The Drill Down

Democrats trail Republicans in cash by nine figures. The DNC reported $16 million on hand against $17.9 million in debt. The RNC reported $130 million. Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers follow the money filling the gap, and most of it comes from senior citizens. A Stanford researcher spent eight months preparing an investigation for The New York Times. Fact checkers cleared it. Lawyers cleared it. Then the Elias Law Group sent cease and desist letters on behalf of Democratic committees, and the paper walked away. What the research found: a spam text pipeline built to squeeze a captive pool of elderly donors. An 85 year old man in Oxford, Ohio gave 7,800 times, nearly $650,000, more than double the value of his house. A 90 year old woman in an Indiana senior living facility gave more than 25,000 times, $250,000 in total. Fewer than 1% of Democrat donors account for almost half of the $1.4 billion these PACs have raised since 2017. One network alone pulled in $390 million. Most of the money never reaches a candidate. It recycles back into the fundraising operation. Hakeem Jeffries shows the shift in one chart. In 2018, his average donor was 54 and 21% were 65 or older. This cycle, his average donor is 73 and 86% are senior citizens. Then the midterm ledger. Ripple and Coinbase sit at the top of $230 million in special interest spending, ahead of Big Tech and Wall Street. FanDuel and DraftKings make the top six. George Soros has given more than $102 million this year. AIPAC drew headlines for $30 million behind Haley Stevens in Michigan, while the money moving against her opponent's opponent stays far harder to trace: a $200,000 super PAC check from Abdul El-Sayed's father-in-law, an Islamic Society of North America figure; $25,000 from an Egyptian American activist sentenced to life in absentia; $115,000 tied to people affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Saudi Arabia spent $92 million on Washington lobbying last year with roughly 148 registered foreign agents. Peter and Eric close on Sharia law, Jesse Watters' interview with El-Sayed, and whether the red-green alliance holds long enough to make Michigan competitive. (00:00) Cold open (00:31) Votes from the poor, money from the rich (02:33) The DNC has $16 million and $17.9 million in debt (04:43) Granny's Social Security check funds the campaign (06:34) The New York Times kills the story after legal threats (07:33) One donor, 7,800 gifts, $650,000 (09:30) Hakeem Jeffries' donor base ages 20 years in eight (12:27) Crypto, gambling and AIPAC lead the midterm spending (15:25) The influence money nobody tracks (20:14) CAIR cash, Jesse Watters, and the Sharia law question

Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers track three fronts in China's campaign against American immigration controls, and the officials in Washington who look away. Trump signed two executive orders on August 6, narrowing his birthright citizenship push to birth tourism and surrogacy. Five days later the same coalition from Barbara v. Trump went back to the same judge for a restraining order. Brett Kavanaugh already signaled a pathway for limiting 14th Amendment abuse, so the left should not assume a win at the Supreme Court. The Justice Department charged a network selling green cards through fake weddings. Chinese nationals paid facilitators up to $100,000. Facilitators paid American citizens up to $30,000 to stand at the altar. One prenuptial agreement instructed the bride never to speak to the groom again. Then there is Mexico. Former Mexican tourism official Simón Levy published a report on how Mexicans are manufactured in Mexico. Civil registry employees took $4,000 per migrant to forge birth certificates for Cuban, Haitian and Chinese nationals. Mexico deleted the database field recording when a passport was issued in 2021, so the forgeries are untraceable. A Mexican passport drops your US visa refusal rate by 49.5 points. A Chinese national in Beijing becomes a Mexican citizen, then walks into the United States under a new name. The declassified Swalwell file closes the loop. Eric Swalwell admitted a physical relationship with Chinese intelligence asset Fang Fang. She placed interns in his office and laundered money into his campaign. He joked to friends his girlfriend worked for the Chinese CIA. He stayed on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Nancy Pelosi kept him there. The FBI, which the committee oversees, kept trying to recruit Fang Fang and never moved on Swalwell. (00:00) China thinks in dynasties, not decades (01:13) Trump's August 6 executive orders on birth tourism (03:23) The ACLU coalition sues again, and Rob Bonta calls it a tantrum (05:35) Birth tourism is an industry term, not a slur (07:03) DOJ charges the $100,000 sham marriage ring (08:46) Staged attacks and weaponized immigration (11:58) Simón Levy's report: Mexicans manufactured in Mexico (15:17) The passport database field Mexico deleted in 2021 (17:56) Eric Swalwell, Fang Fang, and the warning signs he ignored (24:13) The FBI knew, kept recruiting her, and never touched him

