On today's show, we hear from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), who is fighting for accountability in Washington, D.C. We also hear from a man who has been charged with conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism. And we get to the bottom of the latest on an alleged second Trump assassination attempt.
00:00:51.520These encounters with death have not broken my will.
00:00:54.640They have really given me a much bigger and stronger mission.
00:01:00.720They've only hardened my resolve to use my time on Earth to make America great again for all Americans to put America first.
00:01:10.580Brand new video from a source called Mega, M-E-G-A in West Palm Beach, Florida.
00:01:15.660This is the area where that gunman hung out and hid out for 12 hours.
00:01:22.540That is the new mugshot of Ryan Wesley Ruth.
00:01:26.460He's 58 years old from North Carolina.
00:01:29.140The attempted Trump assassin who brought a backpack and an AK-47 outside the perimeter of the Trump International Golf Club on Sunday.
00:01:37.800We understand there's been quite an influx across the borders, and that has actually been one of the things that's allowed unemployment rate to rise.
00:01:48.220And the other thing is just the slower hiring rate, which is something we also watch carefully.
00:01:52.680So it does depend on what's happening on the supply side.
00:01:56.240I'm supposed to be at that stage, but that doesn't matter.
00:02:00.940Because I got you the best present you'll ever have.
00:02:03.560This is the best present you'll ever have.
00:02:58.560Welcome, everybody, to Human Events Daily.
00:03:02.400I'm John Solomon, the editor-in-chief of Just the News.
00:03:04.940And I'm filling in, along with my amazing co-host, Amanda Head, for the great Jack Posobiak today, who's out on assignment.
00:03:10.720Now, we have a packed show for you, don't worry, including an extended conversation with one of Washington's true accountability seekers, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
00:03:19.660We're also going to take a deep dive into the alleged second trap assassin, Ryan Ruth, whose background and how the government allowed him to allegedly get so close to former President Donald Trump with a gun.
00:03:30.200That question has become all the more important after we confirmed earlier this week that Ruth was flagged by the government during his return from a trip to Ukraine a year ago.
00:03:38.460Just the News reported yesterday that Customs and Border Protection agents in June 2023 became so concerned about some of the things that Ruth was telling them as he landed in Honolulu on his way home to Hawaii that they flagged him for additional investigation.
00:04:00.040We've also got some breaking news on election integrity we want to share with you from JustTheNews.com.
00:04:05.040This morning, House Administration Committee Chairman Brian Stile, who oversees election integrity in Congress, asked five states to investigate whether illegal straw donations are being routed through ActBlue, one of the Democrats' most prolific fundraising platforms, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for Democrats like Kamala Harris.
00:04:22.940The referrals to five state attorneys general are the result of months of extensive investigation in a computer analysis by Congress that found thousands of donors who were donating money at levels far beyond their means.
00:04:34.600At least according to their net worth, that has raised suspicions that maybe there's some election cheating going on.
00:04:39.720I'm going to bring in my amazing co-host, Amanda Head, to talk a little bit about this.
00:04:43.860Amanda, a lot of people wondering, is this another Bill Clinton-Chinagate scandal from the 1990s?
00:05:05.980And, John, I'm so glad that you are on top of this case.
00:05:08.180But it certainly seems like when it comes to Democrats with election integrity, whether it is the rules that the state legislature set up for their election procedures and methods, they will just always try to find a way around it.
00:05:20.460And I'm not saying that they are culpable, that they are guilty, but I am so glad that you, along with Congressman Brian Stile, and, of course, you're covering this out of his committee, are going to be on top of this and hopefully figure out exactly what's happening.
00:05:33.660We were talking to him a couple weeks ago.
00:05:34.960He hinted this big bombshell was about to come, and this morning it broke out there.
00:05:39.280One other thing, Amanda, the former Border Patrol chief, the top uniformed officer of Border Patrol, said today that the Obama administration, or excuse me, the Obama, listen to me, the Biden-Harris administration tried to keep him from revealing how many terrorists had crossed the border.
