Rich Lowry joins me to discuss the latest polls in the Virginia primary, the latest in the Biden administration's immigration policies, and the latest on the Democratic primary in Virginia. Plus, Alan Dershowitz weighs in on whether Alec Baldwin should be charged with a crime for allegedly touching a woman at a movie theater.
00:04:28.900Merrick Garland has not backed down notably, even though the school board association withdrew the
00:04:32.860letter and apologized. Merrick Garland stands by his intention to investigate and potentially
00:04:38.120prosecute threats, threats, violence and threats of violence, violence and threats of violence,
00:04:43.000of which there have been basically none, none. I mean, if you look at the addendum, and I know you
00:04:47.960guys took a close look at it, so did we on that school board association letter. We went through it
00:04:51.900in great detail on Friday for people who want to hear it. But there are no threats or violence or
00:04:55.600violence that were brought to the DOJ's attention. The only thing they had was that one case in
00:05:00.380Virginia with Scott Smith, the dad upset that his daughter had been raped. He's the only one facing
00:05:04.800criminal prosecution, which he should not be. So we'll see. But clearly what we're talking about
00:05:09.820now is voter backlash. And just to put a point on it, the OK, parents backed McAuliffe by 10 points
00:05:18.960two weeks ago, according to the Fox News poll. So parents were behind Terry McAuliffe by 10 points
00:05:24.460two weeks ago when it came to education. Now they're going for Youngkin by 14, a 24 point swing.
00:05:33.000I mean, very clearly something big is happening in Virginia when it comes to education. And this is
00:05:38.660not a bright blue state. It's no longer red. But that's this is one of the reasons why I know you've
00:05:45.880been saying this would be huge. It would point to a viable path ahead for the Republican Party in swing
00:05:52.960states like Virginia if Youngkin manages to pull this off. Yeah. So what Youngkin has done, he's
00:05:58.760shown there's a there's a model where you can win the Trump base. And Youngkin, you know, he's he's a
00:06:05.300he's a smart guy. He ran a really serious business CEO of the Carlisle Group. So he's been deft about
00:06:10.840this. He's kind of played along with some of Trump stuff, said, you know, Trump Trump Trump is
00:06:16.560Trump's the reason he's running in some respects. So he's kept the Trump voters. At the same time,
00:06:22.880he's kept some distance from Trump himself. He hasn't had Trump in to campaign for him. He
00:06:27.940hasn't doesn't talk about God of his way to talk about Trump on the campaign trail. And as I said,
00:06:33.760he's defined himself kind of as a nice suburban police wearing suburban dad. So you can you need
00:06:39.620both in a state like Virginia. You're not going to win with if the Trump voters hate you. They don't
00:06:43.800hate Youngkin. They're supporting him. But you're not going to win if you're a 2020 obsessive
00:06:48.720MAGA hat wearing true blue Trumpist because you're not going to win the suburbs. And he's not
00:06:55.180that. So he's made huge gains in the suburbs. And you don't need to win Loudoun County. Loudoun
00:07:00.200County, astonishingly enough, is ground zero for this education fight. Biden won Loudoun County by
00:07:05.00062 with 62 percent of the vote. This is an outer suburb. This isn't like an inner suburb that's been
00:07:10.860a blue forever. So he is talking about winning Loudoun County, which would speak to kind of landslide for
00:07:18.160him, I think. But if you just take the edge off Loudoun County and other places, that should be
00:07:22.900enough to get him over the top. Now, deep red states, this is not what you're going to do,
00:07:27.640right? You're never going to get through a primary unless you're you're a real Trump fan.
00:07:31.380But in swing states, it shows that this is possible. And for me, it's just it's an obvious
00:07:36.700common sense path just that just requires a little deafness and a little acuity as a campaigner.
00:07:43.620Youngkin's had that. Mm hmm. So what's been really interesting because of the dynamic you're
00:07:48.020just outlining is that, yeah, Youngkin has not been mentioning Trump. Trump now is going to have
00:07:52.200a tele. I really want to say tele-tubby. It's not right. He wants to have a tele-rally,
00:07:58.100tele-town hall for Youngkin. And Youngkin's not going to participate. Again, smart political moves,
00:08:04.140irrespective of his feelings about Trump one way or the other. We don't really care. He's just
00:08:07.860politically trying to keep that arm between the two of them. But but McAuliffe, I mean,
00:08:12.920so somebody put together a mashup of McAuliffe talking about, well, it seems like he's talking
00:08:20.720about Trump, but he's trying to attack Youngkin. Listen to this.
00:08:24.880Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump.
00:08:43.000Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump. He keeps invoking
00:08:48.080Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Trump, Donald Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump.
