Guilfoyle’s Sudden Exit & FBI Targets African Scam Compounds | 10.14.26

Okay, first before we give you the facts of the day, run Hyde Fight Infadels is streaming now only on Daily Wire. It's an ode to the great action movies of the 80s and 90s, there's even a love story which nobody expected, and you can support Daily Wires Mission to continue making movies that people actually want to watch. Go check it out. Back in DC, Trump's new press secretary takes to the podium and a very high-profile ambassador steps down amid allegations. We have asked Ambassador Gelfoyle to resign. She has been a wonderful asset to the team and we wish her well. I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Wednesday, October 14th. This is Morning Wire. The FBI announces a sweeping crackdown on international scammers who have taken hundreds of millions from Americans. The FBI has read four joint operations overseas in the Middle East, and in Southeast Asia, where we've seen $17 billion in fraud. And we follow the election money. Where are Democrats spinning the most and what does it tell us about their strategy? Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. You've heard me talk about them as fast-growing trees, but now they're trees.com. The same trusted online nursery with a simpler name. Trees.com is America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and over 3 million happy customers. They have all the plants that your yard or home needs, including fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs and house plants, all grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy. Trees.com delivers healthy, carefully packaged plants directly to your door. No trip to the garden center required. Trees.com helps you find plants suited to your climate, growing zone and space. I also like knowing that every plant is backed by their live and thrive guarantee. If I ever need help caring for mine, plant experts are available 7 days a week by phone, chat or email. Right now, you can find select plants for up to half off. Morning Wire listeners get an additional 20% off with Code Wire at checkout. Go to Trees.com and use Code Wire. That's Trees.com Code Wire. Offer valid for limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. With just 20 more days until the midterm elections and some key staffing shakeups in the administration, President Trump is ramping up his campaign efforts. Our White House correspondent, Mary Margaret Olehann joins us now to discuss, welcome on. Thanks for having me. That's something that's very relevant to your day to day. There's a new press secretary taking the podium yesterday. What do we know about her and how is she performing so far? Yes. So yesterday, White House press secretary Katie Zachariah held her first briefing at 9.30 a.m. ET at the White House. I was there, of course, in our seat, our hard-earned seat. I like to remind everyone, thank you for your support. And we were there and this was a really interesting briefing because it only lasted 14 minutes, which is very, very unusual. You know, typically the briefings go much longer and Caroline Levitt would call on, you know, over a dozen reporters and take many, many questions. In this particular briefing, I would say that Katie Zachariah looks a little nervous. I think this is one of the toughest jobs that you can possibly have in the country when it comes to PR, when it comes to comms. There's a room full of very savage and aggressive reporters. And if you watch it, you can see that at the end of the briefing, when she said that the briefing was over and she was going to let the president take more questions when he departed for Alaska, the reporters weren't having it. They were jumping all over trying to say, you know, are you going to do another briefing on Friday and she did seem a little disconcerted by the level of noise and just aggressiveness in the room. So I'm curious to see her next briefing. I think she'll probably come back more, you know, for round two, ready for the next fight. And I'm excited to see it. I didn't get a question today, but hopefully we will next time. Now changing gears. There was another high profile staffing change in the administration. President Trump asked his ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who also we should know, at one point almost was his daughter in law. She was engaged to Don Jr. for a period of time. He asked her to step down, which she has since done. What was all that about and what has she said since? Yeah, Kimberly Guilfoyle is a really interesting figure in Trump world. People often forget that she actually dated and married Governor Gavin Newsom and was miss Newsom for quite some time. And there's an infamous photo of them lying on this Grecian carpet that, you know, often makes rounds on social media. But yes, so Kimberly Guilfoyle, there was a damning story that came out a few weeks ago, or maybe even last week, which shared that she had allegedly been asking a donor to pay off her credit card bill. Again, allegedly had asked for this money in exchange for what appeared to be influence given her position as ambassador to Greece. Now, I have not confirmed any of those details myself, but the president found them damning enough to ask her to resign and during the White House press briefing yesterday, the new press secretary, Katie Zacharias, shared that she had been asked to step down and that Kimberly Guilfoyle was going to do so. And shortly after the briefing, Kimberly Guilfoyle announced that she would be stepping down from the position. So one of the more dramatic and high profile departures of the administration so far and definitely a scalp for like a seed media because this was a story that many of them had sought to cover and this was the result that they got. Meanwhile, a pretty newsworthy week already for the White House, Mary Margaret, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. Have you thought about your holiday shopping yet? Imagine being responsible for getting everybody