Federal Prosecutor Bill Essayli Exposes California’s “Kingdom of Fraud” | Real Talk | PragerU

Bill, this revelation of fraud in California, did you just discover it now? It's definitely not new. The Department of Justice has always done fraud. We're cleaning up California. $20 billion has been spent on high-speed rail, and no one can really tell us where that money went. There's no railroad. $30 billion was defrauded out of fake unemployment benefits. $25 billion was spent to solve homelessness. Very little of it has been accounted for. Then you put on the healthcare fraud, and this is the big giant gorilla. The scale is so high, it's in the billions. Why would the governor of California be okay with this type of waste? Because they don't want to slow down the flow of money from the government to these NGOs, to these unions, to these groups. Basically, they're political allies. We need and want to know what is going on. Bill, we are sitting here in the kingdom of fraud, California, and I oftentimes wonder whether we can save this place. Then I meet people like you, and I have some hope. I'd love for you to just describe to us, what are you doing to try to save California? That is a great question, because I think so many of us who grew up here who love California and are not leaving California, because that's always everyone's question is, when are you leaving? I'm not leaving. What you can do to make it better, because everyone's so focused on the problems, no one wants to take action to fix it. I started my journey of trying to fix California, if you will, when I ran for the state assembly. This was back in 2018. I was a career prosecutor. I loved my job, but I was looking around, and they were decriminalizing everything. They're emptying the prisons. It was almost like, what am I doing here? What's the point? I'm like, who's making these laws? You look at a place like Sacramento, and you see the quality and the character of people there, and you're like, oh, my God. The opportunity was presented to run for office, run for the assembly there, but it took a big sacrifice. I had to quit my job and run a campaign, and the first time was unsuccessful. I eventually got in. I spent two and a half years in the legislature, and now I'm the United States attorney for the Central District of California, which is the largest district in the nation. I'm the chief federal officer. Now I can actually investigate and look into all the things that we were complaining about in Sacramento, not having any power. Now I'm in a position to actually do something about it. I want to talk about the fraud and hospice and everything that is on your plate right now, but before we get there, you mentioned that you were in Sacramento. You were working there. For those of us who are trying to understand, why would people run our state to the ground? California is the greatest state. It should be the greatest state in our country. We have perfect weather. We had so many resources. The 70s were amazing, and I can't look anywhere else but at Sacramento to try to understand why elected officials are running our state to the ground. You're in it. What do you think is the main symptom of the rut? That is a great question because you think, who would want to intentionally ruin this beautiful state? And you think, is there some master plan? But you get up there and you realize there's a bunch of people there, and they're all there for the wrong reasons. I think this is something our founding fathers understood was human nature and how easily it's corrupted and how people want to amass power and use it for personal interest. So a bunch of checks and balances were put into the system. Well, our system has always been a two-party system, so you have the checks and balances that can work. And I would say since California became a super majority, meaning one party has basically all of the power from governor to attorney general to the legislature, there's nothing to check their ambitions, their thirst for spending money, for programs that don't do anything other than give them a great headline or enrich their political friends. So you have everyone there. They're part of the same party. No one criticizes each other. No one criticizes their bills because that's rude to your colleague. I mean, the left is very good at loyalty. They're very good at loyalty. And so I would sit in committees and they would propose some really bad bills. And every year, you get to propose 50 bills, and they all do. They come up with 50 terrible ideas. And you're not allowed to say anything bad about it in public. They say, if you have a question, come talk to me about it behind the scenes. I'm like, no, I'm sorry. The public needs to be involved in this conversation and understand. There's a funny clip you could pull up where I've probably had my microphone muted so many times up there in Sacramento because they just did not want me asking certain questions or they didn't want to get into it. But there's nothing to check them. There was no checks or balances. They can pass the budget without a single Republican vote. They can pass a bill without a single Republican vote. So the systems that would be in place where you'd have a party, as much as we talk about US Congress and the Senate, there is a bit of checks and balances there because even in the Senate, you need some of the minority party to pass something. So that checks the excess of the majority. We have nothing like that in California. So for the last couple of decades, you've had one party with terrible ideas just ramming these through, and you could see the consequences now. And the problem with having a super majorities, they'll never acknowledge they made a mistake. They're not going to say the homelessness problem, the crime problem is because of our policies. No matter what happened, they always blamed it on Trump. It was remarkable. It's remarkable. It's something like you can point to a law they passed and the effect it had, like, oh, it's Trump's fault. Well, this is why I say, I don't know what Democrats are going to run on if they can't run against President Trump. They have nothing left to say. Yeah. It is bad, but I think it's worth looking at Sacramento and studying it. So you have the quality of the people going up, not great. They're political animals. They're activists. They're former staffers. They're not real people who've had real jobs. And I got criticized for saying that. They say staffers are real people, but I'm talking about people who are in the real world, working real jobs, paying real taxes. Those aren't the people representing you in Sacramento. Then you have the lobbyists who call themselves the third house in Sacramento. So you have the assembly, you have the Senate, and then they call it the third house, which is the lobbyists, and they feel like they run the place. They write all the checks to the members. We feel like they run the place. You feel like, and they do run the place. So for me, when I was running in an open seat, the lobbyists were very involved in trying to recruit a candidate they preferred, a Republican they preferred, and then they would fund the candidate they thought would be most malleable. And that's the only thing the lobbyists care about is having a politician who's going to scratch their