| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Colleague, thank you. | |
| And finally, to the people of North Carolina, thank you for putting your trust in me. | ||
| Having taken my oath of office, I am profoundly aware of my solemn responsibility to support, maintain, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of the state of North Carolina and to faithfully discharge my duties as governor. | ||
| I pledge to the people of North Carolina that I will do just that to the best of my abilities. | ||
| The work ahead will surely be challenging, but the time is now to build a safer, stronger North Carolina, where our economy continues to grow and works for more people, where our public schools are excellent and our teachers are well paid, where our neighborhoods are safe and our personal freedoms are protected. | ||
| And of course, we must act with urgency to help the people of Western North Carolina recover from Hurricane Helene. | ||
| We must help rebuild housing, support small businesses, and restore broken infrastructure. | ||
| We can only accomplish these goals by reaching across the aisle and working together. | ||
| So we must reject the politics of division, fear, and hate that keep us from finding common ground because we will go further when we go together. | ||
| Not as Democrats, not as Republicans, not as Independents, but as North Carolinians. | ||
| Folks, I love North Carolina. | ||
| It's home. | ||
| It's where my parents raised my brother, my sister, and me. | ||
| It's where Anna and I raised our three kids. | ||
| And I pray that together we build a state that our kids and grandkids and your kids and grandkids also want to call home. | ||
| I am confident that we will because we are North Carolina strong. | ||
| Today I stand before you humbled by this responsibility, grateful for this opportunity, and ready to get to work for you, the people of North Carolina. | ||
| Thank you, and may God bless you and the state of North Carolina. | ||
| Again, a live picture from the Roosevelt Room of the White House this evening, where we're awaiting remarks from President Biden on today's jobs report in the state of the U.S. economy. | ||
| This is his last jobs report while serving as president. | ||
| The unemployment rate, by the way, ticked down a notch from 4.2 to 4.1 percent last month. | ||
| Live coverage of the president when he starts here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Waiting for remarks from President Biden on the latest jobs report. | ||
| While we wait, we'll show you a recent discussion on Washington Journal. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Jameel Jaffer. | ||
| He is National Security Institute founder at the George Mason University Law School. | ||
| He's a former senior counsel to the House Intelligence Committee. | ||
| Jamil, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me, Mimi. | |
| All right, so in talking about this attack in New Orleans, the FBI had said that the attacker is 100% inspired by ISIS. | ||
| Tell us how they reached that conclusion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, the most obvious piece of evidence that we have is that he put a ISIS flag on the back of his truck that he drove into that crowd there on Bourbon Street, killing 14 people. | |
| But beyond that, we know that over the course of the last year, and in particular, right in the lead up to his attack, he posted a number of things on social media indicating his allegiance to ISIS, indicating his concerns with music and Western culture and the like. | ||
| And that's what's made clear to us. | ||
| And in particular, that he's involved ISIS. | ||
| And in particular, he actually mentioned in one of his posts right before he conducted the attack that he actually was thinking about killing his own family, but decided that that wouldn't be splashy enough. | ||
| It wouldn't get his cause enough attention. | ||
| And that was part of his concern, which is why he conducted the particular horrific attack that he did there in New Orleans. | ||
| Now, the U.S., I believe, has largely defeated ISIS in Iraq and Syria. | ||
| So what's the current state of ISIS? | ||
| Do they currently hold any territory? | ||
| And how much influence and power do they actually have right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you're right that we've conducted a strong series of operations over the course of nearly a decade now against ISIS. | |
| But they do continue to hold small pockets of territory. | ||
| Just in the last few days, U.S. forces, along with Iraqi forces, have conducted strikes in Syria and Iraq against ISIS targets. | ||
| In addition, on December 20th, 2024, we killed a senior ISIS leader, Abu Yusuf, also known as Mohammed. | ||
| And so we continue to conduct strikes against ISIS because they continue to pose a threat both in the region but internationally as well because they're trying to plot these longer-term attacks against the United States, against our allies in Europe. | ||
| And they're also trying to continue to inspire people like Shamshuddin-Jabbar to conduct attacks in their homelands, either here in the United States or in Europe as well. | ||
