Trump⧸Biden Debate Analysis, 50 ISIS Related Illegals Roaming America & Unlawful Appointment of Jack Smith Week In Review
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Summary
Ted Cruz and Ben Ferguson break down Joe Biden's performance in the Democratic primary debate and what it means for the future of the 2020 campaign. Plus, the whereabouts of 50 ISIS-related illegal immigrants that were smuggled into the country by an ISIS human smuggling network remain a mystery. And finally, the appointment of a special counsel in the Russia investigation and what this could mean for Donald Trump.
Transcript
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And my oh my, was it a crazy week with one of the worst debates we've ever seen in history.
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And we're going to cover exactly what this means moving forward.
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As Democrats are now pushing to get rid of Joe Biden altogether.
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Plus another important story that you may have missed.
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We now have unknown the whereabouts of 50 ISIS related illegal immigrants that were smuggled into this country by an ISIS human smuggling network.
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The White House wants you to believe that everything's under control.
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Well, where are these 50 people with ties to ISIS?
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And finally, the unlawful appointment of the special counsel and what this could mean for Donald Trump.
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It's the Weekend Review and it starts right now.
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Let's also talk about, there was two moments that I think really speak to the demise of the cognitive client of Joe Biden.
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There was one moment when he was asked about Social Security.
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And then the moderators looked at him like, what are you doing?
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You still have, I think they said, 84 seconds left or something like that.
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There was another time he was talking about African-American voters, African-American community and African-American issues.
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And they're like, sir, you still have like another minute and X number of seconds, 64 seconds left.
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And by the way, he spent eight days at Camp David preparing and he could not fill the two minutes with an answer.
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The two minutes on two vitally important issues.
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Like, Social Security, any politician should be able to fill for two minutes.
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In fact, you should be able to fill for 20 minutes.
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Let's go to the next conversation that's being had right now.
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And I'm sure it's being had at the White House, at the EOB, at the campaign headquarters.
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Who goes to the president first and says, step down?
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And then you're also dealing with a guy that's very stubborn, though.
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Like, can't he just look at them and say, I'm not going to do it?
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I think it is every leader in the Democrat Party.
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I think they will appeal to his vanity and say, you are the next FDR.
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Right now, if you stay in the race, you risk undoing your entire legacy and giving that
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legacy, going down in history as the man who made Donald Trump president.
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If you stay in this race, it will be your fault that Trump is president.
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And look, that is, I think, to Joe Biden, a really powerful pitch.
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He said during Trump's presidency, we had a thousand trillionaires.
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By the way, there are no trillionaires on planet Earth.
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At another point, he said during Donald Trump, we had 50 percent unemployment.
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At another point, he said he created Joe Biden, created hundreds of millions of jobs.
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And apparently he's created hundreds of millions of jobs.
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So more more jobs than there are working Americans like it is.
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At another point, he said the Border Patrol endorsed me.
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The Border Patrol union immediately tweeted out to be clear.
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We have never and will never endorse Biden at every stage.
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And what's interesting, he was also trying to insult Trump.
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It was really and actually when Trump poked Biden, Biden freaked out.
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And so the contrast and I'll say something else.
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Trump's numbers are surging in the black community.
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And I think tonight he made a very hard pitch for black voters and his most significant pitch.
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He had a lot of points about how bad Trump, how bad Biden has been for the African-American community.
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He talked about inflation, how it's hammering black families.
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But then he also tied it to illegal immigration.
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And he said, look, the millions and millions of illegal immigrants that are coming into this country,
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Trump prosecuted the case and Biden crashed and burned.
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And in fact, the Wall Street Journal just sent out their key takeaway, their story that they wrote tonight.
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And their headline is Biden crashed in first debate with Trump.
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That's the news headline in the Wall Street Journal, because it is just objectively.
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If you watch the Hindenburg explode, you don't say Zeppelin landed tonight.
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Well, let's also talk about those that have been lying.
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They've been going on TV telling you that Joe Biden can run circles around me.
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The White House press secretary saying over and over again, saying there's no cognitive decline here, saying that he's in perfect health.
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Now they're all actually having to admit they're wrong.
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But no one's going to, I think, hold them accountable for that.
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They're just going to run out there and say, clearly, it's time for him to step aside, step aside, step aside.
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Which is also weird, because if you're not cognitive, you don't have the cognitive ability to be president in the future, right?
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And they're saying he can't be the president come January again.
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Then when does the 25th and does that even come up?
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Because you're admitting that he's basically incapacitated now.