else's gift out the door. Shipstation helps online businesses handle that rush by bringing orders into one place, automating repetitive shipping tasks and helping teams keep up when order volume suddenly takes off. A friend of mine ran an e-commerce department and Shipstation saved her team an enormous amount of time in the fulfillment process. Peak season doesn't wait and neither should you. Get ahead of it today with Shipstation and get 60 days free at shipstation.com with Code Wire. That's shipstation.com Code Wire, Texas and fees apply. The issue of scam centers is a global pandemic. Under President Trump's administration, some 17 months ago, he made attacking fraud one of the biggest priorities for law enforcement. The next step of that campaign is to take it to the rest of the world. That was FBI director Cash Patel promoting a crackdown on overseas scams targeting Americans. The operation has produced dozens of arrests, the rescue of more than a hundred trafficking victims and the removal of millions of fake social media accounts. Daily Wire Culture Reporter Megan Basham joins us now with the details. So Megan, let's start with an overview here. What was the scope of this operation and what did the authorities find? Yeah, Georgia. So Operation Blackout, which is what it's known as, is part of this joint effort between the Justice Department, the FBI and the British National Crime Agency. Now, they worked with more than a dozen tech companies and law enforcement agencies from 10 different countries. And they recently announced the first results from this coordinated effort to take down these scam networks in West Africa that, you know, they target a lot of Americans, but they particularly target American seniors. And here's part of the public service ad that the FBI produced to warn Americans about these kinds of scam networks. And Homeless Text on Your Phone, it didn't come from a hacker in a basement. It came from inside a fortified compound halfway around the world, barbed wire, armed guards, the works. These aren't call centers. They're scam compounds built by criminals to steal billions from Americans. Behind the fake profiles, there's a brutal supply chain, human traffickers, gunman holding captives, and slave labor forced to work thousands of phones, online accounts, and fraudulent websites. So, that ad goes on to say that Operation Blackout was designed to allow the FBI through these strategic partnerships to start to dismantle these massive foreign criminal networks, Root and Branch, rather than trying to, you know, follow up on each case one by one. Right. It makes sense. But as they, like you said, a complicated operation, clearly, I understand that meta was among those tech companies that were part of this Operation Operation Blackout. What exactly was their role? Yeah, John. Actually, a lot of big tech names in this, Adobe, Google, Starlink, Open AI. But as you say, meta has been particularly proactive. They have tipped off investigators so that they've been able to identify things like fake job offers, romance, scams, investment fraud, all the Nigerian prints type of requests that we've all seen, but they then track them back to their source. And they say that they've removed nearly four million Facebook and Instagram accounts that are linked to these West African scam networks. Yeah. So, a lot out there. And these accounts, what they do is they, they build a romantic or professional relationship with the victim. And they then leverage that relationship to get the victim, to send them money for things like, you know, scam, cryptocurrency investments. But there's actually a particularly cruel follow-up to this, where once someone loses their money in one of these scams, another scammer comes along and offers for a fee to get that money back for them. So, the victim ends up being re-victimized. And this was Patel providing details on this operation at a Senate hearing last month. The FBI has read four joint operations overseas in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia, where We've seen $17 billion. in fraud, crypto and cash. And we've also, through that's our operation blackout. That is the premier law enforcement program leading the annihilation of scam centers. We go in there, we free the traffic workers, we collect evidence, and then we work with our partners to literally bulldoze those scam centers so they can never be up again. And we suffocate their communications capability with the private sector by eliminating their access to the internet. Now, according to the DOJ, authorities have so far arrested 28 people in this particular operation in West Africa. And that included 19 in Ghana and nine in Nigeria. They've seized hundreds of devices and have identified at least $11 million in funds that could potentially be frozen. But, you know, what really stands out to me, John, is that they were able to rescue 117 people who were being held against their will in Ghana. So we're talking about people who are imprisoned in these compounds. And they're forced to participate and act as, you know, the face of some of these scams. Megan, thanks so much for reporting. Yeah, my pleasure. All eyes have been on president Trump and congressional Republicans as they try to save their house and Senate majorities in the midterm elections. Daily wire Washington DC bureau chief Tim Rice joins us now to look at the Democratic game board. So Tim mainstream outlets, of course, have focused a lot on Republicans. They're the party in power. But if history is prologued, we could see a changing of the guard pretty soon. So how are Democrats approaching the midterms? It's a great question, Georgia. And one of the reasons that we haven't heard too much about Democrats midterm strategy is not just because they're not in power, but because they're midterm strategy is pretty average, which is not a bad thing. They're spending money. They are out there buying up ads in all sorts of major markets. So on the house side, the house majority pack, which is