Ted Cruz and Ben Ferguson discuss the latest scandal surrounding Joe Biden and the intelligence community, and how they got him through the debate. Also, terrorists are coming across the southern border and we are catching them. And finally, Donald Trump has closed door meetings with House Republicans and the GOP in the Senate.
00:05:20.160And, by the way, the people who have signed this letter, they're not coming back and admitting, okay, I was completely full of crap, and I lied to the American people right before an election, and it influenced the election profoundly.
00:06:18.320I mean, back in the good old days when he was meeting with Trump and you guys, he was wearing a suit when he came to ask for money.
00:06:23.420Yeah, ever since the war started, he's in the fatigues every day, and so he was in kind of an olive green sweatshirt.
00:06:31.900So, you meet with him, and he's got a bunch more money, a couple hundred million dollars more, 200 and something, I think, is what Biden said during this trip that he was going to give to them again.
00:06:46.440What was it like this time, and what did he have to say?
00:06:49.700So, well, there was a group of senators that went to D-Day for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, went to Normandy, and there were 19 senators.
00:06:58.240It was a big, big trip, and there were, I think, 53 House members, so it was a significant percentage of the United States Congress.
00:07:06.320And so Zelensky sat down, had a meeting with all the senators, and then after that, he had a meeting with the House members, so both sides sat down and met with him.
00:07:14.100We met in the historic Talleyrand Hotel, which is this beautiful hotel in Paris that actually the U.S. government now owns.
00:07:22.240It's no longer a hotel, and it is where the Marshall Plan was signed.
00:07:26.220And so there's a big room that has gold, you know, gold on the ceiling.
00:07:31.360It's very elaborate, and it's a historic meeting space.
00:07:37.200So that's where we met, and it was a good discussion.
00:07:40.580Look, Zelensky was there with several of his aides, and he was describing what is happening, and he was, you know, he is a wartime leader.
00:07:48.840And listen, there are some who are big critics of Zelensky.
00:07:56.820I think he is trying to defend his nation from an invasion, and an invasion from Russia, and Vladimir Putin is a bad guy.
00:08:04.520And so Zelensky is doing what you would hope any leader when his country is at war is doing, which is trying to defend his country and trying to get help wherever he can get it.
00:08:13.080And so he's coming in, and he's asking for American help, and he's laying out his goals in the war.
00:08:20.640And so he laid them out, and then each of us had the opportunity to ask questions.
00:08:26.860My principal question, I asked him, I said, how would you define victory?
00:08:34.340What does victory mean, and what is the path to getting there?
00:08:44.400The difficulty, and I've got to say, that question that I asked, he didn't really answer me on how he would define victory.
00:08:51.120He has, in other contexts, defined victory as Ukraine winning back essentially every square inch of territory that Russia has taken.
00:08:59.980I understand why Zelensky would say that's victory.
00:09:04.300If you were Zelensky, you'd probably say the same thing.
00:09:08.180But that doesn't mean it is in the United States' interest to demand every square inch of territory be taken back.
00:09:15.960The reason we have an interest in this war is that we want, we do not want our enemy Russia to win and get stronger.
00:09:23.140And instead, we want Russia to be weaker so that they're less able to pose a threat to America.
00:09:32.560There are also, by the way, very, very significant resources, in particular rare earth minerals in Ukraine, that are critical for the economy going forward.
00:09:44.180One of the reasons Russia's invading Ukraine is to get a stranglehold on those rare earth minerals.
00:09:51.980Those, those, that would not be good for America.
00:09:56.600And, and, and so, but, but, you know, what was really striking then is in the meeting with Zelensky and we also had a classified meeting with, with senior leaders of the Pentagon talking about details of what exactly is happening in the war, where the battles are, where the victories are, where the losses are.
00:10:14.780And, and, and, and it was, it was a very interesting and worthwhile briefing.
00:10:19.240But, but the question of what does victory mean?
00:10:25.200This administration is not asking that question.
00:10:28.440No Democrat in that room is asking that question.
00:10:33.020And I got to say it really, you know, when it struck me, it is, we went out to lunch two days ago at a little Paris cafe in between meetings.
00:10:41.740And we're sitting there at lunch talking and, and I was, most of the, the, the senators there at the lunch table were Democrats and they were all talking about Vietnam.
00:10:52.420And it struck me looking around the table that they're all baby boomers.
00:11:16.400Vietnam did not impact my awareness of the world.
00:11:19.980It was done by the time I was learning about the world.
00:11:25.400And so I got to say a lot of the boomers, particularly the Democrat boomers, they took the wrong lesson from Vietnam.
00:11:35.080And, and, and, and I think there are lots of lessons to take from Vietnam.
00:11:38.540But one of the central ones is that you should have a clear, defined objective that you know what it is that is directly related to your national security that is achievable.
00:11:48.140You should have a plan to achieve it, and then you should get the hell out.
00:11:51.820And, and Vietnam, we just let it go on and on and on and be a quagmire and just kept pouring money and American soldiers and lives into it without a clear objective that we were willing to use overwhelming force to accomplish.
