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And whether it could lead to the end of the Russia-Ukraine war. | |
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| Good morning. | ||
| It's Monday, August 18th, 2025. | ||
| A busy day at the White House as President Trump is set to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as a half dozen European leaders and the head of NATO to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine. | ||
| Today's meeting comes three days after President Trump's Friday summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin. | ||
| And amid plenty of speculation about what Ukraine and Russia would accept before agreeing to stop the fighting. | ||
| Our phone lines are open for you to weigh in. | ||
| We want to know what do you want to hear from President Trump and Zelensky and the gathered European leaders today. | ||
| Republicans, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can also send us a text, that number, 202-748-8003. | ||
| If you do, please include your name and where you're from. | ||
| Otherwise, catch up with us on social media on X. | ||
| It's at C-SPANWJ on Facebook. | ||
| It's facebook.com slash C-SPAN. | ||
| And a very good Monday morning to you. | ||
| You can go ahead and start calling in now. | ||
| Our coverage of today's events are going to begin live at noon today, but we're going to spend our first hour of the Washington Journal taking your phone calls about this summit between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, again, coming just three days after that Trump and Putin meeting. | ||
| Here's how the Wall Street Journal frames it in their lead story today. | ||
| They write, nearly six months ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was asked to leave the White House after a televised confrontation with President Trump over real security guarantees the Ukrainian leader insisted were needed for a peace agreement with Russia. | ||
| When Zelensky returns to the Oval Office on Monday, the gap over security guarantees will have narrowed, but a chasm over Moscow's territorial demands remains. | ||
| That's the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| This morning, President Trump last night laying down a marker, his marker, for some of the points being discussed at today's meeting. | ||
| This is what he wrote on his Truth Social page. | ||
| President Zelensky of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, the president said, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight. | ||
| Remember how it started, the president said. | ||
| No getting back Obama-given Crimea 12 years ago without a shot being fired and no going into NATO by Ukraine. | ||
| Some things never change. | ||
| Donald Trump making those points about not going into NATO and that the war could end immediately if Zelensky wants to. | ||
| He'll be sitting down with the Ukrainian president today. | ||
| Again, that meeting will happen a little after lunchtime today. | ||
| Following that, there'll be a meeting with the European leaders. | ||
| Security guarantees a key part of this conversation. | ||
| And it was yesterday on Fox News Sunday that Steve Witkoff, the special envoy for President Trump on this ongoing conflict, spoke about the guarantees that he expects are going to be offered today. | ||
| So let's talk about the security guarantees because you mentioned those. | ||
| What does that mean in practicality? | ||
| What is the U.S. willing to commit to that effort to give Ukraine the assurances it needs to come to the table? | ||
| It means that the United States is potentially prepared to be able to give Article 5 security guarantees, but not from NATO, directly from the United States and other European countries. | ||
| That is big. | ||
| I mean, really big. | ||
|
unidentified
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Does it mean boots on the ground? | |
| What does it mean? | ||
| But logistically. | ||
| I think part of the discussion that we're going to have on Monday throughout the day, because there's going to be breakout sessions there, is exactly the specifics of what the Ukrainians feel that they need. | ||
| Because remember, as mediators, we were at this summit to advance the Ukrainian position, and we did that. | ||
| And we did it successfully. | ||
| Now it's for us to drill down on the granular details of exactly what the Ukrainians need to give them a sense of security in the future. | ||
| And by the way, what the Europeans need as well. | ||
| And we were fully committed to be there for that purpose. | ||
| Steve Witkoff, that was yesterday morning. | ||
| This morning on the Washington Journal. | ||
| We are getting your thoughts ahead of this summit between Donald Trump and Vlodomir Zelensky. | ||
