America On Fire
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Summary
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) joins CNN's Jake Tapper to discuss the aftermath of the shooting of a police officer in Minneapolis, and the response to the riots that have erupted across the country since. Senator Cruz explains the difference between peaceful protest and violent rioting, and why the First Amendment protects the right to assemble.
Transcript
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The news cycle always makes it feel like the world is on fire.
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and we have seen riots break out across this country,
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all stemming from the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
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This is now spread out into a much larger movement,
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much larger action to the point that National Guardsmen,
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and troops have been called in to help maintain the peace.
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Luckily, we will break down the whole story and what it means.
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it seems like just a completely different political situation now.
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And you see it everywhere, not just on the news.
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I know you spoke on the Senate floor about this this week.
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Well, listen, this has been a tough week in our nation's history.
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What we've seen all across the country has been really, really hard.
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Well, I mean, let's start with some first principles.
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Every one of us has a right to protest, to speak.
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But what you don't have a right to do is commit acts of violence.
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What you don't have a right to do is shatter store windows.
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What you don't have a right to do is burn police cars.
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What you don't have a right to do is murder police officers.
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And so we're seeing all of these come crashing in.
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At this point, all of us have seen those eight minutes of video.
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And the criminal justice system needs to hold those who violated that,
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which in that instance was four Minneapolis police officers,
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one who put his knee on his neck and took Mr. Floyd's life grotesquely,
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and three others who stood around and didn't stop him.
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But then we saw the anger, the paroxysms that came out of that,
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We have the right under the First Amendment to speak out and to speak out for racial equality,
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The law should apply to everyone fairly, regardless of your skin color.
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And the protests calling for standing for racial equality were in the best tradition of America.
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Then we saw looters and thieves infiltrate these protests
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and begin wreaking mayhem, begin destroying communities,
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And I got to say, to every one of those violent criminals
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who slipped into the otherwise peaceful protests
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and began rioting and committing acts of terror,
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what they did was not only wrong and criminal, it was bigoted.
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and a laudable goal, a goal this nation was built on.
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The proposition that all of us are created equal,
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And I got to say, watching our country burn this past week,
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Senator, I'm actually struck by the simplicity of your observation
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because it's something that we actually haven't gotten
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It's wrong to commit violence against innocent people.
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It's good to voice your own expressions of anger at injustice.
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the brother of the Democratic governor of New York,
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Chris Cuomo came out and explicitly defended violent protest,
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which also known as riots, also known as domestic terrorism.
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I mean, he said, actually, show me where it says that protests have to be polite and peaceful.
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Could you show him where it says that, Senator?
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Well, there is this little thing called the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
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The First Amendment protects the right of the people to peaceably assemble.
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And by the way, some of the most effective protests in the world
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And I think you've actually honed in here on what lies at the heart of this.
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It's not just Chris Cuomo going out and saying protests should be violent.
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It's that Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota,
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held up a photo smiling with a book called The Antifa Handbook,
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I mean, they do in the sense that they behave like radical communists and anarchists.
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When you march in and violently assault people, you are being fa.
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And, you know, I think the president this week said that he wants to classify them
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they're using violence against civilians to achieve political ends.
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And what does it say about the state of our country that you've got elected officials
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Well, listen, for two years, I've been calling on the Trump administration to designate Antifa
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I introduced a resolution last year in the Senate calling on Antifa to be designated because they
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They're often rich white college kids who wear masks.
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And look, you know, they're sitting there with their thousand dollar iPhones saying capitalism
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And interestingly enough, they're not burning their dorm room to the ground.
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No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that, that, that, that would be too much.
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They're going into the inner city and they're burning to the ground.
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The communities that, that, that people have to live in it.
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And look, Keith Ellison's son is a city council member in Minneapolis.
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They're literally burning his city to the ground.
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And these democratic politicians, and I'll tell you, if anyone behave worse than that,
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So, so Hollywood celebrities are all engaged in this virtue signaling where they're giving
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And, and, and this is literally the, so, you know, I, I engaged with some of these celebrities
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Uh, you know, Justin Timberlake was like, Oh, give money to this fund to bail the rioters
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How about you give money to a fund to rebuild the African-American and Hispanic owned small
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businesses that have been burned to the ground by these violent criminals instead of bailing
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the criminal out of jail, right, help the innocent victims.
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But here's the part that's deemed, Oh, you can't say this.
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You can't say black lives matter, Hispanic lives matter, Asian lives matter, white lives
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This is, so I actually had this conversation with, with my daughters today where they were
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talking about some YouTuber that raised a bunch of money for BLM.