California pays 270 people to investigate Medicaid fraud. In 2024 they returned 32 indictments. Arizona pays 33 people and returned 82.   PeterSchweizer and Eric Eggers break down 'the summer of fraud' on ep. 281 of The Drill Down.   Federal Medicaid recoveries went from 1.4B to 2B. CMS withheld 351M from Minnesota and 1.3B from California. Alabama employs seven fraud investigators. Minnesota employs 28.   Chapters: (02:33) The federal numbers (07:58) California's 32 indictments (10:37) Alabama has seven (15:01) 1.9B to the Virgin Islands, zero homes (19:09) Minnesota and Feeding Our Future (26:13) What happens when the money stops

Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, and his own party's establishment spent roughly $83 per vote trying to stop him. Haley Stevens had the governor, Jim Clyburn, AIPAC money, and most of the state's Democratic leadership behind her. She lost anyway. Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers go through what that result says about where the Democratic Party is headed. The DSA is 85 percent white and 4 percent black by its own membership surveys, a black-led advocacy group put $2 million into ads warning that its agenda threatens decades of progress built by black Americans, and one third of Democratic voters now tell CNN they identify as Democratic socialists. The DNC is carrying debt and borrowed against its own headquarters while left wing superPACs stay flush with Soros money. Schweizer's read: nobody in the party is going to confront the socialists, because Democrats cannot retake the Senate in November without holding that Michigan seat. 00:00 A socialist wins Michigan and the party has to live with it 00:55 The first DSA statewide win outside New York and California 02:17 $83 a vote for Stevens, $40 a vote for El-Sayed, and she still lost 02:58 Why there will be no Sister Souljah moment this time 04:22 The Teamsters are gone and the unions that replaced them are left wing 07:39 Elite overproduction and the $150,000 comparative lit degree 09:48 The DSA is 85% white, 4% black, and losing black voters 12:00 Clarence Thomas on who hands out your rights 15:02 The DNC is broke while the left wing superPACs are flush 17:43 The 2028 calendar, the Michigan AG, and a cider house that apologized The Drill Down is the flagship podcast channel of the Government Accountability Institute. 

An OpenAI model sat inside a sealed testing environment with one job: pass a cybersecurity exam. It decided the fastest route to the answers was to break out of the sandbox, get onto the open internet, and hack Hugging Face, the central repository for AI models. No human directed it there. Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers sit down with Wynton Hall, GAI distinguished fellow and author of the New York Times bestseller "Code Red: The Left, the Right, China and the Race to Control AI," to explain what actually happened and why it will keep happening. Also in this episode: the quarter of a billion dollars flooding into the midterms over one question of who writes the AI rules, why Anthropic's push for regulation looks a lot like Goldman Sachs and Dodd-Frank, how California can set AI policy for Florida and Idaho without a single federal vote, the universal basic income groundwork being laid before the job losses arrive, and whether China is stealing its way forward or genuinely out-innovating us.  

Donald Trump's recent speech on election integrity, followed by a Department of Homeland Security briefing, generated more heat than light. But what was actually revealed? Peter and Eric cut through the rhetoric to examine the real findings: Over 270,000 noncitizens identified on voter rolls from limited state data—a number likely much higher China's breach of at least 18 states, accessing voter files across the country (covered up by intelligence agencies) Why states resist cleaning voter rolls and how federal pressure is escalating The media's failure to cover the story and what it reveals about institutional accountability Listen & Explore The Drill Down - https://thedrilldown.com/ Peter Schweizer - https://www.peterschweizer.com/ Government Accountability Institute - https://accountabilityinstitute.org/ Follow the Show X - https://twitter.com/TheDrillDown1 Facebook - https://facebook.com/TheDrillDownwithPeterSchweizer Instagram - https://instagram.com/drilldownwithschweizer YouTube - https://youtube.com/@TheDrillDown Rumble - https://rumble.com/c/DrillDownwithSchweizer/ Follow Peter Schweizer Website - https://www.peterschweizer.com/ X - https://twitter.com/peterschweizer Follow Government Accountability Institute: Website - https://accountabilityinstitute.org/ X - https://twitter.com/Govt_Acct_Inst Facebook - https://facebook.com/GovernmentAccountabilityInstitute Instagram - https://instagram.com/govt_acct_institute YouTube - https://youtube.com/@governmentaccountabilityin2277 Rumble - https://rumble.com/@GAI  

Political parties may soon make a comeback. A new Supreme Court decision “could fundamentally change the equation in American politics,” says Peter Schweizer about a Supreme Court decision on campaign finance. “This will allow the parties to have more influence and more direction on who their nominees are,” he says.

