November 2, 2024 • 29 mins
Newt discusses a breaking news story with investigative reporter John Solomon, editor-in-chief of Just the News. The story centers on allegations of suspicious activity tied to Democrat fundraising through the platform ActBlue. Concerns have been raised about potential foreign interference from countries like China, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, who may be funneling illicit money to Democrat candidates. Solomon explains the mechanics of ActBlue and WinRed, the Republican counterpart, and highlights the lack of transparency and potential for money laundering due to the absence of certain security measures like the CVV code on credit card transactions. The discussion also touches on ongoing investigations by Congress and multiple state attorneys general into these allegations.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of News World. In a breaking news
story from Just the News entitled House formerly subpoena Zac Blue,
as Feds confirm suspicious activity tied to Democrat fundraising. The
story reveals that lawmakers are concerned that foreign adversaries like China, Iran,
Venezuela and Russia are rooting illicit foreign money to Democrat candidates.
(00:30):
Here to discuss the story, I'm really pleased to welcome
my guest, one of the great investigative reporters of our
time and somebody who has really helped shape history by
the quality of his investigations, John Solomon, editor in chief
of Just the News. John, Welcome, and thank you for
(00:59):
joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Great to be with you, miss speaker.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Before we get into this very very important topic which
you've really helped break, Tom, just woman for our audience
about Just the News and what you're doing, the what
you're trying to accomplish and how they can get there.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, it's a simple place to go to justinnews dot com.
We don't do any op eds. We just do news.
And I've been in the legacy media for most of
my life, the Associated Press and Washington Post, the Hilm
for most of the Washington Times for a little bit,
and in twenty I decided I wanted to do something
on my own because I saw a drift towards trying
to make news stories look like news, but they really
(01:35):
were disguised opinion, that they were giving opinions and trying
to lead people to their own truths, the reporter's truths,
rather than the actual facts. And so I decided, I
think Americans want to be trusted with the facts, and
I'll give them the facts and they'll let them make
up their own mind. I have no goal of making
up their mind for them. And so not only when
we started the site, we not only did hard news
all day. Everything that's in our reporter's notebooks going a
(01:57):
thing called the dig In tools that you can see
our videos and our documents and our audio and our
links and our research that we use so if you
don't want to check our word for it, you can
go dig in yourself. About twenty percent of readers on
every story go into that section and go do their
own research. And I call it back to the future project.
We're doing old fashioned journalism, but we take advantage of
the future tools of the Internet, which allows everybody to
(02:18):
dig deeper.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
You broke what I think maybe the last really big
story about the selection campaign. But to set the stage,
can you talk just a little bit about what is
act blue and what is it when.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Read about a decade or a little bit a little
more than two decades ago now the FEC allowed for
online fundraising to begin. It started slow, and today it
is one of the largest forms of donations by its
own account. Act blue is a fundraising platform that has
raised sixteen billion with a v billion dollars since two
thousand and four, and a lot of that money has
(02:53):
been raised just in the last three elections. Anyone can
go on, they can put their name in there, they
can sign up and get an account. Once yea an account.
You can choose who you want to donate to, and
you make small micro donations a buck, two bucks, three bucks,
four dollars, and you have them recurring. You can say
every two weeks, I want to give three dollars to
Kamala Harris. If I'm at act blue, and if you
(03:13):
go to win Red, you can do three dollars to
Donald Trump, or to Mike Johnson, or to your favorite candidate,
Eric Hofdy, in Wisconsin, and so as the fundraising game
has changed, more and more donations are moving online because
it's easier and quicker. You don't need to wait for
a check. And two, it creates sort of impulse opportunity.
If someone is motivating a second, if you're act blue,
(03:34):
you might be able to row them in and they
might give three dollars for the next two years, and
that becomes a significant amount of money. Another reason that
candidates and parties like these new digital online fundraising platforms
is that it eliminates a form of disclosure that we've
had at the Federal Election Commission. If you give under
two hundred dollars in a contribution, it doesn't have to
be reported by name to the Federal Election Commission. So
(03:57):
there are lots of money flowing in and there's not
a lot of disclosure of who these people are and
what they're giving. And so in the last couple of years,
ActBlue has become almost the largest source of money for Democrats,
and there's been suspicion that maybe there's some cheating going on,
that the amounts of money rolling in and the type
of people who are listed as the donors didn't seem
to match their economic profile. If you have someone that
(04:19):
makes thirty thousand dollars a year and they're donating sixty
thousand dollars a year in the micro donations, it raises
a red flag. And so about a year and a
half ago, Congress and three or four Attorneys General began
investigating ActBlue because two things had occurred. One, James O'Keefe,
the undercover investigative journalist, caught someone associated with ActBlue saying,
(04:39):
we're laundering money in the names of fake people. These
donors don't even know that their names are being used.
It's not their money, it's someone else's money. That raised suspicion.
And over time Congress got involved as well, particularly Chairman
Brian's Style from Wisconsin to the chairman of the House
Administration Committee, which is the Election Integrity committee in the House,
and James Comber the House Oversight Committee, and they have
(05:02):
begun to do computer analysis and they found this great disconnect.
There are people who don't have the economic means who
are giving tens of thousands of dollars and they think
that there's a money laundering operation going around. And that's
where we are today. We're in the nineteen States and
two major congressional committees and one US Senator Ron Johnson
all investigating Act Blue based on these allegations.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
We actually have a clear case with Mark Block, who's
the former chief of staff to Hermann Kin, who was
a Republican twenty twelve presidential candidate. And Block apparently went
back to some of his old emails and suddenly realized
that he'd made three hundred and eighty five donations to
left wing causes win as a hardcore Republican, he'd actually
(05:47):
made zero with these three hundred and eighty five fake donations.
They included the Harris Victory Fund.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yes, thirty times he allegedly made donations to Kamala Harris,
which he hadn't.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, that's not become a real case, So I understand
it correctly.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
It is. It's filed under Wisconsin's organized crime civil statutes,
so it's a racketeering lawsuit, and it says that my
identity has been stolen. I Mark Block has had my
identity stolen. I still have control of my email. I
didn't give anyone access to my email, but someone's using
that email address to make addresses in my identity. He
is the first real dispositive proof of what James O'Keefe
(06:24):
captured on the tapes, which is someone in Act Blue
said this was going on, and here's a guy who
actually found it in his tapes. Now, since that occurred,
and since these stories have bound up, a house, speaker
Mike Johnson went out and found a website where people
could go and put in their name and find out.
And I just interviewed Speaker Johnson just a few minutes ago.