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Of course, my daughters already know the acronym BLM.
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I'm like, so tell me what does, what does BLM stand for?
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And, and, you know, my daughter said, well, you know, equality, equality is good.
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And I was like, yeah, that's, that's certainly true.
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But if you look at the radicals who are co-opting the message, black lives matter, what they're
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advocating is number one, an absolute assault on police.
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Because when this happens, if you look at what happened in Ferguson, you look at what
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There's something called the Ferguson effect, which is essentially that when cops feel like,
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okay, if, if I get in an interaction, maybe with a criminal and, and, and somehow it gets
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And the perfectly rational thing to do is, Hey, I'm going to step back.
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And what you see happen over and over again is the murder rates skyrocket.
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And you end up with, if you are committed to the proposition, black lives matter, demonizing
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the cops will end up with more black lives being lost more because by the way, the people
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By violent criminals, by gangs are people in low income neighborhoods and often they're
00:11:04.460
Well, this, this is, I think the key point here, because, you know, people see that phrase
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And they say, if you don't support this organization and the most radical leaders of this organization,
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And the fact is virtually, statistically, nobody in this country thinks black lives don't matter.
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Ever anybody with any political influence, it believes black lives matter.
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Anybody with any media influence believes black lives matter.
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Major corporations donating millions and millions of dollars to black lives matter.
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Anybody with an Instagram account or a Twitter account or a Facebook believes black lives
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Every, everybody agrees on this point, but some radicals, some people pushing things that
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are not so great, that are not so popular are co-opting that very basic message that everybody
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agrees with and using it to put, push radical leftist ideas that the vast, vast majority of
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And it's so cynical and it's so bullying and it's so, so intimidating that I think a lot
00:12:07.380
One of the agenda items of, of, of the radicals that are leading this movement, uh, is to use
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Uh, this past week that was tweeted by Hillary Clinton's former press secretary, defund the
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How good do you think it would be for African American communities if there were no police
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If just the drug dealers could run free, if the street gangs could run free, it's already
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How good would it be for, for your family or mine?
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How many Americans this week, as you watch the rioting thought about the right to keep and
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How many, how many, how many thought about what happens if that mob comes to my house?
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And, and that, that is an, an extreme agenda and it's not right.
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Here's the name the, the media doesn't want to talk about.
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David Dorn was a retired police officer in St. Louis, Missouri.
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David Dorn spent four decades serving honorably as a police officer.
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And yet the media doesn't want to talk about him.
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If you believe in black lives matters, David Dorn's life matters.
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I'll give you another name, David Underwood, who was another law enforcement officer who
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Las Vegas, you had another law who was also, David Underwood was African-American as well.
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We had two African-American police officers murdered by this rioting.
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And yet the woke virtue signalers in Hollywood, on CNN, on Twitter, those lives don't matter
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Look, we should protect everybody's life and we should have a passion.
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In this whole racial issue, in this whole issue of the protests and the riots.
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I mean, in the fact of the riots and the protests, probably the most outrageous cynicism
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is that just a week ago we were told, if you go outside to do anything, you're killing
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grandma, you're endangering people because of the coronavirus.
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If you go, God forbid, to protest any of the lockdown orders, you are a terrible, no good,
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And then this week we're told by the very same public health experts, by the very same
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politicians, everybody should go out by the hundred thousand to protest in this left-wing
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I mean, people look at that and I think our capacity for outrage just goes out the window.
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Well, look, one of the more ridiculous hypocrites on this has been Bill de Blasio in New York,
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who de Blasio was asked this last week, so if you can come and protest and get much, much
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closer than six feet apart, can we go to church?
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And de Blasio said, no, no, no, no, no, no, because there's a history of racial discrimination
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in America, but there's no history of religious discrimination.
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I mean, you want to talk about millennia of racial discrimination, yes, but of religious
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I mean, we're in a country that was literally founded by people fleeing religious persecution.
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You look at the pilgrims who arrived here, they arrived to come to a land where they could
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And by the way, you want to talk about people persecuted for faith.
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You look at the Jewish community in New York City, who de Blasio has singled out for persecution
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You know, Jews in World War II, six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust to say there's
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This is a political leftist, anti-American narrative that is nonsense.
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Amid all this chaos, 2.5 million jobs added in May.
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The economy is now, I mean, the stock market surged when we got this news.
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Is there a chance that we could see something like a V-shaped recovery?
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Is there a chance that we could come out of this thing pretty strong?
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We're seeing states all across the country reopening.
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Now, that doesn't mean ignore all of the efforts we're doing.
