00:00:10.240And here are the big stories that you may have missed that we talked about this week.
00:00:14.280First up, a New Mexico judge now behind bars for housing an illegal gang member.
00:00:21.220And the AG is not backing down on activist judges either.
00:00:25.120I'll have that for you in just a second.
00:00:26.600Also, Donald Trump roasts ABC News in a 100-day interview in the Oval Office.
00:00:33.320And what he had to say, it went viral and we'll play it for you as well.
00:00:36.980And finally, Doge and the Institute for Peace, well, they're exposing they weren't actually very peaceful.
00:00:43.820Is they were giving money to former terrorist members.
00:00:47.740It's the Week in Review and it starts right now.
00:00:50.500So when you combine this and these types of arrests, there is no inclination here that this is preemptively an idea or a mindset by the DOJ or anybody else.
00:01:04.480This is reactionary to these activist judges.
00:01:07.780And that's something that the media is also distorting.
00:01:12.940And I will say, look, there's another story out of New Mexico, which is former Doña Ana County magistrate judge Joel Cano, 67, his wife Nancy Cano, 68, are in custody right now.
00:01:28.680They were arrested by Homeland Security at their Las Cruces home.
00:01:32.860They were arrested for harboring a gang member, a Trender-Aragua gang member in their home.
00:01:43.820And this Trender-Aragua gang member, he's covered in gang tattoos, and the judge faces charges of tampering with evidence.
00:01:57.340He took this Venezuelan gang member's cell phone, smashed it with a hammer because it had incriminating evidence of the gang member with firearms, and then he went and disposed of the cell phone.
00:03:17.500The attorney general, by the way, she came out strong and said, we're not backing down when we see this type of activism.
00:03:25.500Here's part of what she had to say on Fox.
00:03:28.040And to set the stage for you and Sandra, this was truly horrific.
00:03:32.580This guy was in court being prosecuted by a state prosecutor for domestic violence battery.
00:03:38.380He had beat up two people, a guy and a girl, beat the guy, hit the guy 30 times, knocked him to the ground, choked him, beat up a woman so badly they both had to go to the hospital.
00:03:49.800And, John, you know, it's so rare for victims to want to cooperate.
00:03:53.880They were sitting in the courtroom with the state prosecutor.
00:03:57.960The judge learns that ICE was outside to get the guy because he had been deported in 2013, came back in our country, commits these crimes, charged with committing these crimes.
00:04:47.200And I want to play a second clip from from Pam Bondi where she's talking about the New Mexico judge, because this is not this is not a crazy outlier.
00:04:56.420Give a listen to the attorney general talking about this New Mexico judge harboring a Trender-Aragua gang member in his home.
00:05:02.680I mean, when you look at the associations with this violent Venezuelan gang, Trender-Aragua, and this person that they harbored in their home, he was showing signs through clothing, we're told tattoos.
00:05:17.900There was evidence through voice messages and text messages of his association to TDA.
00:05:23.740So what charges will Cano and his wife face, if any?
00:05:27.940So Judge Cano, soon to be former Judge Cano, got he got his charges were just unsealed.
00:05:40.000He took one of the TDA members cell phones himself, took it, beat it with a hammer, destroyed it, and then walked to the pieces to a city dumpster to dispose of it to protect him.
00:05:52.360The wife also is charged with destroying evidence.
00:05:55.540Sandra, not only that, this TDA member, and he had on a necklace that said, kill, something about death.
00:06:31.820In the criminal report affidavit, he goes to a shooting range with these assault rifles, with a suppressor, with other known TDA members, and they're shooting.
00:06:42.280This is the last person that we want in our country.
00:06:45.320Nor will we ever tolerate a judge or anyone else harboring them.
00:06:50.500I'm just so glad we have an attorney general.
00:06:55.280That is able to articulate this the way that she is, to continue to combat the lies that are being put out there about who is actually getting arrested, who we're targeting, and who we're trying to get out of the country.
00:07:07.400No, that's exactly right, and it's the simple principle that no one is above the law.
00:07:13.660Well, here's what Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, tweeted out.
00:07:18.060Just now, the FBI arrested Judge Hannah Dugan out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on charges of obstruction after evidence of Judge Dugan obstructing an immigration arrest operation last week.
00:07:30.540We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, allowing the subject, an illegal alien, to evade arrest.
00:07:40.840Thankfully, our agents chased down the perp on foot, and he's been in custody since.
