The left finally feels that finally has some room to run after the supposed scandal of a bunch of Trump National Security officials being on a secret messaging group chat with a reporter from The Atlantic. Now, members of the Trump administration are saying there was no classified material on the chat.
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00:00:28.000Well... The left feels that finally has some room to run after the supposed scandal of a bunch of Trump national security officials who are on a signal chat together.
00:00:37.000And someone from National Security Advisor Mike Walz's office accidentally invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the execrable editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, into the chat.
00:00:49.000And there, a conversation ensued all about when and how to strike the Houthis in Yemen.
00:00:54.000And people are pretending to be extremely angry about this.
00:00:57.000When I say people are pretending, What I mean is that there used to be a time, say, 15 years ago, when national security breaches based on revelation of classified information would have been a national scandal.
00:01:08.000And now we have been through this many times and no one has been prosecuted.
00:01:12.000And so the idea that anyone takes this stuff super seriously at the top level is kind of ridiculous.
00:01:17.000Of course, I mentioned this yesterday when Hillary Clinton was let off the hook by the FBI and by James Comey.
00:01:25.000Basically, it was open season on screwing around with the classified information.
00:01:29.000And so the idea that Americans are sitting around their kitchen tables today saying to themselves, oh my God, I can't believe that they invited a reporter into a signal chat and then nothing happened and the Huthies got hit with missiles.
00:01:40.000I just don't think that that is going to motivate the American public to move away from President Trump.
00:01:45.000And that is what the evidence, by the way, is showing right now.
00:01:48.000Harry Enten over on CNN, he says that despite all of the Democratic attempts to paint President Trump as deeply unpopular.
00:01:53.000The numbers are better for President Trump than literally any time in his political career.
00:01:58.000All we talk about is how unpopular Donald Trump is.
00:02:01.000But in reality, he's basically more popular than he was at any point in term number one and more popular than he was when he won election back in November of 2024.
00:02:12.000His net favorable rating right now comes at minus four points.
00:02:14.000Compare that to where he was when he won in November of 2024 when he was at minus 7 points or March of 2017 when he was at minus 10 points.
00:02:23.000So when you compare Trump against himself, he's actually closer to the apex than he is to the bottom of the trough.
00:02:30.000Okay, that is absolutely right, which means that unless a scandal actually goes to sort of the core of the Trump administration, and by that I mean his actual agenda, not how the agenda is carried out, but the actual agenda itself.
00:02:42.000It's not going to harm Trump in any serious way, and President Trump knows precisely that.
00:02:46.000So, yesterday, there was large-scale controversy over that signal chat.
00:02:50.000Members of the Trump administration were testifying in Congress and talking about whether classified information was actually revealed.
00:02:58.000It was maintained by Tulsi Gabbard, who is the Director of National Intelligence, that there was no classified information that was revealed.
00:03:04.000John Ratcliffe of the CIA said the same thing.
00:03:06.000He said that that chat did not include any real classified information.
00:03:57.000And so they're all saying that there was no classified information on the chat.
00:04:00.000Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, says fine.
00:04:02.000Well, if there's no classified information on the chat, then I guess I'm just going to put everything out there.
00:04:06.000Because there had also been a debate over whether there were actual war plans in the chat or whether it was sort of broad-ranging discussions, what was going to happen, the kinds of stuff that you could actually say to each other in text as opposed to in a skiff or in some sort of classified venue.
00:04:22.000According to the Wall Street Journal, President Trump and two of his top intelligence officials denied Tuesday classified materials about military strikes in Yemen were shared by officials on a group chat on a non-government service while Democrats denounced the security breach as both reckless and dangerous.
00:04:36.000said that this did not include classified information.
00:04:40.000The information was not, in fact, classified.
00:04:44.000Meanwhile, The Atlantic has now responded by publishing the rest of the information.
00:04:48.000They say, fairly enough, if it's not classified, then you'll have no problem with us putting that out there.
00:04:54.000Jeffrey Goldberg, this morning, put out a story about this.
00:04:57.000They had emailed the White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt, and Levitt had responded, quote, as we've repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat.
00:05:04.000However, as the CIA director at National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation.
00:05:10.000This was intended to be an internal private deliberation among high level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed.
00:05:15.000So for those reasons, yes, we object to the release.