He's going to come out around three o'clock today, and
(06:44):
he said, Hey, there are thousands of people now that
have found their identity in Act Blue who believed that
they didn't give these donations. So they're crowdsourcing the potential
fraud here and learning more and more about it. That's
one piece of evidence that's growing every day. A second
piece of evad and it sets growing every day, is
the computer analysis that Chairman Style did where they now
(07:05):
have found tens of thousands of donors who look to
be giving more money than they have the financial means
to give. That is a classic thing that banks and
financial institutions and money laundering investigators do. So that's the
second piece of evidence. And then the bombshell evidence that
was revealed yesterday is at the Treasury Department. The Biden
Harris Treasury Department has now told Congress there are hundreds
(07:29):
of what are known as suspicious activity reports. This is
the third body of evidence financial institutions. When they find
evidence that looks like money laundering. Money's hopping to one, two,
three spots and then it ends up somewhere else at
the end location it doesn't look like where it started.
That's called money laundering. They now have told Congress there
are hundreds of these reports related to Act Blue, and
(07:51):
that is a real sign that the United States government
has some concern that there's some odd behavior and potential
illegal behavior going on. ALUSARS has a very hot threshold
when you file it, it means you have a real
suspicion that there's money laundering. Almost all the time when
sars are filed, there's usually some wrongdoing that they uncovered.
(08:11):
They were key to the Hunter Biden Biden family grift.
When Congress got ahold of those, the mainstream media could
no longer deny that Hunter Biden was getting all this
money from foreign entities. And I think here, as you
articulated so well in the opening congressman style and Senator
Johnson and Congressman Comerce say they have reason to believe
from their interactions with the Treasury Department in the banking
(08:33):
community that Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela may be taking
money in foreign countries which can't be donated to candidates,
buying gift cards and then using those gift cards to
make donations in the name of people who don't know
their names, or even being used in America to make
the Democrats have a larger financial advantage in the selection.
(08:56):
It's fundraising, cheating, and it appears to be driven by
foreign soveres, and the Treasury Department now, according to their
admissions to Congress, has some visibility and awareness that this
has been going on.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Based on your hard work, this has really been evolving
that Back in December twenty twenty three, Texas Attorney General
Paxton opened an investigation in that blue and then in
August of this year of Virginia's Attorney General Miaras also
demanded answers. And now aren't there like a whole number
of state attorney generals.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Involved, nineteen states. So what happened was Texas and Virginia
and Missouri began looking at this issue parallel to Congress
on their own, but driven by the same concerns that
Congress had. And then in early September, Chairman style the
House Administration can be Chairman sent a letter to five
states thing, listen, here is a data dump of donors
(09:47):
that have given lots of donations, in some cases thousands
of donations from a single donor, totally tens of thousands
of dollars. This doesn't look right. These people don't look
to have economic means to be making These are in
poor areas, they're on single fixed retirement money. We think
you should look at it. Those five states started working
together and they started to find evidence of wrongdoing in
(10:08):
other states, and now there are nineteen states. Almost half
the country has states attorney generals who are investigating behavior
on Act Blue. Now it doesn't mean Act Blue itself
is complicit. It could just be being abused. But to
have that level of state investigations along with two congressional
committees and one senator, there's something very serious underway here.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
You know, everybody was amazed that come got to like
a billion dollars so quickly, But isn't there a concern?
If I remember the numbers correctly, like four hundred million
of that came through gifts in which they don't put
in the security code for their credit card.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
There's a little bit of fuzzy math on that. Right now,
you are correct that ActBlue has now admitted to Congress
and it has not been requiring on all of its
credit card transactions. It's credit card donations that you use
that CVV number on the back of your credit card.
That's that three number digit card that every time you
go to a Walmart and Amazon online you put it
in to make sure that you can prove to Walmart
(11:24):
you really are the person that's buying this. That's your
credit card, you have control of it. For some reason,
and I think it's the big suspicion that Congress has
Actblu was not using that basic identity theft protection device
on credit cards. Almost everyone else who uses a credit
card online, when you're on an online vendor, you put
it in. It's a paint. You got to always look
it up and put it in. Actblu wasn't doing that,
(11:46):
And for Congress that is a point of great concern
that maybe ActBlue wanted some or wanted to create an
environment where people could cheat again. We don't know yet
whether that's the case, but they did admit to both
the Texas Attorney General and to Congress that they have
not been using the CVV. Now they've told Texas they're
going to start using it. We'll see if that actually occurs,
(12:06):
but by that point the twenty twenty four election will
be over and whatever cheating occurred, if there is any,
we'll have already been done, in part because that CVV
wasn't using. When you use the CVV, you are able
to tell as a financial institution that the person that
is placing the credit card in there is the owner
of that credit card, or they're using a name but
it's actually someone else. So maybe someone in China is
(12:28):
using it, but they've put it in John Solomon's name.
That CVV allows that financial institution very quickly say this
is a mismatch transaction, this could be fraudulent. And that's
how banks monitor and stop fraud in real time and
also report fraud to the government for things like human trafficking,
drug cartel transactions, and other illicit activity that occurs online,
(12:49):
often with credit cards.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Now, when read the Republican version, do they require.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
They do I've checked both sites and both up here
in the last month to be using them. I didn't
go back earlier because we weren't looking at wind red
until recently. But they both seem to use it now.
And the question is why for a very long period
of time, while all these other things were popping up,
people saying my name is being used and I didn't
give that donation, or lots of donations are showing up
(13:15):
in the names of people that don't appear to have
the economic means to give it. Why did ActBlue not
have that three digit capability in there, which is something
almost everyone uses. And that resulted yesterday last night, for
the first time, Congress issued subpoenas to Act Blue, compelling
them to turne over evidence of why they didn't use
this CVV, why and when they may have changed that practice,
(13:38):
Whether they've gotten complaints from people who said that's those
aren't my donations, what have they done with those complaints.
So this is a sweeping subpoena. It's a very big
escalation in this sprawling investigation that gets bigger and more
serious every day.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
I mean, you made a point to Simpson, which is
it could be that Act Blue is simply a vehicle
and did nothing particularly wrong except failed to set up
the right safeguards, and who is guilty. I was looking
at some of the large numbers of very small donations.
Now I wonder if they actually have donor bots. They're
(14:11):
out there just automatically hunting for available credit cards and
just sending them ounds so small you don't initially notice it.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
That's right, Yep, that could be the case. Now Mark
Block raises a different possibility, which is they're assuming the
identities of real Americans, but they're just using gift cards
that someone buys at have Wallmart or Walgreens and putting
them in and making it harder to attract to you.