00:05:54.020I think that's something we're going to ask Senator Ron Johnson about, right?
00:06:47.300And, you know, there are still so many questions surrounding what transpired on Sunday,
00:06:54.020any of the details around the second Trump assassination attempt.
00:06:58.100And we've been hearing reports about stonewalling coming out of DHS.
00:07:02.100And it's sad that even some Democrats are getting upset about that.
00:07:05.920If you remember this quote from Senator Richard Blumenthal.
00:07:09.020I think the American people are going to be shocked, astonished, and appalled by what we will report to them
00:07:22.940about the failures by the Secret Service in this assassination attempt, but I think they also ought to be appalled and astonished by the failure of the Department of Homeland Security,
00:07:38.980to be more forthcoming, to be more forthcoming, to be as candid and frank as it should be to them in terms of providing information.
00:07:48.440John, you know, Senator Richard Blumenthal is certainly not a supporter of President Trump,
00:08:03.260but I think that he is seeing very clearly that when it comes to protectees of the Secret Service, that there is much to be desired.
00:08:11.040Yeah, that's one of those issues that I think rises above the chronic partisanship in Washington.
00:08:16.360And I'm going to put a couple of things on the map that other people aren't talking about.
00:08:19.520We know in April from our reporting that the Homeland Security Department's Inspector General unveiled to the Secret Service
00:08:26.500and to the Homeland Department's top leadership all the failures that the Secret Service engaged in on January 6th.
00:08:33.020That's the day they brought Kamala Harris within 10 feet, excuse me, 10 yards of a bomb.
00:08:37.140That's the day that their driver for Mike Pence drove off from the Capitol during the violence,
00:08:42.160leaving the vice president without an escape car for a period of time.
00:08:45.760So those things are already on the radar.
00:08:48.080And then two days before the July 13th assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania,
00:08:55.100the Secret Service was alerted that the FBI was rounding up a man, a Pakistani man,
00:09:01.180who had been in Iran and was believed to be working with Iran to assassinate President Donald Trump.
00:09:08.180And their security posture certainly doesn't look on July 13th like an agency that knows that there's about to be a foreign plot,
00:10:11.120Give us billions more and we'll do a better job.
00:10:13.080Now, this is an agency that really gets three or four billion dollars a year.
00:10:16.220And his primary goal is to protect those VIP protectees.
00:10:20.500They clearly have not been doing that.
00:10:22.680And one of the things I heard yesterday someone say is that lawmakers have been briefed that the way that Donald Trump was protected in the second assassination attempt,
00:10:30.860the one in Florida on Sunday, is the same security posture that they would have had for Joe Biden.
00:10:36.400If that's the security posture for Joe Biden or any sitting president, I'd be pretty worried if I was Joe Biden.
00:10:41.480And this spin, the bureaucracy, the insanity that people have been giving to try to excuse what is obviously an unacceptable security posture around our VIPs, just remarkable, just remarkable.
00:12:11.740And unfortunately, we can't get to the bottom of who is responsible for making the decisions that were such spectacular failures in terms of protecting President Trump.
00:12:30.000So I want to ask, is there anything that the Senate's been told that would explain Senator Blumenthal's very downtrodden assessment of what the American public is about to learn?
00:12:39.240It seemed like he seemed to understand that there's going to be some bombshells.
00:12:42.480Have you or anyone else on the Homeland Security Committee or the PSI been given any briefings?
00:12:47.240Do you have any sense of what the final findings are going to be?
00:12:50.700Well, we're going to be issuing a preliminary finding report hopefully next week.
00:12:55.580Really, it's just going to confirm what most people think.
00:12:58.820You know, there's all kinds of failures across the board.
00:13:21.480But then, in addition to that, be prepared to defend them and press to actually have them apply to the agencies.
00:13:28.660Because my guess is the Secret Service FBI will thumb their nose at the subpoenas, just like they're thumbing their nose at congressional oversight in general.
