life sentences. You know, we're let out multiple people in that list, you know. I think he cited something like two thousand of them went on to become repeat offenders after they got out. Yeah, like a fifty cents a mod that committed murder. Yeah, fifty seven percent re offending recidivism rate, which is above like any norm. So whatever kind of criteria they were using, I would say, use something else, because whatever criteria you are, you know, Yeah, this thing happened fast too. I mean the suit was filed something in like in early April twenty twenty, but by December a special master have been appointed to you know, hammer out the details of this so called settlement, which then happened I believe in February of the following year, and it was the judge in the case was Judge Rosier superior Court judge. He was actually appointed by Cooper during his first term. In the second month of office, he was bumped up to Superiod Court by Cooper and they pushed this through. But based on the legal filings, which are all available on the ACLU website, it doesn't look like there was much of a fight that was put up, even though he claims that he fought it, and you know, he dropped it because the judge said that he would lose. Well, that judge is someone he appointed, right, So you know, it's for where I was sitting. And I said this in my in my newsletter that this was obviously some kind of sue and subtle situation. It was an appeasement thing. Right. It was one of the larger releases in the country. I mean there were the hundreds of thousands that were released I believe nationwide, and this was one of the larger ones during the COVID era there, Right, so that a lot of people in there that were you know, not supposed probably shouldn't have been released early. Right. The sue, the sue in settle strategy, and I went over this on Friday also that and the example, the classic example was the election lawsuits during cod it also where you had these same left wing groups and they sued and then the state is like, you know, with their fellow Democrats, they're like, oh my gosh, we're totally going to lose, so let's go ahead and do a settlement agreement, which remarkably coincidentally gives the groups basically everything that they wanted, and the Board of Elections chief was pushing for but was being blocked from implementing by the Republican legislature, which was oh, by the way, cut out of the settlement talks because they never would have agreed to settle the case like they did. And so this is it was being represented by then Attorney General Josh Stein now governor right, yeah, involved in that settlement. It's a collusive agreement, a collusive settlement. This is another example of it. And Cooper I don't find this believable at all that he's like, oh, well, we were fighting it in court, and I was trying to fight it in court, Like I know what Cooper looks like when he's fighting something in court. And the example is he spent fourteen years trying to avoid apology for lying about a Republican opponent in an attorney general's race, and he spent fourteen years in court fighting that this thing didn't even last a year. Yeah, yeah, it was like, okay, we have one appearance and a judge that I appointed says I'm going to lose. So I guess I'm going to lose. All right, Let's turn them all loose. Let's cut them all loose. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. All right. We also have this story of and I've not seen this anywhere else, You've got this at more to the story, Cooper's Donors, sorry, Cooper Donors company fined one point one billion dollars by the FIRK the federal was it Energy Regulatory Commission. We're talking about a company called American Efficient, which is co owned by a guy named Ben Abram. Who is Ben Abram a donor? Yeah, yeah, that one was. That was That was the story that came along also along with the Boviate solar deal, the Vietnam rechter company that the Trump's subsidies cut that deal up into shreds. And that was another one that was here in North Carolina. He recruited them in twenty twenty four with a thirty two point six million dollars state tax instead of package. But you know, by Able twenty twenty four, they were saying that Bovie it was going to bring nine hundred jobs, but they didn't and it was thirteen hundred jobs once the plant was fully operational, but in reality it ended up being like three hundred jobs. So yeah, So this other one, though. It's amazing how like they big they do the big announcements with the ribbon cutting and the ridiculously oversized scissors and they get all of the applause when they bring all the jobs to town. And then when these deals don't work and the companies you know, downsize their footprint and they they they draw down the scale and scope of their projects, it's like it's for some reason, it's never there's never any press release from the governor's office on this stuff. Right. So with American Efficient it was a little bit different of a situation. Here. Firk did find them one point one billion and asked them to repay and they called it one of the largest most brazen frauds in history. Nice. So this company, you know, it's co owned by Ben Abram. He is the son of a major Democratic donor, Adam Abram, and Adam Abram is the husband of North Carolina State Senator Sophia Chilick out A Durham. So this is a state lawmaker's sons