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Yeah, listen, we have seen reporters and we've seen Democrats lying about Joe's mental capacity for a long time.
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And nobody fair and objective who watched tonight could conclude anything other than this is a man who is seriously mentally diminished.
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Andrew Yang, who you remember, ran for president against Joe in 2020.
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He tweeted out tonight, quote, look, I debated Joe seven times in 2020.
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That's from one of the alternative, one of the other candidates who ran against 2020 for a prominent Democrat.
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Two of the top trends that were trending tonight right after the debate were dementia and Michelle Obama.
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Now, that's bad news if that's if that's what's what's what's what is trending.
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And all right, I want to wrap up tonight's pod with this.
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I'm going to do something I have rarely if ever done.
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This morning's debate, you and I both thought Jake Tapper and Dan Abash would do a terrible job.
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CNN did an excellent job tonight with this debate.
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That was the best debate moderation they have ever done.
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One of the interesting things, no one is debating about the moderators.
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When Chris Wallace debated, moderated, the whole debate was about him because he wanted to be right in the center of the show.
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When Candy Crowley from CNN was the moderator between Obama and Mitt Romney, she made it all about her.
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They would press the candidates, but not in a jerky way.
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They'd just say, I asked you the following question.
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You have another 60 seconds to answer it when they didn't get their questions answered.
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That's a perfectly reasonable thing for a debate moderator to do.
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I've been in multiple debates that each of them have moderated.
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I think they both were incredibly sensitive to everyone laying out the facts that they have shown wild bias.
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I have to ask you one other question because everyone's asking it in their head right now.
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And since you're a former employee of CNN, I'm not going to let you.
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The question is, do you think Jake and Dana did a good job?
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And here's why I'm not going to give them as much credit as you did.
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I think they were in as much shock as we were going, holy crap.
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I'm watching an incapacitated president of the United States of America.
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Like, it was a default mode because it was such a glaring disaster with Biden
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that none of the moderators were honestly paying attention to Donald Trump
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But Jake and Dana were more measured than I've ever seen them.
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They knew that half the country viewed them as wild-eyed partisans.
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Look, we played this morning Jake analogizing Trump to Adolf Hitler.
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I think he believes it, but tonight that didn't come out.
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And so if we're going to criticize him when he's not doing a good job, I will say,
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I was impressed that they did their job tonight.
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They were doing the biggest political train wreck in American history, and they were in it,
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I think if Joe Biden would have showed up, jacked up like he did at the, say, the Union,
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I think it would have been a completely different debate from the moderator's standpoint.
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But I think they saw what everybody else saw, which was,
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we have a president that is incapacitated, and the whole world is watching it now,
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There was no one to step in and lead him off the stage.
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Like Barack Obama did two weeks ago, which brings me back to that question that everyone's asking.
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How quickly will we find out if the conversations with Joe Biden are going to work to get him to step aside,
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And number two, how quickly do Democrats have to fall back in line and stick with this guy
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And those are the two most important questions maybe the entire night.
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I think you're going to have massive chaos following this debate.
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I don't think, given the train wreck that happened tonight,
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I don't think they'll wait until after the Democrat convention.
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I think they're going to want Michelle Obama to be the keynote speaker at the Democrat convention, not Joe Biden.
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So I think we have 21 days for this to play out.
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And, look, over the course of the last year, I've handicapped this.
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I then shifted as the Democrats and the media were starting to get nervous about Joe Biden.
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As we sit here today, I put the odds at north of 80%
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that Michelle Obama is the Democrat nominee on the ballot in November of this year.
00:12:23.320
Now, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation,
00:12:25.980
you can go back and listen to the full podcast from earlier this week.
00:12:32.640
More out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them.
00:12:36.780
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00:12:42.900
And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.
00:12:46.640
Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers.
00:12:52.400
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00:12:55.380
Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:13:04.020
Senator, I want to move to another shocking story.
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And it is one that I wish I could say I didn't think we would see.
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We've talked about it, that this was going to keep happening.
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The Department of Homeland Security has identified now, quote,
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And now they are desperately trying to find people they had caught and released.
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Look, this is a shocking story that in some ways is not shocking.
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Because we know that this administration, that Joe Biden and the Democrats, have effectively rolled out the red carpet
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and with open borders have given an invitation to terrorists to come into the country.
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But even so, the degree of naivete and reckless disregard for the safety of Americans is remarkable.
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The whereabouts of over 50 remain unknown, the officials said.
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And Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking to arrest them on immigration charges when they are located.