We don't know which one it is right now. When
you read the letters from Congress, and when I interviewed
Congressman Style, and when I interviewed Senator Johnson, and when
(14:42):
I interviewed Speaker Mike Johnson this morning, they all said
that the operating theory Congress has is that a foreign
power is going out and buying these gift cards and
then creating a farm of people who charge these gift
cards in the names of Americans that looks like legitimate donations,
but it doesn't appear to me now will that proof
co I think the suspicious activity reports will become one
(15:03):
of the key pieces of evidence to let us know
whether this theory is a real theory or whether there's
some other explanation for it. But it's gotten very serious,
and I think right now the money trail is going
to become a little more crystallized. I don't think Congress
will get these reports until l after election Daycause're only
four days away, five days away. But I think in
that post election period this has the ability to become
(15:25):
very similar to a story I broke almost thirty years ago,
twenty eight years ago. I was sitting at the Associated
Press in October of nineteen ninety six and discovered looking
through some donations because I was a campaign finance reporter
at AP at the time, and there were all these
donations from a single location and I looked it up
and it turned out to be a Buddhist monastery, and
I'm like, well, when did Buddhist monks start becoming Democratic donors?
(15:47):
And that led me on a long journey to Hawaii
to Oklahoma. But it eventually led to an investigation you're
very familiar with because you were a speaker when it occurred,
the China Gate fundraising, where Democrats in an earlier generation
benefited from fundraising cheating funded by Chinese interests.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
It was frankly amazing because it built upon an earlier
investigation we did into Clinton in the ninety six campaign.
But let me stick with Gore for a second, because
all this kind of disappears from popular memory. So Gore
goes in Hacienda Heights, California, to the Sea Lii Buddhist Temple,
which has a whole number of nuns and monks who
(16:25):
are committed to poverty. Those poverty stricken monks and nuns
made fifty five thousand dollars in contributions. Turns out that
apparently the temple then gave the monks and nuns the
money which they gave, which is illegal in itself, and
we don't quite know where the temple got the money.
(16:48):
But three of the contributors were foreign nationals, which is illegal.
And the Senate came back later and said two of
them have ties directly to the Chinese Communist Intelligence Service.
And then go Carre said he didn't realize that this
was a fundraising event.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yes, he didn't use that.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
You walk out with one hundred and sixty six thousand
dollars and you don't know what's a fundraising event.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
That was a pretty disingenuous answer. I think most Americans
came to that conclusion. You have a wonderful memory. It's right.
There were these bundlers back in those days. And to
do straw donations back in those days, you had to
give the money to someone and then they had to
write a check in their name, and so that created
up a trail that the FBI and investigators could unravel.
(17:32):
The digital era, this fundraising error, the Act Blue era
as I call it in America, makes it a lot
easier because credit card transactions can easily be faked. You
don't have to have the checkbook, access to a fake
donor a straw donor to do this. You can just
find their identity maybe somewhere along the way. They hacked
someone's email, or they hacked Act Blue. So these foreign
intelligence operas are again a focal point of Congress. Have
(17:56):
they proved it yet? No? Do they suspect it? Yes?
Based on the stars, based on what they've learned from
financial institutions that have been cooperating with Congress. The last
few weeks, based on the fact that the CVV number
wasn't used. I think they're thinking that this is a
modernized version of the Buddhist temple and the Buddhist monastery,
but done in a more easy way, because with identity
(18:16):
theft and credit cards, you can do this on a
much larger scale, much quicker, like you said, a farm
moments than you could in the old days, where you
had to make sure that the person was sending a
check from their own account.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
I really worry about the degree to which, frankly, both
with American billionaires, but even more with foreign governments and
foreign movements, we're going to have to profoundly rethink our
campaign finance laws. And I'm curious, as somebody who's lived
this for most of your professional career, what do you
think needs to be done to get to sort of
an honest financing of our campaigns.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Well, one of the things is if everyone could be
held to the current laws, I think the system would
still work. You know, there'd still be a lot of
money in it, but the temptation achieap would be hard.
But here is a question. Ron Johnson, I think brilliantly
laid out this anecdote that I was shocked by. All Right,
the Treasury Department has hundreds of sars. Normally, a couple
of SARS usually triggers an investigation. If you're a cartel
(19:11):
investigation offense, there's stars of one or two. When you
have hundreds that are associated with a single entity like this,
you have to ask yourself, well, what's the Treasury Department
been doing? What has the FBI been doing? You have
the Odie and I the Director of National Intelligence, Avel Haynes,
saying Iron is involved in active measures in trying to
influence this election. They've tried to assassinate President Trump. We
(19:32):
know that. We know they've also tried to hack President Trump.
So the third thing is would they not try to
finance his opponent. So there's a brief in just a
couple of weeks ago where Avel Haynes and Christopher Ray
are there. At this point, there's already been all these
letters by Congress, there's been the video by James O'Keefe.
Now we know hundreds of sars that are coming into
(19:53):
the federal government. Who's supposed to monitor this. The reason
to have SARS is for the government to jump on
it and they asked the question, do you have any
suspicious activity related to Act Blue based on the fact
we've been writing about it, and according to Senator Johnson,
they drew a blank stare and like, we don't have
any idea what you're talking about, and then they shut
down the briefing. They just stopped, like we're done, we'll
talk to you later. If you have a system with
(20:14):
lots of money into it, you have to trust the
institutions you've asked to follow it to do their jobs.
And I think one of the things that is becoming
a larger concern to the members of Congress I've talked
to Congressman Style Senator Johnson, Congressman Comer, is that the
FBI might have been asleep at the switch that this
is going on right in front of them. And as
(20:35):
Senator Johnson said, what good are money laundering reports if
no one bothers to look at him and look at
the patterns. And so, if we had a more robust
and I think bipartisan trusted law enforcement system like we
did in the nineties when the FBI took this seriously
and got to the bottom of it, I think we'd
be okay. But I think that the problem starts right now,
as we learned painfully with Hunter Biden under the Trump
(20:59):
Justice Department, Under the Trump Treasury Department, the Hunter Biden
fundraising scheme was flagged in real time by the Treasury
Department by banking institutions at filed stars by the IRS
agents and the FBI agents who had the evidence at
their disposal but were not allowed to go investigated. Those
two IRS whistleblowers lay out a portrait of an entire
(21:21):
law enforcement ecosystem that refused to look at a Democrat
for wrongdoing. And I think that here now is a
similar question posed by Congress, which is where was the
FBI and where were the Treasury Department? Because we now
know all of these warning signs are available to them.
