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It’s Jan. 6 yet again, and this time, it will be the electoral college votes for President-elect Donald Trump getting certified at the U.S. Capitol building. Over the course of the last four years, and even after the election results were declared for 2024, Trump has faced legal actions that raised questions over whether he could be rendered ineligible for reelection. Despite the pressure, and some recent doubts that were cast over the election certification, Republicans and Democrats in Congress appear to remain in support of a peaceful transition of power. We’ll discuss this topic and others in this episode of “Crossroads.” Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/3PKKVBX Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

You may soon be seeing new engagement on Facebook, but this may not be from human users. Instead, it may be from AI bots, and you may be unable to tell whether or not you’re engaging with a real person. Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has announced it will bring AI-generated characters to the social media platforms in a move to increase engagement on the platform, and users will be able to engage with these bots. This is raising some concerns over what’s been referred to as the “dead internet theory.” This used to be a conspiracy that much of today’s internet is bots and AI-created content, while human users have been disengaging. And there are also concerns that the bot content could be used to drive different narratives or agendas. We’ll discuss this topic and others, in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/3W5KWE1 Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

A suspected terrorist attack killed at least 14 people in New Orleans on New Year’s Day. The suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was killed in a shootout with police after driving a truck through a crowd of people celebrating the new year, and an ISIS flag was discovered inside the vehicle. The FBI is now investigating whether the attack has any ties to another incident the same day, where a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with gas tanks and fireworks exploded outside the Las Vegas Trump International Hotel. Yet these incidents are also raising an additional concern. Just prior to this, a former CIA agent warned in an interview on the Shawn Ryan Show that the terrorist groups ISIS and al-Qaeda were planning a resurgence of attacks within the United States for 2025. We’ll discuss this topic and others in this episode of “Crossroads.” Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/4j1Xtlw Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

The city of Los Angeles is set to host the 2028 Summer Olympics. And despite still being many years away, the individual athletes and teams are well on their way in terms of training—hoping to get that gold medal around their necks. Part of the reason it matters is because aside from individual achievement, the medal count is a real point of pride for every country. In fact, during the Olympic Games, almost every news media keeps a running total on its front page of how many medals each country has won. In 2024, the USA won the overall medal count. Our athletes earned a total of 126 medals—35 more medals than second-place China. But, if you only look at gold medals, we actually tied with China, with both countries getting 40. That might be good enough for some, but in 2028, we as a country should accept nothing less than complete victory. That means American athletes need to step it up to win as many gold medals as possible. To that end, we should discuss a sport that American athletes are having difficulty competing in: racewalking. At the Paris Olympics, no American athletes qualified to compete. Not only did no Americans win, we failed to even qualify to compete. However, many people don’t know that besides racewalking being one of the longest-running (pun intended) events held in modern-era Olympics, the sport was allegedly also the most popular in the United States at the end of the 19th century—only to have its popularity completely fall off a cliff. In order to make sense of this sport I spoke with professor Jeff Salvage. He is a lifelong racewalker, a coach to many top Olympic contenders, and the founder and CEO of racewalk.com , which served as the U.S. racewalking committee’s official website for nearly a decade. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. 🇺🇸 Epoch Times $1 Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale

Every year, the United Nations holds its annual climate change conference. It’s called the “Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP). This year, the 29th annual COP was held on Nov. 11 in the city of Baku, which is the capital of Azerbaijan. However, unlike previous years, many challenges have arisen this year that pose serious problems to the U.N.’s climate agenda. Whether it’s the reelection of Donald Trump (and his promise to exit the Paris Climate Accords), western world leaders skipping the conference, or the host nation giving a speech in favor of fossil fuels, it appears that the pendulum is beginning to swing in the other direction. But the U.N. is not taking this lying down. Instead, it has announced a new initiative, called the “The Baku Initiative on Human Development for Climate Resilience.” Let’s go through what this latest initiative is, how it’s being implemented, the specific challenges it’ll face, and what it’ll mean going forward for the countries that are still committed to the U.N.’s climate agenda. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. 🇺🇸 Epoch Times $1 Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale

A heated debate erupted on the X social media platform over H-1B visas, and now President-elect Donald Trump has chimed in. The debate was triggered by comments from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will head the incoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Both came out in support of the visas, while many influencers with pro-Trump leanings came out strongly against the visa policies. The topic could become a key factor in the policies of the next Trump administration on immigration, domestic manufacturing, and American innovation. We’ll discuss this topic and others in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/4gOmBKO Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, I’m sitting down with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). In the next Congress, Johnson will become chairman again of the homeland security committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has uniquely powerful subpoena powers to investigate crime and corruption within the U.S. government and beyond. In this wide-ranging episode, we dive into the future of the Make America Healthy Again movement; what Johnson believes key steps are for the incoming administration to restore transparency, scientific integrity, and small government; and why Congress needs to retake its oversight authority. Watch the video: “Our oversight authority is probably our greatest authority and greatest responsibility. ... We’ve got to fund government. But then once we funded it, we need to take a look at what we funded. … What we passed, did it actually work?” Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. RUSH TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Senator Ron Johnson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Senator Ron Johnson: Thanks for having me. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been a supporter of a number of the prominent Trump nominations for the incoming administration. What do you see as the real promise of this administration? Senator Johnson: First of all, the primary thing that President Trump promised in the campaign, in a macro sense, was he was going to focus on the working men and women of this country. What do they need to support their efforts? How can he limit the damage that the government does to those individuals? Then, obviously, secure the border, make America great again, make America healthy again. I mean, those are all, from my standpoint, subcontexts of the overall effort is, you know, focus on the people that actually built this country and that we’re going to need to rely on to make America great again. Mr. Jekielek: These are all big categories, right? But where do you see are the biggest pressure points, the biggest change that needs to happen? And is it even possible? Some people are asking this question. Senator Johnson: If I have a mission as a U.S. Senator, it is to wean as many Americans off the concept that the federal government can solve their problems. The federal government is singularly incapable of solving problems. It creates or exacerbates more problems than it’s ever going to solve. Take a look at how it mismanaged the extracted earnings in Social Security and spent all that money. It’s gone, and now that trust fund is going to be depleted in the next 10 years. The federal government was primarily designed by the genius of our Founding Fathers to protect and ensure our liberty and freedom, not crush it by over-regulation, over-taxation. That’s the main thing that President Trump is coming into office to do. That’s what DOGE is all about. Take a look at how the federal government is crushing the American people, the people that built this country, and how we can get the government off their backs so that they can do what they do best, which is utilize that freedom, which is the essential ingredient. It’s what our ancestors used to dream and aspire and build and create this marvel of a country. How can we unleash the entrepreneurial spirit, the creativity, the work ethic of the American public, and create incentives for people to get off the couch, reengage in the workforce, and help us rebuild this country? Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about a few of the candidates. You’ve been a big supporter of the Make America Healthy Again idea. That’s a great slogan that Bobby Kennedy, Jr. used to be the Health and Human Services Secretary. What actually needs to happen there? Senator Johnson: We'll talk about this repeatedly as we go through this process, but I come from a manufacturing background where you’re solving problems all the time, And there’s just a very well-defined process you go through in solving a problem. It starts with admitting you have one, okay, which is oftentimes a very big step. The next crucial step is properly defining it. Once you’ve done that, now you need to start looking at the root cause. What happens in Washington, D.C. is we generally start with somebody’s solution. It’s a completely flawed solution or it exacerbates the problem. We look at scores. We look at, you know, the political realities. Can you get this passed? Who’s going to vote for it? As opposed to, no, let’s go back to the basics. When it comes to, Make America Healthy Again, you have to understand we have a problem. And I think the American people understand we do. You have this explosion in chronic illness. And again, all you have to do is look back in history and take a look at the stats, whether you’re talking about all the autoimmune, I mean, the obesity, autism. These things have exploded. I’m almost 70-years-old now. You look back to when I was a child, I'd never heard of things like lupus or autoimmune disease or autism. I never heard of any of these things. The American people are asking the question, what has caused this? Now, people like Bobby Kennedy who have asked that question get ruthlessly attacked. You were certainly aware of the public event that I held at the end of September with Bobby Kennedy and Casey and Calley Means and a number of nutritionists that have social media platforms. Of all the excellent testimony, I thought the best snippet came from Dr. Chris Palmer, a psychiatrist who does a lot of work on the impact of nutrition on mental health. His statement was, to paraphrase, they don’t want to discover the root cause. That’s a profound statement, but it’s 100% true. Because if we discover that something causes autism or something causes obesity or something is causing all this thing, that’s going to disrupt multi-billion dollar business models. So those people who are engaged in those multi-billion dollar business models, they don’t want to discover it. They don’t want their ingredient or their activity to be implicated or proven to cause all these ailments, driving up our cost of health care. That is the basic definition of the problem. You have science that’s been corrupted, and you also have these federal agencies who are tasked with protecting public health, thoroughly captured by the companies that they’re regulating. I come from the private sector. I have no problem with big business. I mean, big business has done all kinds of wonderful things. Big Ag culture has fed the world, okay? But because government grows and government over-regulates, these businesses naturally have to figure out, how can we survive in this environment of over-taxation and over-regulation? They can go beyond that. They get smart enough to realize, not only can we survive in this, but we can turn that regulatory agency to our advantage and to the disadvantage of our competitors. When you’re turning it to the disadvantage of your competitors, you’re crushing competition. All of a sudden, the consumer gets crushed. So to me, the problem is the government. Government is power and power corrupts. That power has been corrupted and we need to uncorrupt it. Eisenhower warned us about this in his farewell speech. The primary