| And how are they inspiring those attacks? | ||
| Through what medium? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, it's unfortunate, but it's actually online. | |
| They're posting videos that talk about the jihad. | ||
| They talk about training terrorists. | ||
| They talk about what might motivate you to conduct an attack. | ||
| They talk about extreme versions that are not the actual version of Islam that most of the world's billion Muslims practice. | ||
| And so they are working in effort to actively take people who have other issues. | ||
| Shamshuddin-Jabbar had issues in his family life. | ||
| He had issues financially. | ||
| He had issues acculturated to life after the military. | ||
| And they want to take those vulnerable people and convert them into killers by giving them something to believe in, by giving them something to motivate them, something that explains why they're having problems that aren't the actual reason for their problems. | ||
| I'm going to play you just a short portion of Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh talking to reporters last Friday about the level of threat that ISIS represents today, and then I'll get your reaction to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
ISIS retains capabilities as we've seen in Iraq and Syria, and that's why we have our forces in both of those countries to ensure that ISIS can never reconstitute or resurge or surge back to what it was just a decade ago. | |
| I mean, the entire mission of our force presence there is to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS. | ||
| And that's why we've partnered with the Syrian Democratic Forces over the past few years. | ||
| And that's why we continue to conduct strikes against ISIS positions, whether it be as recently as in the Badia Desert or elsewhere. | ||
| Because of course, ISIS remains a threat, but they certainly are not the same threat that they were a decade ago. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| What do you make of that, Jamil Jaffer? | ||
| And the concept of military defeat of ISIS, given that this is more of an ideology that inspires other people to make attacks on their fellow citizens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, look, Mimi, there's no doubt that it's hard to combat an ideology, but ISIS isn't just an ideology. | |
| It's also a group of fighters and planners who are conducting attacks and plotting attacks overseas, who are looking to recruit people online, making these videos that we're talking about, trying to radicalize people, communicating over encrypted apps with Americans in the United States, with Europeans in Europe as well, trying to get these attacks conducted. | ||
| So there are people, there are facilities, there are training camps, there are capabilities that they're obtaining. | ||
| Just look in Syria with the fall of Bashar Assad, which is a victory for the world, that brutal dictator who used chemical weapons against his own people. | ||
| At the same time, the very people coming into power, Hayat Tar al-Sham, HGS, Jalani, the new leader of Syria, purportedly, he's a former member of al-Qaeda, former member of the Nusra Front, a key terrorist group in the region. | ||
| Now, he claims he's reformed himself, but they now control real territory with real weaponry. | ||
| The Israelis have taken a significant effort to take out a lot of that Syrian military equipment. | ||
| But the truth is, that's a real challenge, and these terrorists are not going away. | ||
| They also believe that they continue to remain at war with the United States, whether we think they're defeated or not. | ||
| They continue to conduct these attacks, continue to identify opportunities. | ||
| And if we take our eye off the ball, unfortunately, Mimi, they will achieve success, not just in ways like they did here in New Orleans, but in bigger and even more spectacular attacks, which is ultimately their goal. | ||
| And we will take your calls for Jamil Jaffer of George Mason University. | ||
| And we're talking about the threat that ISIS poses to the United States. | ||
| We are taking your calls by party. | ||
| So it's Democrats 202748-8000. | ||
| It's 202-748-8001 for Republicans and 202748-8002 for independents. | ||
| Well, President-elect Trump has said that he wants to scale back the U.S. presence in the Middle East. | ||
| And just as a reminder, the U.S. has about 2,000 troops in Iraq, about 900 in Syria. | ||
| They're there to counter ISIS. | ||
| What do you think that the impact of that will have the more isolationist or America-first agenda? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, look, Mimi, we've had three presidents in a row, President Obama, President Trump, and President Biden, all of whom have wanted to reduce our force posture overseas, remove ourselves from a lot of these overseas conflicts, focus here at home. | |
| And at times when we've done that, we saw the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. | ||
| We saw President Trump's successful efforts against ISIS, but then... | ||
| Hey, buddy. | ||
| Thanks for your patience. | ||
| It's been a long day. |