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Now, we've had 40 million people lose their jobs.
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It's the first time in a long time we haven't seen job numbers that were several million going down.
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So, instead of going down, they're going back up sharply.
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The 40 million jobs that went away were self-inflicted.
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Let's let them get back to work and get the economy moving again.
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And before we get to mailbag, because I do want to hit the mailbag, there is one more story on the subject of destruction that I've got to get back to.
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Obviously, destruction has been in the news a lot.
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But it's important, I think, to talk about your absolute destruction of Rod Rosenstein's testimony before the Senate when you were discussing the gross mishandling of things over the past several years at the DOJ.
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Could you just tell us a little bit about this?
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Because I think for those of us who have been gaslit for years and years on this subject of how the DOJ was going after Trump, I think it was just so refreshing to see you shed light on what was really happening.
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What we now know, as more and more information has gotten public, is that the Obama-Biden administration politicized the FBI, politicized the Department of Justice, politicized the intelligence community, and targeted them at the Trump campaign, targeted them at Donald Trump directly.
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They targeted them with wiretaps directed at Carter Page, a senior advisor to the Trump campaign.
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They targeted it with spies sent in wearing wires, confidential informants to the Trump campaign, their opposing campaign.
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And they went after, in particular, General Michael Flynn, a three-star general who'd spent his entire life fighting for this country.
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We now know that the decision to target them went all the way to the top.
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On January 5th, 2017, there was a meeting in the White House, in the Oval Office.
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And he reported to the president and to the vice president about their targeting of Michael Flynn, the incoming national security advisor.
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Sally Yates, who was the acting attorney general, said she didn't know anything about it.
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So she learned that the FBI was targeting the incoming national security advisor from Barack Obama because the FBI was briefing the president directly.
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And if you look at everything that has come out, the inspector general report at the Department of Justice showed that the FBI was totally politicized.
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It showed 17 material misstatements that were made to the FISA court.
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It also showed that a senior FBI lawyer fraudulently altered evidence.
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And so and here's what he did, because it's worth remembering.
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So they're trying to get a warrant to to to wiretap Carter Page.
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And Carter Page is talking to a bunch of Russians.
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And so, look, if you're talking to a bunch of Russians, that's ordinarily kind of suspicious.
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So so but even so, there's a little bit of suspicion there.
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So the FBI sent an email to the CIA said, hey, is this guy working for you?
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Because if you're working for the CIA on going after the Russians, then you probably ought to be talking to the Russians if you're working for the CIA.
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So CIA says in writing, Carter Page is working for the United States government when he's talking to the Russians.
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The FBI lawyer takes that email and alters it and literally changes it 180 degrees the opposite.
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He alters it and creates a fraudulent document.
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If you or I did that in any court in a traffic ticket.
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If you created a fraudulent document and submitted it, you would go to jail.
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And by the way, Rosenstein signed one of those applications.
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I laid out that history that I just walked through and I said, listen, you were coming into a deeply politicized, corrupted law enforcement environment.
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One, you were complicit in the weaponization of law enforcement against one political party.
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And what we walked through, I said, look, did you know about the Steele dossier that was the basis of this whole application?
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The principal witness behind it said, oh, it's not reliable.
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It was all just a bunch of guys talking to the bar.
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Did you know that there was a bunch of exculpatory information?
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Did you know that this lawyer had fraudulently created this document?
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Did you know that the guy was working for the CIA at the time?
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Did you know that the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, had paid for this oppo research pile of lies?
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He just said, well, the FBI told me that, so I just listened to them.
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And what it raised, now it's interesting, Rosenstein testified.
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He said if he knew what he knew now, he never would have signed it.
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That now means the next step is to go ask people like James Comey, go ask people like Andrew McCabe, the deputy at the FBI,
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because there were people lying and complicit, and the responsibility, I believe, goes all the way to the top.
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And I got to say in this hearing, one of the most interesting things, Michael,
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Senate Democrats so desperately wanted to change the topic.
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And they just didn't care about law enforcement being abused.
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They don't want anything that touches Joe Biden.
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So in their narrative, Obama could never do anything wrong.
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But I got to say, so I asked this week, yesterday, actually, at a Senate hearing, I said, look,
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what would you guys think if Donald Trump did exactly what Obama and Biden did?
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What would you think if Donald Trump today sent the FBI to wiretap the Joe Biden presidential campaign?
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What would you think today if Donald Trump sent in FBI spies wearing wires to the Joe Biden presidential campaign?
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What would you think today if Donald Trump directed the FBI to submit fraudulent evidence to a federal court to target the Biden campaign?