warning, the famous one, was against the military industrial complex, which we have not taken seriously. It has led us in all kinds of foreign policy debacles. But the second warning was government funding of science and research. He said it would produce a scientific and technological elite that would drive public policy like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins who created what we saw during COVID. But I would go beyond that and say it corrupts science. When you pay for research, you’re going to get the result you want. Fauci got the results he wanted, and he doled out billions of dollars for research. Big Pharma, they’re the ones funding the studies. They’re the ones that hold the data. Now, they’ve so corrupted the process. For example, in the Pfizer injection, they’ve so corrupted the agencies, it was the FDA that went to court to delay the public revelation of the trial data for 75 years. Now, I’m sure Pfizer would have gone to court as well, but they didn’t have to. The FDA did it for them. The FDA should have been all about transparency. They should have been releasing that trial data as they were receiving it, so their experts could look at it, which I doubt they did, and that’s why they’re covering it up. But the medical community could have looked at it and they would have said, whoa, hang on here there are more deaths in the trial group than there are in the placebo group. These deaths aren’t being reported on time. We now have evidence of myocarditis a few months into the general administration of these injections. But all that was hidden, and they continue to try and hide it. So again, it’s the corruption of science. Bobby Kennedy’s first task is to bring integrity back to scientific research across the board. Then we need to end the corporate capture of these federal agencies and that corruption as well. That’s a big task because as we all know from COVID, those of us who were fighting that same battle, we’re up against powerful forces. These guys have all the money. They control the narrative. Quick aside, and then I'll quit my filibuster here. I’m a private sector guy. I never would have thought I would come in on the side of banning big pharma from advertising. It’s free market means that’s their free speech. But big pharma is using those ad dollars to push the drug. You see those ads and you have no idea what the drugs are for. You’ve had a bunch of happy people playing with their dogs at the beach or whatever. But you don’t listen to the unbelievably bad awful side effects of those drugs. There’s no way somebody trying to sell a product would run an ad like that to actually sell it to convince somebody to take it. The only reason they spend billions is to capture the narrative. That’s what they did during COVID, which is why they were able to sabotage early treatment. I believe it resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people lacking early treatment, things like ivermectin that worked. We have evidence of that. I think a lot of the American people saw it. A lot of people had their eyes opened. That’s why there’s such a great deal of support for Bobby Kennedy’s confirmation from the general public. Now, again, the vested interests will come out of the woodwork and be relentless. The people that are captured by them in the media, whether they realize it or not, they’re doing their job as well. So that’s, I think, going to be one of the more challenging ones. But in the end, I think Bob Kennedy will prevail because the American people, in a completely non-partisan way, support what he’s trying to do here. Mr. Jekielek: Is this like making the agencies great again or making the government great again? Senator Johnson: No, please, no. Make government small again. Okay. You know, the genius of our founding fathers was they came from dictatorial monarchies, you know, totalitarian regimes. But they realized, you know, men and women, we’re not angels. You know, if we don’t want to live in anarchy and chaos, we need some governing authority. But they realized that governing authority would be, by and large, something to fear. It had to be limited. It had to be contained, which is, again, the genius. They’ve developed this system of government. We have three branches that were supposed to jealously guard their own constitutional authority and power so that the other two branches wouldn’t eclipse their branch in terms of ruling the nation. They also created a Constitution that enumerated what the federal government could do. Unfortunately, particularly during FDR’s New Deal, the federal government busted out of those constraints, the enumerated powers. Now, the federal government is massive. Congress, a bunch of wimps that don’t want to be held accountable, have willingly over the decades given their constitutional authority over the executive branch. So we don’t pass conscriptive laws anymore, or prescriptive laws anymore. We pass these frameworks with a really nice name, like Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. It’s like, here, administration, give us 20,000 pages. You fill in the blanks. You protect patients. You make health care affordable. Of course, they didn’t do it. From my standpoint, Congress has willingly given up a lot of its constitutional authority. We don’t have three co-equal branches of government anymore. The executive is probably the most powerful, combined with the courts. Congress is just a shadow of itself. We’ve let our oversight authority atrophy. We don’t enforce it. I intend to if I have support for my conference. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about that because this is something that isn’t discussed as much as we’re looking at these various cabinet appointments. What does Congress need to do to play its role, as you’re describing it? Senator Johnson: We need to really understand that our oversight authority is probably our greatest authority and greatest responsibility. Yes, we’ve got to fund the government, but then once we’ve funded it, we need to take a look at what we funded. Did what we passed, did it actually work? Again, I'd be a big proponent of splitting the appropriation process in half or maybe even thirds and appropriate either six or four accounts a year and then spend the next two or three years, or the next year or the following year, doing oversight over what we appropriated. That would be a rational system here, okay? But we absolutely have to do far more investigations. We have to take that oversight capability seriously. I will become chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. It is the premier investigatory subcommittee of Congress. We have the strongest subpoena authority of any committee or subcommittee in Congress. The House has theoretically the same, but they generally have to go through the Speaker’s office. I don’t. I decide to issue a subpoena. I notify the chairman of the full committee, which I used to chair, and then I just issue the subpoena. But that premier investigatory body has a huge budget, so I have five staff. I have five investigators. Now, they’re good. They do a lot of really good work, but it’s only five investigators to do oversight investigations on a federal government that spends almost $7 trillion and employs a couple million people. It’s literally a joke. Mr. Jekielek: Can that be changed? Senator Johnson: I hope so. But again, as you well know, my areas of concentration have not really been all that particularly popular with my colleagues. For example, I couldn’t get the support of all the Republicans on my committee when I chaired the full committee because I had to get a vote to get a subpoena to subpoena the Bidens. That was viewed as too political. I was accused of, in public hearings, of misusing committee funds with my investigation of the corrupt Biden crime family. Now, had we been able to pursue that, had I gotten those subpoenas, had we gotten the documents we needed, history might have been changed dramatically. We probably wouldn’t have an open border. Joe Biden probably would not have won the election. We would have obtained the Hunter Biden laptop well into 2020. Remember, MacIsaac, when he turned that over to the FBI, on the way out the door the FBI said, it’s our experience that people don’t talk about these things. Don’t get hurt. Don’t get in trouble. I’m paraphrasing here. When Senator Grassley and I issued our report at the end of September. You don’t need more evidence in terms of corruption in the Biden crime family. These millions of dollars coming in for only one purpose, you know, political influence, political corruption. John Paul MacIsaac offered us that laptop the day after we issued that report. He finally felt safe enough to offer that computer because he took the warning from the FBI seriously. Now, because we had obtained an unsolicited briefing by the FBI saying we were targeted to Russian disinformation in August. That was a pretty odd story to us. It’s like, that could be a Russian plant. Who knows what’s on that? So we did our due diligence. We’re very thorough investigators. We did our due diligence. We went to the corrupt FBI. We said, what do you know about this? Is this stolen property? What do you know about it? Mum was the word. They gave us the runaround for weeks. Even though they had that laptop, they had authenticated it, they wouldn’t tell Chairman Grassley and Chairman Johnson. They wouldn’t tell us, we’ve got it, we took possession of it in December, it’s authentic, there’s no problem in you accepting that, okay? That’s what they should have told us the day we contacted them. They didn’t, so MacIsaac got impatient and gave it to Rudy Giuliani’s attorney. He turned over the New York Post and the rest is history. The most important part of that story is the fact that Anthony Blinken, our current Secretary of State, working in the Biden campaign, used his contacts in the intelligence community, former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell. Hey, can you help us out here? Can you write a letter and cast doubt on this Hunter Biden laptop? That’s where that letter, signed by 51 former intelligence officials, said that that laptop had all the earmarks of a Russian information campaign. That letter was a U.S. Intel information campaign and it worked. It was the greatest example of election interference in my lifetime. Thoroughly corrupt and changed the course of history. So you would like to see proper oversight over the FBI going forward. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about the confirmation process for Kash Patel. Senator Johnson: I had a conversation with Kash, and obviously we worked with him when he was working at the Director of National Intelligence Office. He helped us get documents, but we couldn’t get all of them. Kash is very intelligent and says he wants to concentrate on fulfilling the agenda, fighting crime, restoring integrity to the FBI, which means probably decentralizing it again. What has led to this corruption is they took all these decisions that used to be run at the branches, independent of political influence here in Washington, D.C. They moved people and the decision-making process to the political leaders of the FBI in Washington, D.C., so that corrupted the process. What Kash wants to do is go back to an FBI that has greater integrity, a single system of justice, not a dual system. And from a standpoint of looking back, which we have to do, just open up the information, provide congressional committees with the information we need for our oversight attempts. And as we do that oversight, if we see criminal behavior, we can refer that criminal behavior for potential prosecution to the Attorney General. That’s a very common sense approach. It certainly delivers on President Trump’s promise when he said, no, our retribution will be a success. He’s not looking back. Look what he did when he won first one in 2016 and 2017. He announced, listen, we’re not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, although I think he could have successfully. What she did was a crime. I was investigating it. The minute President Trump said, no, we’re not going to do that, that’s what they do in third world countries, we’re moving on, I moved on. We dropped our investigation, although with my five staff members, we’re the ones that uncovered all the editing of the James Comey exoneration memo, where they turned grossly negligent, which was a criminal term, to extremely careless. Comey actually wrote a memo that was very incriminating. It would have been very hard not to prosecute her. Anyway, that’s the approach. That’s just going to be true for Bobby and Pete Hegseth—they’re looking forward to it. They’ve got a big mess to clean up, and they’re going to clean it up. When it comes to looking back and holding people accountable,they’re going to pretty well rely on providing us documents, opening up their agencies, making them transparent, which is what the American people should expect, and then have Congress do our oversight work. I just need resources. So write to your senator and say, provide Senator Johnson with the resources he needs. Mr. Jekielek: It would take a vote of the Senate to strengthen the investigation subcommittee. Senator Johnson: Yes, we need resources. I understand how the public is not a real fan of Congress. I’m not a real fan of Congress, okay? But we actually do need funding if we’re going to do these things. I can’t, as an investigatory body, compete with, let’s say, the Mueller probe, where they spent, what, $30 million, $40 million exercising their lawfare? How much did Alvin Bragg spend? I mean, all these other agencies, executive