back when they need it. And then you have, once you get up there, it's a bubble. You're up there for nine months of the year, and it's a little club. They have parties. They go out to dinner. They drink every night. They go on free trips to Dubai, to Ireland. They go to Hawaii every year to the Four Seasons. Who takes these legislators to Hawaii in the Four Seasons? They set up these bogus nonprofit groups, and they call them educational trips. And yes, they report them as a gift and everything, but they're still living like kings. They still get to go on it. And so you get a lot of the legislators who are now attracted to this lifestyle. They're traveling the world. They're being called honorable this. They're being treated as if they're the smartest and the funniest person ever. And I would tell some of my colleagues, I said, they're not laughing because you're funny. They're laughing at you. They're laughing all the way to the bank. So they get corrupted by the lifestyle there. And then if you don't go along with the program, they want to make an example out of you. So I never got invited to these trips, and I wouldn't go to these trips. But then because I took strong positions, some of my colleagues would look at me and see, oh, Bill, he got thrown off his committee. All his bills died. Which positions did you take that they gave you grief over? The biggest position I would say was on parental rights. And one of the first bills I introduced, I got just a vitriol reaction, was when we learned that schools were transitioning very minor kids socially. Yeah, not with medication, but socially. Names, pronouns, files, without telling the parents. And so the kid had one identity at school, and the parent had no idea. And this only came to light because Harmeet had clients whose kids committed suicide. Yeah, Harmeet Dhillon and the Chloe Cole case also. Well, yeah, Chloe Cole, but she had other parents as well whose kids committed suicide and come to find out they were struggling with this transgender issue, and the parents had no idea, and they found out the school was hiding it from them. And that's when I saw, like, okay, this is weird, because when I was in school, we couldn't watch a Disney movie without a parental slip. You couldn't go on a field trip without a parent slip, and now you're transitioning kids with no parental involvement. So who came after you when you were advocating for parents? What did they do? I wrote a very simple bill. All it said was, if you're going to change the kid's gender, you have to let the parents know. It didn't even stop them from doing it. Just inform the parents. And just the left, the radical left, because I think it exposed their agenda. This had been going on in the shadows. They were doing all these things, and this put a giant spotlight on it. And it was called anti-this, anti-that, and I was persona non grata for highlighting this issue. And to be honest with you, most of Republicans didn't want to touch it either, because they saw the reaction I got, and they want anything of it. So I was removed from committees, my bills died, I wasn't invited to the parties anymore, I wasn't getting their campaign donations, and I was fine with all of it, because that's not why I was there. So that got a crazy reaction, but that created a movement. And we're so grateful. Parents like me, we're so grateful for that. Do you feel like, now that you're working for the federal government, and you're not working here within the state of California, you're able to do more? Is there something that the federal government can do to help save Californians? Absolutely. I think it's important to know what your role is in your position. So when I was in the minority in the legislature, I knew I didn't have power, and my colleagues couldn't figure me out. They're like, don't you want to pass a bill? I'm like, I'm not here to pass bills. I'm here to stop them from passing crazy bills. We're not a bill factory. So I knew my role there was to shine the light, to bring public awareness and attention to what was happening in their government, in their name. But I didn't have the power to stop anything, per se. Now I'm in a different role. As the U.S. attorney here at the U.S. Attorney's Office, I have the full weight of the federal government and the investigative resources of the FBI, the IRS. But what I do here, it's different in that it's not political. It's not like we're trying to get political agendas through. We're enforcing the law. And I think that's what's been missing in California for a long time, is proper oversight and accountability of the use of taxpayer dollars, and frankly, the enforcement of just a variety of crimes, whether it's violent crime or human trafficking. All these issues we've been highlighting, I'm actually in a position now to do something about it. Now there's still a lot of challenges. It's not easy. It's not like I have a magic wand or anything, but I'm able to usher the resources of the federal government to focus on these priorities that have been articulated by the president and the attorney general and those in the administration. So what does a day in the life of Bill Asale look like? Because I know you need to do a lot of press because the court of public opinion is very important, not just because ultimately we end up voting, but because we need and want to know what is going on. And so you're spending a portion of your time, I'm assuming, doing things like this, but then you're also prosecuting and you're basically managing a department here. So can you just describe to us what does it look like? Well, every day is different. Yeah, a big part of it is engaging with the press because if people don't understand and know what we're doing, then it's almost as if it doesn't matter because the needs to know what's happening. That's a small part of what I do. Most of what I do is probably a lot of boring office work. And so I'm in the office, I'm hiring, I'm making personnel decisions, I'm meeting with attorneys to go over their cases and decide what's a priority, what isn't. I'm meeting with the law enforcement agencies to set priorities for what types of cases we want to investigate. As you can imagine, we get tons of reports every day of what people think is happening, what crimes, but we have limited resources. So we have to prioritize these are the cases we're going after. I'm overseeing cases that are in court, there's issues that come up, decisions have to be made, plea offers, sentencing, et cetera. I'm dealing with defense attorneys who want to appeal decisions of our office or revisit charges. I'm dealing with the bench and with the judges and managing the relationship between the executive and the judicial branch. I'm dealing with DC and keeping them abreast and informed of what we're doing out here and getting feedback as far as the priorities from DC and the administration. There's a lot that's job. And so there isn't one thing I do every day, it's just a bunch of things I do all the time. So you talk about priorities from DC. Yes. The left would say that now the Trump administration is using lawfare against their political opponents because President Trump is angry that lawfare was used against him. At least now they're admitting that lawfare was used against him. Is that your sense