Steve Robinson

And it's not just houses where they're growing marijuana.

We found boarding houses, places that are set up for a large number of guys to...

um eat sleep and in between cycles going out to tend to the marijuana plants that was in 2022 yeah or 2022 you found 270 homes now there's well over five yeah so in 2022 that was when the memo came out revealing the existence of these locations uh and in the ensuing years we began a process of uh

Based on the patterns we found on the address that we obtained from the reporter who first published that leaked memo, we expanded our investigation, looking at property records, real estate records, tax records, electrical records, to identify more of these places, and then set about driving probably more than 10,000 miles around the state of Maine to inspect these spaces, try to talk to these people, talk to their neighbors, and see if we could

uh you know put some reality around this story that had come out because you know i've been in conservative media long enough so i've seen these flash in the pan stories where it's like oh the chinese are doing this the iranians are doing this and it's like yeah well am i trying are they trying to like scare me are they trying to use me in some way and this was around the time too when there was there was a lot of stories coming out that were like

you know, the China spy balloon is, you know, coming over the North America.

And there was some some stuff that just seemed like they were they were trying to push this narrative of conflict with China.

So I was a little bit skeptical of it at first.

So I wanted to actually get out and see for myself firsthand what was going on.

And then through that process, we identified without having any leaked information, the 270 sites that the Department of Homeland Security was aware of and actually identified

I want to say we actually identified more than they were aware of.

And I eventually did get the Department of Homeland Security list through a source.

And I was a little bit embarrassed for them because mine was way better.

Yes.

I think it's a mixture of both.

I think I'm finding new ones that had already been operating, but they are at a point where they're building themselves new facilities that are more suited to what they need.

They're building facilities that are larger, that are more industrial in nature and are closer to the I-95 corridor and have better security.

And in part, I think that's- What kind of security?

I mean, gates, security cameras, motion sensors.

There's some that I've been to where maybe 40 feet before you drive past the foot of the driveway, you pass a motion sensor and lights go on at the end of the driveway.