company. Oh yeah, he's tied to it. Yeah. And the son was named the chair of the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency Board of Directors by Cooper during his first term in twenty nineteen. So there's the tie in there. And he's made a lot of donations. I think the number that I saw was that the family altogether had made two hundred and forty some odd donations to North Carolina Democrats going all the way back to nineteen ninety one, and the total of that was over eight hundred and eighty six thousand dollars worth of money, almost seventy three thousand of which went to Cooper campaigns for Attorney General, and at least two hundred k went to the Democratic Leadership Committee here in North Carolina, which Cooper controlled at the time the donations were secured. So more recently that family has contributed over twenty two thousand this Cooper Senate campaign. So there's a try in there. I mean, it's not it's not stuff to sniff at that, that's not a small amount of chump change. But the fact that you know, this company was finding this huge amount and that there's that connection there was interesting to me. And there was an outfit called The Assembly. They ran a whole story on the company itself and not a single time mentioned Droy Cooper. But that's I mean, that's the Assembly, right, I mean, that's that. Yeah. They launched as like, you know, we're going to be taking an objective look at the General Assembly and you know, legislative matters and all that stuff, and then it very quickly went where their heart wanted to go. You know, the heart wants what it wants, and they went, they went all the way like a. Green company apparently was supposed to be a green company. And through his two terms, Cooper pushed quite a number of green energy yeah initiatives, you know, and see clean Energy Plan was one of them, the zero missions for transportation goals another one. Clean Energy and Equitable Economy Plan, I think was was what that rolled up under. So you know, I mean he would have known of this company right at that time. Well, and remember he also tried to get them, and he tried to get that slush fund for green companies with the settlement of the the Atlantic Coast Pipeline deal. Right when he tried to do that thing. Yeah, that thing blew up. That thing blew up pretty fast. That was in his first term, and that was mostly negotiated. At least the emails have his his general counsel was in there and I'm trying to remember her name, but also his advisor at the time, ken Udy. Yep, it was this close, you know, his senior advisor or whatever. Right after that thing blew up, he disappeared for a while. He just was gone. He wasn't working there anymore, he wasn't doing anything anymore. But then in the second term, I think it was year two of his second term, he quietly brought it back. And if you go to a North State Journal NSG online dot com and look and just putting ken Uty into the search box, you'll you'll see that story we noticed. Yeah, all right, well there's too yeah, tons of stuff that's e U d y. If you're going to do that search over at NSJ online dot com. AP Dylan, thanks for your time, as always, keep up the good work. We appreciate you absolutely, thank you. All right, take care. That's a d Dylan. You can read her work at substack. More to the Story is her newsletter. You can subscribe to that and you can also read her work. She's a reporter at the North State Journal and again that's nsjonline dot com. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Minhill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit Creative video dot com all right over on the text line, David says, Hey, I did not know that Roy Cooper was French, but with his giving up and surrendering, I did not either. Bob says, all that COVID nineteen spending that old bidy Joe Biden shoved into the systems overwhelmed all but the fraudsters. Yeah, I mean, that's that was part of it. You know, there were trillions of dollars that were just pumped into all of these areas. And I suspect part of it, you know, the the NGO industry, you know Democrats after try On in twenty sixteen, and all these NGOs that are funded through these government grants and programs. This sort of constellation that has risen up where these people just kind of go and they work in these NGOs that are attached to government grants and funding sources and stuff, and then they kind of become just like a shadow government, just kind of waiting in the wings until a Democrat wins, and then the Democrat administration then just sort of scoops up all of these people who have been hanging out. It's basically like it's like the jobs program that universities do for Remember well, I mean former North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue, she got one. She got a scholarship up at Harvard. I think Roy Cooper did too, John Edwards. Remember they created the Center for Poverty and Work I think is what it was called at UNC Chapel Hill. These are like no show gigs and it gives them, you know, a six figure paycheck. They have to show up like once a quarter or something, but it allows them to have income while they mount their next campaign. And that's what it seems like these NGOs do as well, particularly some of the more well known ones, the bigger ones at a national level. But then they also spread that money down and then the people who