00:07:46.440But the judge's obstruction created increased danger to the public.
00:07:53.980And then the attorney general, Pam Bondi, she tweeted,
00:07:56.280I can confirm that our FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan, a county judge in Milwaukee, for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid arrest by ICE.
00:09:03.140Like, explain to me that thought process.
00:09:06.920My brain is not nimble enough to get around this.
00:09:09.340See, this is where I think to myself, I'm like, all right, well, then there's got to be some sort of incentive that is connecting them.
00:09:14.980There's got to be something to gain here personally, because I can't just imagine this judge is just like, yeah, genuinely want to hang out with people that are celebrating or involved in this type of criminal activity, including, as you described it, beheadings.
00:09:30.920Yeah, look, you and I watch Breaking Bad.
00:09:33.500I don't know if this is a judge that's on the take, if there's corruption, if he's been paid by the gang.
00:09:38.780I don't know if he's ideological and stupid or corrupt or what.
00:09:45.500There's clearly more to this story we will learn, but the facts on the face of it are astonishing.
00:09:52.840And what's amazing, I don't know of a single Democrat elected official who's denounced this conduct by the judges.
00:10:00.000Instead, what they're saying is they're rushing to defend these judges that are brazenly, brazenly defying the law.
00:10:09.160Now, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation, you can go back and listen to the full podcast from earlier this week.
00:10:28.200And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:10:37.980So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:10:41.220Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:10:48.880Here's something else that President Trump said at the rally where he actually reprised my favorite line from his State of the Union address this year,
00:10:58.860where he talked about how Joe Biden had said just one year earlier that the only way to secure the border is if Congress passed new legislation.
00:11:07.720Give a listen to what President Trump said.
00:11:09.520For years, Joe Biden and the media told us that stopping the flood of illegal immigration was absolutely impossible.
00:16:26.520I think the cabinet is much stronger than than the 2016 or the 2017 cabinet.
00:16:32.040I think in the first term he made some appointments that frankly did not serve him well.
00:16:37.200He put people in place who disagreed with him, who undermined him.
00:16:40.860And I think this second term, I think he learned.
00:16:44.180I think he learned during during the four years of his first term as president.
00:16:48.000I think he learned during the four years he was out of office.
00:16:50.460I think he had a lot of time to think about if and when he came back, what he would do.
00:16:55.380And I think he put in place change agents.
00:16:59.020And, you know, there's another exchange in that ABC News interview that I really like where where ABC News is defending illegal immigration and the open borders under the Democrats.
00:17:10.600And he just utterly calls them out here.
00:17:13.320Give and listen to that talking about, you know, you're making this person sound.
00:17:16.500This is a MS-13 gang member, a tough cookie, been in lots of skirmishes, beat the hell out of his wife.
00:17:24.920And the wife was petrified to even talk about him.
00:17:27.380OK, this is not an innocent, wonderful gentleman from now.
00:17:57.000We are, you know, our pod two days ago, if you didn't listen to it, really is astonishing.
00:18:01.260There are two different Democrat judges in jail right now for obstructing justice, for blocking federal law enforcement, for arresting illegal immigrants.
00:18:12.920And one of the two, a judge from New Mexico, is charged with sheltering a Trender-Aragua Venezuelan gang member in his home and destroying evidence.
00:18:26.500So this gang member had a cell phone, and this Democrat judge took the cell phone, smashed it with a hammer, went and threw the cell phone away in a dumpster, all in an effort to cover up the evidence of this gang member's criminality.
00:18:39.840And one of the astonishing things that the Department of Justice has told us is that cell phone that the Democrat judge destroyed had pictures of two people who had been decapitated, two victims presumably of gang violence who had their heads cut off.
00:18:56.820And Ben, like what does it say that today's Democrat Party, what they're about, is there for Venezuelan gang members who cut people's heads off?
00:19:05.920Literally, I don't know how you could be in a more radical position than where they are right now.
00:19:12.500As before, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation on this topic, you can go back and download the podcast from early this week to hear the entire thing.
00:19:33.740And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:19:43.540So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:19:46.760Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:19:52.540I want to get back to the big story, number three of the week you may have missed.
00:19:57.240Senator, I want to talk about what we just found out with Doge.
00:20:01.760And I think it's an important point to reset because we saw a lot of press about Doge early on.
00:20:08.780We've now moved on to other topics, or I should say the media has moved on to other topics.