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One of the U.S. officials and people said people affiliated with ISIS are operating as human smugglers in Central Asia
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and helping people there leave their countries and travel to the West where they are smuggled into the U.S.
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It is not known whether the human smuggling activity directly funds ISIS activities
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or whether ISIS members are making personal money through human smuggling on the side, the U.S. official said.
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The official added that the U.S. has no indication that the more than 400 migrants brought to the U.S. by the network
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But immigration agents are looking to arrest them out of an abundance of caution.
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And here's a quote from the Biden administration.
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In this case, it was the information that suggested a potential tie to ISIS
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because some of the individuals involved in smuggling migrants to the borders
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And out of an abundance of caution, make sure that we exercised our authority
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in the most expansive and appropriate way to mitigate risk
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because of this potential connection being made.
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We let 400 people go that ISIS had smuggled into the country because we're so cautious.
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And then we realized, wait a second, there's an election.
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And all these people that ISIS smuggled in, if they carry out a terrorist attack
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and people realize we let them go, that's going to be a real problem.
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Well, and not just insane, but it's also interesting to see now how the media is covering this.
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NBC Nightly News actually ran this on the Nightly News and called it an NBC investigation.
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Tonight, NBC News has learned more than 50 migrants with potential ties to an ISIS-affiliated smuggling network
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Many illegally crossed the border and were released into the U.S. by Border Patrol
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because there was no information suggesting terror ties at the time.
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Now, their whereabouts are unknown as immigration agents look to arrest them.
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U.S. officials tell us, saying they're among a group of over 400 migrants DHS identified in the U.S.
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from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Russia as subjects of concern
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because they were brought to the U.S. by an ISIS-affiliated smuggling network,
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something the FBI director warned about earlier this year.
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Some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we're very concerned about.
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ICE has located and arrested over 150 of the 400 migrants so far, with some already deported from the U.S.,
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Adding authorities are not panicking because their ties to ISIS are not certain,
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but they're prioritizing their arrest out of an abundance of caution.
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The problem is the volume of people coming across the southern border,
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individuals from ISIS and other affiliated groups, have recognized it as a weak point in our defense,
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and they're using this opportunity to try to sneak in.
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NBC News was first to report on a similar arrest of a Uzbek man in Baltimore,
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whose country alerted the U.S. he was affiliated with ISIS.
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That man, like the others apprehended so far, was arrested on immigration charges,
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ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for deadly terror attacks in Russia and Iran in the past year.
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And recently, the DHS inspector general sharply criticizing vetting at the U.S. southern border,
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saying DHS is at risk of admitting dangerous persons into the country
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or enabling asylum seekers who may pose significant threats to public safety
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and national security to continue to reside in the United States.
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Two senior law enforcement officials told NBC News they are not tracking a terror plot from this group of migrants,
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but their arrest on immigration charges come out of an abundance of caution.
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They sure do like that word, Senator, abundance of caution.
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I also love in there that one line that really just made me laugh is, quote,
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Really? That's supposed to make me feel better?
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Well, remarkably, though, what they're not panicking about is not the actual public safety threat.
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They're freaked out because there's an election in a few months,
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and they realize, oh, no, this could look really bad for us.
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It has been the consistent pattern of this White House that they do not prioritize national security.
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Everything, everything, everything is partisan politics.
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And, okay, what I'm about to say, it's not hyperbole.
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Day after day, week after week, month after month, for three and a half years,
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Joe Biden and the Democrats have released illegal immigrants who are murderers,
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who are rapists, who are child molesters, who are gang members,
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and who are being smuggled in by ISIS-K, a known terrorist organization,
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The 400 notice, notice in that NBC report, they said they were released by the Biden administration,
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so we apprehended them, said, oh, look, ISIS-K bringing someone in.
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Like, that is, it defies words, and if there were not an election in five months,
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I don't think the Biden administration would be doing anything at all about it.
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This is all about cover it up until after election day, and then we can let them go again.
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And I don't get, actually, I do not understand the thought process.
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If you're Alejandro Mayorkas, help me on this, Ben, seriously.
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If you're Alejandro Mayorkas, you're like, hey, 400 people ISIS-K smuggled in.
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Like, what is, how do the brain synapses fire for your answer to be, yep, let them go?
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Yeah, and the scary part is, I think they just say, this is just part of the,
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you've got to take the bad with the good, and their definition of good is letting millions in.
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So, hey, we know there's going to be bad actors in those millions.
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We can't check them all out fast enough as we're allowing them to flood into this country.
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We know there's people on the terrorist watch list, and we're just going to do it anyway.