agencies, it’s just got millions pouring out. We’re pretty constrained. I get less than a million dollars for my subcommittee. Now, when I was chairman, I gave Rob Portman, who was chairman of the Supreme Subcommittee, a million bucks. When I became the ranking member, I lost the chairmanship. We lost the majority and I was termed out of the chairmanship. Gary Peters didn’t want me to continue my investigation, so he dramatically cut back the amount he allocated. Rob Portman didn’t have to follow suit, but he cut the budget of PSI. It hasn’t been restored by Rand Paul, but hopefully Rand will. Mr. Jekielek: You were talking about how power is inherently corrupting. Could it be possible that these agencies will actually ask for oversight? Because it doesn’t seem like something that would normally happen. Senator Johnson: Oh, no, that’s one of the reasons I’m very enthusiastic about these nominees, is that they are asking it. As I’m meeting with them, we’re talking about, you know, what’s going to be our strategy. Now, I’ve said publicly what President Trump really needs to appoint or nominate is the Secretary of Information Extraction. You know, as I’m talking to these people, if I have one concern is they may be a little bit too optimistic of how capable they will be of providing this information. I went down to Mar-a-Lago a couple of springs ago before President Trump was our nominee, really trying to determine, did he have a full grasp of how his first term was sabotaged, undermined from within? I think he does. You’re seeing that being reflected now in these appointments. Of course, the establishment here hates this because these people are articulate fighters. That’s what they don’t want to see in these agencies. Trump needs people who can articulate what they want to do in these agencies that are willing to fight for it. There aren’t going to be tender flowers and wilt when they start getting criticized by the establishment, which is the legacy corporate media. Mr. Jekielek: Across the board, the president is choosing strong communicators for these roles. Do you agree with that? Senator Johnson: Yes, and he needs them. The establishment is going to look at, well, he doesn’t have a background in X, Y, or Z. He can hire the expertise in X, Y, and Z. What you need at the top of these agencies are people who, again, have the willingness to fight, have demonstrated their willingness to fight, but can also articulate what it is they need to do. You’ve got to win the political argument. One of the greatest things that this Trump administration has going for it is the alliance now with, for example, Elon Musk. Conservatives, we’ve never had the vast bulk of the media telling the truth, or certainly not promoting what we’re trying to promote. We’re always in conflict with the media. They’re always doing everything they can to pick apart anything we want to do. Now, for the first time, it’s going to be, I think, promoted what we need to do. The fact that we are $36 trillion in debt, that the deficit is almost $2 trillion, that we’re spending $7 trillion and so much of it’s being wasted. So now you’ve got an advocate like Elon Musk, who is, from my standpoint, a genius at organizing and efficiency. In the conference, I’ve quoted his idiot index. Again, I come from a manufacturing background. This really resonates to me. This is the idiot index. He'll take a look at a product and say, what is the raw material cost of this product? Let’s say, this thing costs 10 bucks to make and sells for $100. The idiot index is 10. You take the selling price vs the raw material cost. The higher the idiot index, just as an engineer, the greater opportunity for dramatically decreasing the cost. That’s what we do here in America. We make things more efficient. You know, 100 years ago, what, maybe half of America was involved in agriculture. Now it’s a single digit percent. That’s called progress. Now, I bemoan the loss of the family farm. We want to maintain that tradition. But we ought to celebrate the fact that we’re not saddled with half of our population just figuring out how we can feed ourselves. We’re a very small fraction of our population feeding the world. The rest of us now can create all kinds of really great products and services that we all value. Mr. Jekielek: How do you react to Senator Warren’s assertion that there’s too many conflicts of interest on Elon’s side with respect to the future administration? Senator Johnson: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] is her brainchild. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court didn’t agree that it was completely unconstitutional. She’s a nice person to greet in the hallway, but her ideology is not what America wants to adopt. Mr. Jekielek: Are there possibilities of conflict of interest? Senator Johnson: Who doesn’t have a conflict of interest? Literally, who in the world doesn’t have a conflict of interest? I think they need to be exposed. Be transparent about the conflict. Be transparent about it. For example, with campaign finance, I would allow unlimited contributions to a campaign, so it’s accountable, but it had to be revealed immediately. As a candidate, you want to accept a multi-million dollar contribution from one person, my guess is that'd be not working to your advantage in a campaign. The public would know about it. You know, that’s far better than the system we have right now where those multi-million dollar donations are going to the campaign committees where the real corruption occurs. It’s not the five or ten thousand dollar donations to individual members that really cause corruption, it’s the million dollar, the multi-million dollar donations going to the Senate Leadership Fund, and the Democrats are equivalent. Those are the people that are at the table when these 1,500 page or 2,000 page bills are being written. I’m not at the table. I don’t get to see these things until we’re going to vote on, like the CR of 1,500 pages that we’re going to be voting on in the next couple of days. I have no idea what’s in it. We'll get a summary, but the Corporate Transparency Act or whatever that thing was called that was slipped into an NDAA. It’s an awful piece of legislation apparently. I’m hearing in this CR we will delay its implementation by a year. Why don’t we just repeal it? It’s awful and has been overruled by the court. Mr. Jekielek: Why is it awful? Senator Johnson: It will impose a regulatory burden on business and be crushing. Nobody will comply with it. There’s no reason for it. It’s such a government overreach, which is what the court ruled to stop its implementation. Congress ought to recognize that we slipped it into one bill. Let’s slip its repeal into this one. Mr. Jekielek: Well, the question I have is this. I mean, from everything I’m hearing and everything I know about you, you’re a champion of transparency. But this Transparency Act isn’t about transparency. That’s what you’re saying. Senator Johnson: No, that is intrusive. Transparency in government, not ordinary citizens. Again, we have constitutional amendments protecting us against unreasonable search and seizure. I would consider this an unreasonable search and seizure where you’ve got to disclose all these things to the public. You’re a private citizen. You’re running a private company. Your fellow citizens don’t need to know everything about your business. That’s an unreasonable search and seizure. No, transparency is about government, what government is doing. We need to be transparent. So again, what the government is forcing is unconstitutional transparency on its citizens. But at the same time, we’re not going to give you the information on how we arrived at that decision. We’re not going to give you the data that we’re forcing that farm to give to us. We’re going to go to court and we’re going to delay the disclosure of that for 75 years, well after we’re dead and gone. So no, it’s transparency in government, not forced unreasonable search and seizure of the American public. Mr. Jekielek: I became familiar over the past few years with the concept of subsidiarity and governance. Basically, it is the idea that you give the governance of any issue to the smallest possible unit that can handle it. Trump has said 10 regulations must be removed for any new regulation to be added. That’s to up the ante. Senator Johnson: Yes, we had the one-in, two-out rule. He exceeded that. At one point, his administration achieved something like one, 22 gone, for everyone in. I can’t remember the exact figure, but it was massive. And it was, to my mind, a derogatory effort. Again, that doesn’t mean to remove all regulations. There are things the federal government should do. But because they do all these other things, they do what they should do very poorly, or they don’t do them at all. The vision of our Founding Fathers was a federated republic of sovereign states, close to the governed, where it’s more accountable, it’s more efficient, more effective. The education for our children ought to be occurring at the local level, as much as possible funded at the local level. And from my standpoint, the only role the state ought to play in that is making sure that the funding is equally distributed so all children have an equal opportunity in terms of good education. What roles does the federal government have in that? I suppose there could be some disparity in states, rich states versus poor states, and maybe there could be some leveling there. But otherwise, there should not be a Department of Education. I hope that is one promise that President Trump delivers on, ending the Department of Education. But again, our form of government was supposed to be most governing occurring in the states and the federal government doing only a very few things that are enumerating the Constitution. That’s why I have in my office stenciled on the wall the Tenth Amendment, which is impossible to memorize because it’s written in 17th or 18th century prose, but it basically says the Constitution grants governing authority primarily to the states or to the federal government only as enumerated in the constitution very limited the rest of governing authority should occur in the states but the power resides in the people you know so in the end subsidiary you know we are the sovereign each individual citizen. The federal government was formed primarily to ensure our freedom and protect our freedom and protect us with secure borders and defense of the nation. Local government and state government is there to actually protect our persons in terms of law enforcement. Most criminal penalties should be state penalties. We’ve criminalized way too many things at a federal level. It shouldn’t be involved that way. Leave it up to the states. Mr. Jekielek: At Epoch Times, we’ve been covering the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to silence its critics here in America. This goes under this rubric of transnational repression. The Biden administration is actually trying to tackle that somehow with some new approaches. How should the government fit into it? I'll give you a few examples. One example is a young woman from Hong Kong who got asylum here in America who has a bounty on her head. And it kind of lives under that rubric. We have all sorts of examples of what appears to be lawfare and utilization of media by the CCP against Falun Gong. We have a whole bunch of different examples of this happening on the Chinese side, and other nations as well. What role should the government have in this sort of scenario? Senator Johnson: Again, it needs to protect the citizens of this nation and people that are under its governing authority. And that includes people that are here legally. You know, we have laws against vigilantism. You can’t be a vigilante and take the law into your own hands. So that means China can’t send in its operatives here to enforce its laws. So those operatives, we should find them and arrest them. And then in our foreign policy, be very blunt in terms of, got to knock that off. Quit stealing our stuff. got to knock that off. You know, quit stealing our stuff. Quit sending over your extra legal vigilantes here. You can’t do that. Again, China is a problem, but the Chinese people aren’t. Our foreign policy has lost sight of the type of diplomacy we need to engage in, in terms of recognizing and respecting the people of these countries and pushing back against their governments that are doing things that are harmful to the world order. Now, the same, we can’t impose our will. I mean, at certain points, say, okay, that’s, okay, you’re the governing authority of that nation. We need to respect that. We’re not going to go to war because you’re not doing things the way we want you to do. We certainly can in world trade organizations and have alliances with other people that want to engage in free trade and will push back against people who are violating trade agreements that are using industrial engineering and state power that are destroying industries and the rest of the world. I mean, that’s a problem. That’s one of the real problems we have with China is they’re investing massively in things like, for example, steel production is probably the best example, destroying steel industries throughout the world. We all need to be able to make steel. We can’t rely on only one being able to. So that’s a difficult issue to deal with. That’s probably the best use of a terrorist in as intelligent a way as possible, because terrorists are a real double edged sword. There’s a cost to implying them. Mr. Jekielek: You have certainly been briefed on this whole Salt Typhoon hack, how the Chinese regime