or is your department using lawfare against President Trump's political opponents or against the left in particular? Are you picking on particular segments of the population? Absolutely unequivocally not. That's one of the things that the president ran on was to depoliticize the department of justice, which was weaponized against him. He was indicted multiple times, charged with multiple felonies. It was weaponized against other members of the Trump administration. And so that's been a big thing is we're going to return the department of justice to doing what it always was done, which was doing justice, following the evidence, not picking a target and then creating a crime. And I would say that's the big difference. I've never had a I've never given a directive that said, we don't like this person, go get them. That does not happen. We will follow evidence. So if we have evidence that there is an elected official engaged in criminal activity, then the direction has come. Yes, absolutely. We are going to pursue that. Nobody's above the law. And I think what you're hearing with the president is he's frustrated with the double standard. They went after him with everything for nothing. And then you have these other elected officials. I'm not going to name any specific ones, but there's open records, open record evidence where they're engaged in some sort of misconduct and there isn't the zeal. There isn't this, this sense of like, go get them. And he wants to know why aren't they being prosecuted the way I was. And I think that's a fair question on his part. He's like, I was prosecuted for what he would call BS crimes. And meanwhile, these look like real crimes and they should also face the full weight of the federal government. So no, we do not persecute. We do not go after political enemies. We go after anyone and everyone that we believe has committed a crime and there's no, no one's above the law. There's something we have to talk about. It's very important to how I got in this position because normally the senators of the state control who the U.S. attorney is. This is very important. People don't really understand this. The U.S. attorney is part of the executive branch on paper. They're selected by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But that has been corrupted because what has happened is the senators have what's called the blue slip. You probably have heard about this. So basically no one can become a U.S. attorney or a federal judge in a state unless the two senators of that state sign off on that person. So what's happened is the White House in the past has sort of let the senators select who they want to be the judges and the U.S. attorneys. And then as long as the White House is okay with them, they would then become that person. And that has been a very bad system because now you have, even in this case, you would have like a Trump U.S. attorney who owes their allegiance or their position to Democrat senators like Adam Schiff or Alex Padilla. And so there'd be no appetite to then look or prosecute high ranking officials in California because you were picked by them. It's different this time. The president did not consult with the senators when he selected me for this position or the other U.S. attorneys. The president picked the prosecutors he thought would do the best job. The senators are very upset about this. They've refused to hear my candidacy. They've refused to consider me in the Senate. So I'm technically the first assistant U.S. attorney. So there's some word stuff going on here. But I'm not a full fledged U.S. attorney of this blue slip process, but I am running the office. And so we're in a little legal gray zone there, but that's an important distinction because I don't owe any allegiance. I don't owe anyone other than the president of the United States for being in the position that I'm in. And I think that's important to have that independence. Yeah. I mean, you speak of independence. The first thing I think about when I think about California and who runs the state, everybody seems to be related to one another. It is. It is bizarre. And I'm sure you can think about a bunch of names of people where the wife and the husband are somehow involved and it's the cousin and somebody who was married to somebody. And no wonder they can all cover for each other because they all probably have Thanksgiving dinners together and they're all related somehow. And so they're all in it. It's like, I mean, you call California the kingdom of fraud and I call it the mafia. It is a little bit like that, especially right now in California. And that's really a product of having these political family dynasties because once someone's in and their name is recognized, whether it's a Bush or Clinton, it's just the public is just more willing to elect that person. It's a name ID issue. There's a lot of reasons why it's a condition thing. It's a name ID thing. It's like you see a bunch of names on the ballot. You don't know any of these people, but you know, Bush, or you know, Clinton, or you know, Bonta, you know, who's the attorney general was in the assembly. Now his wife's in the assembly. And most people are only looking at that last name and like, oh, I think I voted for that before. So I'll vote again. So you get a lot of these family dynasties that get into the legislature. You have the Rubio sisters, you know, you have the Cervantes sisters, you have the Bontas. There's a bunch of those examples. That's not a good thing because people are not being elected based on merit or who's best for the position. It's literally because you're related to somebody who's in office. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the major issues that you're busting right now. And I know you're comfortable with me asking you some hard questions. And so when I looked you up, the first thing that showed up was that you lost seven cases. And so you're trying to do some good work here. And the court of public opinion is constantly pushing this idea that nothing can be done. I think they're selling us a steady diet of despair as well, because they're saying, here comes in one of your guys. He tries to clean up California, but it's not even possible because he lost already seven times. Yeah. You know, it's one thing that I've learned about the media is there's very few outlets out there that want to report news. They all have some sort of agenda or ban that they're trying to push. And they should just come out and say they're activists and not reporters. And so I don't even treat them as legitimate reporters mostly these days. But yes, we did something that was unprecedented last summer. When we had the riots in LA, and we had thousands of people in the street, and a portion of those were engaged in assaults, violent assaults against federal agents, or trying to impede or stop our immigration officers from doing their job. We arrested over 100 people easily and charged them federally. The state wasn't going to do it. No one was going to hold these people accountable. We had to do it. This is not something that US Attorney's Office normally does. It's sort of like a DA function, where we were charging a bunch of misdemeanors or felonies for basic assault. So we did something we've never done before. We charged over 100 assault cases. I