If we can see them, they've seen them, why aren't
they acting? And I think any reform of campaign finance
(21:43):
or corruption in America may have to take a look
at the institutions we've trusted to enforce the law, because
there's a significant evidence they haven't been enforcing the law evenly.
Senator Johnson said it quickly. I wish I had an
FBI that took allegations against the Democratic Party as serius
as they do against the Republican Party, and I think
that that may be the reforming part before you start
tinkering with where the court has brought us. The Supreme
(22:05):
Court has brought us and the citizens United Era, there's
a pretty clear predisposition of the court to allow as
much free speech engagement with your money as possible. But
these things are easy to detect, and we know our
enemies are trying to make America fall from within. The
FBI appears to be asleep in the switch. And by
the way, originally my interest in this was not from Congress,
(22:26):
who had been kind of dormant for a while. When
I started asking questions in June and July, it came
from a federal law enforcement source who told me that
the FBI was seeing some activity, but they weren't being
allowed to look at it. And the roadmap that that
source gave me is beginning to check out. He mentioned
that there might be stars there are now. He mentioned
there was no use of the CVV. He mentioned some
(22:46):
of the countries that now Congress has made public. So
I think there are patriots inside these agencies that believe
that maybe they're not being allowed to do their job
on something that does spreat national security and the integrity
of our elections.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
One step is being taken. Chairman Brian Style recently introduced
the Secure Handling of Internet Electronic Donations Act, and that
would require the disclosure of the card verification value as
a condition of accepting online contributions, and it would prohibit
the acceptance of contributions made through gift cards or prepaid
(23:36):
credit cards. It strikes me that that's a building block
in the right direction.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Very simple thing. It would just apply the same consumer
protection laws we have when we go on on Amazon
to politics, and they're not onerous. People do it every day.
But the Democrats have this allergy. They have an analogy
to using voter ID, They have an aalogy to using
CVV for their donors. And one has to begin to
wonder why analogy to such things that we do everywhere
else in our life. When we get on the airplane,
(24:02):
we show our ID, when we get on Amazon, we
put in our CVV number. There is a stubborn resistance
to Democrats doing common sense things that would solve this problem.
That make you under Are they in on something that
we're about to uncover? We don't know the answer yet.
But it is the question that a lot of lawmakers,
including Mike Johnson today and my interview really raised, which
is why are the Democrats not wanting to do simple
(24:23):
things like this?
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Well, and at the same time you have examples of
an extraordinary fight against taking illegal immigrants off the rolls. Mean,
you have the Justice Department suing Virginia.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
We had to go to the Supreme Court there resolve this.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
There is a whole pattern here, both of illegal money
and illegal voting that seems to be at the core
of the Democratic party culture. What's your sense just a
few days out of the stuff you're picking up about
early voting and about the patterns you're seeing. I mean,
you're a very smart observer of the system. What's your
general sense as you look at all this.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
I've been blessed to talk to both sides, both Republicans
and Democrats, and sometimes you get very mixed messages like, oh,
the Republicans are talking one way and Democrats are talking
another way. But there is a consistency in what both
sides are seeing in their internal polling and their internal
tracking of early voting. And Democrats and Republicans have told
me that the early voting patterns are down for Democrats
(25:21):
from twenty twenty. They're closer to twenty twenty two, which
is an off year, a smaller voting year, and Republicans
are way above any prior election in terms of early voting.
So that is the first important and then the second
question is when you get that data, what sort of
people are Republicans bringing to the polls early? Is it
people that we're just going to vote on the day
(25:41):
of election you moved them to a different column, or
are you bringing a new or dormant voter to the table.
And in the last few days, I've been able to
do a lot of checking first in polling and posters
tell me that a lot of the Republican early voters
that they have picked up in their exit surveys and
in their surveys are people who haven't voted since twenty sixteen, eighteen,
(26:02):
or twenty, so they've been dormant for four to eight
years or even longer. The second thing is I talked
to the organizers of one of the largest early get
out the vote operations that Conservatives are running, and that
is run by former congress and Lee z Elden and AFW,
which is associated with America First Policy Institute. Ashley Hayak
is the woman there, and together they put together one
(26:24):
of the largest get out the vote operations that have
ever been constructed. On the Republican side. Four point seven
million Americans have had conversations with AFW or Leezelden's group
at the door in the last few months, and that
has resulted in a quarter million people in just twenty
one counties, a quarter million people in just twenty one
counties who haven't voted in eight or ten more years,
(26:47):
who've already voted early. So the signs on the Republican
sign are that these are new voters that are entering
the system by getting early because they were asked to
do it. Someone actually took the time to court them
and got them out of of their we're not going
to vote mode and into let's vote early and we'll
help you get there. That would suggest that Republicans, if
they have the normal day of election turnout, could have
(27:09):
a very good day. Democrats and the polling that I've
talked to have almost the same type of voter that
they brought the last three elections. Since twenty eighteen, Democrats
have done an outstanding job getting low propensity voters out.
They're doing that same group to all the early voters
are Democrat voters are people who weren't going to vote
on election day, but they're trailing their performance in twenty twenty.
(27:30):
They're running closer to a twenty twenty two model, which
in a presidential election year might be viewed as underperforming.
On the Democratic side, Democrats are privately and publicly acknowledging
they're a little worried about election day. They don't feel
this could go well for them in any of the races.
There's money reasons polls have moved towards Republicans. Early voting
numbers are more advantageous to Republicans. Even though Democrats are
(27:52):
winning the early vote, it's by a much smaller margin,
And so Democrats are pretty concerned. And I would say
Republicans are cautiously optimistic, but basically talking like we're not
going to take any chances. We are going to keep
our foot on the gas pedal until eleven pm on
November fifth, And so I think that's the dynamic. Just
from talking to people who know what's going on on
the front lines.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Well, it's going to be an amazing weekend and then,
of course a number of states are already saying they're
not going to get the numbers at night. There are
three or four states they're saying.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Some states say thirteen days.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
We may end up not just with an election night party,
but maybe with a week long party.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
It could be Christmas shopping and still trying to figure
this out.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Yeah, John, I want to thank you for joining me.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
That's a great honor to be with you, sir.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Our listeners can find your reporting on ActBlue and a
ton of other things at Justthnews dot com, where you
report on a number of breaking stories. You also have
a fantastic podcast, which I've done with you before, John
Solomon Reports that can be found on the Just the
News website or wherever you listen to podcasts. So thank
you for joining me in being part of this.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
It's a great honor be with you you. Thanks so
much for the time today.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Thank you to my guest John Solomon. You can get
a link to his website, Just the News on our
show page at newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by
Gingers three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan.
