00:00I want to echo some of what Carolyn said about what we're doing to combat the rampant fraud that exists in our immigration system, thanks to failed politicians and thanks to people who allowed the American taxpayer to be taken advantage of for far too long. I think it's important to understand why this matters to the American people. I am a father of three young kids, a lot of kids, a lot of people in my generation.
00:23What is that going on there? Is that normal? Okay. CNN installed this broken camera just to throw me off my game, but it's not going to work. So here's the simple fact here. If you're a young parent struggling to afford childcare in the United States of America, there are programs that we have to make it easier for your kids to get in daycare, for your kids to get in preschool. Those programs should go to American citizens, not be defrauded by Somali immigrants and others.
00:53Make it hard for you to get the access to the resources you need. But number two, making it easier for people who shouldn't even be in this country to fleece the United States and our taxpayers to begin with.
01:04We have actually activated a major interagency task force to make it possible to get to the heart of this fraud. We have Department of Agriculture resources that are focused on snap fraud so that people who need food benefits can get them, but illegal aliens and other fraudsters don't.
01:21We have over 1,500 subpoenas that the Department of Justice has issued to get to the heart of the fraud ring. We've done almost 100 indictments, mostly Somali immigrants, but also a few others.
01:32And of course, we're looking in with broad investigatory authority to a number of the instances of wrongdoing that we've seen in Minneapolis. But we also want to expand this.
01:43We know that the fraud isn't just happening in Minneapolis. It's also happening in states like Ohio. It's happening in states like California.
01:50And so what we're doing in order to help coordinate this remarkable interagency effort from the Trump administration, but also to make sure that we prosecute the bad bad guys and do it as swiftly and efficiently as possible is we are creating a new assistant attorney general position who will have nationwide jurisdiction over the issue of fraud.
02:12Now, of course, that person's efforts will start and focus primarily in Minnesota, but it is going to be a nationwide effort because unfortunately, the American people have been defrauded in a very nationwide way.
02:23I want to thank a couple of people for the cooperation, in particular, Pam Bondi, our attorney general, first of all, for getting a lot of resources to Minneapolis to start to investigate and prosecute this fraud really at an industrial scale.
02:35We've never seen fraud like this in the history of our country. Pam has been doing a great job to get the resources there to uncover it.
02:42But importantly, creating a job like this often takes months, sometimes even longer.
02:47When we realized that we needed this associate attorney general position, Pam got this person up and running in about a week.
02:54We're going to make the nomination hopefully in the next few days.
02:57We'll obviously let you guys know who that is when we do it.
02:59I've talked to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who has promised me swift confirmation for this official.
03:04But this is the person who is going to make sure that we stop defrauding the American people.
03:10And here's one final thing I'll say about this.
03:12I've heard a lot of people say that we need a special counsel to investigate fraud in the United States of America.
03:17I actually agree.
03:18And that's what this position does.
03:20It has all the benefits, all the resources, all the authority of a special counsel, but with two crucial differences.
03:27Number one, it will be run out of the White House under the supervision of me and the President of the United States.
03:33And number two, it's actually constitutionally legitimate.
03:36As you guys may know, the special counsel statute has some major constitutional questions.
03:40When we get the bad guys, we want to make sure we get them permanently and they don't have some legal technicality they can get out of,
03:46which is why we set it up as an Associate Attorney General.
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