will say most of them have pled guilty or have been resolved outside of court. Some of them have gone to trial, and those are the seven you've talked about. And some of them have gotten the non-guilty verdicts. And there's a lot of reasons for that. I mean, we're in LA, you have an LA jury. Most of this conduct I would put in the misdemeanor category, so it's not overly egregious from the perspective of the jurors. And even when I was a DA, these were hard cases because when people hear, oh, this officer got assaulted, they kind of feel like it's part of the job. So those are always hard cases. But from my perspective, it was important to make the arrest, file the complaint, and make them go through the criminal justice system. And you know what? If the jury wants to let them walk at the end of it, that's the jury's problem. That's not my problem. But in this district, if you assault an officer, you will be arrested, you will be charged, and you will face a trial at the end of it. So I can't control the outcome of the jury, but that perspective is wrong. I mean, seven out of 100 is not- And we've had some great, I mean, we still have a massively high conviction rate on the serious cases. And on one of these cases where one of these activists followed a immigration officer to his home and live-streamed where he lived, his address, and brought out a bunch of agitators to the neighborhood, which scared his family and young kids, we did charge them, and they were convicted by an LA jury of cyber-stalking. The media doesn't want to talk about that case a lot. So we have had some successes. But for me, the deterrence and the reason I believe that LA did not turn into Minnesota is because in here, it was made known that if you touch, we're going to hit you with a felony. And so if someone went hands-on or threw a rock or threw a bottle, they were out. And you'd be surprised, it's really a few agitators in a crowd that gets the whole crowd riled up. So if you can remove those agitators, things generally calm down. I will give some credit to the LAPD. Maybe not right away, but within hours, when things got out of control, the LAPD did respond almost every time in riot gear and was able to push out the crowds or make the arrest. So we've had some cooperation when needed from our local partners as well. Okay. So you mentioned Minnesota. So I remember when the fraud cases came out in Minnesota with daycares, I remember driving home and thinking to myself, okay, I feel really bad for Minnesota. But if they only looked at California, I can only imagine how much fraud and money is being wasted in our state of California because it's much bigger, right? Just the size that we're talking about here. And so fairly quickly, your name came up as you started busting some of the fraud cases here in California. So can you talk to me a little bit about this process? Is this revelation of fraud in California, specifically with the hospice cases, but we can talk about some other ones. Is this a new thing? Did you just discover it now? It's definitely not new. Our office has always done fraud cases. And you could just go through some of our press releases we've done in the past. So the Department of Justice has always done fraud. I would say what Nick Shirley did, if anything, is he put a giant spotlight on this issue and how big the issue is. And I don't think people up until that point had an appreciation of how widespread and the magnitude of fraud. We're talking about billions. I was going to ask you, how much money are we talking about here? Billions and billions of dollars. In California, during COVID, we know $30 billion was defrauded out of EDD. These were fake unemployment benefits that were paid during COVID. $30 billion confirmed fraud mostly went out of the country by organized groups. Gone. You've got this high-speed rail. The money went out of the country? Most of it was siphoned out of the country by organized groups. To whom? There's a lot of countries I could point on a map, but Eastern Europe and some other places. Most of it was done by organized elements here. Here we have a lot of organized Armenian fraud rings in California. You've got some other groups from other countries that do it. There are organized fraud rings that have international ties. And they know when they get the money, they want to get it out of the country because it's harder for us to then trace it and recover it. So you've got $30 billion right there. You've got $20 plus billion that has been spent on high-speed rail, and no one can really tell us where that money went. There's no railroad. Nope. So there's no railroad, but $20 billion plus dollars on high-speed rail, they still tell us it's going to cost $100 billion. And then you've got homelessness fraud, which is something that is a passion of mine and a task force I put together when I first got in. We know that $25 billion was spent in the last five years to solve homelessness, and very little of it has been accounted for, and there's very little to show for it. And we've already started bringing some cases there we can talk about. Then you put on the healthcare fraud, and this is the big, giant gorilla. Because we had a case here, this was one defendant who pled guilty to taking about $200 million from Medi-Cal in an 11-month period because he figured out how to game the billing website. This is how silly things are. They're upgrading their payment processing website, so they took out the fraud prevention tool on there, which is you have to submit preauthorization to bill for certain medications. They suspended that because they were upgrading their website. And so this fraudster found that loophole, and he put $200 million worth of bills in there. Actually, he put $270 million, and he got almost $200 million in cash from the state of California, no questions asked. That's one person. So multiply that- Is this person a physician or a healthcare provider or a patient? He had a healthcare company, and he was billing for medications. This was just all made-up stuff. By the way, he's a professional fraudster. He's been previously convicted for fraud. The state of California knows he's a fraudster. And again, no vetting, no checking, no questions asked. He puts this through their website, and he gets a wire. And he got $200 million in 11 months. That's one person. And he pled guilty earlier this month. So that's just one example. What's the consequence for something like that? This time, he'll be looking at, I think, up to potentially 20 years in federal prison. So he's going to be in prison for a very, very long time. I would say the attitude has also changed with fraud because now the judges are actually willing to levy high prison sentences, where before the judges, I would say sometimes they do probation, they do lower stuff. I think that culture has changed now. We're seeing even our judges here in LA are willing to bring the hammer down because there are victims at the end of this. When you drain $200 million out of the Medi-Cal system, that's $200 million less to go for seniors, to go for disabled people in California who need it, to really go to the sick and poor and disadvantaged that need it. And instead, this fraudster is taking it. So he's corrupted the entire system. So that's only one case. I'm sure you have