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But right before the election, we're going to clean it up a little bit and look like we're being proactive.
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I've said this multiple times, but I very much believe it.
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We are today at a greater risk of a major terrorist attack than we have been any time since September 11th.
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And the director of the FBI has been saying that over and over and over again in congressional testimony.
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What the FBI is looking at, I'm confident, is even worse than what we're talking about.
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And that is the direct consequence of utterly reckless policies of open borders.
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And to tie this to what we started at the beginning, I think this should be front and center what Trump is talking about tonight at the debate.
00:22:13.540
I was going to ask you, that was going to be my final question for you is, if CNN doesn't bring it up, do you force the issue?
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Because I have a feeling they're going to be playing defense for Joe Biden.
00:22:24.860
So, does the president go all in on these type of issues, even if they don't bring them up?
00:22:31.720
As 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.
00:22:43.620
More out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them.
00:22:48.080
And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:22:54.200
And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.
00:22:57.580
entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:23:03.700
So, if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:23:06.920
Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:23:12.660
I want to get back to the big story number three of the week you may have missed.
00:23:19.960
And that's the unlawful appointment argument that's been made about the special counsel, Jack Smith.
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I want you to walk us through this because it is complicated.
00:23:30.960
And I want you to make the argument that is, why is there a possibility that this may work for Trump's legal team?
00:23:39.420
They're the ones that are basically raising the argument about this special, the unlawful appointment of Jack Smith.
00:23:46.600
Walk us through the argument that his legal team is making and why they're making it now.
00:23:50.580
Well, let me start by watch and listen to how it was laid out in a TV interview with Andy McCarthy,
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and then we'll talk about it as soon as we listen to this.
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The difference between the issue about Smith's status that's been raised in this case that distinguishes it from other cases
00:24:12.260
is that prior independent counsels were appointed under a congressional statute.
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This independent counsel, Jack Smith, has been appointed under a Justice Department regulation.
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And what the Constitution says is that when you're talking about an officer of the United States carrying out these kinds of duties,
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either the person has to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate,
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or has to occupy a position that Congress has established by law.
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So this actually is a pretty novel and important argument,
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which is why people like former Attorneys General Edwin Meese and Michael Mukasey have filed briefs
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saying that Smith doesn't have adequate legal constitutional basis to proceed with this case.
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And I think the rap on Judge Cannon is just ridiculous.
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She could have satisfied the media and said, you know, we'll have an August 1st trial date that everyone would have known was illusory.
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Instead, she's trying to move through a massive pretrial work that has to be done so that she can set a realistic trial date.
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And for that, she's being accused, I think, falsely of postponing the case because she's trying to help Trump's electoral effort.
00:25:33.180
I want to ask you about Meese and these others that have filed these amicus briefs.
00:25:37.920
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00:25:43.020
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00:27:24.340
Senator, I want to get your reaction to the point he said about these briefs that were filed.
00:27:33.320
And yet, for many Americans, they can still sound very overwhelming to understand.
00:27:40.520
Yeah, and let me say, by the way, we just played a clip from Andy McCarthy.
00:27:44.100
One question I'd be interested from verdict listeners, we could certainly have Andy as a guest on this podcast.
00:27:51.740
We could also have law professor Jonathan Turley as a guest on this podcast.
00:27:57.480
So if you all think those would be good guests to have a detailed discussion about these issues, let us know on Twitter.
00:28:06.760
And either or both of them we could have on, and it could be a very interesting discussion.
00:28:11.600
Listen, so the judge in Florida has set an oral argument on the question of whether Jack Smith's appointment is legal and constitutional.
00:28:19.520
And that's going to be argued by Gene Scher and Josh Blackman.
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Gene Scher is a very, very well-respected Supreme Court litigator.
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He was a Clarence Thomas clerk the same year I clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist.
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I've known both of them a very, very long time.
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Ed Meese, former attorney general, who has brought this argument and has filed an amicus brief,
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arguing that Jack Smith is not appointed legally.
00:28:52.960
And the argument, first of all, they say there's no federal statute that establishes an office of special counsel in the Department of Justice.
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So there's not a statutory basis for creating this role.
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Secondly, they argue that even if you ignore that there isn't a statute,
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there is also no statute authorizing the attorney general rather than the president
00:29:16.760
with the advice and consent of the Senate to appoint such a special counsel.
00:29:20.760
The special counsel, the way it's structured right now,
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has more power than any of the 94 U.S. attorneys who prosecute cases across the country.
00:29:31.180
So all across the country, there are 94 U.S. attorneys.