has open access to our telephone networks? It is to the point where we have to use encrypted apps to not be listened to by the Chinese, but that’s not an act of war, apparently. Senator Johnson: China is a real problem, and there’s no equivalency here whatsoever. But in using all this technology, we are giving up our privacy in a massive way, whether it’s to the Chinese government or whether it’s to Google and to Amazon and everybody else. It’s kind of the deal we’ve done. Now, if you want your privacy, don’t use the technology. But very few people don’t want to avail themselves of that. I’m saying keep your nose clean. Certainly, I try to use this. Don’t put anything in a text or an email that you wouldn’t want splashed on the New York Times. I try to be careful that way. There is not an easy solution here, okay? There just isn’t. Nuclear power is a wonderful thing until it’s turned into a nuclear bomb and destroys civilizations. Technology is like that. There are marvelous benefits to technology. There always seems to be a dark side and a very destructive downside. A question for civilization is how do we utilize technology where it doesn’t destroy us? That dates back to the wheel, when they started using the wheel for these machines of war. It’s that same conflict. It’s just ramped up to higher and higher tech. Mr. Jekielek: With this extreme violation of privacy and security, the future president’s and vice president’s lines were exposed. Might a reaction be to put some holes in that great firewall of China that prevents the Chinese people from getting all sorts of information that the regime doesn’t want to see? Senator Johnson: Don’t accuse me of moral equivalency here, but my guess is we do a little bit of snooping ourselves. We need to be honest. We need to retrospectively look at the results of our foreign entanglements, our foreign policy, our wars. Go back and take a look at, let’s say, Vietnam. What was the goal there? What did it cost in human life for Americans as well as for the Vietnamese and Asians and everybody in Southeast Asia? What did it cost to all sides? What was the result? I think you'd find out that, you know, boy, that was a war we never should have involved ourselves in. And they just keep moving forward. I mean, right now you take a look at Ukraine. I’m all for people seeking freedom. I certainly understand those Ukrainians that would rather orient themselves to the West. But to be honest, a lot of Ukrainians would rather be part of Russia, and we didn’t recognize that reality. We used our enormous influence to pretty well foment the revolution of dignity. At the time, we were not briefed properly by the State Department. As a U.S. Senator, you don’t really understand the true divisions occurring in Ukraine, so you’re all for the freedom-loving people. The result of that has literally been the destruction of Ukraine and pushing us toward, what, 90 seconds from midnight on the doomsday clock, closer to World War III and nuclear holocaust than I think we’ve been during my lifetime. That’s not a good thing. Take a look at the disaster that is the Middle East. There has been the destruction of totalitarian strongmen, sure. But now what do we have? Now we have chaos. We’ve destroyed so much. There’s been so many lives lost. It’s not a success. I’m pro-America. America’s a great country because Americans are good people, but that doesn’t mean that American leaders haven’t led us in some really bad ways and produced some horrible results that don’t get reported on. We need to take a very realistic view of what we have engaged in, what were our goals, what was the result, and right now I think you have to take a look. I don’t see how any unbiased observer could take a look at the current state of the world and say, you know, hey, the foreign policy we’ve been pursuing for decades under both Republican and Democrat administrations hasn’t been basically a miserable failure. Take a look at the promise we had. People were writing about the end of history with the fall of the Soviet Union. Why didn’t we just accept Russia, try and integrate them as much as they wanted to be integrated into the West, but we just had to keep pushing them and pushing them and pushing them? It’s true. Gorbachev and Secretary Baker sat down and I’ve seen the readout of their discussion in Berlin. It was certainly implied we weren’t going to move NATO one inch to the east. We’ve moved it hundreds of miles.Then the final straw, which was very well recognized, this was the red line for Putin. We just blew it off. We just ignored it by having NATO in Ukraine. And so he reacted. Now, Ukraine is a great deal destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of lives lost in Ukraine and with Russian conscripts. I take no joy in that. This has been an utter disaster. Trump is probably the least likely person to get us into war. And the example I use is, I asked him about this because I heard the story was not quite right. But remember when they downed one of our drones. If you remember the time, there was the drumbeat of war, we can’t accept this, we have to retaliate. We were basically at the 12th hour of retaliation when the president finally intervened and asked, OK, hang on here now, what did that drone cost? The answer is a couple million bucks. OK, how many lives are going to be lost? It’s a few hundred. Then President Trump very appropriately showed leadership. He said, I don’t think a couple million dollar drone is worth that loss of life, and he pulled us back from the brink. Then I told him that was the moment that I truly supported what you’re trying to do here. Again, I don’t agree with anybody 100% of the time. I disagree. But that was the moment I thought, okay, no, this is a guy that I can trust being commander in chief because he wants to keep us out of war. Bobby Kennedy talks about his uncle. The number one goal of an American president is to keep the peace, not involve us in war after war after war. The overall message of the Trump campaign was, focus on the needs and the desires of the American people who work and that have built this country. Part of that desire is don’t send us off to war. Don’t endanger our children. Keep us safe. Don’t have the world engulfed in flames and get us closer to a nuclear holocaust. Step back from that. It just takes a completely different outlook from what most of Washington sees. We have Mitch McConnell right now saying that we need to be, what is it, preeminent? We got to spend 5% of our GDP on defense. Listen, in normal times, that’s an unreasonable percentage, but these aren’t normal times. We’re $36 trillion in debt. Also, what are we going to spend it on? I’m all for spending money on the defense of this nation to make sure that nobody would ever attack us. Do I want to spend money on platforms so we can project our power stupidly and actually create greater insecurity for this nation? That’s the whole purpose of a retrospective look. We have what we’ve done, not only accomplished the goals we set out, not only created so much destruction, cost us trillions, has it actually made us less safe? I would argue it has. I don’t feel more secure today. Mr. Jekielek: You’re hoping this is the assessment that’s done as part of the work of the incoming administration? Senator Johnson: Yes, and that’s why I think there’s always been such resistance to Trump. He is such a threat to the established order of this place, of the military industrial complex. Remember I said, you know, Eisenhower warned us about that. We haven’t heeded that warning. And we haven’t heeded the warning about government funding of scientific research. We certainly haven’t heeded his warning about plundering our children’s future. There were four warnings. I just gave you three. The last one was probably the most prescient. He said, we cannot allow global society to descend into a state of dreadful fear and hate. That’s where we are, right? I mean, isn’t that what drives all these policy decisions is we create a boogeyman, you know, you scare the American public, you know, there’s some external threat, so we can build up our military for the benefit of the military industrial complex, we go to war, read the novel 1984. That was all about, you always had to be at war, you always had to, you know, rev up your population, you always had to be fighting something, you. You’ve got to fight climate change because CO2, a trace element that mankind is responsible for a fraction of what’s naturally occurring. We have to be afraid of a buildup of CO2, spend trillions of dollars,even bend the curve down. Again, it’s all creating fear and then hate. That’s what identity politics is about. That’s what critical race theory is about, because if you get people to hate each other, you divide and conquer. Again, people should go back, it’s 15 or 60 minutes long, and listen to President Eisenhower’s unbelievably prescient and wise farewell address. Military deaths are complex. Government funding of science and research. Don’t plunder. Don’t mortgage your kids’ future. And step back from this dreadful state of fear and hate that we have in the world today. That’s what I hope Trump can do. He gets criticized. He’s dealing with tyrants. Those tyrants are in charge of China and Russia and Iran and North Korea. I'd rather be talking to them than pushing them to the point where they have a misunderstanding of what our intentions are, where they end up hitting the button before we do. That’s the threat. We’ve got to step back from that. Mr. Jekielek: In his first term, President Trump demonstrated this idea of peace through strength, of acting very decisively and projecting American strength when necessary. Senator Johnson: Let me talk about strength, though, because the first element of strength is economic strength, prosperity, a strong country, a unified country. That’s why for years, I’ve been quoting Lincoln, that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. This division has been sown by both sides, but primarily by the Left. Again, critical race theory, identity politics, the whole issue of transgenderism, where did that spring out of, okay? It was all meant to divide us. A divided nation is a weak nation. A nation that’s $36 trillion in debt is a weak nation, okay? A nation that opens up its borders to all comers, including people who really threaten this nation, our adversaries coming into this country. That’s a weak nation. That’s why the world’s in turmoil today. When America is weak, the world’s a dangerous place. But it starts and almost stops with economic strength and then using the economic strength to help other nations create opportunities for their citizens. I’m not opposed to importing products from people to help them create wealth for themselves. Now, I appreciate the fact that China’s lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. That’s a good thing. It’s not a bad thing. Now, they have to play by the rules. When we’re an engine of economic strength that helps drive the rest of the world to greater prosperity, that’s how you achieve peace. So you have to take the broader picture here. I don’t want us at loggerheads with everybody. What we’re trying to do is, how can we figure out how to get along? How can you recognize the other person’s perspective? China has a huge demographic problem now. They still need to lift millions of people out of just abject poverty. That’s true around the world. What can we do without harming our own American citizens, but how can we generously try and help build that prosperity to benefit us? Again, this should be a win-win situation. This doesn’t have to be a win-lose type of thing. So look for those win-win situations, but have, again, have the broader perspective of peace through strength starts with economic strength, national unity, and don’t rely so much on our military prowess. Mr. Jekielek: Senator, something you said earlier about communicating with the people of nations, especially dictatorships, I think there’s something, I guess, very significant there in the vein of exactly what you just talked about. A final thought as we finish up? Senator Johnson: Again, I think America is a great country because Americans, by and large, are good people. And to the extent that even when our government or our leaders are potentially hostile to a nation, I think where there’s free information, it’s very difficult to suppress all free information. I think most people in the world do recognize that Americans are good people. We’ve done so many good things. We’ve been so generous. Let’s embrace that. Let our leadership in the world be driven by the principles that made this country great. Our love of freedom and our desire to allow other people to have the same kind of freedom, the same kind of opportunities, the same kind of prosperity that we enjoy because of that freedom. That’s how we need to lead in this world. That’s why we’re a shining city on a hill. Not because we’ve got the biggest missiles and we can threaten people, we can take out governments with a massive strike. People respect us because, again, we’re good people. This model is based on the essential ingredient of freedom, it’s working. It has worked. It’s worked around the world. There are so many more democracies. There’s so much more freedom today than there was 100 to 200 years ago. That’s because of the example we’ve set. Let’s set that example and lead by soft power. Adventurism and trying to impose our will on other people is not the solution. Let’s lead by example. Mr. Jekielek: Senator Ron Johnson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Senator Johnson: Thanks for having me on.