a stack of these. I have a stack of them. And then in March, we did a whole healthcare fraud takedown with Dr. Oz. And we charged over $50 million in just one day. And we went and arrested a bunch of fraudsters. The reason I can't quantify exactly how much fraud there is, is we don't know because the scale is so high and our resources are limited. And so we only know about what we know about. But what I can tell you is if one guy can take $200 million, you can just do the math of how many other people have probably exploited the system. It's in the billions. Why is this not an issue that the state has also been involved in? Who is giving these people the licenses? Because you're talking about fraudsters that have licenses to essentially rob the American people. So how is this going on? And how do we deal not with just the gajillion cases that you have in front of you, but actually turn the faucet off at the top, which is giving people licenses, having no accountability, the entire environment that it's okay to defraud the public and basically not do anything about it? That's a great question. And the governor's tried to mislead the public on this because he says, oh, well, this is federal money, and it's the federal government's job. And so the fraud is their problem. But really, when you look at it, the federal government's really just the piggy bank. We do appropriate all the money for these healthcare programs. It's the state that's responsible for administering the program. So in this case, Medi-Cal, for example. Or we can talk about hospice. Nobody can bill the government for hospice unless you have a license from the state of California to operate as a hospice. It's the state of California that's supposed to be making sure that you're a legitimate hospice. It's the state of California that's supposed to make sure you're a real doctor, you're a real nurse. They're supposed to be doing the checks at the facility to make sure the patients are being treated well. That's the state's responsibility. They've totally abdicated. They don't care. California, like a lot of other blue states, have what's called a pay and chase model. They just want to get as much taxpayer dollars out the door, and then they will go chase and look for fraud after the fact. And so yes, they do say, well, look, we caught some fraudsters here, or we referred this to the federal government. That's great. We don't want to clean up your dirty work after you've made this mess. Our criticism of states like California is they need to be more responsible at the front end before the money goes out the door. You cannot have a website where some fraudster can go on and bill $200 million. That's unacceptable. That is unacceptable. You got to have vetting, you got to have checking, you got to have fraud prevention and detection. And now with AI and all kinds of things, it should be easier than ever to detect these anomalies. This is something Dr. Oz talks about a lot. He's responsible for CMS, so the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, and he's turning off the spigot. So if we find some suspicious actors in the healthcare space, we refer that to CMS, he will turn off their billing. They cannot get any more money from the federal government, and they're not challenging it because they're fraudsters. Okay. The obvious question is why would the governor of California be okay with this type of waste, right? Isn't it his job to make sure that money isn't, this is the one job that he actually has to make sure that we're not wasting California dollars. Why wouldn't he fix this? Why wouldn't he, forget about fix it, why wouldn't he stop it? Yeah, that's such a rational question. And you should go to Sacramento, it'll blow your mind. Nobody there cares or talks about oversight. Nobody cares about accountability. The only thing they care about are headlines and growing government. So they want to be able to say, we spent a billion dollars to solve homelessness. We spent a billion dollars on healthcare. And then they have a press release, and then they tell their voters, look what we're doing. So for them, that's the accomplishment. This is crazy because they're okay saying that they're spending all this money to provide healthcare, to solve the homeless situation. They're okay being accountable there. But then when it actually turns out into one giant fraud, then they're saying, well, actually that's not our money. It's the federal government's money. They will say that. They will say, well, that's wrong. And that will be prosecuted. They're not going to endorse the fraud, but they have their head in the sand and they don't want to do anything to prevent it because they don't want to slow down the flow of money from the government to these NGOs, to these unions, to these groups. Basically they're political allies. Do you think these NGOs ultimately turn around, take the money and then help them with their political campaigns? Well, they're definitely making political contributions, whether they're making other forms of kickback is something we're looking into. And we're going to get to the bottom of that. Wow. That's unbelievable. We're going to get to the bottom of that. But go up to Sacramento and see if you can convince a single committee or a single chairman to hold an oversight committee. It doesn't happen. And again, this goes back to the supermajority. They don't want to have oversight over the governor or his agencies. They're all one party and they see themselves as one. So no one wants to check each other. I've always asked, why can't we subpoena some of the governor's people and have them come in and answer questions? We don't do that to the governor. So this is mentality of like, it's party first, country second for them. Party first, country second. Explain the hospice case in details, because I think that people have no idea how crazy this whole thing. Were there actually no real people in the hospice care? So it's a mixed bag. Some of them have no people. So the way it works, so one of them was, for example, a husband and wife. He was a doctor. She's a nurse. They had a prior criminal conviction, so they're not even allowed to have a hospice license. So they obtained a hospice license in their daughter's name. So they get a hospice license in their daughter's name, no questions asked. Then they operate this hospice and then they sign up what we call benny or beneficiaries. Some people know what they're signing up for. Some don't. They'll go up to someone and say, give us your social, we're going to bill you out and we're going to give you $500 a month. And they're like, okay, sounds great to me. So they know that this is fraudulent, but then the beneficiary themself is getting a couple hundred bucks. And they pretend to be in hospice. It's not like they have to go act. It's just putting their name on a piece of paper because nobody's checking this. So then every month they'll send a bill to Medicare and they'll say, I got 50 hospice patients here, their socials and pay me my money. And you get five to $6,000 a month per social security number. So some of the beneficiaries allow themselves to be placed on these lists. Other times it's just fraudulent and they steal people's identities and put them on there. Now you do not get hospice forever. I mean, you