00:08:56.580Have you made this race too much about Trump?
00:09:07.480So and I would almost date you can almost hear in McCall's voice when he knows he's losing that kind of horser version of the Donald Trump.
00:09:40.580And this thing from over the weekend where all of a sudden you're saying, no, this race isn't about Trump.
00:09:44.520I don't think I've taught that much about Trump.
00:09:46.160And he's kicking away what has been his main line of attack against Youngkin for months, clearly because they know it's not working.
00:09:54.600And they're just desperate to have a guy on the ballot who's just not.
00:09:58.500And, you know, maybe he will be in 2024, but Trump's not on the ballot in Virginia.
00:10:02.620He's not going to be on the ballot anywhere in 2022 either.
00:10:04.900Well, and Youngkin's, you know, whole approach to this, just sort of like maybe I'm a little avuncular, maybe I'm a little boring, I'm a little milquetoast, is working, which is why I know you wrote fear the fleece.
00:10:16.580You do need to fear the fleece, his little fleece sweater vest that he's been wearing that, you know, Obama came out after and McCullough came in, like, you know, to try to paint him as some sort of crazy extremist white supremacist in a fleece vest.
00:10:33.420And it's not it's not working, but they do need to fear the fleece a little because it's sort of that softer, gentler, more more Commonwealth of Virginia, like gentlemanly approach that's working.
00:10:46.540Yeah. And it's it's not to your point is kind of a Commonwealth of Virginia sort of style.
00:10:52.760This is the model that give or take is always work for Republicans in state level races.
00:10:56.660Going back to George Allen, what is, you know, basically a red state, but George Allen, Bob McDonald, Jim Gilmore, they all made themselves acceptable to the center and then ran on kind of practical cost of living type issues.
00:11:10.760And Youngkin has done that with a greater emphasis on education, as we talked about.
00:11:14.820And what he's managed to do is, one, avoiding seeming like Donald Trump and two, avoiding seeming like Mitt Romney, because this would be the other line of attack on him.
00:11:23.640He's a vulture capitalist. He's a just a soulless business guy.
00:11:27.860And he has a profile that, you know, if you just read the bio, is very similar to Mitt Romney, but he's made himself softer.
00:11:34.900He's defined himself not as, you know, a jobs creator and a businessman, an entrepreneur, but instead as a suburban dad.
00:11:41.140And that's just been just right for this race, just right for the state.
00:11:45.020Especially because it's really parents rights that are now going to join this.
00:11:47.840And I know it's so crazy, Rich, to be talking about a race this tight where education seems to be what's going to turn it for the Republican, for the Republican.
00:11:56.640I mean, I would say as a parent who's been very outspoken on the lunacy being unfolded in our schools from the mask and vaccine mandates to the critical race theory to the trans stuff.
00:12:06.340I'm so delighted to see parents standing up and actually having an impact.
00:12:11.440You know, it's not so much about Youngkin for me.
00:12:13.060It's that parents in a purple state have had enough and are trying night and day in the context of this race to draw a line on how far they will let crazy far left agendas permeate their schools.
00:12:27.600Yeah. And with Youngkin, he's talked about it from the beginning, and it hasn't just been critical race theory.
00:12:33.440He's obviously hit that hard, justifiably so.
00:12:35.760But it's been excellence and standards.
00:12:38.580There's a school down there called Thomas Jefferson High School, which has been a big focus because there's been an effort to undermine the merit-based admissions there because it supposedly has the wrong, quote-unquote, composition of the student body because it's heavily Asian-American.
00:12:53.480He's hit that from the beginning. He's hit school safety. He's hit this kind of explicit content that parents are worried about and obviously hit CRT.
00:13:01.800But if you talk to the Youngkin people, what they will say is it used to be all this was kind of too disparate, you know, and you have a bunch of people in the room, and only some of them would be into the academic standards, and some of them would be into the safety, and some of them would be into the CRT.
00:13:13.440But McAuliffe really helped them tie a bow around it and the legitimacy, the question of the legitimacy of parent involvement, parent protest.
00:13:24.000And when we say that, they say everyone in the room applauds, whereas, you know, maybe only a quarter of the room is into the, you know, defending Thomas Jefferson University and high school and the standards, but they all support parental involvement.
00:13:36.600And just getting on the wrong side of parents, that's a cardinal rule of American politics.
00:13:41.120Whatever the issue is, don't do it. And Terry McAuliffe has.
00:13:45.360Yeah, and they're doing it at the state level and at the federal level, as we discussed.
00:13:49.440So, meantime, the Lincoln Project guys, always on admission to double down on their just terrible behavior from their previous attack ads or complaints or whatever it is.