aligned with House Speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, has spent about $284 million across 70 markets. The Senate majority pack, which is affiliated with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, is spending in a lot of states that Democrats came close to winning in 2024, or did outright win. So we've got $46 million in Ohio, $33 million in Maine, $31 million in North Carolina, and $20 million each in Michigan and Georgia, those last two being the biggest states the Democrats are trying to hold on to. So for most of the cycle, until a couple of weeks ago, really, the Democratic Party, certainly on the Senate side, and a little bit less so on the House side, we're mostly focusing on keeping seats that they have, keeping states that Kamala Harris won or came close to winning, but we're starting to see that strategy shifting a little bit in the waiting days of the cycle. So it sounds like the Democrats are pretty bullish on their chances in some of these red states as well. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So we're now see Democrats diverting a lot of resources or allocating more resources. You could say to states like Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and Kansas, all traditionally deep red states, all states that Trump won by double digits in 2024. They think that their message is going to resonate with voters, including in these deep red Trump supporting states. And to that point, their message, is it mainly the affordability message? What are we hearing from Democrats in the red states? Yeah, it's affordability, I would say, across the board. That's the big umbrella term. So you're thinking about things like gas prices, food prices, kitchen table issues as commentators like to say. But the other thing that really, the Democrats really have going for them with the affordability issue is how much of what they say is unaffordable is tied to sort of non economic things that the Trump administration is doing. So by that, I mean, the big one is the war in Iran, right? So Democrats have a really easy time running on affordability, which is sort of the vacuous issue. And as we've seen with Republicans, they sort of struggle on how to message it. But Democrats don't have that problem because affordability means lowering gas prices, that means ending the war in Iran. Affordability means making goods and services cheaper, that means ending the Trump tariffs. And then once you start talking about tariffs, then you can start talking about Trump, corruption, international business deals, really all of the Democrat hits that we've heard going back to 2016. So yes, affordability is the short answer, but the long answer I think is important there because I really show is how Democrats have managed to turn what was originally a Republican talking point. Unless we forget affordability came out of the White House as an issue, but Democrats really managed to take that and turn it into a pretty winning campaign issue for them. Now, an issue that's new this year that's really swept through politics is AI and Democrats are planting their flag firmly in the anti-AI position. How's that landing with voters? Yeah, it's another really smart move by Democrats, Georgia, because again, if you look at the landscape, as you just said, AI sort of took everybody by storm, I think voters and politicians alike, but one thing we're seeing is that Americans are really worried about AI, about data centers being built in their communities. A lot of Republican lawmakers share those concerns. One Republican lawmaker who does not share those concerns is President Trump. So again, by coming out as this anti-AI or more AI skeptical party, Democrats are appealing to a lot of swing voters, maybe some disaffected Republican voters who feel like the president's ra ra AI is great, you know, kind of drumbeat is not resonating with their concerns, but they're also putting their Republican opponents in a really tight spot because now in the waiting days of the campaign, we're going to need to see our Republicans on the ballot in vulnerable states. Will they go against the president when it comes to AI? Will they disagree with him? And you can actually see just how much Democrats are honing in on this issue when you look at a super PAC that launched just earlier this month. It's called tomorrow together. It is a tech-focused political group founded by a couple of former Democrat operatives and they are spending $4 million across four house races in the final weeks of the midterm cycle to push the message that Democrats are the ones who hear you on AI. Democrats are not the ones who are going to put a data center in your backyard. Democrats are not going to go blindly into this uncertain AI future. And it's also important to note, this super PAC said that this $4 million spend in four key house races was just their opening salvo. So definitely trying to make this a clincher issue in the midterms, but also a clear sign that Democrats are looking to keep this a winning issue for them as we go into 2028. Well, amazing that this became the top issue practically overnight. Tim, thanks for coming on. Of course. Thanks for waking up with us. And before you go, Daily Wire just announced a brand new movie coming this November. So stick around for the trailer of our new film Confession. And if you want to hear our thoughts on it, you can watch the all-access live we taped last night, a special thanks to all those who tuned in live. The reporting that feels this show is only possible because you tune in every day and because of our Daily Wire subscribers. To enjoy the show, add free and join our mission, become a member at DailyWire.com. We'll be back this evening with more news you need to know. [Music] [Music] Professor. [Music] Let me out! You will remember your duty. This isn't heroin. You're useless, Scott. You sit there and shake because you're depending on during your sick as all over you. Have you ever seen a child start a death professor? No. I am.