| 202-748-8001 for Republicans to call in. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We noted that President Trump laid down a marker on social media. | ||
| So did Volodymyr Zelensky. | ||
| This is his tweet that he posted coming into the meeting after arriving in Washington, saying that we are speaking with Donald Trump and European leaders. | ||
| I am grateful for the president for the invitation. | ||
| We all share a strong desire to end this war quickly and reliably. | ||
| And peace must be lasting. | ||
| Not like it was years ago, he said, when Ukraine was forced to give up Crimea and part of our east, part of Donbass, and Putin simply used it as a string springboard for new attacks. | ||
| Or when Ukraine was given so-called security guarantees in 1994, but they didn't work. | ||
| Of course, Crimea should not have been given up, he said. | ||
| Just as Ukrainians did not give up Kyiv and Odessa and Kharkiv after 2022, Ukrainians are fighting for their land and for their independence. | ||
| Now our soldiers have had success in Donetsk and the Sumy regions. | ||
| I am confident that we will defend Ukraine effectively and guarantee security and that our people will always be grateful to President Trump, everyone in America, and every partner and ally for their support and invaluable assistance. | ||
| Russia must end this war, which it itself started. | ||
| And I hope that our joint strength with America, with our European friends, will force Russia into a real peace. | ||
| A lengthy social media post there from Vlodimir Zelensky ahead of this meeting today. | ||
| We're asking you simply what do you want to hear from this meeting? | ||
| If and when they do come out and take questions from the press, we want to ask you what you would want to know from the two presidents. | ||
| Ed is up first out of West Virginia, Independent Line. | ||
| Ed, what are your thoughts ahead of today's meetings? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I'm 90 years old. | |
| I'm blind and can't walk without assistance. | ||
| And we are still negotiating with Russia the way we did after the Bate War. | ||
| The negotiations used to go like this. | ||
| They would sit on each side of the table. | ||
| The Americans would give what they wanted. | ||
| And the Russians would say, we want to sleep with all the American negotiators' wives. | ||
| The Russians would, the Americans would holler ridiculous. | ||
| It can't happen. | ||
| We'll talk back. | ||
| They come back to the table. | ||
| The Russians say, you're right. | ||
| We agree. | ||
| We only want to sleep with half of the Americans' wives. | ||
| The Americans jumped up and said, it's a deal. | ||
| We'll take it. | ||
| That's just what this is working out to here. | ||
| So Ed, you don't think America does well in its negotiations with Russia? | ||
|
unidentified
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Never, never with Russia. | |
| Never. | ||
| Only with John F. Kennedy. | ||
| That's the only last time I ever know that we dealt with Russia. | ||
| But we come out looking good. | ||
| The only time. | ||
| What do you think of Volodymyr Zelensky and his ability to negotiate with Donald Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I hope he settles down a little bit. | |
| He fell into a trap the last time. | ||
| And I hope he goes with a cooler head. | ||
| And I hope he's got some Europeans with him to set and listen and make sure he's not buoyed. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Trump, I voted for him once. | ||
| I've never been a Trumper, but I had no choice. | ||
| I did vote for him the last election only because Missy Haley did not mention the border. | ||
| That's Ed in West Virginia. | ||
| Tedla, Zaza, Flushing, New York, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| For me, I have to go back to the basics. | ||
| Any big country try to redraw a map of another country, if you allow it, we are going to go downhill in a dangerous path. | ||
| Russia invaded Ukraine. | ||
| Ukraine resisted, fought back. | ||
| Now, I don't know how many percentage of its land is occupied. | ||
| Trump should never ever force Zelensky, give this land, and we'll give you protection. | ||
| That is not going to bring peace in the future. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| So the best thing for me is that Donald Trump has to take from his mind about who did what Obama gave Chechen, I mean, Crimea also. | ||
| It is not about that. | ||
| He has to take out his domestic issue from this matter. | ||
| This is an European international issue. | ||
| Trump couldn't handle it very well. | ||
| I can tell you that. | ||
| The way he respects it, Putin, he didn't do a fraction for this man. | ||
| That is embarrassment for me. | ||
| No, no man is above the law. | ||
| So for me, Russia has to go back to where it came from. | ||
| And then security, there will be guarantee for those areas, Davosko, whatever. | ||