00:13:35.380Again, these agencies have just gotten used to the fact that Congress does not impose its congressional authority over these agencies.
00:13:50.120We rely on the Department of Justice of the current administration.
00:13:54.080And when you're investigating the current administration, the Department of Justice of that administration has no interest in, you know, really enforcing this penis.
00:14:03.440Senator, to find out, and I don't know if we will ever fully find out how this was allowed to happen and how July 13th was allowed to happen.
00:14:12.340But it obviously requires a coordination of multiple different agencies.
00:14:16.300And it sounds like there has been a little bit of stonewalling by the Department of Homeland Security.
00:15:24.660And, for example, the FBI, you know, I asked the deputy director of Bate, you know, what about the transcripts of the interviews you're doing?
00:15:34.900I asked that two weeks after the assassination.
00:15:36.580Now we are two months later when he said, well, we'll check into it, get them to you right away or, you know, as soon as possible.
00:15:41.980I haven't got one 302, which would come in really handy when we interview the people we're interviewing, but we've only had access to 12 individuals from Secret Service to interview.
00:16:11.980And it's probably by design that Congress can't do its job.
00:16:15.180Senator, I want to ask real quickly, is there any doubt that the Secret Service would have known about the Iranian plot, about that man that was rolled up prior to July 13th?
00:16:24.840And did that make their security posture even all the more alarming when they knew that there was a foreign power, perhaps, behind an assassination plot on Donald Trump?
00:16:33.300Yeah, and I have to be careful of committee confidential information, but I'm quite sure there's public reporting that they knew.
00:17:02.320Senator, before we hit this hard break, I know that your colleague, Alabama coach, Senator Tommy Tuberville, had suggested some type of coordination with the military, possibly Navy SEALs, stepping in to fill some of those gaps of protection for President Trump.
00:17:16.720Is there any world in which, governmentally, that's possible?
00:17:20.800Well, personally, if I were Donald Trump, I would hire former Navy SEALs, former Special Forces people.
00:17:27.240Well, I'd get a real security expert to be in charge of even what the Secret Service is doing.
00:17:32.300Now, at this point, I wouldn't have confidence in him.
00:17:35.040Again, and that's not to say that the men and women on the ground, I mean, it was extraordinarily alert that he saw the barrel of the gun.
00:17:41.520But unfortunately, it was luck that the assassin made his barrel protrude from the fence.
00:18:42.660We're also lucky enough because Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has agreed to stick around for another block.
00:18:46.980We have so many more questions we want to ask him.
00:18:49.560Senator, good to have you on the show again.
00:18:52.020I want to start with or stay with the topic we're on before we went to break, and that is the Secret Service.
00:18:57.400Yesterday, we had a story that the second alleged assassin, Ryan Ruth, that he was stopped at the border coming back from Ukraine last year.
00:19:05.760He made comments about being in contact with our enemies and talking to Afghanistan, getting involved in the conflict in Ukraine that so troubled Customs and Border Protection agents that they referred him for follow-up investigation.
00:19:17.640But the Homeland Security Department, the same one that supervises the Secret Service, they decided, we're not going to follow up on that.
00:20:00.120There have obviously been failures and missed opportunities every step of the way.
00:20:04.460I think that there's also a bit of culpability at the source of all of this, because there has been a great deal of incendiary rhetoric coming from the left, referring to President Trump and his supporters as threats to democracy.
00:20:16.060Even just a few days ago, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre from the podium, again, referring to President Trump as a threat.
00:20:22.800There's responsibility on the shoulders of Democrats, too, isn't there?
00:20:25.860What is so galling, being conservative, is the Democrats, the left, falsely accuse us of doing exactly what they do.
00:20:37.040To say that Donald Trump's a danger to democracy, they're the ones that are using and weaponizing the federal government against one individual and others as well.
00:20:46.460They are the ones that are purposely dividing us.
00:20:48.740That's what critical race theory is all about.
00:20:50.540That's what identity politics is all about.