00:05:18.000A CIA spokesperson asked to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe's chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the signal chain because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified.
00:05:28.000But Ratcliffe had also testified earlier that the officer was not undercover and said it was completely appropriate to share their name in the signal conversation.
00:05:34.000The Atlantic, for purposes of caution, is refusing to release the name of the officer.
00:05:40.000Otherwise, the messages are unredacted.
00:05:46.000Well, at 1144 Eastern Time, this is Saturday morning, The Secretary of Defense posted in the chat, team update, weather is favorable, just confirm with CENTCOM we are a go for mission launch.
00:05:59.000And then the Hexeth text continued, 12.15 Eastern Time, F-18's launch, first strike package, 13.45, 1.45 Eastern Time, trigger-based F-18 first strike window starts, target terrorist is at his known location, so should be on time, also strike drones launch, MQ-9s.
00:06:15.000So Jeffrey Goldberg says, why exactly is this not classified?
00:06:19.000This signal message shows the U.S. Secretary of Defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him at 1144 a.m.
00:06:25.000This is 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi target terrorist, was expected to be killed by these American aircraft.
00:06:34.000If that text had been received by someone hostile to American interests, the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds.
00:06:40.000The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.
00:07:46.000It's intent to spread classified information beyond its boundaries.
00:07:48.000Then you're guilty of some sort of crime.
00:07:50.000Then obviously there was no intent here.
00:07:52.000No one meant to include Jeffrey Goldberg on purpose in the middle of the chat.
00:07:56.000Obviously. So, on a legal standard, very difficult to say that this would be violative of law as actually reinterpreted by James Comey and the FBI and pretty much everybody else going forward from that point.
00:08:08.000Which means 15 years ago may be a crime.
00:08:33.000And the discussion that was actually had, as I mentioned yesterday, the discussion was quite fascinating because it illuminated differences inside the president's team over foreign policy and showed that both Secretary of Defense Hegseth and NSA Waltz in particular are very strong defenders of President Trump's peace through strength agenda.
00:08:50.000This is what Mike Waltz was saying yesterday on national television on Fox News.
00:08:54.000He said, listen, we're knocking the crap out of the terrorists, which is the central issue here.
00:08:58.000This journalist, Mr. President, wants the world talking about more hoaxes.
00:09:03.000And this kind of nonsense, rather than the freedom that you're enabling, and a key part of our sovereignty is open sea lanes and knocking the crap out of terrorists, which is exactly what your team and Pete Hegseth, a good friend and fellow veteran, is leading the charge on.
00:09:19.000President Trump, for his part, did the right thing.
00:09:22.000And I say it's the right thing here because the idea that Waltz or Hegseth or anyone is going to get fired over this in the wake of the reality about how national security information has been treated.
00:10:02.000It's equipment and technology that's not perfect, and probably he won't be using it again, at least not in the very near future.
00:10:11.000Well, President Trump is defending Mike Waltz, as he should.
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00:12:42.000Is it something that anyone takes seriously at this point?
00:12:45.000Especially when it's kind of no harm, no foul?
00:12:47.000The answer is going to be no going forward here.
00:12:50.000Democrats who are trying to seize on this as sort of their moment in time to make hay, they're making a very large tactical mistake, I think.
00:12:59.000Again, most Americans don't care about this.
00:13:01.000Most Americans don't really understand why this is such a major issue other than somebody got messy in the signal chat.
00:13:09.000Senator Mark Warner of Virginia ripped into John Ratcliffe, head of the CIA, and Tulsi Gabbard, DNI, over the carelessness and incompetence and all the rest of this.
00:13:19.000If this was the case of a military officer, Or an intelligence officer, and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired.
00:13:35.000I think this is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly towards classified information, that this is not a one-off or a first-time error.
00:13:53.000Yeah, again, this sort of outsized outrage is kind of rich coming from these people.
00:13:58.000John Ossoff, the senator from Georgia, who is not long for the Senate, by the way, went after John Ratcliffe and said, oh, this is totally so unprofessional, just terrible.
00:14:05.000You guys had literally a person who was dead as president of the United States for several years and you covered it up.
00:14:11.000You guys presided over the worst American humiliation since the Vietnam War with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, where you turned over an entire country of 38 million people to the world's worst barbarians while getting American service members killed.
00:14:23.000People are dropping out of the wheel wells of airplanes.