can only get it for a few months because you're not supposed to be in hospice long-term. And so that's where we can develop the red flag. So if they're billing for the same patient more than six months, that does trigger alerts because the survival rate is supposed to be less than 90%. So when we see billing for patients who are not dying, that's a red flag. And so now we go and we turn that off and say, no more billing for you. We're going to investigate you. But before this last year, that wasn't happening. They would just continue to pay these bills over and over again. Some of these hospices, these fraudulent ones have learned, okay, I can use this highest hospice license for six months, then it's no good. So then I'll close this one and I'll open a new hospice. So it's always a whack-a-mole game trying to figure out. They know sort of the thresholds that raise red flags. They'll bill a couple million under one license, then they'll switch to another license. So these are all kinds of the tricks that they use, but some of them bill tens of millions of dollars of just pure fraud and they're getting it wired to their accounts and they're living the life. One of the houses we hit with Dr. Oz was a mansion out in the LA suburbs and palm trees and luxury cars. You physically show up. Oh, I took Dr. Oz. We took the FBI SWAT team and we broke the gate down and we arrested them. What was there? Certainly no patients. No, no, no, no. We were arresting the husband and wife running the hospice. And they were wealthy, living the life. They were living the life. And so we gave them a very early wake-up call and we took them to prison. And now they're facing very serious charges. And that was the takedown we did back in March. So these cases, they sound simple, but they take a lot of work to put together. We have to review the financials, bank financials, billing financials. We have to go interview the beneficiaries and determine whether they were aware of being on these bills or not. It takes months to put these things together. And I think I understand some of the public's frustrations. It's like, well, Nick Shirley just filmed this video at this hospice. Why can't you just go arrest them? It's not that easy, but I just want to assure the public, we are taking this seriously. We have a lot of open cases and we are going to be ushering many, many, many fraud cases. You make such an important point because I think that many of us who get to sit here on the couch and watch you guys in action, we have expectations that all the promises that you've made will happen right away or within a year or within two years. And it's hard. I mean, you have bureaucracies, it's quicksand. There are a lot of different elements. You can't do illegal things. You can't just, sometimes you can't even do what makes sense because of the jingo of the bureaucracy. And so the public is upset because they want everything perfect right away because President Trump promised make America great again. And so that means that everything has to be perfection right away. And I do think that we need to remind the public that even stopping things from getting worse, like what you did when you were in Sacramento, even that is a very, very good thing. Even that is admirable. And sure, if you can stop things from getting intensely worse and even more corrupt, right? But just the pause of corruption is helpful, right? Shining a light on it, letting the public know what's happening. So at least then they could do something about it. I will say it is frustrating being in California and in this position, because a lot of people come to me and they're like, you got to do this. You got to do that. And I always turn to them and say, what are you doing? Get involved. You can get involved at the school level, school board level, city council level. There's so many opportunities, but I feel people are just so despondent and they almost feel like this is just too big. It's too messy. But I really encourage people, figure out what you can do where you are. And even in my office, if you're not happy with the pace of prosecutions, if you're a lawyer, we're hiring. And I always turn around, I would say, well, we're hiring. You want to come work here if you want this prosecuted? And I usually get like, well, it's expensive to live here. There's always a million reasons, but I will tell you the left, they're all in the government. They've been building up their forces in the bureaucracies for decades. They did not build this in one year. Decades of people with a certain mindset have gone into the government and they're running these bureaucracies. One person at the top, President Trump, cannot fix it by himself. And I think that's one thing we learned in his first term. He's very cognizant of that in his second term. So having the right people, I would say personnel is policy, but we need people to do the work. We need people to be FBI agents. We need people to be U.S. attorneys, assistant U.S. attorneys. So come to work. If you really want to work on this, we got a job for you. Yeah. So there was something I thought was very significant that the president and the Trump administration has done, and that is to recategorize the cartels as terrorists. And I know that you've been dealing here in California with the MS-13 gangs. How has that impacted you and how is that helping us Californians? It is huge. When he designated these transnational criminal organizations as terrorists, that opens up more tools for us to use at the Department of Justice. It opens up the national security apparatus. It opens up charges. Where before, if you were selling and moving drugs on behalf of the cartel, we'd hit you with distribution of drugs. Maybe you had a gun in your possession. It sounds like really basic stuff, but if we can prove that you knew you were aiding a terrorist organization, a cartel, now we can hit you with providing material support to a terrorist organization. Now you're looking at even more serious prison time. And it also opens up, like I said, the tools. We put together a new task force. It's called the Homeland Security Task Force. This was an executive order signed by the president. He did not want FBI over here working on their cases and Homeland Security over here working on their cases and ATF over here. He wanted everyone working together. So now we have a one task force. It sits in my LA office over here, and we have two floors of agents from all these agencies, including the Department of War. You've got intelligence components. You've got FBI. Everybody's there working together as one team using all their tools to go after specific targets, specific investigations, and to dismantle the operations of these organized criminal operators. So we don't just go arrest one gang member. As you saw last week, we did an operation in the Mexican mafia. We arrested 47 people. We charged 47 people. We arrested most of them in one morning. That's something only the federal government can do. We have the tools to go and clean up an entire neighborhood in one morning and take out all the high-level gang members who've been terrorizing their communities. We can do that, and we have the tools to hold them in prison for a long time. California cannot. They've decriminalized so many laws. They've emptied so many