A Republican official from Maricopa County, Arizona has been indicted on a massive scheme that involved smuggling human beings into the United States and helping to sell their children in this country. The scheme netted the Republican some big bucks, but it shows that there really are no crimes that are off limits for the GOP. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
A Republican official from the state of Arizona has now been indicted on 11 charges and these may be some of the most disgusting charges I’ve seen in the years covering Republican corruption. The man in question, his man by the name of Paul Peterson, he is a Mericopa County assessor and if you now familiar with Maricopa County, uh, that’s, that’s where the sheriff came from, the bad one. And apparently there’s a lot of other bad Republicans in Maricopa County too, including Mr. Peterson. And here is what the prosecutors have accused Mr. Peterson of doing. These are the accounts he was indicted on. He transported some 40 pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to Utah to give birth and then proceeded to sell the babies to US families for $40,000. He also was accused of fraudulently billing Medicaid for the prenatal costs by claiming the Marshall and these women were residents of Arizona. So there’s human smuggling, there’s baby selling for $40,000 a pop, Medicaid fraud, and all kinds of other fraud wrapped into this one individual. This story is nuts. And what’s nuts about it is that it kind of touches on a lot of the problems that we have here in the United States today. Human smuggling into the United States is getting worse. Little to anything is being done about this problem. And here we have a Republican official and elected Republican official actually making the problem worse, smuggling humans into the United States, Medicaid fraud, another huge one, and he’s right here doing it with them. undocumented immigrants coming into the country. I thought Republicans hated that, right? Well not Mr. Peterson, because he’s making $40,000 every time one of these womens spits out another baby boom cash in his bank account. this person, Paul Peterson out, they’re not well known. Most people probably won’t know that name, won’t remember that name, but I want you to remember the story. And yes, he’s not a high ranking official. Most people in the Republican party, you’ve never even heard of him. Probably people in his own County don’t even know who he is or what he does. but this is a big deal. What Mr. Peterson did is absolutely disgusting. But more importantly, it continues to show the growing hypocrisy within the Republican party. Absolutely. Going out there and making the problems worse that his party right now is railing at us against saying, the Democrats are the ones making these problems worse. The reality is when you scratch beneath the surface, you start to see that the Republicans are in fact the ones who continue to make these problems worse. But then they go out there and say, no, no, no. It’s the Democrats who are doing it. And they say those things cause they think you’re stupid. They don’t think you’re going to do the work. They don’t think you’re going to do the research. They don’t think you’re going to read the papers. But stories like this are out there. And I for one hope that Mr. Peterson not only has every penny that he ever made from selling babies taken away from him, but that he also never sees the outside of a prison for the rest of his life.