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
(29:23):
at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
news World can sign up for my three freeweekly columns
at ginglestree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich.
(29:44):
This is newts World.
On this episode of News World. In a breaking news
story from Just the News entitled House formerly subpoena Zac Blue,
as Feds confirm suspicious activity tied to Democrat fundraising. The
story reveals that lawmakers are concerned that foreign adversaries like China, Iran,
Venezuela and Russia are rooting illicit foreign money to Democrat candidates.
(00:30):
Here to discuss the story, I'm really pleased to welcome
my guest, one of the great investigative reporters of our
time and somebody who has really helped shape history by
the quality of his investigations, John Solomon, editor in chief
of Just the News. John, Welcome, and thank you for
(00:59):
joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Great to be with you, miss speaker.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Before we get into this very very important topic which
you've really helped break, Tom, just woman for our audience
about Just the News and what you're doing, the what
you're trying to accomplish and how they can get there.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, it's a simple place to go to justinnews dot com.
We don't do any op eds. We just do news.
And I've been in the legacy media for most of
my life, the Associated Press and Washington Post, the Hilm
for most of the Washington Times for a little bit,
and in twenty I decided I wanted to do something
on my own because I saw a drift towards trying
to make news stories look like news, but they really
(01:35):
were disguised opinion, that they were giving opinions and trying
to lead people to their own truths, the reporter's truths,
rather than the actual facts. And so I decided, I
think Americans want to be trusted with the facts, and
I'll give them the facts and they'll let them make
up their own mind. I have no goal of making
up their mind for them. And so not only when
we started the site, we not only did hard news
all day. Everything that's in our reporter's notebooks going a
(01:57):
thing called the dig In tools that you can see
our videos and our documents and our audio and our
links and our research that we use so if you
don't want to check our word for it, you can
go dig in yourself. About twenty percent of readers on
every story go into that section and go do their
own research. And I call it back to the future project.
We're doing old fashioned journalism, but we take advantage of
the future tools of the Internet, which allows everybody to
(02:18):
dig deeper.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
You broke what I think maybe the last really big
story about the selection campaign. But to set the stage,
can you talk just a little bit about what is
act blue and what is it when.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Read about a decade or a little bit a little
more than two decades ago now the FEC allowed for
online fundraising to begin. It started slow, and today it
is one of the largest forms of donations by its
own account. Act blue is a fundraising platform that has
raised sixteen billion with a v billion dollars since two
thousand and four, and a lot of that money has
(02:53):
been raised just in the last three elections. Anyone can
go on, they can put their name in there, they
can sign up and get an account. Once yea an account.
You can choose who you want to donate to, and
you make small micro donations a buck, two bucks, three bucks,
four dollars, and you have them recurring. You can say
every two weeks, I want to give three dollars to
Kamala Harris. If I'm at act blue, and if you
(03:13):
go to win Red, you can do three dollars to
Donald Trump, or to Mike Johnson, or to your favorite candidate,
Eric Hofdy, in Wisconsin, and so as the fundraising game
has changed, more and more donations are moving online because
it's easier and quicker. You don't need to wait for
a check. And two, it creates sort of impulse opportunity.
If someone is motivating a second, if you're act blue,
(03:34):
you might be able to row them in and they
might give three dollars for the next two years, and
that becomes a significant amount of money. Another reason that
candidates and parties like these new digital online fundraising platforms
is that it eliminates a form of disclosure that we've
had at the Federal Election Commission. If you give under
two hundred dollars in a contribution, it doesn't have to
be reported by name to the Federal Election Commission. So
(03:57):
there are lots of money flowing in and there's not
a lot of disclosure of who these people are and
what they're giving. And so in the last couple of years,
ActBlue has become almost the largest source of money for Democrats,
and there's been suspicion that maybe there's some cheating going on,
that the amounts of money rolling in and the type
of people who are listed as the donors didn't seem
to match their economic profile. If you have someone that
(04:19):
makes thirty thousand dollars a year and they're donating sixty
thousand dollars a year in the micro donations, it raises
a red flag. And so about a year and a
half ago, Congress and three or four Attorneys General began
investigating ActBlue because two things had occurred. One, James O'Keefe,
the undercover investigative journalist, caught someone associated with ActBlue saying,
(04:39):
we're laundering money in the names of fake people. These
donors don't even know that their names are being used.
It's not their money, it's someone else's money. That raised suspicion.
And over time Congress got involved as well, particularly Chairman
Brian's Style from Wisconsin to the chairman of the House
Administration Committee, which is the Election Integrity committee in the House,
and James Comber the House Oversight Committee, and they have
(05:02):
begun to do computer analysis and they found this great disconnect.
There are people who don't have the economic means who
are giving tens of thousands of dollars and they think
that there's a money laundering operation going around. And that's
where we are today. We're in the nineteen States and
two major congressional committees and one US Senator Ron Johnson
all investigating Act Blue based on these allegations.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
We actually have a clear case with Mark Block, who's
the former chief of staff to Hermann Kin, who was
a Republican twenty twelve presidential candidate. And Block apparently went
back to some of his old emails and suddenly realized
that he'd made three hundred and eighty five donations to
left wing causes win as a hardcore Republican, he'd actually
(05:47):
made zero with these three hundred and eighty five fake donations.
They included the Harris Victory Fund.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yes, thirty times he allegedly made donations to Kamala Harris,
which he hadn't.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, that's not become a real case, So I understand
it correctly.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
It is. It's filed under Wisconsin's organized crime civil statutes,
so it's a racketeering lawsuit, and it says that my
identity has been stolen. I Mark Block has had my
identity stolen. I still have control of my email. I
didn't give anyone access to my email, but someone's using
that email address to make addresses in my identity. He
is the first real dispositive proof of what James O'Keefe
(06:24):
captured on the tapes, which is someone in Act Blue
said this was going on, and here's a guy who
actually found it in his tapes. Now, since that occurred,
and since these stories have bound up, a house, speaker
Mike Johnson went out and found a website where people
could go and put in their name and find out.
And I just interviewed Speaker Johnson just a few minutes ago.
