The Great America Show - February 17, 2025


Monday Headlines： February 17, 2025

Topics
federal immigration judges firing
Hosted by
John Fawcett Lou Dobbs
Mentioned
Donald Trump Zelensky Rick Grinnell Joe Biden Sam Harris Kennedy Center Matthew Biggs Scott Besson Elon Musk Godspeed
The Great America Sunday Show： February 16, 2025 ‘Domestic Terrorists' fight back against Marxist School Boards

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

162.32

Word count

927

Sentence count

56

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the Great America Show, John Fawcett talks about President Trump's attempt to get Ukraine to pay back the $350 billion the U.S. has loaned them in the past, President Trump firing 20 immigration judges, and more!

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello everybody, I'm John Fawcett with this Great America Show midday update for Monday, February 17th.
00:00:06.340 Happy President's Day everybody and happy President's Day to our great 45 and 47 President Donald J. Trump, our savior at this point in time.
00:00:17.960 President Trump yesterday heading out to the Daytona 500 in Daytona Beach, Florida, the first NASCAR race of the season.
00:00:25.160 President Trump talking to the media saying he's working on a plan for Ukraine to pay back the $350 billion that the U.S. has sent to them.
00:00:35.340 President Trump has previously floated the idea of taking rare earth minerals from Ukraine or figuring out a way.
00:00:41.760 Zelensky doesn't seem to be on board with it. Now, I'm not entirely sure why.
00:00:46.000 Zelensky didn't think he was getting that money for free, did he?
00:00:48.860 Did Joe Biden make some sort of deal with him before he left the White House or when he came into the White House?
00:00:54.320 Scott Besson, who's the Secretary of the Treasury, is actually over in Ukraine right now on an overseas trip trying to put together some documents to figure out how he's going to make Ukraine pay back that money.
00:01:07.740 Zelensky of Ukraine, not very happy.
00:01:10.320 I have to assume some of that money, that $350 billion, found its way into Zelensky's pocket one way or another.
00:01:18.500 And the Doge Committee, led by Elon Musk, announced over the weekend they've recovered almost $2 billion, folks.
00:01:25.240 Folks, that's $2 billion with a B. Not million, but billion.
00:01:30.480 These funds originally allocated to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, also known as HUD, under the Biden regime for financial services and administration.
00:01:38.840 And they were identified as, quote, unnecessarily due to procedural inefficiencies.
00:01:42.500 I'm not entirely sure what that means, but what I do understand is $2 billion of HUD money was misplaced and misappropriated and somehow found just laying around.
00:01:55.200 $2 billion is a lot of money, folks.
00:01:57.920 It can bail out some cities across America, maybe help some homeless veterans across the country, maybe help solve a drug epidemic.
00:02:06.860 Or it could have went to Housing and Urban Development, where it was meant to go.
00:02:12.360 Something tells me, Joe Biden had his hands all over that.
00:02:16.800 Sounds just like him.
00:02:18.180 President Trump also over the weekend, seems like this man doesn't rest.
00:02:21.140 It's President's weekend.
00:02:22.660 He's down at Mar-a-Lago working.
00:02:24.260 President Trump firing 20 immigration judges, without explanation, of course.
00:02:28.580 This is according to a union official, an amid sweeping move to shrink the size of federal government.
00:02:34.520 On Friday, 13 judges who had yet to be sworn in, five assistant chief immigration judges, were dismissed without notice, says Matthew Biggs, the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents federal workers.
00:02:49.100 Two other judges were fired under similar circumstances in the last week.
00:02:53.120 It's unclear they would be replaced by the U.S. Justice Department or the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the courts and oversees roughly 700 judges.
00:03:01.620 They, of course, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
00:03:06.240 Immigration courts, of course, are backlogged with more than 3.7 million cases, according to latest research by Syracuse's university.
00:03:14.460 And it takes years to decide an asylum case.
00:03:17.240 There's support across the political spectrum from more judges and support staff, though the first Trump administration also pressured some judges to decide cases more quickly.
00:03:25.160 Folks, it shouldn't take a year to decide if someone is here on a legitimate asylum claim.
00:03:31.740 If it takes longer than 10 or 15 minutes, there's probably some sort of foul play going on with regard to the case.
00:03:41.100 And Rick Grinnell, you guys all know him too well, a figure in this, this is Trump administration, a pivotal figure in the last one.
00:03:49.920 This administration, hostage negotiation, and he's also working over in the Kennedy Center, soon to be renamed Kennedy Center.
00:03:58.160 He's reportedly considering a run for governor of California, but only under one circumstance.
00:04:05.020 That's if Kamala Harris decides to run. 0.99
00:04:08.660 Interesting.
00:04:10.580 As I said, Rick Grinnell currently now is the envoy for special missions for President Trump, saying that he will not turn down the role to run if Kamala decides that she wants to go ahead and pursue that as her next career.
00:04:27.800 Godspeed to Rick Grinnell.
00:04:29.980 Kamala Harris is a total mess, even after losing that decisive 2024 election.
00:04:38.020 Doesn't seem like she's getting any better.
00:04:40.440 She's sort of spiraling out of control in some of her latest media appearances and some of her latest events she's been going to.
00:04:49.880 It looks like the drinking problem is only, only getting worse, folks.
00:04:53.880 Folks, please be sure to join us each and every day, every weekday, and every weekend, and each and every day for the Great America Show midday updates, along with the Great America Show, where we bring you great guests, A-level guests, with their brilliant insight, along with some of our political commentary.
00:05:12.620 And then each and every day for the midday updates, where we bring you leading headlines and the biggest stories happening right now in this country that we feel you guys need to know about without having to turn into that mainstream media.
00:05:25.960 Quick five, ten-minute segments where we give you all the news that you need to know for the day that's happening right then and there, broken down into five, ten-minute segments.
00:05:35.520 I'm John Fossett with this midday update, folks.
00:05:38.720 Happy President's Day once again, and we'll see you later for the Great America Show.