00:20:12.900It does not mean that Elon Musk and the Doge staff have stopped doing their job.
00:20:18.100In fact, they are still finding incredible amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:20:24.340And they sat down with Jesse Waters at Fox to kind of give an update of like, hey, here we are.
00:20:29.520It was also a very cool interview because what we're witnessing is Elon Musk showing these do-gooders that he has brought in.
00:20:38.300They could be making a lot more money in the private sector.
00:20:41.420There are a lot of young, brilliant minds that are finding all of this information and digging and digging in our government.
00:20:48.020And he's letting them tell the stories of what they're finding.
00:20:50.980I love this management style from him.
00:20:53.240Well, I got to say, every week there are new bombshells that are coming out from Doge of just astonishing waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:21:01.460And so this latest interview that Elon did with Jesse Waters, he laid out, for example, that the Institute of Peace had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban.
00:21:18.960Now, just let that sink in for a minute.
00:21:21.400$130,000 to a former member of the Taliban, and that is from the, quote, Institute of Peace.
00:21:29.800Nothing like paying a terrorist if you're the Institute of Peace.
00:21:34.660And by the way, that same Institute of Peace deleted one terabyte of accounting records when Doge entered their headquarters.
00:21:45.300I got to tell you, if you're prosecuting criminal conduct in a court of law and a defendant destroys evidence, deletes data on their computer, burns papers, burns receipts, burns photographs,
00:21:59.840that can be taken as evidence of guilt, the fact that you are deleting evidence.
00:22:05.760But here, give a listen to the description of what they found from the Institute of Peace.
00:22:10.380Yeah, so it was by far the least peaceful agency that we've worked with, ironically.
00:22:16.200Additionally, we found that they were spending money on things like private jets, and they even had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban.
00:23:22.180So just a few hours after we got into their headquarters, we found that their chief accountant had actually deleted over a terabyte of accounting records from several years.
00:23:28.720So you'd have to ask the question, well, why would somebody do that?
00:23:31.580The Doge team, unfortunately, was able to recover that data with the help of a few great employees at the Institute of Peace.
00:23:36.600And I think the most troubling thing was they received $55 million a year from Congress.
00:23:40.800And any money that went unspent, instead of returning that to Congress, they would sweep it into a private bank account, which had no congressional oversight.
00:23:48.020And that's what they would use to fund things like events at their headquarters and the private jets.
00:23:53.800And so I think it's a great example because most Americans don't know what's going on at a lot of these smaller agencies.
00:23:59.080And this is, I think, the most extreme case of some of the wasteful spend that we're finding.
00:24:05.120So the agencies are hiding money from you.
00:24:34.560It's certainly illegal to delete accounting records that Congress would certainly want to know where the congressionally appropriated funds are going from taxpayers.
00:24:41.940When you catch them going Hillary-style on their computers, do you refer this to the Department of Justice?
00:24:50.020In this case, we did refer the evidence in the accounting example to the FBI and DOJ.
00:26:40.400And when people looked into it, this wasn't us, this was before us.
00:26:43.700They found that money was being used to rent out Caesar's Palace for parties, rent out stadiums, et cetera.
00:26:48.700And so the one change that Doge made with Department of Education is we had the simple requirement that if you draw down money, you must first upload a receipt.
00:26:57.780That was the only change that was made.
00:27:34.060Let me just ask, like the man on the street.
00:27:38.720Did you think the Department of Education was spending your money, your taxpayer money, to rent out Caesar's Palace?
00:27:49.480That is the very definition of waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:27:53.840Four billion dollars in a COVID slush fund with zero receipts required.
00:27:59.260Let me just say thank God for President Trump and Elon Musk and Doge uncovering this, revealing it, because it is completely indefensible.
00:28:07.480And by the way, the Democrats, just like they've decided they're all in for illegal immigrants and gang members and violent criminals and white beaters,
00:28:14.820they're also all in for this kind of waste, fraud, and abuse, including renting out Caesar's Palace with your taxpayer money.
00:28:21.400As always, thank you for listening to Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
00:28:26.740Don't forget to download my podcast, and you can listen to my podcast every other day if you're not listening to Verdict,
00:28:31.360or each day when you listen to Verdict afterwards.
00:28:33.780I'd love to have you as a listener to, again, the Ben Ferguson podcast, and we will see you back here on Monday morning.