00:15:19.020So the first outlet to break this story was the New York Post.
00:15:22.920And the New York Post announced that these people had been arrested,
00:15:27.680and they were arrested in a coordinated sting operation that occurred in three cities, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia.
00:15:37.200Two ICE sources confirmed to the Post that they arrested six people from Tajikistan over the last week after the FBI contacted the agency to warn them.
00:15:46.920Two others who were part of the same group were also arrested after being under surveillance for several months by the multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task Force.
00:15:56.440Part of the investigation featured a wiretap, which revealed one of the now-arrested individuals was talking about bombs.
00:16:12.500I'm afraid something like that might happen again or worse, one of the sources told the Post.
00:16:17.500The subject, the target who was the subject of the wiretap, was previously released by federal authorities at the southern border with a court date next year.
00:16:30.120But it has since emerged that he has potential ties to ISIS.
00:16:33.360And by the way, it is worth noting, who is ISIS-K?
00:16:37.880So ISIS-K is a splinter group, but it is the group that carried out the terror attack that we just saw, the terror attack that happened in the concert hall in Moscow.
00:16:53.580And that was carried out by terrorists from Tajikistan.
00:16:57.980So the same country these folks are from, the same terror group, ISIS-K.
00:18:06.640The case illustrates the challenges U.S. officials face in identifying migrants who pose national security threats because we're being overrun at the border.
00:18:16.020Remember, NBC News at the time, and we played this, and I just think it's important to remind them.
00:18:20.700It's not just these eight ISIS-K, but go back just to April 11th.
00:18:27.080This is happening over and over and again.
00:18:29.220Yeah, listen to what they said back in April.
00:18:31.040An alarming development in the border crisis.
00:18:33.440Among the record number of migrants crossing the southern border was a member of an Afghan terror organization who was released into the U.S. by border agents, according to U.S. officials.
00:18:43.06048-year-old Mohammed Harwin illegally crossed into California in March of last year.
00:18:48.600His name is on a U.S. terror watch list, identifying him as a member of HIG, a terror group that's killed Americans in Afghanistan.
00:18:56.820I mean, Senator, this is another story that is completely unrelated.
00:19:01.720A month before that, we found out that another man on a terrorist watch list was released, and they had to go grab him up in upstate, I think it was upstate New York.
00:19:10.460So you have these headlines that keep happening.
00:19:15.480We are catching some of these people, and we're releasing them because we're overrun.
00:19:21.660So, and it's worth remembering that the FBI director, Chris Wray, has repeatedly testified before Congress about possible ISIS terror plots being carried out on U.S. soil.
00:19:33.320And the group's potential for using the southern border to get into this country illegally.
00:19:39.180And Chris Wray has warned about a possible, quote, coordinated attack that could take place on the United States from ISIS-K.
00:19:49.860And I want to point out also, you know, we had a couple of months ago, we had the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, and it came over to the Senate.
00:19:56.400And I and many others on the Republican side wanted to lay out the facts that this administration, that Mayorkas' lawless refusal to follow federal immigration law and his releasing of millions and millions and millions, over 11 million illegal immigrants that have come into this country under Joe Biden,
00:20:15.300that a major threat from that are the terrorists that they keep releasing over and over and over again.
00:20:21.040And it's worth noting, Ben, every single Democrat voted not to hear the case, to throw it out, to dismiss it at the outset.
00:20:28.980They didn't want to hear the evidence of terrorists being released in the country.
00:20:34.140They didn't want to allow the House managers to present that evidence.
00:20:37.000They didn't want the American people to hear that evidence.
00:20:41.540It is not complicated that if you continue to invite terrorists from all over the world, whether Hamas or Hezbollah or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or ISIS-K or anybody else,
00:20:52.920if you invite terrorists from all over the world come into this country, if when you catch them, you release them and allow them to continue planning terror attacks,
00:21:02.700it is only a matter of time before, tragically, Americans are going to die.
00:21:07.860March the 11th, Christopher Wray, in his own words, before Congress.
00:21:12.940From an FBI perspective, we are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border.
00:21:19.620There is a particular network that has, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we're very concerned about,
00:21:30.880and that we've been spending an enormous amount of effort with our partners investigating.
00:21:35.160That's at least his second, if not third, warning to Congress.
00:21:39.620I think in the last six to seven months, Senator, does this give you guys leverage to now say,
00:21:45.840we've got these eight ISIS-K, ISIS-K is the same group that had the spinoff that had the attack in Russia,
00:21:51.920the FBI director has now warned us a couple of times, why are you guys not changing the policy at the southern border,
00:21:57.840Mr. President, and clearly, you should know now from all of these warnings that this policy is a disaster,
00:22:04.400and there are multiple terrorists that are already in this country that we don't know where they are.
00:22:08.600So frankly, the only leverage we have is what I'm doing right now, is shining a light and informing the American people.
00:22:16.340Because not a single Democrat in the United States Congress cares.