| But Crimea should go back to where it is. | ||
| If you don't do that one, Russia will never ever. | ||
| He takes whatever they have now, and then it will come back in 34 years again. | ||
| So I don't agree with Donald Trump. | ||
| We should say Russia should go back to its former place. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| That's Tedla out of Flushing, New York. | ||
| He called it a European international issue. | ||
| And a series of European international leaders will be joining Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky today. | ||
| It's going to be a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office is what we're expecting first, and then a larger sort of breakout with the leaders of France and Germany and Great Britain and Italy and Finland, the European Union, and of course the head of NATO that we mentioned, the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, Who met with Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday ahead of this meeting, preparing for this meeting with Donald Trump, | ||
| and the two of them gave comments and expectations about what's going to happen today. | ||
| This was yesterday. | ||
| First, we have to stop the killings. | ||
| Putin has many demands, but we do not know all of them. | ||
| And if there are really as many as we heard, then it will take time to go through them all. | ||
| It's impossible to do this under the pressure of weapons. | ||
| So it's necessary to ceasefire and work quickly on a final deal. | ||
| We'll talk about it in Washington. | ||
| Putin does not want to stop the killing, but he must do it. | ||
| Second, we need real negotiations, which means they can start where the front line is now. | ||
| The contact line is the best line for talking, and Europeans support this. | ||
| And we thank everyone. | ||
| Russia is still unsuccessful in Donetsk region. | ||
| Putin has been unable to take it for 12 years. | ||
| And the constitution of Ukraine makes it impossible, impossible, to give up territory or trade land. | ||
| Since the territorial issue is so important, it should be discussed only by the leaders of Ukraine and Russia at the trilateral Ukraine, United States, Russia. | ||
| So far, Russia gives no sign that trilateral will happen. | ||
| And if Russia refuses, then new sanctions must follow. | ||
| This sword, it's important that America agrees to work with Europe to provide security guarantees for Ukraine. | ||
| And we're very thankful to the United States and to the President for such a signal. | ||
| Vlodymir Zelensky yesterday, you heard him there, mentioned ceasefire, something that did not result from Donald Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin on Friday, even though that was a topic that was widely discussed headed into that meeting. | ||
| It was Vlodymir Zelensky in that clip that we just showed you talking about the current contact line he thinks would be a good line to start from for negotiations. | ||
| An interesting point on that from John Bolton, the former White House National Security Advisor for Donald Trump in his first administration, he's now a columnist in the Wall Street Journal, not a fan of ceasefire lines typically. | ||
| He says ceasefire lines often fall along existing military front lines and when negotiations follow a ceasefire, particularly when accompanied by the deployment of peacekeeping forces, as has also been suggested in this case, the ceasefire line often hardens. | ||
| In short order, ceasefire lines can become de facto borders, considered the history of many United Nations peacekeeping operations, such as Cyprus since 1964 or the Korean armistice, which after two years of negotiation froze the border between North and South Korea for 72 years and counting. | ||
| Trump's announcement that a ceasefire won't precede peace talks is good news for Ukraine, is what John Bolton writes, calling it the silver lining of an otherwise bad summit. | ||
| If you want to read his piece, it's in today's Wall Street Journal. | ||
| This is Derek in Texas. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing? | |
| Doing well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The problem with I see what's going on, it just seems like Putin got something on Trump. | |
| He acts like he's scared of me. | ||
| I don't know what's going on with the war up there, but it seems like the United Nations need to do something better than what they're doing. | ||
| If Trump are part of the United Nations, I don't know very much about sanctions, but they need to lean on Russia more than they are. | ||
| Yes, the war needs to cease from what we've seen this weekend. | ||
| Putin's saying he can do what he wants to do, and Trump's okay with it. | ||
| That's Derek in Texas. | ||
| You talk about sanctions and the fact that you think the United States needs to lean more on Russia when it comes to sanctions. | ||
| Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, was on Meet the Press yesterday. | ||
| He was asked about sanctions, why the United States isn't using sanctions more. | ||
| This is Marco Rubio from yesterday. | ||
| I don't think new sanctions on Russia are going to force them to accept a ceasefire. | ||
| They're already under very severe sanctions. | ||
| I think that should be, you could argue that that could be a consequence of refusing to agree to a ceasefire or the end of hostilities. | ||
| But there is no evidence that more sanctions, because sanctions take months and sometimes years to bite. | ||
| And we may very well wind up in that place. | ||
| I hope not, because that means that peace talks failed. | ||
| But we have to give every opportunity for peace a chance in this particular case. | ||
| And that's what we're trying to do here. | ||
| And so those options remain to the president. | ||
| The minute he takes those steps, all talks stop. | ||
| The minute we take those steps, there is no one left in the world to go talk to the Russians and try to get them to the table to reach a peace agreement. | ||
| So that moment may come. | ||
| I hope not, because I hope we get a peace deal. | ||
| That was Marco Rubio yesterday. | ||
| Of course, Marco Rubio was in the room with Donald Trump and Steve Wickoff, the special envoy, in that meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. | ||
| Here we are today with Vladimir Zielensky and European leaders coming to the White House. | ||
| They're expected to arrive around noon. | ||
| It'll be a meeting with President Zelensky first in the Oval Office, and then we're expecting a larger breakout with the seven European leaders who are joining him for this meeting. | ||
| We'll see if they'll take questions and if there's a press conference after that. | ||
| You can watch it all here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Again, our coverage begins at noon Eastern today. | ||
| This is Jim in Lexington, Michigan, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I believe he was as soon as he walked off the plane. | |
| Putin should have been arrested at that moment. | ||
| What do you think is going to happen today, Jim? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are today. | |
| Still with us, Jim? | ||
| Then we go to Rhonda, Sacramento, California, Independent. | ||
| Morning, Rhonda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, John. | |
| MS Aben Putin arrested. | ||
| Okay, John, here's the thing. | ||
| Three weeks ago, our vice president got on national TV and stated, yes, we're tired of funding the war in Ukraine. | ||
| Next thing you know, two days later, you see Zelensky going to all the European leaders, pitching, will you support my war? | ||
| Then, the next thing you know, another TV station is reporting that, well, Russia has lost more lives in this war than Ukraine. | ||
| Now, here comes Putin, comes to visit with Trump. | ||
| I think what's going to happen, John, is this. | ||
| Trump is going to say to Zelensky, if you take what we're putting on the table, and if not, you walk. | ||
| And you're going to get your support from European leaders because the United States is finished funding your war. | ||
| Nothing is being done here. | ||
| I pray, John. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I hope these talks come to peace. | ||
| Too many lives are lost. | ||
| And that's what I feel. | ||
| Either you're going to take the deal, Zelensky, or you walk. | ||
| So that's my thought. | ||
| Thank you, John. | ||
| Thank you, C-SPAN. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| And thank you, America, for your insightfulness and wisdom. | ||
| Bye, John. | ||
| That's Rhonda in California. | ||
| In terms of U.S. aid to Ukraine since February of 2022 when this war started, so we're looking at three and a half years at this point. | ||
| About $200 billion, just a touch under the first tranche of funding coming just a month after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. | ||
| A $14 billion infusion by the United States, followed just three months later by $41 billion. | ||
| The total numbers ticked up over the years. | ||
| By the end of last year, before the end of the Biden administration, a push to get money out the door, a $20 billion loan coming in December of 2024. | ||
| And where we are today is new agreements in which European countries have agreed to buy U.S. arms with the idea that they would then go to Ukraine. | ||
| So we've seen a change in some of the funding and equipment mechanisms, but the numbers have simply added up over those three and a half years. | ||
| Back to your phone calls. | ||
| This is Tony Arkansas, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
John, we're going to have to make friends with Russia. | |