00:20:53.000That's what an awful lot of this pushing on transgenderism is all about.
00:20:56.840So, again, the left is purposely dividing us for political gain, and then they call us the divisive force.
00:21:03.740No, we're the people that revere our Constitution, that revere our freedoms, that understand that we want a united and healed nation.
00:21:12.620They're the ones that are doing everything they can to divide us.
00:21:16.300Yeah, and that rhetoric has become, sadly, potentially lethal.
00:21:21.600That's the scary part that's going on here.
00:21:23.560Senator, I want to talk about something that just happened on Capitol Hill a couple hours ago.
00:21:27.080The just-retired Border Patrol chief testified to a committee that the Biden-Harris administration instructed him to hide the number of special interest aliens that were coming across the border.
00:21:37.800For those who don't know what an SIE is, that's someone who has terrorism ties that were alleged or suspected terrorists.
00:21:45.100The Biden-Harris administration told him, don't let the public know how bad the situation it is.
00:21:51.740Should there be a consequence to the Biden administration for that?
00:21:55.060Well, they should be voted out of office.
00:21:57.500You know, Kamala Harris should be put into retirement.
00:21:59.700Listen, this is a clear and present danger to our nation, and it's been covered up by not only the Biden administration, but also the mainstream media.
00:22:09.360You know, the numbers we get from Border Patrol, I think it just barely scratches the surface.
00:22:13.760I mean, all these encounters, all the people that have been released without any vetting whatsoever.
00:22:21.320The number I saw, 7 million visas of people, by and large, that we don't interview at our embassies, which is highly unusual.
00:22:28.140I mean, one of the ways you can prevent bad people from coming in is before you issue them a visa, you have them come into the embassy and you interview them.
00:22:35.720And you can, you know, call through people pretty effectively just being able to talk to them.
00:23:37.900Senator, it was interesting to see last week.
00:23:41.280I think that President Trump was not as polished or elegant as Kamala Harris during that debate.
00:23:45.960But something that seemed to ring true with viewers afterwards, which was a surprise to all of us in the media,
00:23:51.320is that President Trump, especially speaking on immigration and the economy,
00:23:55.680regardless of the lack of polish for him, that message was what rang true with the American people in Wisconsin.
00:24:01.860I know the polling goes back and forth between the two, but what's the issue that separates President Trump from Vice President Kamala Harris for the election?
00:26:53.940Senator, beyond subpoenas, the stuff that would typically happen beyond subpoenas.
00:27:00.180I mean, at the very beginning of this conversation, when we were talking about the Secret Service, you said something to the effect of everybody is responsible, so nobody is responsible.
00:27:07.880It is this theme of dilution of power in Washington.
00:27:11.380Whoever is responsible at ActBlue or within the Democrat Party for these straw donations, straw donations are punishable.
00:27:49.680Sir, I want to talk to you about something that just broke on Justin News a little bit ago.
00:27:52.840The State Department Inspector General has confirmed that the State Department did not properly stop its special ambassador for Iran, Robert O'Malley, from accessing classified information after concerns were raised about some of his contacts, some of his behavior.
00:28:06.960We've known about the issue around O'Malley.
00:28:09.260We didn't know that they weren't able to effectively cut him off from classified information in meetings and discussions for a period of time.
00:28:16.580This is the same State Department where Hillary Clinton was able to move classified emails over to her private email servers.
00:28:25.060And has there been anything the State Department seems to have learned about security over the last decade?
00:28:30.020Well, first of all, you have to understand, I mean, O'Malley was the chief coddler of Iran.
00:28:35.180And that is the Biden administration policy, coddle Iran.
00:28:39.840They'll lift the sanctions, funnel billions and billions of dollars into the economy, the military, of the largest state sponsor of terror.
00:28:48.020So that's why Hezbollah, that's why Hamas, that's why the Houthis have all these resources.
00:28:53.340That's why they're able to engage their acts of terrorism and shower thousands of rockets into Israel.
00:29:00.080And again, it's all because of the coddling.