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Every single one of them has been nominated by the president of the United States,
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and every single one of them has been confirmed by the Senate.
00:29:42.540
When you have a prosecutor with that level of power, you go through the checks and balances.
00:29:46.860
Well, Jack Smith was not confirmed by the Senate, and their authority is limited to the jurisdictions where they're appointed.
00:29:54.680
So if you are confirmed to be the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York,
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You don't have the authority to bring any case outside of whatever district you're confirmed to.
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Jack Smith has nationwide authority to pursue his prosecutions anywhere in the country he wants.
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And he's indicted Trump in two separate jurisdictions, in D.C. and in Florida.
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And that, the amicus brief argues, violates the requirements of the Constitution.
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There are times when the appointment of a special counsel is appropriate.
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But federal statutes in the Constitution only allow such appointments through the use of existing United States attorneys.
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So it's worth noting there have been other special counsels, but they were sitting U.S. attorneys.
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So, for example, Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed as a special counsel.
00:30:56.320
Rod Rosenstein was appointed as a special counsel.
00:31:04.400
John Durham was appointed as a special counsel.
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Every one of them had been nominated by the president, had been confirmed by the Senate at the time of their appointments.
00:31:16.140
And so what they argue is you can't just make an appointment as attorney general
00:31:20.500
and create a roving U.S. attorney with national authority greater than any U.S. attorney without the Senate having the right to engage in advice and consent.
00:31:36.760
I mean, you're obviously a guy that did this for a very long time in that role as a lawyer.
00:31:42.100
So the question I ask you is when you hear this argument, you see names like Meese and others that are getting involved and you hear the argument they're making.
00:32:00.340
But look, I think there is a possibility this argument prevails.
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There's a long history dealing with special counsels.
00:32:08.120
And before that, there was something called the Independent Counsel.
00:32:11.540
There was a statute that allowed independent counsels to be appointed.
00:32:16.320
So you'll recall Ken Starr was appointed as an independent counsel to prosecute Bill Clinton.
00:32:24.440
And at the time, so there was a case that was brought challenging the constitutionality of the Independent Counsel statute.
00:32:34.320
The Olson was Ted Olson, who at the time was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.
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He later became the Solicitor General of the United States under George W. Bush.
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And eight to one, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Independent Counsel statute.
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And Justice Scalia laid out an argument why having an independent counsel who is not subject to the authority of the attorney general,
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not subject to the authority of the president, is contrary to Article 2 of the Constitution and exceptionally dangerous.
00:33:12.640
What's interesting is the view of Scalia's dissent, a lone dissent 8-1, I think has been vindicated over the years and over the decades.
00:33:23.260
More and more people realize Scalia made some very effective points, so much so that when the Independent Counsel statute expired,
00:33:31.600
so it was written so it would expire, I don't remember if it was 10 years or 20 years, but it had a date certain where it expired.
00:33:38.660
When it expired, Congress didn't reauthorize it.
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The Independent Counsel statute is no longer the law.
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And neither Democrats nor Republicans wanted to authorize it.
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I think Democrats were really unhappy with the job Ken Starr had done going after Bill Clinton, so they didn't want that to happen again.
00:33:58.300
Republicans had seen it abused going after Republicans.
00:34:01.700
And so both parties said, let's let this statute expire, which means you don't have a special statute authorizing Jack Smith the way you would otherwise.
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We'll see what Judge Cannon does, but these are serious arguments that deserve to be considered seriously on the merits.
00:34:20.960
I think we'll get a decision relatively quickly.
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My suspicion is that we'll get it within the next few months.
00:34:26.900
Best case scenario for Trump, what would that look like?
00:34:29.840
Well, if Judge Cannon rules that Jack Smith is illegally appointed, that he does not have the authority to bring the case, that decision presumably would be appealed.
00:34:42.340
But that would permanently put on hold the case in Florida, but it would naturally have an implication on the D.C. case because Jack Smith is the prosecutor who's brought the D.C. case as well.
00:34:55.920
Now, technically speaking, the D.C. judge would not be bound by the decision of the Florida judge.
00:35:02.960
Nonetheless, how those two interact, it would become a major issue in every case, both cases being brought by Jack Smith.
00:35:10.320
As always, thank you for listening to Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
00:35:15.540
Don't forget to download my podcast and you can listen to my podcast every other day.
00:35:19.200
You're not listening to Verdict or each day when you listen to Verdict afterwards.
00:35:22.160
I'd love to have you as a listener to, again, the Ben Ferguson podcast.
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And we will see you back here on Monday morning.