are living off of the government grants, they then have an incentive to keep voting for people who will keep the gravy train going for them. And generally speaking, those elected officials are not Republicans, those are generally Democrats. And so this is why it has often described this sort of process of taking taxpayer dollars, you know, through tax AI, and then Democrats send it down into the NGOs. The NGOs then make the donations to the Democrats and some money laundering kind of an operation, because you would not be able to fund all of these campaigns out of taxpayer funds, but if you wash it through an NGO, like for example, I was just I saw one of the stories this weekend. There's some sort of diaper ngo. They give diapers to young mothers out in California, and the trying to remember how much it was it, I want to say it was like twenty million dollars or something. I mean it was it was millions. I know that it was millions. And the governor's office they give out this grant to this NGO to give diapers to young mothers. And who could be opposed to that? Right, young struggling single moms need help with diapers. They're expensive, you go through them pretty regularly, you know. So who would be opposed to such a thing. Well you start looking at the NGO and the leader of it, the CEO or the president is the wife of a big time Democrat donor, and the wife is pulling in a salary of four hundred thousand dollars a year. So wait a minute, like, why not just give a voucher to the single moms. Why do we have to run through an NGO to do this? Like I am not I understand how all. Like I remember twenty years ago, twenty five years ago, before the NGOs became like this behemoth, and conservatives argued that government was too big, we were doing too many of these things. We couldn't do it as efficiently at the government level as the private sector could do it, so why not let the private sector do it? And that argument essentially one. However, when Democrats are running this operation, then they started using it as this pass through. You started getting all of these nonprofits, non governmental organizations that started glombing on and feeding from the trough. And the problem is that Democrats are just not ideologically predisposed to monitor whether these programs and services actually are working, especially if you've got donors that are tied to certain nonprofits and NGOs. And we started to see it pretty soon after they were doing it. I remember, like the classic example was there were two different Hispanic nonprofits in mecklamer County. One of them was sort of Democrat aligned and another one was Republican aligned. And when the Republicans took control of the Mecklimber County Commission, they cut the funding for I think it was Mikasa was the Democrat aligned one, and they gave it to another one that was supportive of Dan Ramirez, who was the first Hispanic ever elected to the county commission a Republican because they're all racest, so they put Dan Ramirez on the bord of county commissioners. And then as soon as Democrats won back control, they cut the funding for that nonprofit and gave it back. To Mi Cassa. So I think it was Mikassa. So this has been going on for a long time, and at this point, I'm just like, you know what, voucherize everything. Just give people the voucher for diapers, you know, let them go to the store and buy diapers. Got a message from Russ who says fifty seven percent recidivism is stupid and ridiculously high. But I thought I had heard that the US rate was higher than that, So I just did a search and at least Duck Duck go Ai says our nationwide rate is actually about seventy percent. Seventy percent of incarcerated individuals returned to prison within five years of their release. So the fifty seven percent, I did not know it was that high. But the fifty seven percent number that is tied to the Cooper release does not include people who are facing charges but have not taken a plea agreement or have been convicted. So like, there are people that were arrested for other things but they are still in process, So we don't know. That recidivism rate is probably higher than the fifty seven percent. So that's good info. Appreciate that. Let me see here to do a nine to one nine number, says Pete in it. When we want to know what is still being used or is legitimate on large networks, we shut the service off and wait for the screams. We should do the same for these programs. The ones who scream are most likely legit. Well I'm not yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure about that because remember after the Minnesota fraud with Nick Shirley, remember a couple of the fraudsters they held like a news conference and and and called everybody racist. So I'm not so sure. But uh, I mean, it's as good as a mechanism as any I guess. Joe says, maybe the home health aids should wear body cameras monitored by AI. Well, yeah, I maybe who pays for all that and the monitoring? And yeah, plus if we if we ban the building of AI centers or the data centers, then I don't know, we won't have the capacity. Jeff says they should cut off the Medicare Medicaid funding and let the actual legitimate recipients come forth and reapply. That could help weed out a lot of the fraudsters. Just flip the whole cart over and start over. And Bain says, Ever, wonder what the grand total of all