Could Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of the United States be blocked? A roadmap for this roadblock was laid out in a recent op-ed in The Hill. It was written by two attorneys, and uses the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as its main tool. Attorneys Evan Davis and David Schulte write that Congress could use this strategy to prevent Trump from taking office. We’ll discuss this topic and others in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/41MJgmt Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

A new Pentagon report says the Chinese regime is planning to launch a cognitive war against the United States. The Department of Defense released its 2024 report to Congress on the military and security developments of the CCP, and it notes that the CCP is planning to launch sophisticated information warfare operations against the United States. These will allegedly include the use of deepfake AI content and other forms of psychological warfare. We’ll discuss this topic, and others, in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/4fGtxIM Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

A recent study found that programs for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) may actually create the problems they claim to address. The study conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University found that DEI training resulted in people seeing discrimination and abuse in areas where no such cases existed. It also found that people who underwent DEI training became more hostile and authoritarian. We’ll discuss this topic and others in this episode of “Crossroads.” Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.     🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/3ZUkBts Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

Children in the United States could start learning about the dangers of communism. A bill was just passed in the House of Representatives that would create a class in U.S. schools to educate kids about what communism really is, and about the harm it has caused the world. The bill was passed in an overwhelming majority vote of 327–62, and received support from both Republicans and Democrats. We’ll discuss this topic and others, in this episode of Crossroads. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.     🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇   https://ept.ms/4gli0zQ Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

There is an unprecedented child trafficking crisis in America today. Large numbers of unaccompanied migrant children are being released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to sponsors that are not thoroughly vetted, including individuals associated with dangerous criminal organizations like MS-13 and the 18th Street gang, whistleblowers say. Many migrant children now work backbreaking shifts in slaughterhouses, restaurants, or factories. Others are being sold for sex. From 2019 to 2023, immigration authorities transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied minors from the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the HHS. A recent watchdog report found that ICE is unable to account for more than 32,000 unaccompanied children who failed to appear for court hearings. Another 291,000 unaccompanied children simply did not receive notices at all. So how many children in America have fallen victim to trafficking? To what extent are international actors facilitating this? What can the incoming administration do to stem child trafficking? What will be the greatest challenges they must tackle? Join me for this special live crossover episode with NTD’s International Roundtable program, hosted by Cindy Drukier. The two of us will be sitting down with three key individuals who have been at the forefront of exposing child trafficking and demanding policy change. Watch the video: Guests: Tara Rodas, HHS whistleblower and 20-year public servant, primarily working in the federal inspector general community Aaron Stevenson, DHS whistleblower and former intelligence research specialist for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Mary Flynn O’Neill, executive director of the America’s Future nonprofit Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Welcome to this special live stream of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host Jan Jekielek, and this is my co-host Cindy Drukier. Cindy Drukier: I’m the host of NTD’s International Roundtable and today we are co-hosting this special event. We’re going to be covering a pretty tough subject today and that’s child trafficking in America, and particularly the question of what’s happening to these unaccompanied migrant children that are crossing the border. We’ve learned some really troubling things actually from people who have put everything on the line to reveal these facts. Let me introduce our guests today. First, we have Tara Rodas. Tara has been on American Thought Leaders before. She’s a whistleblower who has testified both in the US House and the US Senate about what she witnessed firsthand while on a temporary assignment with HHS. She’s a 20-year public servant and has worked most of her career in the federal Inspector General community. We have Aaron Stevenson. Aaron is a former intelligence research specialist at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who became a whistleblower when he uncovered some very troubling truths. And finally, we have Mary Flynn O'Neill, who’s the executive director of the nonprofit, America’s Future. They’ve been doing remarkable grassroots work, educating the public across America about the realities of child trafficking and how to make a difference. Ms. Drukier: This is a particularly tough topic. Many people don’t really understand the scope of it, so let’s start there. Tara, can you explain to us the scope of the problem, and what we’re actually talking about today? Tara Rodas: Jan and Cindy, thank you so much for having us here to talk about what we now know is government-sponsored, taxpayer-funded child trafficking. More than half a million children have come from their countries to the U.S. border. Then the U.S. Government has a program that is white-glove delivering them to people who we know are criminals, and traffickers. Because of Aaron’s disclosure, members of transnational criminal organizations, and the children have just disappeared. We don’t know where they are. It’s very troubling that children in America are missing . Ms. Drukier: What do you mean by disappeared? Ms. Rodas: The U.S. government can no longer say where the children are. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General has said the children aren’t showing up for their immigration hearings, so they have no way to check on them. Some of them haven’t even received a notice to appear, so no one will ever know where the children are. Mr. Jekielek: When you say over half a million, surely not all these children have been trafficked. What is the reality? Ms. Rodas: Well we know they were all smuggled to the border, because who at seven or eight-years old is going to be able to cross from one country into another country? Anyone can see that children can’t make it to the United States of America on their own, so everyone agrees they were smuggled here. The question is what happens to them after that? What happens? We do know, due to some of the reporting, even at the New York Times, that less than 10% of the children in some zip codes are actually going to their parents—less than 10%. Mr. Jekielek: Mary, Aaron, please feel free to jump in anytime. Mary Flynn O’Neill: There’s a reality that I researched and saw, being an advocate for children myself for years. Before the 2020 election, I was carefully watching the government statistics come out of HHS on CPS, on foster care with how many kids in the foster care system. I was watching a very disturbing number come out of the government on foster care. I believe it was like 400, 000 children were missing in 2020 out of that system. Now, that was before the new administration came in. Before that new administration came in, during Trump’s administration, you saw literally adults bringing children to the border. You can watch those videos and the news reported those things. Prior to this new administration, you have adults bringing children to the border. Now you just see children being brought to the border without adults. We witnessed that. And we also now, and I believe that what was happening with this now we talk about this number that’s phenomenal you know over 500 right 350 whatever that amount is it is a new supply of children to buy and sell so what changed exactly was it a rule that changed or was it lots of things changed lots of things changed first of all simply for the people to understand DNA stopped being done and then vetting stopped being done on the sponsors. So it was happening prior to the election in 2020, but now you see all holds barred. Everything’s gone. All those really important factions were taken out. DNA was one thing. It’s very important to understand that these kids were not being given or being brought by their parents or their relatives. The DNA wasn’t there. And then, of course, as we talk on, is the DNA, excuse me, the vetting was gone. There was no more vetting of people. Ms. Drukier: Aaron, what were you seeing at DHS? Aaron Stevenson: Our scope and our lens was looking at bad guys. Specifically representing USCIS, I was on this thing called the Transnational Organized Crime Working Group, a government body. It was a whole government approach to combat transnational organized crime, cartels in other words. This thing started in like 2016, so I’ve been on there for a while. You can see patterns over time of what type of aliens, what type of non-Americans are on this watch list. Typically, it started off with Eastern Europeans and then some of the Mexican cartels. Trump came in, he put on MS-13, 18th Street Gang, and the rest of Sinaloa. In that timeframe, we start seeing a lot more encounters to USCIS from south of the US border specifically. It’s a land border, so they can cross over easily, and that’s where we see the records. But February 2021 is the first time that I see one of the records coming over of what’s actually happening with the sponsors and these kids. So prior to February 2021, you would see things like deportation flights. You would see things like DUI arrest, a court record, or maybe a travel record. But you never saw that an MS-13 member is going to sponsor a child. The first thing that I saw was a little code talking about how this alien on the watch list name, date of birth. We know who this guy is. We gave his fingerprints to HHS for the purpose of this little program. The first one blew my head up. I said, I don’t know what that means. Mr. Jekielek: Can you flesh that out? You’re looking at a sheet that basically says that an MS-13 member is sponsoring a child? Mr. Stevenson: Yes. They’re emails. Basically, they come across live feed. When you put your fingerprints down to sponsor a child, that gets shipped out to a lot of government agencies. It goes into their records. Then these things come up automated and kind of packaged. It goes to an analyst at the terrorist screening center. Then they do a little, let’s fill in the blanks here. Here’s the guy’s name. Here’s the date of birth. Format it correctly. Where’s the guy’s other government information? And then you go from there basically. So when these emails come in, because they’re just emails, it just says, for the purposes of 6-USC-279-USC-SPONSOR. I said, I’ve never seen that before, so I didn’t even really get into it. In March, I see another one again. I see that code and say, I saw that before, what is that thing? I copied and pasted it and looked through all my records going back to 2016 of all these encounters and there were only two, the one in February and then the one I’m looking at today. That was the beginning. So I googled it because I’m an analyst. I don’t know what it is, but I figured it out. It’s talking about this unaccompanied child program. I asked my co-workers, what is this thing? They said, we’re USCIS. Ms. Drukier: And that is run by Health and Human Services, HHS, and not DHS? Mr. Stevenson: Yes, so I said, that doesn’t involve us. I’m hitting dead ends in my work okay, but now iIll keep looking into this thing. I see another one in April and it’s like it’s three in three months now. That’s weird. So I started asking the rest like the top transnational crime working groups. I’m hitting up the DOJ, FBI, and Customs Border Protection, enforcement minded people. There’s a whole different approach. There’s a lot of people to call, but no one had any response to it. I was just like okay, no one’s tracking this thing. It just seems kind of odd to me because this just started. In May we see another one come through sorry now in naysay another one come through it’s four in four months. So I’m starting to really dig into the alien set. Who is a sponsor? What’s going on with that thing? Okay, I got the name, date of birth. Okay, this guy is MS-13, that person is in the 18th street gang. She’s MS-13. This guy is in a Balkan group. I was like, wait a minute. This is a new thing that I’m seeing. We’ve never seen this before. This is happening with four different nationalities that have come over to do this in three different gangs. Okay, something is happening. I have no idea what it is, but it’s a problem. Now, the complexity that I want to make sure people understand is the watch list. Because that’s a big word. This thing is capped at 40,000 people. It’s not because of technology. It’s not like we can’t handle more. It’s because the government caps it at 40,000 people. So I’m looking at a very little box, and there are bad guys coming in every four months to get a kid. On top of that, I’m going through their immigration history. First off, all these aliens are illegal. But also, they are all utilizing the asylum process. By doing so, they will be coming off that watch list eventually. It takes a manual review, but by U.S. policy, they are to come off that watch list. Ms. Drukier: Because they’re sponsoring the child? Mr. Stevenson: Because they’re going for asylum, so it takes a little bit of time. It takes the analyst a while to find the guy’s name. Ms. Drukier: Sounds like a loophole. Mr. Stevenson: Which is exactly what it was. Now, I’m seeing a regularly occurring pattern, and it’s coming from more than one country, and it’s coming from more than one gang. That was my big alarm bell, because rival gangs don’t share resources. They will never share the same pool of how they can make money. If this is a new drug, the MS-13 team will be trading with the 18th Street Gang. That was enough for me to go like, okay, there is something bigger here. I’m trying to query all the reporting I could find, but no one is covering it. The Department of Justice is not writing intelligence reports on this thing. DHS, Homeland Security, is not writing about it. Mr. Jekielek: Tara, this is a good time for you to give us an overview of what happened. Ms. Rodas: At the beginning of 2021, he’s starting to see this. And at the same time, the federal government makes an all call to all federal employees and says we have a crisis at the southern border. We need help with people to come and place these children with family here in the United States. So I believed, I was looking at an announcement, saying, hey, we need federal employees.If you have language skills, that’s great. I’m a fluent Spanish speaker, and we need you guys to come help these children. I thought, I’m going on the humanitarian mission of my lifetime, and I thought, what better thing could I do than to be there, greet the children, play games, do puzzles. Sadly, once I ended up getting on the ground and working in case management, seeing what was happening with the children, we started to see this with my team in June of 2021. We are seeing aliens, these transnational organized criminals sponsoring the kids. We’re seeing what we were calling a suspicious sponsor. It was early June when we sent in the first suspicious sponsor, not knowing that one child had ever been trafficked through this program. Ms. Drukier: What was the red flag that made it suspicious? Ms. Rodas: The children, the flood of all these kids. But then also children on their own, revealing they weren’t going to their parents, and that they didn’t actually know who they were going to. That they were coming for work. They had been told stories, because trafficking is force, fraud, or coercion. That’s what’s happening. The children are being lured with a story. They’re being told, hey, you’re only making $2.50 a day in your home country. And they’re telling the child and the parent, you’re only making $2.50 a day. But if you let your child come with us to the United States, we will pay for the journey. Now, they will have to pay the debt off once they get here. But we will pay them six dollars an hour. That’s the recruiting. So the children believe and the families believe they’re gonna be Elon Musk-rich. These children think they’re in good hands, because the government is doing it. It’s the U.S. government. Ms. O’Neill: And that comes into the NGOs that are recruiting. Ms. Drukier: So the NGOs are going to the villages of these families? Ms. O’Neill: They’re already working for the government, recruiting down in international areas, outside the border to recruit with these promises, they'll be taken care of. Now, those are faith-based, most of them, which we know from the grand jury that took place in Florida which was amazing. These are faith-based. They still receive money from the government. They’re recruiting children because they’re trusting, and because they’re Christian. There’s a Jewish foundation. There is a Lutheran social service. They think they’re in the trusting hands. They have no reason to be suspicious. The families think, you will take my child and my child will be safe. They’re going to make money up there. We’re going to be getting them out of this poverty and they will be bringing them into America. Mr. Jekielek: We have some information about the situations they’ve ended up in on the American side of the border. What is the range of things that can happen to them? Ms. Rodas: We could start with the New York Times. Hannah Dreier crisscrossed the country and interviewed children who were saying they were in forced labor conditions. The children are not only working overnight shifts in slaughterhouses, but they’re dying on jobs here. They’re in roofing jobs that they’re not trained to do. Some children are dying like their first week here in the United States. We also know because reporters who’ve taken the addresses of suspicious addresses we had they’re knocking on the doors. There was a 16-year-old girl in Houston who said, my sponsor says she’s my aunt, but I’ve never met her. She’s pimping me out for sex in the house where I’m living. The children are telling stories of abuse and rape and some are dying. They are working as slave labor. We have child slave labor today. Mr. Stevenson: These are the doors we can actually find where they answer. Because a lot of these places like in Florida and in Virginia they’ve done it, only five percent of the doors actually get answered, where the person is actually there. It’s basically just a landing spot to then move the kid on because right within a week, they’re gone. Ms. O’Neill: That’s what we found in Bonita, FL., with that one case with three houses. They bring the kids to one house through a contractor. Then they move the children to another house. There are all kinds of behaviors from the traffickers, the johns, the buyers, and the sellers. This is an over $150 billion business. Ms. Drukier: What business specifically? Ms. O’Neill: The trafficking and child exploitation. I’m going to say child exploitation. There are so many different things that they can use a child to make money off of. Pornography, slave labor, child sex, and also breeding young girls for babies. Now, we’re finding another very disturbing piece, and they’re all priced at a different level. Little boys can be turned into a transgender. They can be a boy or a girl. These things are very specific for what buyers and sellers are doing with children. It is not only to the point where a child’s physical body they use, it is also this organ harvesting. A child that’s being raped ten times being used over and over and over. A drug can be used once and it’s gone. A child can be used over and over and over. But that lifespan is basically two years at a pace of making money off of a child. Ms. Drukier: Are you saying that the kids don’t live beyond two years of this? Ms. O’Neill: These children have physical trauma and mental trauma. Many of these children are brought to doctors that fix them and get them back working again. Yes, if they are exploited, their lifespan is short. You can’t do that to a child ten times a day and not expect that child to have repercussions from that. Mr. Jekielek: This is a horrific reality. We’re talking about 500,000 kids that at this point we don’t know where they are. How many of them are actually being trafficked, according to the definition you gave earlier? Ms. Drukier: There must be some legitimate well program where children are being reunited with their families. Ms. Rodas: We have the data right that says in some zip codes less than 10% of the children go to their parents. The HHS has created a new position called a unification specialist, not reunification. So it’s no longer family reunification. This is just unifying the child with a sponsor here in the United States. There doesn’t have to be any relationship. You don’t have to have proof that you are related to this child. You don’t have to have proof that you have the financial resources to care for this child. There is no screening to see if the sponsor is a criminal? Ms. O’Neill: That is the dropping of protocols. Ms. Rodas: Yes, there is no screening. They don’t meet them. There’s no specific criteria. Ms. Drukier: Is there a follow up on how things are going once they get there? Ms. Rodas: A phone call. That’s it. Because the U.S. government has no legal obligation, and HHS has said this before Congress many times, we have no legal obligation once the child is out of our custody. So once the child has been turned over, there are no legal ways to check up. Mr. Stevenson: They’re basically saying, not my job. We got the kid in. It’s the American government’s job to follow up, but no one takes responsibility. This is the complexity of the problem. This whole thing is governed by a layer of procedure and law. The Florida Settlement Agreement dictates certain things. The Homeland Security Act of 2003 dictates certain things. The TVPRA of 2008 dictates certain things. You have administrative law in which HHS can determine like, okay, so now we have this program of mission, so we’re gonna actually change some definitions and how we collect information and what’s our system of record in which we actually do case management. If the goal is to not traffic children, that’s not what this thing is. The goal of this thing is to get kids from A to B, out of the country, into the country. They do that very well, because it takes on average 10 to 14 days, but they’re capped at 30 days. Within one month they want this kid out the door. They can’t have them there any longer. Ms. Rodas: They move them to another facility, so that it doesn’t appear on a report that a child has been somewhere very long. They were driving home this 10 to 14 days, move this kid, move this kid. That means a child has presented alone. Remember, there are no parents involved here. A child presents at the border to our fine border patrol. They record a US point of contact. You may have seen in the news where the children have a little piece of paper. Sometimes they have a number sharpie on their arm, it’s written on their clothes. So our border patrol takes down that US point of contact, and then they have 72 hours to transfer the children from DHS to HHS, our care. Once we get the child, we take that US point of contact that came with the child, we’re calling them, hey are you expecting someone? And our goal was to then move the child to that person in 10 to 14 days. The child presents information that the US government takes down and says, okay, we’re sending the child to that person. Mr. Stevenson: There’s no scrutinization there. No screening, that’s the gospel. Oh, that note was stapled to this kid’s leg? Got it. That’s the number we’re calling then. Ms. O’Neill: HHS has this Child Protective Services agency. There’s lots of different agencies in the HHS. There’s CASA, which is an attorney or a legal representative for a child. In our family court system, there’s CPS, there’s CASA, there are all these agencies. In family court, when there is a neglect charge, there’s a parent involved. They have different protocols than this system that is supposed to be checking on the child. HHS is doing something really seriously wrong by not having any responsibility once they move the child. This American system right is supposed to be doing this for these unaccompanied foreign children coming in who are lost. Ms. Drukier: If you see that a sponsor is an MS-13 gang member, do you contact HHS and say, hey, that kid that you’ve got, don’t send him there? Mr. Stevenson: Those notices specifically went out to a working group of 116 people. The first thing I did was to go through all the URLs, all the domains. They were all at DHS.gov. There was no HHS though, so I know that they weren’t receiving those notices. But again, I’m law enforcement minded, and I’m intelligence minded. I’m calling up and going through reporting from every other entity of this working group, which was from 10 departments and agencies. I can list them all, but it’s the government, basically. No one had any idea, but also, they had no concerns. I said, CBP, do you guys track unaccompanied kids? I don’t know this program, it’s all classified. Some of these sponsors are MS-13. It’s verified, they’re on the watch list, and I can show you. I'll send you the thing. They said, no, that’s not us, we don’t do that. There was no curiosity. It wasn’t like, we don’t do that, but we should look into this. I made that same phone call throughout numerous departments. Again, there’s a major problem. This is a nightmare. This really solidified for me in July, 2021, right before I go public. At that time, DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis [I&A], a component of DHS that’s actually a representative of the intelligence community, published an unclassified document called a collection primer. Intelligence as an enterprise and an industry is very, very structured. It’s very organized. It’s not just cloak and dagger. It’s very top-down. The intelligence cycle is just straight up planning, collection, exploitation, analysis, and distribution. Step two is collection, and a primer is exactly how to think about it. It’s like the first coat on the wall, right? So their collection primer was about international gangs. This is a new administration and we want to know about organized international gangs, guns and drugs. That was it. There was nothing about human smuggling, nothing about child trafficking, and nothing about the enterprise of moving people for profit or exploiting kids for money. And that was okay and that’s top down. That’s coming from the Executive Office of the United States through all the departments and through DHS. They were saying, we’re not tracking this thing at all. So I said, I am going public with this and telling the American people. That was a huge part of it. But there are people in the system that are seeing this thing. There has to be a lot of feds out there who are looking at this thing. For me, it was like hoisting a flag up to where someone can see it and say, I’m seeing that thing too and it’s not good. That was Tara, Debbie, and Mayra at the emergency intake site in Pomona, CA. That was a short-term contract, a short-term work type thing. Just understand, that’s how hodgepodge this operation really is. How many kids did they move in that time frame? Ms. Rodas: Over 8,300 children in less than six months. Mr. Stevenson: And these are temporary employees doing the majority of the work. Most of them aren’t feds. Most of them don’t have a background in vetting. Mr. Jekielek: You would want to have some kind of professional experience, like you’re not just going to take someone’s word for it. Mr. Stevenson: Vetting for child trafficking is not like vetting an ideology. You can vet for Al-Qaeda. You can look for extremist remarks, you can look for ISIS flags, you can find