The Supreme Court's decision in the birthright citizenship case is “a monumentally terrible decision,” says author Peter Schweizer, whose latest bestseller exposed China's efforts to exploit birth tourism on an industrial scale. In Trump v. Barbara, The Court this week threw out President Donald Trump's executive order to federal immigration agencies not to automatically grant citizenship to every child born to a foreigner on US soil. The decision, although expected by many, is absolutely terrible for American sovereignty, Schweizer believes.

America is about to celebrate its 250th birthday, but some left-wing Democrats plan to skip the party. “When you forget who you are, it's easy to be talked into becoming something else, says GAI's Eric Eggers. A new CNN poll found surprising support among Democrats for socialism, with 66 percent of those surveyed saying they have a positive view of socialism, compared with a minority – 42 percent – saying the same about capitalism and the free market system, a flip of their sentiments from 15 years ago. Is this caused by their hatred for President Donald Trump and his populist turn, or is it a longer-term trend?

More than a million people are coming to America this summer for this year's World Cup soccer matches. It's “sports tourism.” At The DrillDown, however, host Peter Schweizer is more interested in stopping what he has called “birth tourism.” “The Trump administration announced actions against networks in Africa that were designed to provide birth tourism,” Schweizer says. “This is where foreign women, wives or girlfriends of people in these countries are sneaking into the United States to give birth so their child will be born a US citizen. We have exposed this as it relates to China, Russia, Turkey, and other countries. but this is a positive development – exciting news.”

California's glacial counting of primary election votes is a feature, not a bug. The state's election laws are deliberately designed to make elections as untraceable and lengthy as possible. As author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer asks, “If you make election fraud legal, is it still fraud?”

They caught $200 billion in fraud — now Congress wants to take away the tools that found it. Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers are joined by fraud investigator Andy McClanahan to expose a buried amendment that would ban federal agencies from buying the data they use to hunt criminal fraud networks. Critics call it the "digital defunding of the police." Plus: a $14B Russian Medicare bust, the IRS keeping your biometrics while fraud cops get cut off, and Washington State chaos — a ballot box that exploded, 360 blank ballots in a dumpster, and voter cards where 92% of names were Chinese. Take away the data, and investigators go back to a notepad and pencil. Here's who benefits. Subscribe at TheDrillDown.com

As America approaches its 250th birthday, the media insists we're hopelessly divided and on the brink of a second Civil War. Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers ask the question nobody in Washington wants answered: is that actually true — or is someone profiting from making you believe it? In this episode, Peter and Eric dig into the leaked DNC "autopsy" of the 2024 election — a 152-page report so damning that DNC chair Ken Martin tried to bury it before releasing it anyway. Wait until you hear what its "conclusion" section actually says. Plus: why Trump now owns the Republican Party outright, why the Democrats' biggest names can't win back rural America, and the foreign adversaries quietly funding the chaos.

With important mid-term elections coming in November, “the latest rage in politics is cracking and packing,” says Peter Schweizer. “Gerrymandering is in the news right now,” says co-host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The Drill Down. “Cracking is when you spread out your opposition's voters into different districts. Packing is the reverse of that – when you pack your opponent's voters into a single district.” They discuss the long history of politicians trying to choose their own voters.

How Mexican Consulates Are Engaged in Political Interference in the US

Whether it is interfering with airline mergers, off-shoring a state's oil refineries to Asia, or placing bets on chip makers, the nine scariest words in English are, in President Ronald Reagan's immortal phrase, “I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” The fall of Spirit Airlines “is the classic Democratic problem,” says author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer. “They don't understand the implications of their decisions, the costs and repercussions that affect real people's lives.” On the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast, Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers tie a neat bow around Spirit Airlines, California oil refineries, and chip-maker Intel Corp.

The shots that rang through the ballroom at the Washington Hilton last week bounced off the same walls as when President Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed 45 years ago. But the reaction to the two events says how much our culture has degraded. In 1981, the Academy Awards were postponed for 24 hours. When emcee Johnny Carson opened the broadcast by wishing Reagan well in his recovery, there was thunderous applause from the Hollywood audience. All those years later, two days before the attempt, liberal talk show host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the First Lady having the “glow of an expectant widow,” which he later defended as a joke aimed at her age difference to the president. Some prominent Democratic influencers on Bluesky began peddling a theory that the whole incident was somehow “staged.”