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And by the way, we also know that General Michael Flynn, that his identity was unmasked, was revealed by Joe Biden himself personally and directly Joe Biden did that.
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And I got to say also, so one of the things that became public in recent weeks, there's an email from Susan Rice.
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Now, Michael, you and I both know what that date is.
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That is the date Donald Trump was being sworn in.
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Usually your last day in the office, what are you doing?
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Your last day in the office, what do you want to do?
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It's one of the funniest CYA emails you've ever read.
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She says three times that President Obama has directed this investigation into Flynn.
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The only reason you send that is you're sitting there going, oh, crap, the new guys are going
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to come in and they're going to find out about all this.
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Let me write an email to say we're doing everything by the book.
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The only reason you write that email is indicative of a deeply guilty conscience.
00:26:02.600
I think I think we need to know who abused the political process.
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And those who broke the law need to be prosecuted.
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It's evidence of a guilty conscience and the cleverness to realize this isn't going to be
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looking very good when the new guys get into power.
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Before we go, I've just got to get to a few mailbag questions here.
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First one from Margo, why are you two still socially distancing?
00:26:35.200
John asks, what are the effects this will have on the 2020 election?
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I think it depends, number one, on what happens with coronavirus.
00:26:53.060
If the numbers suddenly start skyrocketing, that is really bad for America.
00:26:58.920
But that's also probably bad for Trump as well.
00:27:04.440
If we see massive job losses between now and election day, that's really bad for Trump.
00:27:12.200
If we see the sort of thing we just saw in these job numbers, the economy coming back, that's really good.
00:27:17.780
And this racial division and rioting, look, rioting, I think, scares people.
00:27:27.540
I think it also shows just how radical and extreme the Democrats are.
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If a Democratic presidency means the radicals who want to burn our cities to the ground or put in charge, that ain't good.
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So how all of this plays out, I look at this election and I think there's a huge delta.
00:27:59.260
What I hope we will see is I hope we will see the economy coming back, optimism coming back, hope and the promise of America.
00:28:09.440
And if that's the case, we could see a really good election.
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We could see the president reelected by a big margin.
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We could see the Republican majority in the Senate grow.
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That's what I hope will happen, that people will look at this craziness of Nancy Pelosi and the extreme radicalized left and say, we don't want any of that.
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And so if things go really badly, we could end up with a terrible election.
00:28:43.780
Daryl asks, what's your take on the use of military personnel to help quell the riots?
00:28:47.720
I know your Senate colleague, Tom Cotton, got the New York Times in a lot of trouble because he weighed in on this and some of the younger Times staffers were very upset by it.
00:28:58.540
Well, OK, so let me take two different issues there because they're both worth addressing.
00:29:03.880
The New York Times, you literally can't write satire about them anymore.
00:29:11.240
So Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed in the Times that said, send the troops in, advocated for sending in the military to bring peace to the cities.
00:29:20.240
And the New York Times began to have an epileptic fit.
00:29:40.640
You know, you remember the old archetype of the tough, grizzled reporter?
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Shane Smoking was going to speak truth to power, was going to uncover whatever's going on.
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You've now got these pansies who are reporters that are just like, mommy, scary words, scary words.
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Like, okay, if you disagree with Tom Cotton, all right, buckaroo, here's a crazy idea.
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And by the way, listen, I actually think Tom, I don't agree with everything Tom said.
00:30:17.820
I mean, you actually look at the substance of it.
00:30:20.280
How do you keep cities safe in terms of how it operates under the law?
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The first line of defense are our police officers.
00:30:28.180
It's why I'm so vigorous in saying don't undermine our cops.
00:30:33.360
We've seen a lot of Democratic politicians basically tying police officers' hands behind their back,
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And so the first line of defense are the police.
00:30:45.520
The second line of defense is the National Guard.
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And so if the police are overwhelmed, you can call up the National Guard.
00:30:55.120
Look, there is a long tradition of the military in a case of violent insurrection, in a case of rioting coming in.
00:31:05.620
And so I think there's some Republican politicians that are showing how tough they are by saying send in the Marines on day one.
00:31:13.980
Well, look, look, if we need to, yes, we need to do whatever is needed to keep people safe.
00:31:19.580
But but let's start with not handcuffing the police officers and let them actually protect our communities.
00:31:26.580
And the military should only be a last resort, I believe.
00:31:35.580
But, Senator, if that stogie invitation is real, I will call the airline right now.
00:31:39.760
I will book a ticket and I will see you in D.C.
00:31:41.860
Together, you and I are going to light some fires.