by Frank Holmes, reporter
One of the longest-serving members of the Senate has shed new light on an ongoing scandal that started out as entrenched bureaucrats giving tax payer money to their friends, who refused to do their jobs—but ended up in a sordid tale of child sex trafficking that’s tied to the most prominent leaders of the Democratic Party for the last 50 years.
The explosive story came out of a tiny letter written by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to a member of the Trump administration—a story which nobody in the mainstream media told you about at the time.
It began with reports that something was wrong with a program so small you’ve probably never heard of it: the National Human Trafficking Hotline.
The hotline has been run since 2007 by a group called the Polaris Project—and the group profits from it handsomely.
The federal government contract pays Polaris an absolute minimum of $5 million, and as much as $9 million in taxpayer funds, every single year. That grant is under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and administered through a little-known office called the Administration for Children and Families (ACF).
The group in charge, the Polaris Project, advertises itself as the “leading a survivor-centered, justice-driven movement to end human trafficking,” but there’s a big, big problem: Insiders say it just isn’t doing its job.
“The Polaris Project failed to report several instances of human trafficking – including child sex trafficking – to law enforcement,” announced the office of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, last month.
A whistleblower testified that in March, a caller reported multiple girls in the age ranges of “15-17; 18-21; 22+” being sold into sexual slavery. The caller said the possible victim asked for help but says “[s]he’s going to be physically hurt by the pimp running this company. She’s being forced to escort for sex and money.”
Despite all that evidence, the company reportedly did nothing.
If that weren’t enough, a month earlier, the hotline got a tip from a victim herself. The girl said she and her underage sister were being trafficked and she felt terrified their pimp would hurt her. The hotline marked the file as having “high indicators” for sex trafficking, but then labeled the complaint “Work Not Required”…so they sat on her complaint.
It’s one of many such cases, they say.
Sen. Grassley wrote a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last month, asking what he’s doing to tackle the issue—and he isn’t the only one who noticed. 41 state attorneys general sent a letter to RFK Jr. in April
They pointed out the trouble, especially with children, but with adult victims of human trafficking, things are actually much worse. Often, the hotline doesn’t report adult human traffickers at all, and when they bother, sometimes law enforcement receive them a month or two months late.
A full three dozen state attorneys general highlighted problems with Polaris in February…of 2023. The very group that “Congress has funded for 15 years, is not reporting tips of adult trafficking to state law enforcement except under the limited circumstance where the victim self-reports and affirmatively consents to the Hotline making the report,” they wrote.
Instead, Polaris CEO Catherine Chen told the government in the summer of 2022—deep into the Biden administration—that “the Hotline was beginning to transition away from serving as a tipline” that reported crimes to prosecutors “to concentrate more on connecting survivors with resources.”
The swamp gets even murkier: It turns out Polaris’s co-founder, Katherine Chon, serves as the director of the State Department’s Office of Trafficking In Persons—which approves her own hotline’s $9 million grant.
There’s one more wrinkle: The Polaris Project is also a member of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).
The longtime chair of the Polaris board of directors, Catherine “Kiki” McLean, was also senior advisor to the Hillary Clinton for President campaign in 2008 and worked with Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, the Democratic National Committee, and other liberals.
Another Polar director, Steve Rosenthal, served as associate deputy secretary of the Department of Labor during Bill Clinton’s administration… the former president who flew X times on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express, spent time, and adorned Epstein’s beloved object d’art of a painting showing Clinton wearing the blue dress at the center of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. No word whether Bill posed for the portrait.
Is it any wonder Polaris has hiccups in reporting child sex trafficking?