00:29:04.240He was trying to starve the Iranian economy to make him behave better.
00:29:09.020Both the Obama administration and the Biden administration have coddled, sent billions of dollars, probably changed Iran's behavior for the worse.
00:29:28.300Senator, as you look at the polling coming up for the election in November, things look, I dare say, pretty good for Republicans on the Senate side.
00:29:38.240If Republicans retake the majority in the Senate, what's going to be some of the top priorities?
00:29:42.480Well, if that's the case, then I'm chairman of the firm's subcommittee investigation will have actually have stronger subpoena power than I had as chairman of the full committee.
00:29:53.740I've got well over 60 oversight letters on some aspect of COVID, the vaccines, to all these federal health agencies, Department of Defense.
00:30:03.600I will use that as a foundation for further subpoenas, well, for subpoenas and for oversight hearings and exposure to the truth.
00:31:21.120We've been having a great conversation.
00:31:22.640In a couple of minutes, we're going to have Congressman Matt Gaetz.
00:31:24.440But before we do that, Just the News, as I mentioned with Senator Johnson yesterday, broke a story that Ryan Ruth, the alleged second Trump assassin, was flagged when he came back to the border.
00:31:35.900He was stopped by Customs and Border Patrol when returning from Ukraine in June 2023, just a year ago.
00:31:40.740And people were so concerned about what he was talking about, they flagged him for an additional investigation.
00:31:45.000But the Homeland Security Investigations Unit didn't follow up.
00:31:48.160Congressman Matt Gaetz confronted the associate director of Homeland Security Investigations yesterday.
00:32:05.060I recently, just this morning, learned there was an article that he was, when he entered back into the country from overseas, CBP had contacted HSI.
00:32:16.440And I read all of the items, the things that he was stating, and basically as a U.S. citizen returning to our country from Ukraine is a freedom fighter.
00:32:31.020Based on the information that I read, there would not have been any reason to immediately take him into custody.
00:32:40.740But you can confirm the Just the News reporting that the suspected Trump attempted assassin was flagged by CBP and was referred to HSI.
00:32:58.660Here's an interesting twist there, Amanda, because the question isn't should he be in arrest.
00:33:02.700No one was suggesting he was about to be arrested.
00:33:04.740He was supposed to be followed up with to have an investigation, to find out what this guy was talking about, make sure he didn't have a threat, make sure he didn't have some intervention with enemies that our country didn't know about.
00:33:45.340It sounds like she was very schooled in the Kansas City shuffle, but I think that the congressman is probably going to have more to say about that anyway.
00:33:51.840We're lucky enough right now to be joined by, from the great state of Florida, Congressman Matt Gaetz.
00:33:58.260Oh, thanks for having me, John and Amanda.
00:34:00.640And it's interesting that HSI killed the investigation that Customs and Border Patrol would have thought appropriate.
00:34:08.620And we all know that Customs and Border Patrol, they interact with a lot of these people with strange stories.
00:34:14.120And the fact that they flagged this one in particular seems reasonable given the bizarre fact pattern.
00:34:20.140The attempted assassin was claiming that he was recruiting freedom fighters for Ukraine in Taiwan, Afghanistan, Moldova, other places.
00:34:31.360And when asked how he resourced such an effort, he said, well, I get the money from my wife.
00:34:36.500That may very well have been true, but it might not have been.
00:34:40.320There might have been foreign contacts that were funding this effort on behalf of this American.
00:34:46.200And if that's true, we would want to know the depth of those communications and of the resources that might have been provided to this person by any of these countries.
00:34:54.340Yeah, and you did such a good job asking about that.
00:34:57.000I want to ask for just a quick follow-up, if Amanda would allow me.
00:34:59.020The FBI gets tipped off in 2019 to this guy that he might have weapons as a convicted felon.
00:35:11.700And then CPB flags this guy, and he's still not followed up with whatever happened to say something, see something, say something, do something.
00:35:18.400It doesn't look like the government follows that anymore.