00:14:25.000This is where you're drawing the line of being embarrassed?
00:15:17.000Again, I remember when you were a part of the Biden administration, like a top domestic policy advisor to the Biden administration that presided over the collapse of Afghanistan, among other things.
00:15:26.000So, yeah, I can remember much worse debacles than this.
00:16:26.000That, of course, is really silly, and Trump is not going to fire, and he shouldn't fire these people.
00:16:30.000The reality is that many of the people who are gunning for members of the administration, it's interesting which members of the administration they are particularly gunning for, right?
00:16:37.000They're gunning for Waltz because Waltz included Goldberg in the chat in the first place.
00:16:42.000But also because Walt happens to be a hawkish backer of Trump's peace through strength.
00:16:46.000They're gunning for Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, who, again, is the hawkish backer of peace through strength.
00:16:50.000I mean, again, if you read the chat, what's fascinating about the chat, as I mentioned yesterday, is that the most responsible and intelligent commentators on foreign policy in the chat are Walt and Hegseth.
00:17:01.000They are the two most informed, most reasoned people in the chat about what should be done about the Houthis.
00:17:07.000For example, I do not think it is a coincidence that many of both the isolationists on the right And the Obama foreign policy pseudo-realists on the left are gunning for Hegseth and Waltz.
00:17:18.000I don't think that is merely about the handling of classified information, because there are a lot of people on that chat.
00:17:22.000So not everybody was on that chat, and no one else is being gunned for, which is rather curious, shall we say.
00:17:28.000In the end, it is left to Jasmine Crockett, the new hot leader of the Democrat Party, and she's sort of the fresh-faced AOC.
00:17:39.000But Jasmine Crockett is trying to steal her thunder.
00:17:41.000This is the congresswoman from Texas, the incredibly voluble congresswoman from Texas, who was left to sum up the real problem that happened in the Signal chat.
00:17:51.000And then y'all want to come at us and act like people of color are the problem or that women are the problem?
00:17:56.000Like, baby, you probably need a good black woman in the room who can check you and tell you that, first of all, you shouldn't be doing this on Signal or anything else.
00:19:06.000And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot mess, honey.
00:19:13.000So that is some very inspiring talk there.
00:19:17.000They're in the hot-ass streets with the Hot Wheels governor because he's a hot-ass mess, according to Jasmine Crockett.
00:19:23.000Now, there are a few problems with this.
00:19:24.000Number one, Jasmine Crockett grew up in a rather privileged precinct of St. Louis, and so she's cosplaying this sort of attitude.
00:19:30.000But beyond that, when she refers to Governor Greg Abbott as Hot Wheels, she is literally insulting a person who...
00:19:42.000She's insulting a paraplegic for being in a wheelchair by calling him Hot Wheels.
00:19:48.000And she is being laughed at and cheered by the members of the Human Rights Campaign, which is all about, supposedly, the inclusion of marginalized people.
00:19:57.000I don't think that you're about the inclusion of marginalized people, guys.
00:20:15.000She tried to pretend she wasn't talking about the fact that the Governor Abbott of Texas is a paraplegic.
00:20:21.000She wrote on X, quote, I wasn't thinking about the governor's condition.
00:20:25.000I was thinking about the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable.
00:20:32.000Literally, the next line I said was that he was a hot-ass mess, referencing his terrible policies.
00:20:37.000At no point did I mention or allude to his condition.
00:20:38.000So I'm even more appalled that the very people who unequivocally support Trump, a man known for racially insensitive nicknames and mocking those with disabilities, are now outraged.
00:20:45.000Now, do you remember at that time that Trump supposedly made fun of a journalist who had a condition?
00:20:51.000And it actually was not him making fun of the journalist who had the condition.
00:20:54.000It's the same weird hand motions he does whenever he's talking about someone he thinks is stupid and weak.
00:20:58.000And then they played it as though this particular journalist was being mocked by Trump and became a national news story.
00:21:03.000She literally called a paraplegic hot wheels.
00:21:06.000And now she's claiming the reason she called Greg Abbott Hot Wheels is not because he is in a wheelchair.
00:21:10.000It is because he is sending migrants on airplanes to various cities led by black mayors.
00:21:21.000I don't think that that's what you meant.
