I'm going to come up with a solution and I'm here to solve it.

Yeah, this was a very long journey and it's a very different company than how it started.

So I got my start back in 2020.

So it was really during peak COVID.

Restaurants were all shut down.

There were a bunch of articles coming out about food waste, produce piling up on farms.

And I saw a nonprofit out in Washington state called East West Food Rescue.

The logistics piece.

Ben, tell us about this situation in New Jersey and how this happened.

Well, it looks like it was because of a software, which, uh, with the state's department of motor vehicles, uh, according to governor, Mikey, Cheryl, she said about 6,600 people who, uh, disclosed that they were non-citizens, not eligible, eligible to vote, uh, were registered to vote, uh, because of a software error between June of 2023 and 2024.

The program has been shut down, and they are addressing the glitch, but not before it led to about 400 people of that 6,600 to vote in an election since then.

Now, the state claims that none of these votes were determinative in swinging the results of any election, but obviously this comes at a time, as you alluded to, where the Trump administration is making this big push to Congress to pass the SAVE Act, this restrictive new voter ID law that they say would stop non-citizens from voting.

And this does beg the question, what happened in New Jersey? If the SAVE Act was in place, would it have prevented something like this from happening?

Are there other states that they're looking at in regards to something similar that could have happened?

Well, this was something that the governor of New Jersey said that she disclosed proactively after she learned about it.

She was told about this last week before the president's speech.

I guess the real question, Ben, is out of all of this, was much of it or any of it new last night that we didn't hear or have seen before? The overall

claims made by the president were not new, but what's new is some of the underlying documents that were released by Um, the administration, uh, intelligence assessments, internal FBI emails and deliberations, um, a new claim from the, um, department of Homeland security.

That, um, you know, that, that in four States, uh, looking at voter, uh, roles, uh, vote public voter files, they found 250,000 non-citizens registered to vote.

Although they had no evidence that any of these people actually voted.

or evidence to back up how they came to that number.

So some of the underlying elements of these claims were new, but the overall theme of the speech, the global claims that he made, many of these were already out there.

All right, Ben, and quickly, what's next? Was this a one-off, or does the president have some follow-up scheduled in the next few days to keep hammering at this?

We're going to see the Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen speak today on this topic, and we're going to continue to see this administration beat the drum to Congress to pass the SAVE Act, the voter ID measures that the president wants passed before the midterms.

What are we learning from these documents that the White House is declassifying?

Well, that's the new part of the president's speech last night.

It was these underlying documents that were shared with the public for the first time.

Internal government intelligence assessments, FBI redacted investigative records, emails.

Those have not been seen before by the public, but the overall allegations raised by the president about China accessing voter rolls, about Venezuela working to tamper with voting machines used in at least one place in the United States, and concerns about alleged voter fraud efforts in Michigan.

Those are all things that were previously known, you know, theories and concerns about election, about the 2020 election.

Those are all things that the president has previously talked about.

Ben, were you a little surprised that President Trump didn't address some of the more pressing issues that we are dealing with, the war, inflation, some of those other things that Americans are more concerned about now as opposed to the 2020 election?

It's probably a good thing that it's bipartisan in the anger that this has not been resolved.

I think it's I think the fact that the whole country, Democrats and Republicans, people from red states and blue states are all feeling the pain and on the same issue, I think is acknowledgement that this is an issue that has to be addressed by both parties.

And I think that is a place to start.

But I think it's also notable that, you know, for that and other criticisms that she's made of the president, Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene is respectively pushed out of her party to the point where she's not even going to finish out this term, as you mentioned.

So for even even speaking, you know, making public the fact that this is a problem, the president has this problem.

He said he would fix this and it's hurting people in my state and people who support him.

You know, that had earned her really a scarlet letter from the president.

So throw it back on them to come up with a solution.

How behind is the IRS suggesting that they are, or how bad of an issue or a problem is this, are the Senate Democrats suggesting?

Well, I think it remains to be seen.

We know that Republicans and Democrats feel very differently about the IRS, how big it should be, the role it should play in collecting taxes.

So it's really no surprise that Democrats are raising concerns and criticisms of how the Trump administration is running the IRS.

But I think there are real questions about how some of these hiring changes, some of the layoffs and the buyouts at the IRS, although some have been reversed.

Others have been, you know, gone through and people have left the workforce.

How that will affect tax collections, particularly when it comes to the departments at the IRS that help taxpayers with questions.

Are they suggesting that we should delay the no tax on tips, no tax on overtime proposal?

And they held their little press conference here, and we just played a short clip of it, but everybody's smiling and joking around.

I think, yeah, you know, that was the big takeaway.

I think two big things in there that, you know, Mamdani clearly played to and, you know, building this relationship with the president is something that he talked about in his campaign, which is that a lot of New Yorkers voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

And one of his first viral videos that he filmed was going to the Bronx, going to Queens and talking to New Yorkers, you know, of South Asian descent about why they voted for Donald Trump.

And almost all of them said it was the issue of affordability.

So, you know, it was interesting to see Mamdani bring that up in the meeting.

He actually pointed out to the president that there was somebody he spoke to on the street who owned a pharmacy whose father was actually, was someone who served Donald Trump's father in that same neighborhood in Queens, in the same family pharmacy.

Did they discuss publicly anything, any issue of substance? Was anything they agreed or disagreed on in front of the reporters? Or was it all happy talk?