prisons. It's very hard to get anyone into a state prison in California, and good luck keeping them in there for a long time. When you have people like Mia Bonta who wants to let all prisoners out because she thinks prison is racist, that's the beginning and the end of the conversation with these people in California. Prison is racist. Let them all out. And I would always say, can we go to the prison and you tell me which one we should let out? Why? Because there's really bad people in there who've done really bad things, by the way, mostly to minority victims. And they never want to talk about that. They always want to talk about the color, the race of the people in prison, but they never talk about the races of the victims. And so that's where we're coming in to do their job. We're cleaning up California, whether it's MS-13, Mexican mafia, or human trafficking on Figueroa Boulevard, we're doing that work. And we want to let the public see more of that work that we're doing because it's very important. Nobody can talk about the cartels without recognizing that illegal immigration feeds their business. A hundred percent. So you are trying to diminish the power of the cartels here in Los Angeles, in California. And in the meantime, you have these bills that are trying to pass the Stop Nick Shirley Act, or that's what at least conservatives are calling it, to basically say you can't go after illegal immigrants who are seeking certain services. Can you just explain to me what is going on? Yeah. And we can talk about that bill in a second. I think one of the most offensive things, my parents are immigrants. They immigrated here lawfully. There's a lot of immigrants in California. The president's wife is an immigrant. And they never mentioned the word illegal. They always say immigrant community. And I just find that particularly offensive, especially for people like my parents who did it the right way. They came here, they took the citizenship exam. I remember my mom studying for the test and learning about the branches of government, everything. They never want to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. And I find that particularly offensive. But you're right. The dirty little secret is they want the flow of illegal immigrants. It fuels, well, you could talk about it politically why for census reporting and other reasons, states like California need that population inflow because everyone else is getting out of the state. And then when you go to Sacramento, this is like the protected, oppressed group of the day. And so all their bills every day is like, how do we protect illegal immigrants? How do we get more lawyers for them? How do we get them more services? How do we get them free down payment assistance to buy a home? I'm not joking. That was a bill when I was in Sacramento, they wanted to allow illegal immigrants to access down payment assistance to buy a home. I was like, how do they even get a loan? And apparently you can get a loan with a 10 number, which I found out. But again, people like my mom, she's not getting down payment assistance. She's not getting all these things. She's working. The legal immigrants and the actual Americans are not getting that type of assistance, but the assistance is given to people who committed a crime to get here. Correct. And so for whatever reason, the entire party and apparatus up there is so focused on identifying and creating a victim class. And then they spend all their political capital showing how morally superior they are because they're standing up for the poor little guy and they need to read the room because the public's not there anymore. I think the president has exposed just how the overflow of illegal immigrants in this country, the devastating effects it's had on victims, on families who've lost their kids, their loved ones at the hands of criminal illegal immigrants. And it's really sick that Sacramento will spend its money and its political capital to protect non-citizens at the expense of their own citizens. So yeah, you have to get it. What's going on in Mia Bonta's head, where with all these problems going on in the world, she wants to focus her political capital to create laws to make it harder to investigate and expose corruption by these NGOs. What it's about, I'll be honest with you, Mia Bonta is not a smart person. I'll tell that to her face. She's not a smart person. Let me just remind everybody who she's married to. Who is Mia Bonta married to? She's married to the attorney general of the state of California, Rob Bonta. She did not write a bill. She's never written a bill in her life. The way it works in Sacramento is Chirla or one of these NGOs who's being harassed, they write the bills and then they take it to Mia Bonta and they say, we want you to carry this bill for us. Our people are being harassed and this will protect them. I guarantee you she's never read the bill. She's been given talking points about what the bill is. That's why when she's confronted by Nick Shirley or Ashley Zavala or some of these reporters up there, she acts confused about what you're even talking about. She's never read the bill. But if you read the bill, they say it's to prevent harassment, criminal harassment. It's already a crime to criminally harass people. That's not what it is. It says in there that if you're filming me and I don't want you to film me, I can sue you if you film me without my permission in public. That's what's in there. So if Nick Shirley were to show up to Chirla and starts filming them, they could say, you can't film us. And if he doesn't stop filming, they can now take him to court and sue him and fine him for filming them without their permission. What does that have anything to do with the protection of illegal immigrants? It doesn't. They want to protect the NGOs, the political activists, their political allies who are being harassed. Again, harassment's in the eye of the beholder. Politics requires so much patience. I don't know how you have it in you. Some days it's longer. But I enjoyed being up in Sacramento and exposing these bills. And so going through them, let's talk about this bill. Let's talk about what you're doing. You don't need a law to criminalize harassment. That's already against the law. So what's this bill really about? And getting to the bottom of that. And when you start exposing, you ask those questions, they often get agitated. They get angry. They don't want to have a rational conversation. So they'll say, you're crazy. This has nothing to do with Nick Shirley. Now I'll tell you, that's worked very well for them because they could just shut debate down in Sacramento because again, they're in the super majority. Who's going to stop them? But they're up against something they haven't seen before. You have the entire national audience. You've got the United States public focused on what's going on in California. And you can see that when they're being interviewed by Nick Shirley, they're like deer in the headlights. Who are you and why are you asking us questions? No one asks us questions. They believe they're elite, that they're above the public. Does that give you some hope? Does it give you some hope knowing you claim that they're not that smart. I'll take your word for it. Knowing that they're so corrupt and the public is eager