00:22:19.460Look, the Mayorkas impeachment, every single Democrat, all 51 of them, they voted,
00:22:26.620no, we don't want to hear the evidence, we don't care.
00:22:29.040I sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:22:31.380In three and a half years of Biden's presidency, we have had zero hearings on the risk of terrorism from illegal immigrants coming into this country.
00:22:40.440Joe Biden and the Democrats, they don't want to hear it, which means as long as Chuck Schumer is the majority leader
00:22:48.400and the Democrats have control over the Senate, the Senate is not going to do anything.
00:24:24.720And the initial reports that came out were saying it was a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of excitement from the Republican leaders that were there.
00:26:26.500Number one, he emphasized the border, that we've got to secure the border, that it is insane that we have open borders, that it's an invitation to terrorists.
00:26:36.240If and when Trump wins, we will secure the border in the first month or two of the next Trump administration.
00:26:42.720And I can say that because we know how to do it.
00:26:45.340We did it before and we'll do it again.
00:26:48.280He also talked a lot about inflation and energy in particular.
00:26:52.860And he pointed out quite rightly that energy is foundational to inflation.
00:26:56.440One of the reasons that prices have gone up on just about everything is that energy prices have skyrocketed because the Biden administration has been waging war on American energy.
00:28:01.360There were some divisiveness on the House and Senate side.
00:28:05.000What you seem to be describing this time is if Donald Trump is elected and Republicans have control of the House and Senate, it's game on from January 2nd.
00:28:15.560There's not going to be, you know, let's get to know each other time and have some meetings and maybe come over to the White House.
00:28:20.700Like, there's an agenda and it's ready to go for the American people.
00:28:25.860And let me put it in broader context, which is yesterday, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, came and had lunch with all the Republican senators.
00:28:33.780And by the way, that almost never happens.
00:28:37.000When Paul Ryan was Speaker, he didn't do that.
00:28:39.160When John Boehner was Speaker, he didn't do that.
00:28:41.240When Kevin McCarthy was Speaker, he didn't do that.
00:28:43.380Mike Johnson has done that this multiple times.
00:28:46.060This is either the third or fourth time he's come and had lunch with all the Senate Republicans.
00:28:53.520He said, you know, it's amazing that the media treats it as a news story, that the House and Senate are talking to each other.
00:29:00.520And the reason he came over and talked to us is he said he's focused on his end very much on developing the agenda and the plans to hit the ground running if and when we win in November.
00:29:14.420If we come in to January of next year with a Republican president, Republican Senate, Republican House, we got an enormous amount to accomplish.
00:29:23.440And the Speaker, to his credit, is very focused on the first hundred days.
00:30:09.540In this instance, I'm very glad the Speaker is trying to think proactively.
00:30:14.080And I described something that I did back in the summer of 2018.
00:30:20.480So summer of 2018, we did a lunch with all the Senate Republicans.
00:30:27.440And I prepared a PowerPoint that was about 50 pages long.
00:30:30.820And I spoke to my colleagues probably the better part of an hour.
00:30:34.960And the title of the PowerPoint was Carpe Diem.
00:30:39.700And what I did in the PowerPoint is I looked in the past in previous instances when one party controlled the White House, the House and the Senate.
00:30:51.040When the Democrats do it, they fundamentally transform the country.
00:30:56.840So in the last century, the first time they did it, they passed the New Deal.
00:31:02.400The second time they did it, they passed the Great Society.
00:31:06.500The third time they did it, they passed Obamacare and Dodd-Frank.
00:31:10.080And now for the last two years, we've seen they've spent us into an absolute inflation and recession hole.
00:31:19.000And on the other hand, Republicans, when we have unified control, we tend to do small and piddling things.
00:31:27.780So what I argued in the PowerPoint is at the time I presented it was August of 2018.
00:31:35.300I said, listen, any rational political observer recognizes that there's a very real chance that we will lose at least one House of Congress in November.
00:32:57.840Amazingly enough, that argument proved unpersuasive.
00:33:02.100Mitch McConnell said, well, so the principal avenue that if you look, the biggest legislative victory of the Trump years was the 2017 tax cuts.
00:33:13.020We passed that using what's called budget reconciliation.
00:33:17.120Budget reconciliation is a process under a bill called the Budget Act of 1975.
00:33:23.980The budget piece is not terribly consequential.
00:33:26.580What's consequential is under the terms of the statute.
00:33:29.020You have an up-down vote at 50 votes and it can't be filibustered.
00:33:34.740So it's one of the most important exceptions to the filibuster.
00:33:39.780We could have, if you look at the Democrats, they did three budget reconciliations.
00:33:44.360It's how they passed almost all of their agenda that put us in this hole.
00:33:49.460When the Republicans had the majority, we did only one budget reconciliation.
00:33:53.760We did not do a single one in 2018, which, frankly, Ben is indefensible.
00:33:58.820And so I made the case to the Speaker and my colleagues, let's not make that mistake again.