Susan Crabtree has spent months reporting on a Secret Service losing control of its own ranks. This week the pattern got harder to ignore. A Miami agent wanted his name out of her story. Then police arrested him for leading a near-fatal hazing. Eric Eggers and Susan walk through five agent arrests this year, the resurfaced Vanity Fair essay reopening Gavin Newsom's 2007 affair, and Javier Becerra's role in losing track of 140,000 migrant children as he eyes the California governor's office. 

DHS says it found 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote across four states, with 190,000 in California alone. New Jersey already admitted 6,600 on its own rolls. California refuses to hand over its voter file and rewrote its voter ID ballot measure overnight. Susan Crabtree and Eric Eggers break down the money, the machine, and the fight over the November vote.

A DEA agent seized fentanyl headed for the streets of Albuquerque. His own government punished him for it. On this episode of On Background, Susan Crabtree sits down with Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, the law firm representing DEA Special Agent David Howell. Howell blew the whistle on a policy that let hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills keep moving through New Mexico so investigators could build bigger cases against the traffickers above them. The parallels to the ATF's Fast and Furious scandal are direct, and the human cost was worse.

Leavitt walks through how a 2019 policy requiring agents to seize fentanyl whenever practical got quietly gutted under the Biden Justice Department, how Howell was sidelined and blocked from testifying after he raised concerns, and how a second DEA whistleblower has since come forward describing a separate case where the same tactic let millions more pills hit the street. New Mexico's fentanyl deaths spiked 21% even as the national rate fell. Leavitt also addresses the role of Chinese precursor chemicals, the Mexican cartels, and Biden-era border policy in fueling the crisis, and explains where the congressional and inspector general investigations stand now.

John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting joins Susan Crabtree and Eric Eggers to talk about performing on the USS Nimitz for America's 250th, bringing a freed hostage on stage to play piano, and why patriotism became a political flashpoint.

He explains how a song written after October 7th connected him to hostage families, why he thinks the arts decide the culture war, and what a California flag ban says about the country right now. Susan and Eric dig into the drop in national pride, the media's role, and whether the divide is as deep as the headlines claim.

On Background is a production of the Government Accountability Institute.

Susan Crabtree and Jed McFatter return to walk through ten figures in Gavin Newsom's political orbit who later faced charges, convictions, or prison. They trace verified election coercion in his first run for San Francisco mayor, the bribery cases reaching into his former staff, and the federal scrutiny now aimed at Jennifer Siebel Newsom's nonprofit and the millions flowing between it and her for-profit film company. The conversation closes on the socialist wave in New York and what it signals for Los Angeles and California.

Read the reporting referenced in this episode in the California Globe and City Journal. Get the full investigation in the book Fool's Gold.

Newsom says Trump invented an investigation to stop his 2028 run.

The truth: prosecutors in Sacramento opened it before Trump took office. A whistleblower came forward last year. His chief of staff already pleaded guilty.

Susan Crabtree and Jed McFatter lay out the rest alongside Eric Eggers. 

California's primary is next week and the numbers are wild!

A reality TV star is within 1 point of the sitting LA mayor. One Democrat running for governor said on camera that California "needs Chevron" while taking their checks. Another has spent $195 million on ads and is still stuck in the polls. And two Republicans are splitting the vote in a way that may hand the governor's race entirely to Democrats, cutting off the only real check on Gavin Newsom's record.

Susan Crabtree and Eric Eggers break it all down on this week's On Background.

Steve Hilton is leading the race for governor of California, and he sat down with Susan Crabtree and Eric Eggers to explain why.

The numbers tell the story. California ranks 50th out of 50 for opportunity. 50th out of 50 for business climate, ten years in a row. Highest poverty rate, highest unemployment, highest cost of living.

Where is the money going? Hilton's Golden Together fraud reports found $928 million of a $1 billion climate fund, money meant to put solar panels on low-income apartment buildings, redirected to Democrat political organizing. A separate nonprofit, Tzedek, gets roughly 80 percent of its revenue from taxpayers and openly hires "paid canvassers of varying immigration status, including undocumented" to elect Xavier Becerra.

This is what one-party rule buys you.

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A gunman opened fire at the White House Correspondents Dinner with the President, Vice President, and most of the Cabinet in the same room. The Secret Service Director called the setup “perfect.” On this episode of On Background, Susan Crabtree and Eric Eggers are joined by former House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz to examine what actually happened, what the agency is still hiding, and why a decade of warnings has produced almost no reform.

Chaffetz, who led the most aggressive Secret Service oversight in modern congressional history and authored a 2015 committee report titled “United States Secret Service: An Agency in Crisis,” walks through the structural failures that have only worsened. The average Secret Service employee receives 30 minutes of training per year. The agency is roughly 1,000 agents short. Many uniformed officers patrol the White House grounds without ever having been inside the building. The promised White House training replica has ballooned from $8 million to more than $140 million.

Susan adds her latest reporting, including new details about the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt, the supervisors who were promoted instead of disciplined, the campaign’s request to remove the farm equipment that would have blocked the gunman’s line of sight, and an internal culture that has stopped responding to her questions since her exclusive reporting on a Secret Service agent investigated for alleged tax fraud.

The episode also covers Director Sean Curran’s leadership, the missing transparency about which officer was actually hit, ongoing congressional briefings led by Chairman James Comer, and the six structural reforms Chaffetz says must happen before the World Cup brings unprecedented protective demands to American soil.

This is a sober look at the institution charged with protecting American leaders, and the consequences of letting it fail in slow motion.

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