| There's no doubt about it because we're going to need them to defeat the 100 million man army of China later on, which could be just in a couple, two or three years. | ||
| So I don't know what else we're going to do, but we're going to have to make friends with Russia. | ||
| Tony, what did you think about that summit on Friday? | ||
| Were we making friends? | ||
| Was Donald Trump making friends with Russia on Friday with Vladimir Putin? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He didn't say no, and he didn't put any sanctions on because you put sanctions on, just like Rubio said, that's the end of the deal right there. | |
| So he's got to leave it open. | ||
| But I think Stelinsky is going to come over and do what he needs to do. | ||
| It's going to give up Crimea, definitely. | ||
| There ain't no doubt about that. | ||
| But a lot of that other part of the world, it's the breadbasket of the world. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| Hey, thank you for letting me talk to you. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| That's Tony in Arkansas. | ||
| If you want to talk to us, it's 202-748-8001 for Republicans to call. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002, simply asking you what do you want to hear from today's Trump-Zelensky meeting. | ||
| A lot of conversation on this topic over the past few days, especially leading up to and after that Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday. | ||
| It was the topic of most of the discussion on the Sunday shows yesterday. | ||
| Democratic Senator Chris Van Holland of Maryland offering his reaction to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at that summit. | ||
| This is what he had to say. | ||
| Well, Martha, there's no sugarcoating this. | ||
| Donald Trump once again got played by Vladimir Putin. | ||
| Vladimir Putin got the red carpet treatment on American soil. | ||
| But we got no ceasefire, no imminent meeting between Putin and Zelensky. | ||
| All the threatened sanctions that Donald Trump talked about apparently have been set aside. | ||
| Donald Trump got flattered by Vladimir Putin, but when it comes to Ukraine under European allies, this was a setback. | ||
| I do believe that Congress now, the Senate in particular, should move forward on bipartisan legislation that has over 60 senators as co-sponsors that would impose sanctions on Russia and Vladimir Putin. | ||
| Chris Van Holland, Democrat of Maryland, yesterday, taking your phone calls this morning. | ||
| This is Aaron South Hill, Virginia, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Ukraine has given up enough. | ||
| They gave up their nuclear arms when it comes to Ukraine under European allies. | ||
| America should stand by Ukraine no matter what. | ||
| They should go to NATO. | ||
| NATO should have a vote. | ||
| Ukraine into NATO. | ||
| Any other American president would never stand for nothing like this. | ||
| Whatever Trump got going on with Putin needs to come out. | ||
| Ukraine should stand high and America should support Ukraine 100% as an ally to the United States. | ||
| If they don't, all our allies are going to turn their back on us when it's all time for them to help us to defend our country. | ||
| We must stand up against Putin's tyrant. | ||
| He's a tyrant, and Trump's a tyrant. | ||
| Aaron, you mentioned Ukraine being a part of NATO in Donald Trump's true social post yesterday. | ||
| He specifically said no going into NATO by Ukraine. | ||
| And in that post, that was the only part of the post that he had in all capital letters. | ||
| No going into NATO by Ukraine. | ||
| Seems to be putting that chip down ahead of this meeting as a place where he wants to make a stand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That should not be. | |
| NATO should have a vote regardless of what Trump feels and induct them into NATO. | ||
| That'll put a stop to all of this here because they have the support of all Ukraine's allies and the American allies. | ||
| And America needs to fall in line and do what they're supposed to do: support our allies. | ||
| They should be inducted into NATO immediately. | ||
| That should be the end of this year today. | ||
| And I hope Kaminsky stays in line and tells Trump what he wants. | ||
| He wants to be a part of NATO. | ||
| He gave up his nuclear arms for this. | ||
| They promised that man that they would support him and take care of him and defend him. | ||
| And Trump is not doing that. | ||
| You mentioned NATO. | ||
| The Secretary General of NATO is coming to the White House today. | ||
| Mark Ruda is his name. | ||
| And he's part of that delegation of European leaders that are joining Vladimir Zelensky at the White House. | ||
| The one-on-one meeting with Donald Trump is expected first, and then this larger meeting with the European leaders. | ||