government waste, fraud and abuse is across the fruited plane. I'd love to know a total. Yeah, I'm guessing it's at least a trillion, maybe two. Like seriously, at this point, can you imagine the fiscal position we would be? And if every organization shot straight, any regular trend spotted early, and every book was properly balanced. I bet AI could give us an idea. I'd say the waste fraud and abuse number is so big average folks like average folk like me can't even begin to comprehend it. I've heard it said that huge numbers slash proposals is what liberals love. The bigger the better. Who can truly differentiate between six hundred million and four already trillion? Sometimes I think we're just too big. Yeah, there is something about the large numbers, like I've heard, like in sales, there's a tactic that people who do sales, they'll they'll start with a really high number and then like a ridiculously large number, like a trillion dollars or something, and you just mention it like, oh, did you hear they you know, a trillion dollars in fraud, blah blah blah. And then when you give them your proposal, if your proposal is only like a million, they're already primed to think the larger number. Oh well, a. Million isn't nearly as much as a trillion. But yeah, there comes a point where people don't you cannot even fathom what a trillion is, you know, And that's part of the problem. But sooner or later, it, you know, it starts heading up. I've heard. So in Luke Rosiac's investigation in Columbus, Ohio. The investigation was called Medicaid Millionaires in part two of his series, and I went over part one of the series that was released last week at Daily wire dot com, but Part two starts off thusly. The front doors are open, but inside the seven massive complexes appear to be largely abandoned. Smoke detectors chirp for new batteries, piles of mail outside the doors. The government is under the impression that all of the office buildings hold thriving healthcare businesses. Hundreds of office suites, all owned by a company named Cordoba Real Estate. The buildings owned by Cordoba each house dozens of businesses that bill Medicaid. In fact, two hundred eighty eight businesses registered with Medicaid in the Cordoba owned buildings in Columbus. Together, these two hundred eighty eight businesses charged taxpayers more than a quarter of a billion dollars between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty four. That's in a city where're only about sixty three hundred people seventy five or older are on Medicaid. So you have sixty three hundred people that somehow require like two hundred and fifty million dollars worth of Medicaid services. The Medicaid program has exploded in Ohio thanks to a waiver that expanded the medical program to include wide ranging at home services such as homemaking that allows taxpayer money to be spent for tasks such as making the bed or working on a hairdew. Ohio has three thousand, seven hundred companies with home health in their name. That's according to a review of Ohio business records. In particular, this industry has blown up in Columbus, which is home to the second largest Somali population in the United States. The program has little oversight, with most of the so called care happening inside individual homes, making it susceptible to fraud and abuse. In one of these buildings, these Cordoba owned buildings, there's a sign for National Home Healthcare Services LLC that explained the home medicaid businesses often don't provide healthcare at all. They provide services like companionship and conversation as well as light housekeeping. Another sign for Guidance Home Healthcare LLC was graphically identical to the National Home Healthcare Services, even with the same slogan quote your peace of mind in home Healthcare. One building I finally located a rare home health business with somebody in it called GC Home Healthcare LLC asked how he recruits employees. The owner's son named Abide said, employees and patients come as a package. In seventy percent of the cases, the employees are paid to spend time with their own family members. This is what he said quote. Usually the patient they have someone in their family that has the qualifications to be an aid you know, CPR training and everything, so they just come to us after getting a note from a doctor vouching for the elderly person's need for personal services. I just saw Parker Thayer, who is with the Capital Research Center I believe yes, and investigative researcher, and he worked with Luke Rosiick at The Daily Wire on this series, and earlier today he put out a tweet that said, we found that the anti fraud system in Ohio used to require patient signatures and GPS verification for Medicaid home care visits, right so the patient would have to they would have to sign and there was GPS verification. Then for some reason, Ohio turned both of those off. Don't know why. And he says now over half of home care payments are made despite having zero verification at all. Back to the text line, Eddie says, life is good for pirates when they no longer need a ship or a peg leg or a parrot or an eye patch to steal their boute. Indeed, Wes says, when are we going to get a refund of our taxes that paid for all this fraud? They can take the culprits and sell off all their assets and send taxpayers a refund. That should be done for all