00:21:23.000And the reason I don't think that that's what she meant is because it turns out that in 2021, she liked a post referencing Governor Abbott as Hot Wheels, which was before the migrant transfers.
00:21:36.000That was uncovered by the Washington Free Beacon, which, of course, is tremendous reporting.
00:21:39.000So this, of course, has generated angst and antagonism in the House of Representatives, which is basically descended.
00:21:45.000Much of the House of Representatives is staffed by good, responsible people who actually care about their constituents.
00:21:50.000And then there is, in fact, a contingent of the House of Representatives that is basically Jerry Springer running for various gubernatorial seats.
00:21:56.000That is what the House of Representatives has become in large part.
00:22:02.000It is filled with some of the Dullest knives in the drawer, for sure.
00:22:06.000That includes Representative Ayanna Pressley, who is now complaining about the Trump administration for, wait for it, being too white.
00:22:14.000Look, I don't want us to lose sight of what is actually happening here.
00:22:45.000Well, Democrats have chosen a bunch of idiot leaders and people who actually reflect some of the worst in humanity and back that.
00:22:52.000Well, that worst of humanity still exists and threatens people all over the globe.
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00:25:00.000Get your kids the full-body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults.
00:25:03.000And I think that many, many people in the country.
00:25:06.000There's a whole Democratic campaign right now.
00:26:09.000If they had unified control of government, they would do it again.
00:26:12.000No wonder people are still resonating to President Trump's message.
00:26:15.000Speaking of which, President Trump signed a couple of consequential executive orders yesterday.
00:26:19.000He signed an executive order, according to Politico, seeking to change how elections are administered across the country, especially rules related to citizenship and mail-in voting.
00:26:28.000The Trump order asserts that federal law requires all states to reject ballots not received by Election Day, directing the Justice Department to take all necessary action to enforce that requirement.
00:26:37.000That, of course, makes perfect sense because it's very difficult to determine.
00:26:41.000You can try to do it based on postmark, theoretically.
00:26:44.000But how exactly are you going to determine quickly and easily how an election was conducted if people are still having their votes counted five days after the election?
00:26:54.000The trust and veracity of the American electoral system, is deeply undermined by this idea that you can receive a ballot three days after an election and still count it.
00:27:04.000In Florida, we know the election results literally day of, like within an hour, because they pre-count all of the mail-in ballots and then they add on day of voting and then they're done, which is the way it should be done across the country.
00:27:17.000President Trump's order asserts that federal law requires states to reject ballots not received by election day, directing the Justice Department to take all necessary action.
00:27:24.000Across the country, states have wide latitude to administer elections differently.
00:27:28.000None allow votes to be counted if they are cast after Election Day.
00:27:30.000Some accept absentee ballots after Election Day as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.
00:27:34.000Many others require ballots to be in possession of election officials by the time the polls close.
00:27:38.000For example, in Florida, a ballot must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day.
00:27:42.000In California, a ballot must be postmarked on Election Day but can arrive up to seven days later.
00:27:50.000The executive order also requires the Election Assistance Commission, an independent agency, to add proof of citizenship to the national voter registration form.
00:27:57.000States are required to accept that national form under federal law.
00:28:00.000They can still create their own voter registration forms.
00:28:02.000But if you're going to use the federal voter registration form, you should have to show that you're a citizen.
00:28:06.000That does not seem particularly controversial.
00:28:09.000And this bizarre idea that has been put forward by so many people that impoverished citizens can't show proof of their citizenship is insane and ridiculous.
00:28:16.000You have to show proof of your citizenship.
00:28:19.000Every time you drive a car, what do you think a driver's license is?
00:28:23.000There are lots of poor people in America who are able to drive or able to buy alcohol using an ID.
00:28:29.000It actually is not all that difficult.
00:28:32.000This is an 80-20 issue and Democrats find themselves on the wrong side of it.
00:28:35.000President Trump also signed an executive order directing the FBI to immediately declassify files concerning the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
00:28:47.000The agency probe launched in 2016, was seeking information on the Trump campaign.
00:28:52.000It was deeply corrupt, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
00:28:54.000It was rooted in a false report that was basically crafted out of whole cloth by Fusion GPS, a firm that was hired via Perkins Coy by Hillary Clinton, in order to whip the Steele dossier into existence.
00:29:10.000The Crossfire Hurricane investigation also included impropriety, including the...