He's going to come out around three o'clock today, and
(06:44):
he said, Hey, there are thousands of people now that
have found their identity in Act Blue who believed that
they didn't give these donations. So they're crowdsourcing the potential
fraud here and learning more and more about it. That's
one piece of evidence that's growing every day. A second
piece of evad and it sets growing every day, is
the computer analysis that Chairman Style did where they now
(07:05):
have found tens of thousands of donors who look to
be giving more money than they have the financial means
to give. That is a classic thing that banks and
financial institutions and money laundering investigators do. So that's the
second piece of evidence. And then the bombshell evidence that
was revealed yesterday is at the Treasury Department. The Biden
Harris Treasury Department has now told Congress there are hundreds
(07:29):
of what are known as suspicious activity reports. This is
the third body of evidence financial institutions. When they find
evidence that looks like money laundering. Money's hopping to one, two,
three spots and then it ends up somewhere else at
the end location it doesn't look like where it started.
That's called money laundering. They now have told Congress there
are hundreds of these reports related to Act Blue, and
(07:51):
that is a real sign that the United States government
has some concern that there's some odd behavior and potential
illegal behavior going on. ALUSARS has a very hot threshold
when you file it, it means you have a real
suspicion that there's money laundering. Almost all the time when
sars are filed, there's usually some wrongdoing that they uncovered.
(08:11):
They were key to the Hunter Biden Biden family grift.
When Congress got ahold of those, the mainstream media could
no longer deny that Hunter Biden was getting all this
money from foreign entities. And I think here, as you
articulated so well in the opening congressman style and Senator
Johnson and Congressman Comerce say they have reason to believe
from their interactions with the Treasury Department in the banking
(08:33):
community that Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela may be taking
money in foreign countries which can't be donated to candidates,
buying gift cards and then using those gift cards to
make donations in the name of people who don't know
their names, or even being used in America to make
the Democrats have a larger financial advantage in the selection.
(08:56):
It's fundraising, cheating, and it appears to be driven by
foreign soveres, and the Treasury Department now, according to their
admissions to Congress, has some visibility and awareness that this
has been going on.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Based on your hard work, this has really been evolving
that Back in December twenty twenty three, Texas Attorney General
Paxton opened an investigation in that blue and then in
August of this year of Virginia's Attorney General Miaras also
demanded answers. And now aren't there like a whole number
of state attorney generals.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Involved, nineteen states. So what happened was Texas and Virginia
and Missouri began looking at this issue parallel to Congress
on their own, but driven by the same concerns that
Congress had. And then in early September, Chairman style the
House Administration can be Chairman sent a letter to five
states thing, listen, here is a data dump of donors
(09:47):
that have given lots of donations, in some cases thousands
of donations from a single donor, totally tens of thousands
of dollars. This doesn't look right. These people don't look
to have economic means to be making These are in
poor areas, they're on single fixed retirement money. We think
you should look at it. Those five states started working
together and they started to find evidence of wrongdoing in
(10:08):
other states, and now there are nineteen states. Almost half
the country has states attorney generals who are investigating behavior
on Act Blue. Now it doesn't mean Act Blue itself
is complicit. It could just be being abused. But to
have that level of state investigations along with two congressional
committees and one senator, there's something very serious underway here.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
You know, everybody was amazed that come got to like
a billion dollars so quickly, But isn't there a concern?
If I remember the numbers correctly, like four hundred million
of that came through gifts in which they don't put
in the security code for their credit card.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
There's a little bit of fuzzy math on that. Right now,
you are correct that ActBlue has now admitted to Congress
and it has not been requiring on all of its
credit card transactions. It's credit card donations that you use
that CVV number on the back of your credit card.
That's that three number digit card that every time you
go to a Walmart and Amazon online you put it
in to make sure that you can prove to Walmart
(11:24):
you really are the person that's buying this. That's your
credit card, you have control of it. For some reason,
and I think it's the big suspicion that Congress has
Actblu was not using that basic identity theft protection device
on credit cards. Almost everyone else who uses a credit
card online, when you're on an online vendor, you put
it in. It's a paint. You got to always look
it up and put it in. Actblu wasn't doing that,
(11:46):
And for Congress that is a point of great concern
that maybe ActBlue wanted some or wanted to create an
environment where people could cheat again. We don't know yet
whether that's the case, but they did admit to both
the Texas Attorney General and to Congress that they have
not been using the CVV. Now they've told Texas they're
going to start using it. We'll see if that actually occurs,
(12:06):
but by that point the twenty twenty four election will
be over and whatever cheating occurred, if there is any,
we'll have already been done, in part because that CVV
wasn't using. When you use the CVV, you are able
to tell as a financial institution that the person that
is placing the credit card in there is the owner
of that credit card, or they're using a name but
it's actually someone else. So maybe someone in China is
(12:28):
using it, but they've put it in John Solomon's name.
That CVV allows that financial institution very quickly say this
is a mismatch transaction, this could be fraudulent. And that's
how banks monitor and stop fraud in real time and
also report fraud to the government for things like human trafficking,
drug cartel transactions, and other illicit activity that occurs online,
(12:49):
often with credit cards.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Now, when read the Republican version, do they require.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
They do I've checked both sites and both up here
in the last month to be using them. I didn't
go back earlier because we weren't looking at wind red
until recently. But they both seem to use it now.
And the question is why for a very long period
of time, while all these other things were popping up,
people saying my name is being used and I didn't
give that donation, or lots of donations are showing up
(13:15):
in the names of people that don't appear to have
the economic means to give it. Why did ActBlue not
have that three digit capability in there, which is something
almost everyone uses. And that resulted yesterday last night, for
the first time, Congress issued subpoenas to Act Blue, compelling
them to turne over evidence of why they didn't use
this CVV, why and when they may have changed that practice,
(13:38):
Whether they've gotten complaints from people who said that's those
aren't my donations, what have they done with those complaints.
So this is a sweeping subpoena. It's a very big
escalation in this sprawling investigation that gets bigger and more
serious every day.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
I mean, you made a point to Simpson, which is
it could be that Act Blue is simply a vehicle
and did nothing particularly wrong except failed to set up
the right safeguards, and who is guilty. I was looking
at some of the large numbers of very small donations.
Now I wonder if they actually have donor bots. They're
(14:11):
out there just automatically hunting for available credit cards and
just sending them ounds so small you don't initially notice it.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
That's right, Yep, that could be the case. Now Mark
Block raises a different possibility, which is they're assuming the
identities of real Americans, but they're just using gift cards
that someone buys at have Wallmart or Walgreens and putting
them in and making it harder to attract to you.