government fraud. Danny says, how else do you expect all these lefty protesters to go to all these weekday protests? Have you ever wondered if they have real jobs? Oh, they work in home health care jobs. That explains it. That's possible. Alan says, this is Mars times, okay, oh, Marx times, Cloward plus Piven. Yeah, so Cloward and Piven they were the ones that came up with this strategy to bankrupt the system in order to create social unrest. And how you bankrupt the system is you exploit it. You just put as many people as possible onto all of the social programs and stuff in order to bankrupt it. And then when there's no more money in the treasury, then you have social unrest, and then the rich will agree to a universal basic income. Basically they'll agree, Okay, don't burn down our mansions, you know here, just take some money. You get a monthly stipend, right, don't forget to carry the one either. Karl or Sololenski mentioned the use of large numbers, said to use millions because it was outside the perspective of the proletariat. I guess that makes it a Marxism. I don't. I think Alan, you're doing like math formulas or something on this text. And I was told there would be no math. Okay. When I took this job, they were very clear. They said there would be no math. Okay. The use of the parentheses, that's what threw me. Okay, back to the story from Daily Wire. He's talking about at one of these offices he finally located this guy Abide and he's talking about how you know, the patients and the aid, the healthcare provider. They show up as a package like son and elderly mom, and it's like, here's your Medicaid patient and here I am, I'm now your employee. You now pay me some of the Medicaid money and I just basically keep living with my mom and taking care of her. Right. The family member of an elderly person is not set up to bill Medicaid on their own, so you got to have the middleman, and that's where these scam companies come into play. Abeid says, quote, we are taking a small cut because Medicaid pay us and we pay them their hours. Asked why people wouldn't simply help their aging parents without billing Medicaid, he said, quote, well, if the government will pay you to do it, it's an incentive. I think most people nowadays they don't really care as much like about their parents. Another company, Medina Home Healthcare, led by Normala Adikari, received four hundred and ten thousand dollars from the state of Ohio and twenty two million for Medicaid. Its billing topped out at nearly one million dollars in one month in December twenty twenty three. Its website is a dead link, so nothing there. It has not posted to its Facebook page since September of twenty four. Its last post says the author was transitioning to help people write essays to get into college in the United States. His LinkedIn profile says he lives in India but majored in feminism and social justice. At the University of California, Santa Cruz. With so many companies. Well, I mean, so does a person who graduated with a degree in feminism and social justice living in India? Are they qualified to run a home health care company? Now I have a little bit of a personal connection to this because my father worked for a company that was one of the leading companies in this industry, like forty years ago, thirty years ago, so based in New York, and they would they hired nurses and stuff and home health care aids and they would put them into homes and like this is like one of the first jobs I had was putting all of the paychecks in order they would get them all returned from the bank. They would be this massive box and I would have to put all the checks in numerical order so if they ever needed to pull any checks, they could find them easily and I would get paid. Like four dollars an hour or something like that. So like I am aware. And by the way, when we had my grandfather living across the street from us in his later years, we had one of these home health nurses come to the house. So like we have experience, my family's got experience in this industry. I was unaware, like the idea that we could get Medicaid money for taking care of my grandfather and my grandmother. She was living upstairs in our house too, Like we never considered any of that. Of course, it wasn't available back then. Then there's Moonlight Home Healthcare run by Sasi Kaza. They took nine million. Their office was not just closed, but there was nothing inside of it. It built around twenty thousand a month until skyrocketing to more than half a million a month in December. It appears to have failed to pay its own taxes. It's got seven state tax leans against it. And this guy, Sazi Kazi whatever was simultaneously running Comprehensive Behavioral Health Associates in Youngstown, oh iiO, which build thirty two million for community psychiatric supportive treatment. That company owes six hundred thousand dollars in a federal tax liane against it, and just this year he established Lifeline Home Support registered to the exact same address as the Moonlight company. Like, guys, they're not even really hiding this very well, okay, they're not even hiding it. So if we got to build about a billion data centers, so we can use AI to catch these guys. I'm okay with it, all right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecalanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.