00:29:15.000Improper surveillance of Carter Page, a member of sort of the Trump foreign policy team, although a very low-level one.
00:29:22.000President Trump is declassifying all those files, saying, you might want to go through this stuff if you're talking about government corruption.
00:29:28.000This memorandum requires the immediate declassification of all FBI files relating to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
00:29:35.000This was obviously one of the instances of the weaponization of law enforcement, powers of prosecution against you and others.
00:29:42.000We believe that it's long past time for the American people to have a full and complete understanding of what exactly is in those files.
00:29:49.000Which gives the media the right to go in and go and check it.
00:29:54.000You probably won't bother because you're not going to like what you see.
00:30:11.000Then the media are not going to look into these files because the files show exactly what was going on during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which, again, is one of the most deeply corrupt investigations in modern American history.
00:30:21.000No one was fired for that one, by the way.
00:30:25.000Meanwhile... The Republicans on the Hill are moving steadily toward their one big beautiful bill.
00:30:30.000According to Politico, congressional GOP leaders are coalescing behind President Trump's demand that their massive party line bill include a debt limit increase.
00:30:37.000Senate Republicans are seeing if they have the votes to make it happen.
00:30:40.000Those plans were cemented during a White House meeting on Tuesday with the senior Republicans in both chambers, top tax writers, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
00:30:47.000Senate Majority Leader John Thune said his conference still needed to make a final decision.
00:30:52.000In order to get that strategy going, President Trump will need to force several key Senate GOP hardliners to get behind it.
00:30:57.000Again, the goal here would be to be able to increase the spending limit under President Trump, which is the thing that he wants.
00:31:05.000It is likely that this will be achieved by President Trump.
00:31:10.000In an acknowledgment that the gamut of linking a debt ceiling increase to a filibuster-skirting reconciliation measure might not work, Thun has been careful to leave the door open to striking a deal with Democrats to avoid default in the coming months on the debt limit.
00:31:21.000But many of Thune's members are clamoring to put the debt ceiling hike in the reconciliation bill in order to get all of it done at once because they don't want to actually make concessions to Democrats.
00:31:29.000So the argument that President Trump is making and that Thune and Johnson presumably are going to be making is you can either negotiate a debt limit hike with Democrats, in which case you have to make concessions to Democrats, or you can stick the debt limit hike in this one big, beautiful bill and then pass it along with everything else.
00:31:44.000And you don't have to make any deals with Democrats.
00:31:45.000Thune said, I think that's clearly a preferable outcome.
00:31:48.000Obviously, the House has it in their version, so we have to determine whether or not the Senate can get on board with that idea.
00:31:54.000The Senate's blueprint right now does not have that in there.
00:31:57.000Thune stopped short Tuesday of promising Republicans finally had a plan for addressing the debt limit.
00:32:01.000He believed there was a consensus that was forming.
00:32:05.000Some GOP lawmakers say they may have to strip out the debt limit measure from the massive bill to extend tax cuts if the U.S. approaches the debt limit too early, before the lawmakers can come to an agreement.
00:32:41.000One of these things makes business happy.
00:32:43.000One of these things makes business more unhappy.
00:32:45.000And so if you're going to do the tariff thing, then it just makes what's happening on the other end, on the legislative end, that much more important.
00:32:52.000As the Wall Street Journal reports, barriers to open trade are rising around the world at a pace unseen in decades, a cascade of protectionism that harks back to the isolationist fervor that swept the globe in the 1930s and worsened the Great Depression.
00:33:02.000It isn't just President Trump's new tariffs.
00:33:05.000Even before Trump retook the White House, many countries were increasing trade barriers, often against China.
00:33:09.000Now those efforts are proliferating as countries braced for a new wave of goods redirected across the globe by the U.S.'s rising tariff shield.
00:33:15.000The EU said this month it plans to toughen measures to protect its own steel and aluminum producers from imports diverted from the United States by Trump's 25% tariffs on those two metals.
00:33:25.000Economists suggest that the world could be heading toward the largest, broadest surge in protectionist activity since the U.S. Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which was a large contributing factor in the Great Depression.
00:33:35.000Now, economists don't think that we're headed toward a Great Depression or anything remotely like that, but the economic slowdown could be significant, which is just one reason why if you're going to do one thing, you certainly have to do.
00:33:56.000They may not like the way that this is being pursued.