| He'll be a part of that. | ||
| And we'll see if there's a press conference as well. | ||
| But our coverage, our live coverage of all the events today at the White House begins at noon Eastern time here on C-SPAN. | ||
| And we hope you follow along. | ||
| This is Jonathan, Gaithersburg, Maryland, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| So one thing that I think is being missed in the commentators, or at least I haven't heard it, and the many people who speak on this issue is the basic fact that Ukraine is one quarter the size and population to Russia. | ||
| It is now fighting a grinding war of attrition, which has been compared to World War I with even frozen front lines and trench fighting and dreadful sort of stuff as far as casualties and all. | ||
| And this doesn't lessen the fact that Putin's a terrible dictator and autocrat. | ||
| And you don't want to encourage acquisition of land by conquest in the post-World War II order that the U.S. helped establish. | ||
| On the other hand, the notion that this bitter conflict was ever going to end in anything but at a negotiating table, even if it means an armstice like between North Korea and South Korea, it doesn't have to be a peace deal. | ||
| But it's unrealistic for, I think, Democrats and Republicans alike to carry the notion that the U.S. is the number one funder, I think at least as of 24-23, and with now $37 trillion in debt, can carry forward what I understand to be a preferential policy by the current administration, which seeks to actually turn its focus to the threat against us in the South China Sea. | ||
| And previous administrations, both Democrat and Republican, have talked about this, but no one has actually successfully made the pivot. | ||
| So I would like to hear the commentators discuss it more an issue of, you know, around the issue of geopolitics versus, hey, we've got one president who the left says authoritarian and certainly has broken many norms. | ||
| But leaving aside. | ||
| So Jonathan, to discuss that, what do you think the outcome of a ceasefire, a deal coming together, if there is land given up by Ukraine to Russia, if they don't go back to the original borders, if Crimea stays with Russia after the 2014 takeover, what do you think that all means? | ||
| Looking to the South China Sea for Taiwan and China's designs on Taiwan. | ||
| What does the outcome of this conflict mean for that potential future conflict? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, that's a great question. | |
| It certainly is a double-edged sword in that it could be said to embolden G and embolden Putin even for future, let's say, advances or attempts. | ||
| But nevertheless, where we're fighting a nuclear-armed great power that has shown no reluctance to spend its own population. | ||
| I mean, I'll just say briefly that I think people in the West tend to make a mistake about who Putin is. | ||
| He set up the economy on a war footing. | ||
| His oligarchic circle and he now benefit from this war. | ||
| And they don't care if the populace hates him. | ||
| They really don't. | ||
| I understand the man has something like seven or eight doubles, travels on armored train cars. | ||
| You know, it's not like here in the West where popularity can make or break rulers. | ||
| So I think we have to take a very practical approach and understand that we're no longer able to fight in two political, excuse me, in two geopolitical theaters at once if one of them is the South China Sea. | ||
| And we're flowing as many billions in aid and arms as we are to Ukraine. | ||
| It's Jonathan in Gaithersburg, Maryland, taking your phone calls. | ||
| It is coming up on 7.30 on the East Coast. | ||
| Again, this meeting, live events at the White House expected to kick off around noon Eastern time, and we'll have live coverage this meeting today with Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky and seven European leaders. | ||
| The Washington Post reporting that the U.S. is hoping that following this meeting, a trilateral meeting with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky will take place possibly this week, according to a White House official. | ||
| So look for further events this week. | ||
| It's only Monday, and we'll be covering it all here on C-SPAN. | ||
| When it comes to a trilateral meeting, that topic brought up by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham in his ex-post from late Friday after the Trump-Putin summit. | ||
| Lindsey Graham saying that if there is a trilateral meeting between President Donald Trump and President Zelensky and Putin, then I'm cautiously optimistic that this war will end well before Christmas time. | ||
| If the meeting doesn't happen, he says, I think President Trump may deliver severe consequences to Putin and those who buy his oil and gas. | ||