We don't know which one it is right now. When
you read the letters from Congress, and when I interviewed
Congressman Style, and when I interviewed Senator Johnson, and when
(14:42):
I interviewed Speaker Mike Johnson this morning, they all said
that the operating theory Congress has is that a foreign
power is going out and buying these gift cards and
then creating a farm of people who charge these gift
cards in the names of Americans that looks like legitimate donations,
but it doesn't appear to me now will that proof
co I think the suspicious activity reports will become one
(15:03):
of the key pieces of evidence to let us know
whether this theory is a real theory or whether there's
some other explanation for it. But it's gotten very serious,
and I think right now the money trail is going
to become a little more crystallized. I don't think Congress
will get these reports until l after election Daycause're only
four days away, five days away. But I think in
that post election period this has the ability to become
(15:25):
very similar to a story I broke almost thirty years ago,
twenty eight years ago. I was sitting at the Associated
Press in October of nineteen ninety six and discovered looking
through some donations because I was a campaign finance reporter
at AP at the time, and there were all these
donations from a single location and I looked it up
and it turned out to be a Buddhist monastery, and
I'm like, well, when did Buddhist monks start becoming Democratic donors?
(15:47):
And that led me on a long journey to Hawaii
to Oklahoma. But it eventually led to an investigation you're
very familiar with because you were a speaker when it occurred,
the China Gate fundraising, where Democrats in an earlier generation
benefited from fundraising cheating funded by Chinese interests.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
It was frankly amazing because it built upon an earlier
investigation we did into Clinton in the ninety six campaign.
But let me stick with Gore for a second, because
all this kind of disappears from popular memory. So Gore
goes in Hacienda Heights, California, to the Sea Lii Buddhist Temple,
which has a whole number of nuns and monks who
(16:25):
are committed to poverty. Those poverty stricken monks and nuns
made fifty five thousand dollars in contributions. Turns out that
apparently the temple then gave the monks and nuns the
money which they gave, which is illegal in itself, and
we don't quite know where the temple got the money.
(16:48):
But three of the contributors were foreign nationals, which is illegal.
And the Senate came back later and said two of
them have ties directly to the Chinese Communist Intelligence Service.
And then go Carre said he didn't realize that this
was a fundraising event.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yes, he didn't use that.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
You walk out with one hundred and sixty six thousand
dollars and you don't know what's a fundraising event.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
That was a pretty disingenuous answer. I think most Americans
came to that conclusion. You have a wonderful memory. It's right.
There were these bundlers back in those days. And to
do straw donations back in those days, you had to
give the money to someone and then they had to
write a check in their name, and so that created
up a trail that the FBI and investigators could unravel.
(17:32):
The digital era, this fundraising error, the Act Blue era
as I call it in America, makes it a lot
easier because credit card transactions can easily be faked. You
don't have to have the checkbook, access to a fake
donor a straw donor to do this. You can just
find their identity maybe somewhere along the way. They hacked
someone's email, or they hacked Act Blue. So these foreign
intelligence operas are again a focal point of Congress. Have
(17:56):
they proved it yet? No? Do they suspect it? Yes?
Based on the stars, based on what they've learned from
financial institutions that have been cooperating with Congress. The last
few weeks, based on the fact that the CVV number
wasn't used. I think they're thinking that this is a
modernized version of the Buddhist temple and the Buddhist monastery,
but done in a more easy way, because with identity
(18:16):
theft and credit cards, you can do this on a
much larger scale, much quicker, like you said, a farm
moments than you could in the old days, where you
had to make sure that the person was sending a
check from their own account.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
I really worry about the degree to which, frankly, both
with American billionaires, but even more with foreign governments and
foreign movements, we're going to have to profoundly rethink our
campaign finance laws. And I'm curious, as somebody who's lived
this for most of your professional career, what do you
think needs to be done to get to sort of
an honest financing of our campaigns.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Well, one of the things is if everyone could be
held to the current laws, I think the system would
still work. You know, there'd still be a lot of
money in it, but the temptation achieap would be hard.
But here is a question. Ron Johnson, I think brilliantly
laid out this anecdote that I was shocked by. All Right,
the Treasury Department has hundreds of sars. Normally, a couple
of SARS usually triggers an investigation. If you're a cartel
(19:11):
investigation offense, there's stars of one or two. When you
have hundreds that are associated with a single entity like this,
you have to ask yourself, well, what's the Treasury Department
been doing? What has the FBI been doing? You have
the Odie and I the Director of National Intelligence, Avel Haynes,
saying Iron is involved in active measures in trying to
influence this election. They've tried to assassinate President Trump. We
(19:32):
know that. We know they've also tried to hack President Trump.
So the third thing is would they not try to
finance his opponent. So there's a brief in just a
couple of weeks ago where Avel Haynes and Christopher Ray
are there. At this point, there's already been all these
letters by Congress, there's been the video by James O'Keefe.
Now we know hundreds of sars that are coming into
(19:53):
the federal government. Who's supposed to monitor this. The reason
to have SARS is for the government to jump on
it and they asked the question, do you have any
suspicious activity related to Act Blue based on the fact
we've been writing about it, and according to Senator Johnson,
they drew a blank stare and like, we don't have
any idea what you're talking about, and then they shut
down the briefing. They just stopped, like we're done, we'll
talk to you later. If you have a system with
(20:14):
lots of money into it, you have to trust the
institutions you've asked to follow it to do their jobs.
And I think one of the things that is becoming
a larger concern to the members of Congress I've talked
to Congressman Style Senator Johnson, Congressman Comer, is that the
FBI might have been asleep at the switch that this
is going on right in front of them. And as
(20:35):
Senator Johnson said, what good are money laundering reports if
no one bothers to look at him and look at
the patterns. And so, if we had a more robust
and I think bipartisan trusted law enforcement system like we
did in the nineties when the FBI took this seriously
and got to the bottom of it, I think we'd
be okay. But I think that the problem starts right now,
as we learned painfully with Hunter Biden under the Trump
(20:59):
Justice Department, Under the Trump Treasury Department, the Hunter Biden
fundraising scheme was flagged in real time by the Treasury
Department by banking institutions at filed stars by the IRS
agents and the FBI agents who had the evidence at
their disposal but were not allowed to go investigated. Those
two IRS whistleblowers lay out a portrait of an entire
(21:21):
law enforcement ecosystem that refused to look at a Democrat
for wrongdoing. And I think that here now is a
similar question posed by Congress, which is where was the
FBI and where were the Treasury Department? Because we now
know all of these warning signs are available to them.
If we can see them, they've seen them, why aren't
they acting? And I think any reform of campaign finance
(21:43):
or corruption in America may have to take a look
at the institutions we've trusted to enforce the law, because
there's a significant evidence they haven't been enforcing the law evenly.