indicators and warnings being like that guy’s probably Al-Qaeda based off of XYZ. Child trafficking is an event, not an ideology. The only real way that you can do these things is with a screening mechanism. Does the DNA match the relationship? Okay. Do we positively identify who this person really is based on biometrics or a drivers license? There has to be a proper way to actually positively identify these people. That’s all you can really do when it comes to that. It’s a screening approach. Vetting for these kids in this instance should be like concurrent vetting where we verified who you people are. We’re keeping eyes on you guys the entire time now. We’re going to know where that kid’s at, we’re not gonna do scheduled phone calls, we will have authority and jurisdiction over who this child is. Mr. Jekielek: We are familiar with adoption realities. It seems like the opposite of what you’re describing. Ms. O’Neill: There are experts that know the behavior, that do specific work with child trafficking. That’s what we do, that’s what America’s Future does. That’s what our training is about. That’s why we’re training people. You can take a small course for a couple hours or you can go to be certified with our Association of Recovery of Children, the oldest recovery of children there is in this country. And these are the things that we have to do. But there are behaviorists. There are people that are specifically, they can identify traffic. They didn’t care. Do you have to actually meet these people? Because it sounds like they’re not even being talked to or met, right? Or at least just a phone call. Well, the government didn’t want to get involved. They didn’t want to use anybody that was an expert. And because- Obviously. Where the CPS, that’s my point with this different system within the HHS, they’re supposed to be these experts in the American foster care system. They’re supposed to be these people in the American foster care system. That’s Child Protective Services. They’re supposed to be these people that identify if it’s neglect. But in this system, they didn’t even use any of these specifics. They didn’t care. They just moved the kids. They just brought them in, moved them around. Could have been anyone in the federal government. They were giving them to MS-13, their gang, to bad people. Mr. Jekielek: A big part of what we’re doing today is to try to, you know, offer some ideas about what could be done in the future to deal with this. This feels like a massive problem with 500,000 children that have come in. We don’t know where many of them are. It’s unclear. Obviously, you guys have been thinking about this a lot. Ms. Rodas: It seems like if you create a system in which there’s loopholes to be exploited, bad guys are gonna exploit those loopholes. How do you close them way ahead of the law enforcement criminals? Mr. Stevenson: The way we structure our thoughts on this thing is, first, you have to rescue the kids. You have to get a kid out of that environment. Two, you have to then destroy the actual trafficking networks. It’s not just one bad guy. That guy belongs to a gang and gangs have networks. Then there’s the actual infrastructure with the NGOs and the contracts involved. That has to be dismantled. There’s a three-prong approach. The next huge part which I have less of an answer for is what do these kids need now? They need help and care. But before we get there, we have to actually find these kids. Ms. O’Neill: That’s the key. The first thing that should be done is find the kids, because then they'll find the bad guys. Mr. Stevenson: There are two basic approaches. One of them is like a federal mindset. I’m not saying there is no local involvement, but this is the way I’m seeing it, and also hearing about it in the news, of course. The best way to find the kids is not to go knock on doors where the kids aren’t even staying anymore. We’ve seen that too many times where the kids have been moved out of the house. If we focus on that one avenue, we’re not going to find them. But they did get handed to a trafficker. If we focus on that guy who has a cell phone, who has his information held by the government, it’s an easy way to target these people as a whole. The best way to look at these people, the traffickers themselves, the sponsors, depends on the president and if he intends to continue the current course of transnational organized crime. There’s ways that this can be handled. You have to upload the watch list and increase its priority on the national intelligence priorities framework. That’s just the way the government works. Mr. Jekielek: Should they expand the watch list beyond 40,000? Mr. Stevenson: Yes. And you could not designate them as cartels and transnational organized criminals anymore, but as terrorists. At this stage, that is a much more appropriate way, but also a ready-to-go type thing. There is a framework, a structure, and inherent talent in the government that can already do this job. We have been doing that for 20 years and actually do that pretty well. There’s meat on the bones in that system. If we classify these people as terrorists, the game changes. There are already laws and you can get material support. Now, you’ve got a host of options where this can be handled. Finding the kids, if they go that route, is not going to take that long. That is a six to eight week type thing. First, it’s getting on the networks, then kicking in doors. I’m not telling the president what to do, but that’s where the president has authority to be utilizing federal assets, using U.S. attorneys, and using local law enforcement and sheriffs to go kick doors. It’s not that complex. Then you can look at the NGOs and contractors, because that was the true lifeblood and the lube in the machine that made this thing so efficient to begin with. So it can be done. I know people say, oh my gosh, half a million missing kids. I say, no they are missing right now. I’m telling you very clearly, that is a very solvable issue. Aftercare and treating the kids is a problem because the kids need a lot of care. I don’t know what that entails exactly, but there are a lot of smart people who do. Ms. O’Neill: Right, and there are people that are ready to do this. They’ve been doing this with care of children, doing exactly what dealing with the trauma of a child that’s been trafficked or a child that’s been slave labored. There are people that are healing and working with these children. It’s a different kind of trauma. It’s a different kind of entity as far as what we’re dealing with. It is something that needs not just scientific ways of helping a child. You need the spiritual end of this. There is trauma beyond which we can talk about, this piece of it being an evil thing. These children are very traumatized. They’re not with their mothers and fathers. That’s why we are so passionate, because we’re thinking about abandoned little kids. They’ve been told a lie. They’re here and have been released from their parents who are in a situation where they’re very poor. These are kids that are coming from this trauma all their lives, this poor poverty, maybe from communist countries, and maybe countries with massive corruption. They’re coming into this country, and you think they’re going to assimilate in this society? No, we’ve traumatized them. Now we’ve got to deal with their trauma. We have people that have been doing this. It’s a matter of getting this plan together. It can happen very fast and these people are ready to go. Ms. Rodas: To be clear, we believe there are three main objectives; rescue children, prosecute traffickers, and dismantle the trafficking infrastructure. This new administration can do it simply. All they need to do is designate child trafficking activity as terrorist activity. As Aaron explained, we have a system ready to turn on, and these people can go after the traffickers. When they find the traffickers, they can find all the children being trafficked. Mr. Jekielek: What is the actual definition of trafficking? Ms. Rodas: Force, fraud, or coercion. Children have been lured here with false stories and they believe that they will be living the American dream, going to school, getting an education, and then being able to get a good job to send money back home. That is not what’s happening. Mr. Jekielek: Then when they get here, they’re coerced and exploited. That’s the real picture. Ms. O’Neill: The behavior is already happening. We’re talking about unaccompanied children coming from other countries. Remember, this is the way they work with grooming children in this country, to get them ready to be trafficked. It’s total control. So what’s the intersection between these two? They’re just using the same criminal behavior for how to capture a child. Ms. Drukier: But are they the same people? Do we dismantle them? Ms. O’Neill: Yes, the gangs are doing this. The big money maker is child trafficking. That’s the big money maker. Guns and drugs are secondhand now. The big bucks are from the child as a commodity. That’s the big money, because you can just do it over and over again. Mr. Jekielek: Is that really the case? Because drugs are massive, but you’re saying it’s a bigger industry. Ms. O’Neill: Yes, it’s a bigger industry, but they use drugs to drug the children too. There’s guns and drugs involved. You’re keeping a child in a room with a gun at a table at their head, or they are drugged up as they are being used. This is all part of it. But the big money is in the buying and selling of a child. Ms. Rodas: Right. The question is, how is that? Because for me this was shocking and stunning. I didn’t know that this was happening until law enforcement explained it to me and said, Tara if I sell a drug, I sell it one time. Then I have to go make more. But if I have a child I get to sell them over and over again, day after day, week after week, year after year, until that child is Spent. They are continually profiting. These are evil people who view children as a commodity as a product to be sold. Mr. Stevenson: Okay, so now that’s clear, and we get that part. The current administration’s mindset is family unification, so let’s look at that really quickly. And this is where you get the trends of where the kids are coming from versus where the illegals are coming from to be unified with their kids, right? The children in this program for a long time have had a steady stream and in order. It’s mostly Guatemalan kids and then it’s El Salvador kids and then Honduran and then Mexican and then less than 3% is everywhere in the world. Okay. So now mirror that with people in the country that came illegally wanting their kids back. Are we saying that it’s always 42% Guatemalan kids? Because this stream of kids across these four countries has been constant and never changing. But when illegals come across it’s not mirroring the same thing. It’s not 42 percent of all illegals are Guatemalan. You’re seeing people from all over the world at all different rates at all different times. While this is like a straight line that’s not one chart you get this fluctuation of different countries and different peoples all throughout the world, which is then another indicator for me that they are adults. There’s a reason why we’re not seeing a lot of African kids in this program or Indian or even South American kids, right? This is coming from a population that’s basically closest to us. Those kids are basically right there. They are just harvesting them, which is the recruiting and trafficking part, and bringing them in, because it’s the quickest and most exploitable resource for these networks.I hate looking at it economically, but there are economic indicators showing these things. That’s what I try to understand by looking for the broad trends, because it’s a massive, massive problem. We talk about the number of children that are missing. But there’s no curiosity from the federal law enforcement or television community that’s even like considering it. I go public with my story and they find out it’s me. They said, You’re fired, you’re done. By the way, you’re cut off from the program and you’re not getting any more access to that thing. But nobody ever asked me, what’s going on? What did you see? What was the cause for your firing? Ms. Drukier: What cause did they give you for your termination? Mr. Stevenson: The government just didn’t trust me anymore. They never said I lied and they never said that made things up. They said, you showed some damning things there, so you’re done. Ms. O’Neill: He showed the faces of gang members in his disclosure. They didn’t like that that he revealed their photographs and he revealed the emails. Mr. Stevenson: They were going to do it with the black bar over their faces. I said, no, take it off. Show them the name, but don’t show the date of birth and don’t go crazy with it. You can show their faces, I don’t care. These are traffickers. If we’re doing that with J6 prisoners during the manhunt that they were doing at the time, then we can do this too with child trafficking guys. Ms. O’Neill: We also do it with criminals that have committed sexual assault. I used to get the list of sexual offenders and pedophiles at the church all the time. They do it with that, but somehow they can’t do it with these suspects. Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying that it should be equal treatment. Ms. O’Neill: Yes. It’s just not equal treatment. Ms. Rodas: He’s blowing the whistle on a new and emerging threat that is a danger to children. That’s why he got fired. It’s unacceptable. Ms. O’Neill: That’s why it is important for them to be designated as terrorists. That just has to be done. Mr. Stevenson: That’s a key word which is emerging. We had never seen MS-13 putting their fingerprints to the American government saying, Can I have this kid, please? That never had before until February 2021. All of a sudden we’re seeing a constant flow of it. It’s not just a click from El Salvador, this is happening with international gangs throughout the region. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve heard that the Guatemalan government has actually come looking for some of these kids. What’s happening with that? Ms. Rodas: Robbie Starbuck did a very in-depth interview with the Attorney General of Guatemala. The Attorney General had actually written to Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas, to say, hey, we have all these reports of these terrible things happening to our children. We want to help find our children. Can you help us? Attorney General Paxton doesn’t have access to the data that HHS has. HHS won’t give it to anyone. They won’t give it to foreign governments who are needing it. They won’t give it to the Attorney Generals. I’ve worked with my Attorney General, Jason Miyares, in Virginia. He’s asked for the data, because children are missing. He said, you won’t go after them, but if you tell me who their sponsor is, I will knock on their door. HHS won’t give it. They won’t give the information to Congress. Not even when subpoenaed will they give the data. HHS has the data that today could lead to the rescue of children and the prosecution of criminals, but they will not provide it. Mr. Jekielek: It sounds like you have a policy recommendation here. Ms. Rodas: Absolutely. Give the data. On day one, Secretary Kennedy can release the data to every other agency who needs it. But if we designate child trafficking as terrorist activity, then all the data gets utilized and they will go get them. Mr. Stevenson: Yes and there’s extensions there, because now it’s terrorism. Now, you can bring in OFAC, the Office of Foreign Asset Control. You bring in your telecommunications. You can start doing it a lot quickly. It’s not just like, okay, here you go guys, go for it. There has to be people willing to carry out the mission. But these are simple fixes. This is not a complex problem to solve. That’s like, okay, bad guys have kids. How do you find that out? By doing this process. It’s really, really not that hard. We’re talking about information, that’s all it is. It’s not like we’re lifting up heavy stones with ropes. We’re talking about taking information from one database, ensuring the integrity of it throughout the government, and then doing what the government can do in this case, which is identify networks, identify trends, and then use it for enforcement as the president wishes to do. Ms. Drukier: What would you recommend in terms of changing the policy for unaccompanied children? What would that look like? Mr. Stevenson: Mandatory DNA matching across the board. For all the 500,000 kids, every kid that’s in this program right now has to be found. That’s just like, even if, oh cool, you’re with a good parent, awesome. But guess what? We’re still going to find everybody else. Number one though is DNA matching. That’s required along with concurrent vetting. Courts have some say, and then there’s the administrative state that has some say, and then you’ve got federal executive memos happening all the time. That has to get deconstructed. That takes smart minds. Lock them in a room and kick them in the behind. Ms. O’Neill: Right. The unaccompanied program was just very bad. It was just a very bad system. Mr. Stevenson: There has to be a congressional approach too because this is law and there’s some problems here. One thing is the definition of an unaccompanied child. This is a child under 18, who has no immigration status and no family in the country. So category one sponsor is the parents of the child. Ms. Drukier: Isn’t that contradictory? Mr. Stevenson: It’s entirely contradictory. Absolutely. They need to agree on some definitions. Congress has to be able to understand them. There are some things that are overlapping. This has to get clarified because this thing’s running out of control. We can do this thing in four years, but then what? I don’t want this to happen again. There’s got to be an approach we can take. Ms. O’Neill: The designating of it being terrorists is very key. Mr. Stevenson: It’s very important that people understand HHS is not a law enforcement agency. It’s not an investigative agency. At DHS, Aaron was easily able to see that these are criminals and gang members. Everyone over at HHS says, let’s reunite. Ms. Drukier: It seems strange that this would even be an HHS program, considering what it entails. Ms. Rodas: Exactly. They simply don’t have the knowledge, skills, ability, or tradecraft to go after traffickers. That’s just a fact. They’ve lost control of the program. I don’t think there’s anybody who would deny they have lost control of the program. It’s not 35 children, not 350, not 3,500, but we’re talking upwards of 350,000 children that you can’t put your hands on, that you don’t know where they are. Okay, you’ve lost control of your program. Period. Ms. O’Neill: But when the first report of 85,000 came out, to me that was it. That’s lost control. How do you do that? That’s a lot of children. The number of 85,000 was reported and that stuck with the American people. Ms. Rodas: Yes, and that was 2023. He’s reporting in early 2021. We reported in 2021. They could have done something, but they’re not capable. Then they wouldn’t share the information. There are simple fixes. There truly are simple fixes. Ms. Drukier: What is the rationale for not sharing the information? Ms. Rodas: They value the anonymity of the sponsor. This is just a fact. They value the eminent anonymity of the criminal sponsor over the safety of the child. Mr. Jekielek: Maybe they also don’t want to be held accountable. I don’t think anybody would think this is a successful program. Mr. Stevenson: Right. Given the establishment and how that operates, there’s a revolving door between this program and other ideological components. The current director of ORR is Robert Dunn Marcos. Prior to that, it was a guy in the Obama administration, I forgot his name, it escapes me. He’s currently working for a think tank called the Open Society Foundation. There is a private protection racket going on with friends in that element of our government society where it’s, okay, I’m going to go make sure that policies are good, and then we can go make sure that this program can happen. How is that any different than the defense industry where it’s like, hey, I’m going to retire from the Pentagon, and my friends out here now get a huge contract. Ms. O’Neill: If they do this process properly, and if they designate them as terrorists, I strongly believe it will lead to uncovering the corruption that’s so deeply seated in this country. The American people know that it’s deep-seated in the local community. It will open up a huge can and blow the top off. It will be beautiful for the American people, because it has been a problem. Ms. Drukier: Maybe the time is right, because the issue of child trafficking has actually been in the headlines. Mr. Jekielek: Tom Holman has said he wants to go after the criminals first, so this is a highly compatible activity that you’re talking about. You could help the children while going after the criminals. Ms. O’Neill: We’ve got to help the children first, because then they‘ll find everything else. They’ll find the NGOs. They‘ll find everything. They’ll find everybody that’s been doing this. If they just go designate the terrorists and find the children first, then they'll find everything else. Mr. Stevenson: It’s a very manageable problem. Having worked in the vetting operations for CBP and DHS, having done intelligence work for the government, military, and also contracting, this is not a problem that they can’t handle. There’s no floor of analysts right now that can actually start it themselves. They are there to do another job. But again, it’s just information. You could say, look for terrorists now. There’s a new population of terrorists coming in, these cartels. Bam. They have the tradecraft and development, they know the best practices, and they know how to do this. It’s just a matter of doing that transfer of data. Again, we’re bringing up things like the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, the NIPF, which is a real thing. That’s top down from the president. He wants to know certain things about certain places. Elevate that and designate these things on certain criteria. He’s got smart people lined up. He’s got his people ready now. Just fire off and go. Ms. Rodas: I’ve heard Tom speak very passionately about these children. Tom Holman has a huge heart for these kids. He’s witnessed children at the border who are now no longer alive. They have been brutalized in ways that most people just can’t imagine. I’ve seen him tell stories through tears about what has happened to 18-month-old children. I do believe that Tom Holman, along with Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kristi Noemn under President Trump will go after this. It is a horrible mess. But this is solvable, and I believe this team is going to do it. Mr. Jekielek: Mary, can you discuss the American children? Ms. O’Neill: I want to connect this to Americans. I want to connect the fact that MS-13 doesn’t become a sponsor for just the foreign kids, the kids that are coming in. You’ve got to understand, when they go find children in this unaccompanied program, they’re also going to find the nest, which means it’s going to have American children that are being trafficked. They’re not just a group of foreign children in this house. The people that do this will take any child, will do anything to a child. It’s all money and it’s a commodity. So they’re going to open up a massive amount of these networks and these nests, and we’re going to save more than just the unaccompanied foreign children. We’re going to save American children. This is a huge thing to what America’s Future has been doing, because that’s this component that Tara has done, this champion here. There’s people that are in this team that have investigative journalists, like Liz Crokin. This girl has been terrorized since she investigated Pizzagate. I’m going to bring that up because the FBI has proven that. The New York Times has proven it. We already know about these symbols. There are things that are going on that we can identify. But this team has worked so carefully together in all areas doing their different gifted work that the biggest thing that I need to do that America’s Future has been doing is going around the country and training and teaching people in their communities, especially in churches, because we can do a lot in the, that’s where the people are, in the churches. That’s how I feel that the American people really are. We’ve been teaching people how to identify certain behaviors, little things, like the color of a house, like a door switch in a house that’s inside the house, not outside the house, like a trap door. Certain things, behaviors, these things people need to understand that this is going on in their, every border, every state is a border now. It’s a border state. Every state has children. Mr. Jekielek: Mary, how can people request a training seminar from America’s Future? Ms. O’Neill: Our project, Defend and Protect Our Children, was kicked off here at Mar-a-Lago a couple of years ago. We have gone through eight states this past year. We’ve trained about their policy, know their laws, and know their resources. They get a full picture of what they’re dealing with. Even they learn how to legislate. We have a grooming bill that we’ve passed in Florida and several other states. We’ve got five more states that are trying to push this grooming bill. The grooming bill that is used is like one with the girls that were training to be Olympic gymnasts. In order to prove the assault, they had to prove the grooming. The children came into this to prove the attack, the actual assault. So this grooming piece is extremely important. We’re seeing grooming in public school systems and books with CRT. You’re seeing all kinds of grooming going on. This is the kind of thing that we have been bringing to the states, and we’re going to get through every state, every community we can. I’m thinking of ways that I can get in this team into smaller days of training. The resources that we have brought to the table are phenomenal, and we’re making an impact. The website is americasfuture.net. You can go into our legal resource libraries. There’s election integrity libraries. There’s citizenry libraries. These are all important to protect children and defend children. The PDPC project is called, get in the fight. We’re going to back up this administration with all the education necessary. The law work we’ve been doing is phenomenal. The law work we’ve been doing doesn’t just focus on the abortion issue, or a personal property issue, or the First Amendment. We have taken cases like the Chevron case. We’ve taken the Fisher case, and J6. We take big risky cases to the Supreme Court and win these cases. We’ve filed over 100 amicus briefs, but they’re big cases, and that’s where we go. We’re gutsy, we’re risky, and we’re going to do this for the American people, because that’s what we’re doing. We have to help them keep this strength and fearlessness up, keep them on. Look what they just did with this vote. They just told whoever’s listening that they’re not going to put up with this anymore. This is who they put in office. They gave them the Senate, the Congress. We’re turning this country back into a nation of God. That’s what we’re going to do. Ms. Drukier: I believe you. If your organization has this fire in it and people will be affected. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve come to the end of our live stream. Let’s have a final 30 seconds from Tara and Aaron. Ms. Rodas: I want to thank you again for having us on to talk about this critical issue. There is currently a war on children. I do believe this administration with Tom Homan, Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Kristi Noem, under the leadership of President Trump is going to solve this problem. The problem is solvable. I believe this administration is going to solve it, and we’re going to stand behind them as they do that. Mr. Stevenson: I always hear people say that they affirm us and they back us up. They always say that we have to be a voice for the children. The children are saying, come get me, come help me, come save me. That’s what they’re saying. I believe the incoming president and administration heard that and understand it. I think it’s going to be quicker than people realize. You have to be comfortable with understanding what that means. This is now a reality. This is our country. We should be acting like we own it. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you, Aaron. Thank you all for joining us on this special American Thought Leaders Roundtable crossover. We'll see you next time.