| And Lindsey Graham is the author of a pretty severe sanctions bill against Russia and Vladimir Putin, some 500% tariffs on Russian products, sanctions on countries that buy oil and gas and facilitate the arms industry in Russia. | ||
| It's a pretty expansive sanctions bill that he released back in the spring and that he's been pushing Donald Trump to use if necessary when it comes to Russia and Putin. | ||
| This is Martin in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Moran, how are you today? | |
| Doing well. | ||
| At 65 years old, my grandfather fought in the Battle of Volch. | ||
| My father-in-law was in Tokyo Harbor on the battleship for the surrender. | ||
| My dad built runways in London to bomb Russia in the Cold War in the 50s. | ||
| It seems like we have forgot the history of Russia and our country and China. | ||
| Right now, Putin is being held off by a small country because we supply him weapons. | ||
| If we right now got together with Europe, we could finally end the Russian problem. | ||
| We have the opportunity. | ||
| I don't know if we're going to take it. | ||
| But if we don't take it and we let Russia get bigger and stronger and China with its problems, we're going back 50, 60 years. | ||
| Martin, what does it mean in your mind to end the Russian problem? | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| What are you thinking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would put the iron dome like we gave to Israel. | |
| I would put the iron dome in Ukraine right now. | ||
| No boots. | ||
| I want no boots, American boots. | ||
| But I would support everything that we could give them to put Putin in a box. | ||
| He is not going to stop. | ||
| I don't know if the younger generation in this country understands where we came from. | ||
| This guy is not going to stop. | ||
| We need to arm Ukraine to the teeth, and they can beat this guy. | ||
| Unless I know he threatens nuclear weapons. | ||
| I know he does that. | ||
| I think, in a way, that's like Trump. | ||
| Trump threatens, but does he really go to the all extreme? | ||
| And I don't think Putin will do that. | ||
| I don't think Putin wants to know as the man that actually brought Russia down. | ||
| I mean, destroyed it. | ||
| He'd probably back off. | ||
| Martin, you don't trust the idea of security guarantees. | ||
| Article 5-like security guarantees is what we're being told is going to be on the table. | ||
| A reference to Article 5 in the NATO Charter. | ||
| Attack on one is an attack on all. | ||
| Ukraine would not become a part of NATO, but that's what is being offered. | ||
| Article 5-like security guarantees for Ukraine if Russia were to attack them again after coming to some sort of agreement here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would love to say that would happen, but I don't think until Putin is out of power, which God knows how long that'll be, we're going to have to deal with him. | |
| Just continue on. | ||
| We have to arm Ukraine. | ||
| Article 5, I'm not that intelligent about Article 5. | ||
| I don't know that much about it. | ||
| I've got to be honest with you. | ||
| But we need Europe. | ||
| Those are our ancestors. | ||
| I'm English. | ||
| A lot of us are French. | ||
| That's America. | ||
| We are from Europe. | ||
| These are our ancestors' kids that are fighting him. | ||
| We are all immigrants here, and we're fighting the same guy. | ||
| These are our ancestors, where we came from. | ||
| This is where we all came from, Europe, basically. | ||
| And they're our relatives. | ||
| And Putin just is extracting. | ||
| He's going to take the whole continent if he can. | ||
| And then China, watching him, will take Taiwan. | ||
| It's right back down to the same three, us, China, and Russia. | ||
| And we cannot, we have to stop Russia. | ||
| If we were to stop him right now, it would be over. | ||
| Then all we got is China. | ||
| And then China's on its own. | ||
| Little by little, over the generations of time, as a democracy, as a free-loving people, we have to stop Russia, then we have to stop China and turn them to a peace-loving democratic society. | ||
| And I really thank you for your time. | ||
| That's Martin in the Keystone State to the Old Dominion. | ||
| This is John, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| The way I see it, once again, Trump is having to clean up Biden's mess. | ||
| The time to have stopped this war was before it got started. | ||
| And we all know now that, well, I knew in the beginning that Biden pretty much said, oh, go ahead. | ||
| Just don't take too much. | ||
| But now, Putin's too invested in this thing. | ||
| He's invested too much blood, too much money. | ||
| He's not just going to walk away with nothing. | ||
| And it's something that we're going to have to deal with. | ||
| They're going to have to make a deal where Putin gets something. | ||