00:14:02.200What is this group still out there for? I mean, I don't understand how the Lincoln Project even still has a platform with its, you know, support of this pedophile who they covered up for and this attack of a woman who tried to go public with them and Steve Schmidt admitting what he did with this woman.
00:14:16.240I mean, like the number of attacks on this pedophile supporting organization should have really rendered them irrelevant long ago.
00:14:22.880And yet Democrats seem to love so much all their attacks on Trump and any Trump supporter and Ivanka Trump still and Jared.
00:14:30.100It's like, OK, move on. They can't. And so I was surprised.
00:14:34.580And Stuart Stevens is part of the Lincoln Project. And I used to say I used to have him on the Cali file all the time before he went like crazy.
00:14:41.020I mean, he's just gone so hard into Trump derangement syndrome.
00:14:44.540You can't listen to the guy anymore, like all those guys at the Lincoln Project.
00:14:47.200And they staged this. I don't know. It was like a fake rally.
00:14:54.120It was like a fake little rally trying to imitate the tiki torches and the white supremacists that happened in Virginia in 2017.
00:15:02.940And they now they're like, oh, it was all, you know, it was sort of intentionally fake and we knew sort of we'd be outed.
00:15:12.240They wanted this to look like an actual Youngkin rally of white supremacists.
00:15:17.460And only when they got caught did Stuart Stevens come out and say, OK, yeah, it was us.
00:15:22.580And, you know, we own it and we think it's great.
00:15:24.580But they tried to pull a fast one on Virginia voters.
00:15:28.660Yes. First of all, the purpose of the Lincoln Project and the purpose of it was you had a bunch of Republicans that hated Trump and mainstream media loved it.
00:15:35.200I mean, they're they're on Morning Joe all the time.
00:15:38.380They're on CNN all the time, kind of pumping up what they were doing.
00:15:40.940And so I sort of thought after the 2020 presidential election, they'd kind of go away.
00:16:12.120And if it was just a joke, they punked their own side because you had Democratic operatives, including McCall's staff and left-laying journalists promoting this as a real thing.
00:16:24.600You know, Joe Lockhart, former Clinton press secretary.
00:16:31.520And a lot of these tweets were deleted without explanation.
00:16:34.480But it was a thing among people who are either too cynical to, you know, take five seconds to try to understand what was going on there or too credulous.
00:17:00.620It's it's so, yeah, the several members of the McAuliffe team had retweeted the original item as though or real.
00:17:06.860This is from the Wall Street Journal editorial campaign communication staffer Jen Goodman calling the Tiki Torch photo disgusting and disqualifying.
00:17:14.020McAuliffe spokesperson Christina Fralich said this is who Glenn Youngkin supporters are.
01:11:38.120I don't know what that really means in the context of a movie like this.
01:11:41.240It's hard to pinpoint criminal responsibility on him.
01:11:45.220The person handing him the gun, perhaps.
01:11:47.300The person who is the armorer, perhaps.
01:11:49.760You can't have a conspiracy here because nobody agreed to do anything that would have caused death.
01:11:56.320But I think this should be a homicide investigation and the effort should be to see whether there's proof beyond a reasonable doubt that any individual engaged in manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, improper use of a gun.
01:12:09.620But this is a homicide scene, not an accident scene.
01:12:13.100And just to, you know, you're pointing out to get conspiratorial, but I guess we don't really know.
01:12:17.360I mean, who knows whether somebody intentionally manipulated that gun, that the armorer wasn't union.
01:12:23.860Yeah, I'm not impugning the union, but I'm just saying that would not be a voluntary manslaughter.
01:13:02.440You could get up to 18 months of prison slash probation.
01:13:06.360So I do wonder, because you've got the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed.
01:13:11.280She would have been responsible for the gun initially.
01:13:13.060She but then it was the assistant director, David Halls, who was apparently overseeing a series of onset mishaps with that gun and admits he did not check the the you're supposed to check the barrel and or the I actually don't know the word.
01:13:27.360But you're supposed to check the bullets and look at each one of the six bullets.
01:13:36.120I mean, do you think in a normal case that didn't involve celebrities, they would even be considering charging somebody here?
01:13:42.820Oh, I think you have to consider charging.
01:13:45.200The circumstances are such that you have to presume that there was a crime here in New Mexico.
01:13:52.540Yes, negligence is enough, but it has to be a higher level of negligence than the ordinary civil negligence.
01:13:57.860There's also another statute, a gun negligence statute, which creates a minor misdemeanor.
01:14:04.980And that also requires a degree of negligence higher than a simple tort negligence.
01:14:11.000So if you ask me in the end, do I think they're going to be criminal charges?