00:35:20.280Well, I'm certainly proud of the CBP officials who said, eh, there's something squirrely here.
00:35:26.620There needs to be part of our investigative arm that's activated for the thorough review that would be called for.
00:35:32.780At the top levels, there seems to be a mismanagement of the information.
00:35:36.660And when we had the person who directs Homeland Security investigations before our committee, she didn't have answers as to the basis for not following up with such strange facts encountered at the border.
00:35:48.940So I think there are people doing it right.
00:35:51.400But as you see, if you have one link in the chain that's not effectively conveying the information, demanding the follow-up, then you have a real negative outcome like we had where he was able to enter the country and do harm.
00:36:07.240I mean, all it requires is a little scratch and sniff.
00:36:09.480It also requires coordination of a lot of these different agencies, Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, Secret Service, even Border Patrol in this case.
00:36:17.040And we oftentimes find that it's the brass that is stonewalling or creating the clog in the machine, I suppose.
00:36:41.540I had a senior official from the Department of Homeland Security in my office before the second assassination attempt saying that what he has assessed is that there are five known assassination teams in the United States.
00:36:56.800Three, inspired by other governments, two that are here that are known domestic assassination teams.
00:37:03.860And with that, this individual was coming to me concerned that the force protection around President Trump, even prior to that second assassination attempt, was not sufficient for what it needed to be.
00:37:15.700And the coordination at that level, at the dignitary protection level, is like the bare minimum that we have to do to keep our presidents, our presidential candidates safe while they're on the trail.
00:37:27.520So there are five, I just want to follow up, five assassination teams, are they all targeting Trump?
00:37:34.180No, I should have been clear about that.
00:37:35.600Five teams that we know are targeting Trump.
00:37:37.980And so that raises real questions about why certain teams were being pulled off of the Trump deal detail and put on, for example, the Jill Biden detail.
00:37:47.360Now, we don't want anything bad to happen to Jill Biden, but at the same time, the threat envelope for her was substantially different than the threat envelope around President Trump.
00:37:56.600And it would not have necessitated pulling assets away from the Trump detail for the Jill Biden detail or the John Bolton detail or any other details that were beefed up.
00:38:05.980At the same time, the requests from the Trump detail and from the Trump campaign for more security were going unanswered.
00:38:15.540Congressman, I know that you and a number of other problem-solving type members of Congress have probably thought and had conversations about what could be done to at least supplement secret service.
00:38:28.780What would be your recommendation to the Trump campaign?
00:38:32.460President Trump is the last person worried about this, to be honest.
00:38:36.080I mean, he's worried about his message.
00:38:38.440He's worried about the safety of the people there.
00:38:40.580And I think he himself does not reflect on his personal security.
00:38:45.480And that's why those around him need to.
00:38:47.260I think that there are ways to augment some extended perimeters with some private security.
00:38:54.160I've heard Eric Prince, a very smart guy, opine as to what it could take to ensure that folks aren't able to just set up and get this close.
00:39:01.680I mean, you think about what happened in the second assassination attempt.
00:39:04.680Someone was able to park outside and plan and prepare and lie in wait for the former president.
00:39:37.520So the person was informing me of this information because the Secret Service was aware of the threat profile around President Trump.
00:39:47.400And again, this was before the second assassination attempt.
00:39:49.720And the person was coming to me in part to ensure that if they revealed this information, if investigations and reviews brought this to light,
00:39:57.960that it would be able to be scrutinized and assessed without this person being fired or rat holed or sent into the closet somewhere,
00:40:06.280as you and I know, some folks who are the truth tellers tend to find themselves.
00:40:10.480So our office likes to be a place of respite for those who can come and say, look, here's what's actually happening.
00:40:16.680And then we try to get that information before the public in the most responsible way possible.
00:40:20.960And I think the public should know that the Secret Service was aware of five assassination teams at the time they were taking protective assets away from President Trump
00:40:31.900and redeploying them to other people with less of a risk profile around them.