to bust this corruption. Does it give you hope that actually California can be fixed? It gives me hope that the public is re-engaging and appears to be more interested than it has before in what's happening in their government. You see TMZ now opening a bureau in Washington, DC. And they're doing a lot of things that you haven't seen done there in a while. The saddest thing for me about Sacramento was we probably had two to three good reporters up there for covering like the fifth largest economy in the world. And most of the time, 90% of the really insane stuff never got any coverage. And I do think it's a mistake now that our entire media is focused on national politics. It used to say all politics were local. It feels like now all politics is national. So when the media is hysterical about the latest tweet, whatever, no one's paying attention to what's happening in Sacramento. But now that the public is paying attention, Sunshine is the best disinfectant. And we need more of that. We need more citizen journalists. We need more media. We need more reporters up in Sacramento putting microphones in their face. But let me tell you how arrogant they are in Sacramento. They're building a $1 billion new office building in the Capitol. When this thing is done, it's going to be like a Taj Mahal. They're all going to have their private offices connected to the Capitol. And they're building a tunnel so they can walk from their office to the legislative floor without interacting with the public. They want to insulate themselves from any scrutiny, any accountability so they can stay in their bubble. The only reason Nick Shirley is able to confront them right now is because they are in a temporary office building that's like two blocks from the Capitol, and they have to walk from that building to the Capitol so anybody can stand in that space and engage them. If that wasn't happening right now, you would never see these people. You would never get a meeting with them. They would never answer a question. They would never do an interview. And that's their attitude, is like, leave us alone. Don't bother us. We're going to do what we want to do. Yeah. Sounds just like a socialist country or even a communist country. They're tyrants. Yeah. So I'm sure you're asked this question all the time. Where do you think you're going to be in 10 years from now? And I know this is an annoying question because you may not even know where your opportunities lie, and hopefully you keep doing great things and more opportunities open up, but you're young. And so what does 10 years from now look like? Well, I'm sure God knows, but I don't operate on this life plan. I will say when I first got elected to Sacramento, the first week I was up there, the first question I got was, wow, congratulations, you won this election. What's next? And I was like, I just got here. What do you mean, what's next? So I do think this is an interesting thing in politics, if you will, where people are always focused on what's your next move? What's your next stepping stone? I actually think that's what's wrong with our system right now. Our government was designed to have people leave their community, people who've been successful in their community, people who are leaders, to sort of leave their home, go to the Capitol for a few years, do a public service there, and then return back. This idea of you got to have your next political stepping stone and you're governor, now you're going to be president, you're this, you're that. I've never operated like that. I think for that reason, I've been more insulated from sort of the typical ways they control people in power. I had one person, I had one former legislator give me some good advice before I got elected, and he said, never let them know what you want, because if they know what you want, they'll know how to control you. And I noticed in Sacramento, almost every day someone would ask, what are you looking to do? You want to be on a committee? You want to pass a bill? I bet the lobbyists would ask you that question. What's your calling card? What do you want? So that way we can offer that to you so you can let go of this other stuff that's a problem for them. And I never answered. I just said, I don't want anything. I want to do my job. I want to represent the people that elected me. I want to do what's right. Because you know what? There's a lot of lobbyists up there, but guess who doesn't have a lobbyist? The average American voter or taxpayer. There's no one up there lobbying for them. Every interest group up there has a lobbyist who's making campaign contributions and whining and dining a legislator and telling them why they should vote certain ways. And I always remembered, I am the lobbyist for my district. I represented 500,000 people and I am their lobbyist. And so I have to always keep their best interests in mind. That's not how politics works. So I want to do my job. I want to clean up California. I want to clean up the corruption. I want to clean up the violent crime. And if 10 years from now, California is this back to its shiny city on the hill, I will be happy. Amazing. That's such a good answer. You mentioned that your parents were immigrants. They came from the Middle East? They came from Lebanon. What do they think about what you do? Well, of course, they're very proud. My mom still calls me many times a day sometimes. And so obviously they're very proud, but I have to remind my mom sometimes she can't threaten people that her son's the U.S. attorney. She can't weaponize that position. But no, I'm very grateful. I had very good parents. They raised us very well. They raised us to always be grateful, to be appreciative to be Americans. So me and my sisters, we were born and raised here and they never let us forget how special it is to be an American citizen. They've never lost that awe because when you grow up in another country, you see America as the pinnacle of like, that's the land of freedom. You can do anything you want there if you work hard. And so they got the privilege to immigrate here and become citizens. And they're like, you don't know how lucky you are. I just remember them always saying that you're so lucky you have no idea. And so it's a very different mindset now than where you see these people who feel like you're entitled to come into the United States and you're entitled to take whatever you want. It's a sense of entitlement. And I think that's part of what's wrong with the culture right now. And I think even JFK would agree. He always said, don't ask what your country is going to do for you. What are you going to do for your country? And if everyone had the mindset of how can I give back a little bit, we'd be in a much better place instead of how can I get my little piece. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, it really comes down to gratitude and people who did come here legally and fought to come here. They're just so grateful because they have perspective. Bill, it's great getting to know you a little bit. Thank you for everything you're doing. I know that you don't know what you're going to be doing in 10 years, but I'll be praying that it's going to be good things. And let's hope that you save California, make California great again. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.