01:14:14.140I think it's going to be very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any particular person engaged in criminal negligence.
01:14:21.140But the investigation ought to be a homicide investigation.
01:14:24.680Mm hmm. And it's it's tricky because you're going to have everybody for the listening audience.
01:14:29.340I'm pointing to my left and my right, but you're going to have everybody pointing at each other.
01:14:32.200It was him. It was her. It was, you know, it was his fault, including folks are going to point at Alec Baldwin in two different roles.
01:14:38.320Number one, he was this is according to Zack Knight, a pyrotechnic and special effects engineer who's a member of Local 44.
01:14:45.540He said this is to the Daily Mail. He said Baldwin ignored the golden rule of gun safety by pointing the prop at someone.
01:14:51.560The gun never should have been loaded, obviously, with live ammunition.
01:14:54.960But he says every single person on a movie set has a right to inspect the weapon before it's fired.
01:15:00.860And there's no reason to ever put a person in front of a weapon that's firing.
01:15:05.400Anytime you see a movie where the barrel is pointed down the camera lens, there should not be an operator behind it.
01:15:09.280And so apparently what they normally do is they train actors. You never just in cases, God forbid, something like this were to happen.
01:15:16.760You know, you just never know. You just never point your gun at a real person on set.
01:15:23.440And so Alec Baldwin is not off the hook legally yet. And this may explain his demeanor.
01:15:28.640Of course, the shock of having taken a woman's life, even inadvertently, has got to be overwhelming.
01:15:34.080Here he was this weekend in Manchester, Vermont, with his wife, Hilaria, dealing with the paparazzi who got him to make some comments. Listen.
01:15:42.380I've been ordered by the sheriff's department in Santa Fe. I can't answer any questions about the investigation. I can't.
01:15:49.220It's an active investigation in terms of a woman dying. She was my friend. She was my friend.
01:15:55.480The day I arrived in Santa Fe to start shooting, I took her to dinner with Joel, the director.
01:16:01.800We were a very, very, excuse me. We were a very, very, you know, well-oiled crew shooting a film together.
01:16:09.960And then this horrible event happened. What are the questions that you have other than that?
01:16:13.480You met with the, I forget her name at the moment, but you met with the family?
01:16:35.780Do me a favor. I'm going to answer the question.
01:16:39.280Well, I appreciate that he was probably very upset.
01:16:41.240The guy is overwhelmed with me. This is something that, you know, there are incidental accidents on film sets from time to time, but nothing like this.
01:16:51.700This is a one in a trillion episode. It's a one in a trillion film.
01:16:56.060And so he is in shock. He has a nine-year-old son.
01:17:00.240You know, we are, you know, in constant contact with him.
01:17:02.840Would you ever work on another film set that involves firearms of that nature?
01:17:06.900I couldn't answer that question. I really don't have any, I have no sense of it at all.
01:17:10.060I do know that an ongoing effort to limit the use of firearms on film sets is something I'm extremely interested in.
01:17:17.340Do you think production will start up again on that?
01:21:07.680Generally, when you're Alec Baldwin, you get your name on there as a producer, even though you might not actually be the one who has effective control.
01:21:14.340But I have heard reports that he did have control on this set and that people were very wary of upsetting him and so on.
01:21:19.080And so I felt like that very, very well oiled crew was in his with his producer hat on, not wanting to get sued as the man, one of the men or women ultimately responsible for all the mistakes on the set.
01:21:31.540He can't really win this by pointing at the assistant director because he's got a higher role.
01:21:36.160He's not going to win this, first of all, civilly, because even if it was the assistant director of this in tort law responding at the superior, you're responsible for the people that you hired.
01:21:47.080And so although his role as a producer was probably nominal, civil liability, if I were his lawyers, I'd be moving to settle immediately with payments of extraordinary amounts of money.
01:22:00.120There's no way he can win a civil case.
01:22:02.920But I think none of that necessarily leads to criminal liability.
01:22:07.920So I think there will be a distinction.
01:22:09.880But I hope that the fact that there might not be criminal liability will not affect the changes in the future.
01:25:46.260If there's no further corroboration, that's the way it will go to a jury.
01:25:51.460And but no, the thumb of should not be put on the scale based on Letitia James.
01:25:58.340What she did was an absolute disgrace.
01:26:01.480Remain in the case and file a report, completely one-sided report, intending to use the report to run for governor.
01:26:10.540That's just not the way the legal system should operate.
01:26:13.240Well, I admitted my bias on this because one of my closest friends, Janice Dean, really wanted Cuomo gone and did a great job of calling attention to the nursing home scandal, which is really what should have done it.
01:26:23.380But I also say I have to say, I believe Brittany Camiso.