00:33:59.000But the basic idea of going through the government with a red pen and just line iteming out all of the bad spending ideas, that's something the American people certainly like.
00:34:09.000And the Trump administration is coming, I think, to a better version of this, which is a more Do I think it's a great idea to lay off half of the employees when a system doesn't work?
00:34:45.000President Trump, the rest of the administration, they're not big on the bad headlines.
00:34:49.000And so cutting deeply into necessary areas of government or third rails of government in the case of Social Security, that's not something that President Trump is likely to do.
00:34:57.000So what you're likely to end up with, with this administration, is something like Trump 1, which has a lot of brash and bold policies where the rough edges are sanded off by the process, which is sort of best of all available worlds in reality.
00:35:10.000Alrighty, meanwhile, President Trump's agenda at the college level is continuing to bear fruit.
00:35:14.000So there's been a lot of talk about the supposed crackdown on free speech at Columbia University.
00:35:20.000There is a thing, and it's called the Civil Rights Act.
00:35:22.000It suggests that you are not allowed to receive federal taxpayer dollars and then engage in discrimination against a wide variety of groups.
00:35:28.000One of those groups does include Jews.
00:35:30.000Discrimination against Jews, such as, for example, allowing the setup of gigantic riotous mobs in the middle of campus shutting down buildings.
00:35:41.000That does amount to discrimination, and everybody would know that if it were a bunch of white students who were stopping black students from going to class, for example.
00:35:47.000And so the Trump administration cracked down on Colombia, and they said, listen, all your federal taxpayer dollars are going to go away unless you actually abide by federal law.
00:35:56.000According to the Wall Street Journal, at the request of the Trump administration, Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong publicly reiterated her commitment to implementing changes the school agreed to in negotiations with the federal government.
00:36:06.000Armstrong released a statement emphasizing her support for the changes after holding weekend meetings with anxious faculty about the deal the school made in government talks over federal funding.
00:36:14.000Some faculty said they were concerned Armstrong was playing down the changes and presenting mixed messages.
00:36:18.000She put out a statement saying, That's because the Trump administration forced an agreement.
00:36:36.000That it restricted masks, empowered campus police, and appointed a senior vice provost with broad authority to oversee the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department, which has been a longtime cancer at the very center of Columbia University.
00:36:48.000It used to be run by people like Edward Said, who is a wildly anti-Western figure, indoctrinating students day in and day out with the idea that the West was colonialist and evil while its enemies were actually just poor victims and all of their own terrorist activities were the fault of the West.
00:37:04.000The Trump administration earlier this month canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts over campus anti-Semitism concerns.
00:37:11.000But, again, you could substitute any sort of discrimination concerns and it would meet the standard required under federal law.
00:37:19.000On Friday, Columbia largely agreed to the changes with Armstrong saying, quote, we need to continue to work to restore the public's faith of the fundamental value of higher education for the nation and the long-standing partnership between groundbreaking universities like Columbia and the federal government.
00:37:32.000The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights has lawyers visiting the campus this week, and they're going to investigate this more.
00:37:39.000By the way, how bad were things on Columbia University's campus?
00:37:44.000There's a lawsuit that was filed Monday in Manhattan federal court by six relatives of captives who are being held captive by Hamas or were held captive by Hamas in Gaza.
00:37:54.000This lawsuit was filed in federal court against Students for Justice in Palestine.
00:37:59.000Why? Well, because according to this lawsuit, SJP, which again is one of these radical campus groups, had prior knowledge of the October 7th, 2023 terror attacks.
00:38:09.000So it wasn't just that SJP puts out anti-American pro-Hamas propaganda, which they certainly do.
00:38:15.000It is also that SJP, according to this lawsuit, was in full active coordination with Hamas.
00:38:22.000According to the suit, quote, three minutes before Hamas.
00:38:27.000Three minutes before Hamas began its attack on October 7th, Colombia SJP posted on Instagram, quote, we are back, in an announcement about its first meeting of the semester and urged viewers to, quote, stay tuned.
00:38:40.000According to the filing, the group's account had been dormant for months before the October 6th posting, which was made a couple of weeks after the start of Colombia's fall 2023 semester.
00:38:49.000The plaintiffs accused the group of being part of Hamas'American propaganda arm and a terrorist U.S.-based in-house public relations firm, which has changed form several times to evade criminal and civil liability.