How California's ‘Stop Nick Shirley' Law Threatens Investigative Journalism

Rep. Eric Swalwell's sudden political death was no accident, but a strategic hit job by an unethical California Democratic Party and its media enablers. “Swalwell was pushed out for strategic purposes,” says investigative journalist Peter Schweizer. Call it the law of the jungle. On the Drill Down podcast, Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers review the body count and identify which ethically challenged members will be next to go.

Foreign interference in our elections is the broad theme on today's episode of The Drill Down, as hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers discuss birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court, ActBlue's foreign donor problem, and a lawsuit in Virginia over allowing the foreign-born children of people who once lived in Virginia to vote in the state's elections.

The Supreme Court looks ready to overturn a Mississippi law that allows absentee ballots to be collected as late as five days after the election. Meanwhile, Congress is struggling to consider a bill called the SAVE Act that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in all states and require voters to show a photo ID to vote. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast, host Peter Schweizer asks “will either of these issues determine the outcome of November's elections?”

Are there administration insiders profiting from knowing news about the war with Iran before the public does? Recent news stories from the world of “prediction markets” seem to indicate that may in fact be happening. That story and an interview with the author of a new book that details a barbaric crime by the Communist Chinese.

Elon Musk calls artificial intelligence “a supersonic tsunami headed toward humanity.” The CEO of Anthropic says we have about five years until half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs will be wiped out. Microsoft's head of AI believes it will happen sooner than that. The hype around artificial intelligence (AI) is so thick and constant that people are fatigued by it. Unfortunately, though, that fatigue will allow bad actors to dominate the race to AI dominance, which would be a very bad thing. More than the quick answers AI can give us now, who controls the inputs it will use to provide those answers matters far more. That important question is the subject of a brand-new book, who speaks with host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The DrillDown.

“Birth Tourism” is a major national security threat, with as many as 1.5 million Chinese children who were born as “birthright” US citizens potentially becoming voters in US elections, author Peter Schweizer told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday. Sitting on a panel with three constitutional lawyers and a US Marine, Schweizer told senators that China has created an “industrial scale” way of creating American citizens who are born in the US and quickly whisked back to China where they are raised and indoctrinated in the Chinese Communist Party's ways. He cited Chinese government and academic estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 Chinese have been on US soil since 2013, meaning they are only a few years away from being old enough to vote.

How Trump's Iran Strike Reshapes Global Power Dynamics

Words like “mind control” and “brainwashing” get tossed around, but it is a very real science and a very dangerous game that former CIA operative and now conservative talk show host Buck Sexton calls by its scientific name of “menticide,” the murder of the mind. Psychological attacks are real, and the concept of menticide dates to a Dutch psychologist who studied how totalitarian governments control the thoughts of their populations. Joost Meerloo witnessed and studied the way Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong used the insights from Pavlov's experiments on dogs against people. His most famous work is called The Rape of the Mind.

Did politics destroy journalism, or was it the other way around? Author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, host of The Drill Down, sees the case for both but believes journalism has done more damage to itself than politicians could manage to do to them. Schweizer says, “a friend of mine who used to be a producer on 60 Minutes said he thought that journalists became less interested in actual hard news coverage.” On the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast, his guest Mark Halperin, who had a front row seat to see it happening, agrees.

Bad Bunny

In the week since The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon. debuted atop the bestseller lists, Mexico's president and ambassador to the US have tried to dismiss the book's findings about Mexican consulates interfering in US domestic politics, waving off multiple quotes from numerous Mexican politicians and consular officials themselves. In a statement released by her office, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said, “I categorically deny any involvement or attempt by Mexico to interfere in the internal affairs of the United States.” Schweizer has already been asked to testify at a Senate hearing in March on several of The Invisible Coup's most eye-popping revelations. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, Schweizer responds to the Mexican government's denials.

In its first week, Peter Schweizer's new book, The Invisible Coup, is the number one book in the country. A little celebration might be in order, but Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers relate the book's blockbuster revelations to what is happening now in Minneapolis. Why is ICE even there in the first place? The Department of Homeland Security said  its largest immigration enforcement operation ever, called “Operation Metro Surge,” was tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents, which The DrillDown has discussed previously. Massive defrauding of aid programs including daycare, food, housing, and ambulance services was perpetrated largely by Somalis living in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

The Invisible Coup - Weaponized Migration in America

To respond to “affordability issues,” the Trump administration floated 50-year mortgages for buying homes. Last week, Donald Trump suggested capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent. Financial writer and two-time New York Times bestselling author Carol Roth thinks both are a “terrible idea.” She joins The Drill Down to discuss good financial sense.