Senator Johnson said it quickly. I wish I had an
FBI that took allegations against the Democratic Party as serius
as they do against the Republican Party, and I think
that that may be the reforming part before you start
tinkering with where the court has brought us. The Supreme
(22:05):
Court has brought us and the citizens United Era, there's
a pretty clear predisposition of the court to allow as
much free speech engagement with your money as possible. But
these things are easy to detect, and we know our
enemies are trying to make America fall from within. The
FBI appears to be asleep in the switch. And by
the way, originally my interest in this was not from Congress,
(22:26):
who had been kind of dormant for a while. When
I started asking questions in June and July, it came
from a federal law enforcement source who told me that
the FBI was seeing some activity, but they weren't being
allowed to look at it. And the roadmap that that
source gave me is beginning to check out. He mentioned
that there might be stars there are now. He mentioned
there was no use of the CVV. He mentioned some
(22:46):
of the countries that now Congress has made public. So
I think there are patriots inside these agencies that believe
that maybe they're not being allowed to do their job
on something that does spreat national security and the integrity
of our elections.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
One step is being taken. Chairman Brian Style recently introduced
the Secure Handling of Internet Electronic Donations Act, and that
would require the disclosure of the card verification value as
a condition of accepting online contributions, and it would prohibit
the acceptance of contributions made through gift cards or prepaid
(23:36):
credit cards. It strikes me that that's a building block
in the right direction.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Very simple thing. It would just apply the same consumer
protection laws we have when we go on on Amazon
to politics, and they're not onerous. People do it every day.
But the Democrats have this allergy. They have an analogy
to using voter ID, They have an aalogy to using
CVV for their donors. And one has to begin to
wonder why analogy to such things that we do everywhere
else in our life. When we get on the airplane,
(24:02):
we show our ID, when we get on Amazon, we
put in our CVV number. There is a stubborn resistance
to Democrats doing common sense things that would solve this problem.
That make you under Are they in on something that
we're about to uncover? We don't know the answer yet.
But it is the question that a lot of lawmakers,
including Mike Johnson today and my interview really raised, which
is why are the Democrats not wanting to do simple
(24:23):
things like this?
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Well, and at the same time you have examples of
an extraordinary fight against taking illegal immigrants off the rolls. Mean,
you have the Justice Department suing Virginia.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
We had to go to the Supreme Court there resolve this.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
There is a whole pattern here, both of illegal money
and illegal voting that seems to be at the core
of the Democratic party culture. What's your sense just a
few days out of the stuff you're picking up about
early voting and about the patterns you're seeing. I mean,
you're a very smart observer of the system. What's your
general sense as you look at all this.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
I've been blessed to talk to both sides, both Republicans
and Democrats, and sometimes you get very mixed messages like, oh,
the Republicans are talking one way and Democrats are talking
another way. But there is a consistency in what both
sides are seeing in their internal polling and their internal
tracking of early voting. And Democrats and Republicans have told
me that the early voting patterns are down for Democrats
(25:21):
from twenty twenty. They're closer to twenty twenty two, which
is an off year, a smaller voting year, and Republicans
are way above any prior election in terms of early voting.
So that is the first important and then the second
question is when you get that data, what sort of
people are Republicans bringing to the polls early? Is it
people that we're just going to vote on the day
(25:41):
of election you moved them to a different column, or
are you bringing a new or dormant voter to the table.
And in the last few days, I've been able to
do a lot of checking first in polling and posters
tell me that a lot of the Republican early voters
that they have picked up in their exit surveys and
in their surveys are people who haven't voted since twenty sixteen, eighteen,
(26:02):
or twenty, so they've been dormant for four to eight
years or even longer. The second thing is I talked
to the organizers of one of the largest early get
out the vote operations that Conservatives are running, and that
is run by former congress and Lee z Elden and AFW,
which is associated with America First Policy Institute. Ashley Hayak
is the woman there, and together they put together one
(26:24):
of the largest get out the vote operations that have
ever been constructed. On the Republican side. Four point seven
million Americans have had conversations with AFW or Leezelden's group
at the door in the last few months, and that
has resulted in a quarter million people in just twenty
one counties, a quarter million people in just twenty one
counties who haven't voted in eight or ten more years,
(26:47):
who've already voted early. So the signs on the Republican
sign are that these are new voters that are entering
the system by getting early because they were asked to
do it. Someone actually took the time to court them
and got them out of of their we're not going
to vote mode and into let's vote early and we'll
help you get there. That would suggest that Republicans, if
they have the normal day of election turnout, could have
(27:09):
a very good day. Democrats and the polling that I've
talked to have almost the same type of voter that
they brought the last three elections. Since twenty eighteen, Democrats
have done an outstanding job getting low propensity voters out.
They're doing that same group to all the early voters
are Democrat voters are people who weren't going to vote
on election day, but they're trailing their performance in twenty twenty.
(27:30):
They're running closer to a twenty twenty two model, which
in a presidential election year might be viewed as underperforming.
On the Democratic side, Democrats are privately and publicly acknowledging
they're a little worried about election day. They don't feel
this could go well for them in any of the races.
There's money reasons polls have moved towards Republicans. Early voting
numbers are more advantageous to Republicans. Even though Democrats are
(27:52):
winning the early vote, it's by a much smaller margin,
And so Democrats are pretty concerned. And I would say
Republicans are cautiously optimistic, but basically talking like we're not
going to take any chances. We are going to keep
our foot on the gas pedal until eleven pm on
November fifth, And so I think that's the dynamic. Just
from talking to people who know what's going on on
the front lines.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Well, it's going to be an amazing weekend and then,
of course a number of states are already saying they're
not going to get the numbers at night. There are
three or four states they're saying.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Some states say thirteen days.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
We may end up not just with an election night party,
but maybe with a week long party.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
It could be Christmas shopping and still trying to figure
this out.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Yeah, John, I want to thank you for joining me.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
That's a great honor to be with you, sir.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Our listeners can find your reporting on ActBlue and a
ton of other things at Justthnews dot com, where you
report on a number of breaking stories. You also have
a fantastic podcast, which I've done with you before, John
Solomon Reports that can be found on the Just the
News website or wherever you listen to podcasts. So thank
you for joining me in being part of this.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
It's a great honor be with you you. Thanks so
much for the time today.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Thank you to my guest John Solomon. You can get
a link to his website, Just the News on our
show page at newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by
Gingers three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan.
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
(29:23):
at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
news World can sign up for my three freeweekly columns
at ginglestree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich.
(29:44):
This is newts World.
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