00:38:59.000According to the suit, Columbia SJP was the leading organizer of pro-Hamas disruptions, encampments, and riots on Columbia's campus, including virulent anti-Semitic protests that harassed and physically intimidated Jewish students and faculty, glorified Hamas, engaged in dangerous premeditated unlawful acts, and significantly impaired Columbia University's ability to provide educational services to the U.S.
00:39:23.000SJP was suspended by the Ivy League University only in November of 2023, but it simply morphed and its members joined other groups.
00:39:32.000The lawsuit highlights a toolkit disseminated by National Students for Justice in Palestine October 8th that called on the group's partners and allies to organize a day of resistance and tell its members to sign what was in effect a loyalty pledge to Hamas.
00:39:45.000By the way, the family's suit names several defendants, including Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University, apartheid divest.
00:39:52.000That's the person who's being deported by the Trump administration right now.
00:39:57.000The suit says those organizations have been only more aggressive and more militant in their efforts to, in coordination with Hamas and National Students for Justice in Palestine, distribute Hamas-created and affiliated propaganda.
00:40:08.000So yeah, that is more than Mahmoud Khalil just saying things, as it turns out.
00:40:13.000Meanwhile, I want to bring you some updates on our campaign for the pardon of Derek Chauvin.
00:40:17.000So yesterday I appeared on Stephen A. Smith's program, which was a lot of fun.
00:40:27.000I will say that this was a pretty toned down and conciliatory conversation.
00:40:31.000There are a few particularly interesting points in the conversation.
00:40:34.000One of them is when I asked Stephen A. Smith, what could change his mind in the Derek Chauvin case?
00:40:39.000What new evidence could change his mind?
00:40:41.000And he basically said the thing out loud that everybody who defends the Derek Chauvin conviction says, which is...
00:40:47.000Literally no information could ever change my mind ever under any circumstances because I know what I need to know and I really don't care about all the rest of the information.
00:40:55.000I mean, if you looked at, you said before that you didn't look at the autopsy report, you're not taking a lot of time looking at the evidence or the autopsy.
00:41:01.000What would it take for you to change your mind on the case?
00:41:04.000Or is there nothing that could change your mind on the case because you saw the tape, for example?
00:41:08.000It wouldn't take much, and this is why I said this, because normally I would look at the autopsy reports or whatever.
00:41:13.000I saw people bringing up his arrest record.
00:41:15.000I saw people bringing up fentanyl in the system.
00:41:19.000And all I could come to, Ben, fair or unfair, was that none of that matters if he wasn't on the ground with a knee on the back of his neck for nine-plus minutes.
00:41:41.000And not to say that you would embrace it with the level of sincerity that others may, because I know the level of skepticism that you look at when you see the news outlets.
00:41:53.000Listening to experts talk about how police officers are trained and pointed to the fact that Derek Chauvin had no business being in that position and putting George Floyd in that position, particularly once he was handcuffed and contained.
00:42:06.000To me, that, along with the ultimate outcome, is all the evidence I need.
00:42:15.000Okay, so there's one problem, as I pointed out to Stephen A. Smith there, which is that actually it was a Minneapolis Police Department trained procedure that Derek Chauvin was using that, again, the autopsy report shows no actual damage to George Floyd's trachea, to his neck muscles.
00:43:58.000But when it comes to making public policy...
00:44:01.000Then the only sort of gauge that you can have really is the data.
00:44:05.000Because anecdotal evidence, you can't make public policy for millions of people based on anecdotal evidence because you can't legislate people's feelings.
00:44:11.000I mean, this is sort of one of my things.
00:44:12.000When it comes to trying to craft law, for example, making law based on the personal feelings of people's quote-unquote lived experiences is a bad way to make law that is going to have to be generally applicable.
00:44:25.000Because I may have particular feelings about a particular criminal case based on my own personal experiences.
00:44:30.000But if we do that, then what you end up with is a really high level of tribalism in which if your racial identity prevails or my racial identity prevails, really bad things can come from that.
00:44:41.000The law is designed to treat people as equal individuals underneath it.
00:44:46.000And so the relevance of lived experience, that may play a part in us being able to understand one another as individuals if we're having conversation over dinner or if we're giving advice to each other about our kids.
00:44:56.000But when it comes to actually making public policy, it's a different thing.