The story of welfare fraud in Minnesota keeps getting bigger. And no one in state government has worked harder and longer trying to sound the alarm about it than state Sen. Steve Drazkowski. He joins The Drill Down to discuss the growing evidence of widespread fraud in his state that may include not only welfare and child care fraud but vote fraud as well. Minn. Gov. Tim Walz, who was the Democrats' vice-presidential nominee in 2024, just abandoned his bid for a third term in the wake of the growing scandal, which exposed potentially billions of dollars in fraud committed mostly by Somalis in the Minneapolis area through fake feeding programs, daycare centers, and other social programs. Reporters have also identified political contributions to many of the state's most prominent politicians from Somali immigrants who have been implicated and/or prosecuted in the scams.

2025 Highlights

Massive welfare fraud in Minnesota by Somali immigrants was not supposed to happen because of government “guardrails.” Political violence by an Afghan refugee was not supposed to happen because such people were vetted before being allowed into the US. And voter fraud won't be a problem because there are safeguards to prevent it. Those three separate issues all prompt us to ask… What happens when those “guardrails” are missing, the “vetting” is left undone, or the “safeguards” ignored?

Legal or Illegal - The Debate on Military Strikes

Unmasking Welfare Fraud -The Minnesota Scandal and Its Implications

Thanksgiving Politics - A Family Affair

Unpacking the Arctic Frost Investigation Political Scandal

It's harder than ever to buy a home, thanks to immigration, environmental regulations, and zoning restrictions. The word “crisis” gets used too often, but housing certainly qualifies. On the heels of an election won by Democrats who stressed “affordability,” the Trump administration has floated the idea of introducing 50-year mortgages to lower the entry cost of buying a home. Is that a good idea?

During the government shutdown, Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins has been reviewing data from 29 states administering the food stamp program. Rollins's review has found EBT cards that have been carrying balances of more than $10,000. It found cards that haven't been used in years. It found cards issued to people who never existed. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as food stamps are formally known, has been around since the 1930s but ballooned during the Biden administration years and now serves 42 million people in the US, one-eighth of the population. What's happening? Is the program running efficiently and properly? Will the shutdown really “starve children” as the Trump administration's critics are charging? Joining host Eric Eggers on The Drill Down podcast is returning guest Andrew McClenahan from the United Council on Welfare Fraud. McClenahan's organization represents state-level investigators of welfare fraud. And it turns out there is a lot of it to investigate.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk and other killings by young and seemingly well-educated but radicalized young people has led many to ask: Why does this keep happening? The problems begin not in college, but in the K-12 schooling that is infested with a mind-altering system of control. It is called “social emotional learning” (SEL), and a new book by Priscilla West warns that it will take decades to undo the damage it has done to childhood education.

Voting security is always a hot topic around election time, but manipulation of our electoral system is a bigger problem that we have to worry about all the time. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast, we are not talking about stolen ballots, “ballot harvesting,” or other shenanigans that can happen during an election, but about how congressional districts are both drawn and apportioned. Two things recently in the news raise questions about how we do those things, and whether it's still the best way.

Riot Inc - The Hidden Networks Fueling Unrest

The federal government remains in a shutdown and, depending on whom you believe, it is either because Democrats want to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants, or Republicans want to jack up costs on ordinary Americans. What's going on, and who's right?

The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey has raised cries of “lawfare” from Democrats declaring that President Donald Trump's administration is going after his political opponents. It's a rich charge to make, given the number of prosecutions against both Trump and those in his orbit during and following his first term. One of those targeted during the first Trump terms, Steve Bannon, joins The Drill Down podcast on the most recent episode.

The TikTok Dilemma - A Deal in the Making

“Evil is on the rise in America, and overseas,” says author and talk show host Bill O'Reilly. “Evil is very simple: It's when one human being hurts another human being on purpose with no remorse.” Like Charlie Kirk's killer. Like Vladimir Putin. And about 15 percent of the world's population, O'Reilly thinks.

The NFL's Hidden Agenda - Wokeness or Profit

Is George Soros a racketeer? The billionaire currency speculator, who in 1992 netted $1 billion by shorting the British pound and bringing the Bank of England to its knees, controls a large network of leftwing activist organizations from under the umbrella of his Open Society Foundations.  Days ago, President Donald Trump threatened Soros and his son, Alex, with prosecution under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a 1970 law providing for extended criminal penalties against participants in ongoing criminal organizations. The law was meant to be a weapon for prosecutors against the Mafia, but it has been used in other contexts as well. Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers discuss.

The National Guard's Role in Crime Control