| So, I mean, it all could have been avoided, but now that's kind of too late. | ||
| Anyhow, I just wanted to say, just like the border, Trump has to fix up Biden's messes, and there's a whole long list of them. | ||
| Oh, have a good day. | ||
| That's John of Virginia to Gwen Oak, Maryland. | ||
| Richard, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Look, this is a mess. | ||
| Not only that, what do I mean by that? | ||
| One of the calls not too long ago said, yes, we should help Russia because in case China starts up in Russia, Russia is not going to go against China. | ||
| That's one thing. | ||
| The other thing, the gentleman who just got off hit the nail on the head. | ||
| He said, Russia is fighting Ukraine and with our help. | ||
| They're putting up a good battle. | ||
| They're fighting a good battle. | ||
| If Europe, like you said, the rest of the countries in the world would get together and put the money, Ukraine would win this thing. | ||
| But not only that, you have to look at the whole picture. | ||
| If Putin wins and Donald Trump gives him everything he wants, China is a green light for China to go and invade Taiwan, what they said belongs to them. | ||
| And that's what they want to do. | ||
| Americans, we got to be the dumbest race people in the world. | ||
| I mean, you know, we got all I listen to these planning all the time. | ||
| And some of the callers come up with the craziest stuff and the dumbest stuff. | ||
| We got to go. | ||
| It's a must. | ||
| And then it shows Russia and China what we'll do if you jump on one another country. | ||
| You can count on us. | ||
| And then Donald Trump no more should be in the president as me. | ||
| He don't know, you know. | ||
| And look, spending the money now, it's going to pay off in the end because we checked Russia and Putin. | ||
| And then over the years, I mean, over the couple years on your calling show, you know, they'll say, well, Putin won't stop at any if you want to, you know, probably other countries in that small country near Russia, he might want to invade. | ||
| So look at the whole picture. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| That's Richard in Maryland. | ||
| This is Pat, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Just wanted to say a couple things. | ||
| This Wipkoff guy, I do not understand how he can be running these negotiations. | ||
| He has no experience at all. | ||
| I just am shocked. | ||
| This would be like getting heart surgery from an electrician, first of all. | ||
| And then the other thing, it was all planned to start with a ceasefire, and now it's all changed. | ||
| And Putin is going to drag this out. | ||
| This negotiation will take years while he kills everybody. | ||
| And I can't believe he lets all his own kids die in the meat grinder. | ||
| Who does he care about? | ||
| That's my comment, and have a great day. | ||
| It's Pat in Florida. | ||
| We're asking you this morning, what do you want to hear? | ||
| What are you expecting from today's Donald Trump-Vlodimir Zelensky meeting? | ||
| European leaders also going to be joining that meeting as well. | ||
| And we'll see if they do a press conference and take calls, but plenty of comments on social media about what could happen today, including from members of Congress. | ||
| It was yesterday that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican, saying that President Trump will achieve peace and prosperity in spite of all the haters, the globalists, and those who want war to go on forever between Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| Peace is going to happen. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Greene, yesterday, some of our viewers this morning, Joe saying this morning that I suspect that Donald Trump is only doing this to get the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| He will immediately compare it to Obama's peace prize, which was ridiculous. | ||
| However, it doesn't matter because Putin isn't backing down. | ||
| It will take a Zhukov to remove Putin, referring to the former Russian general, I believe, from World War II. | ||
| Zelensky, Thomas Manner, says, Is Zelensky agreeing to peace is what he wants to hear? | ||
| He has a smaller army, and the bloodshed that might makes right, is what Thomas says. | ||
| And Stephen saying, no land for Russia, no NATO for Ukraine. | ||
| If Trump is the master negotiator that he claims to be, he will get this done. | ||
| And we will see what happens today. | ||
| Again, it begins live at noon Eastern today. | ||
| The image you're seeing on your screen is from Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky's last meeting in the Oval Office that ended with Vladimir Zelensky being asked to leave the White House. | ||
| That was back in February of this year. | ||
| This is their first meeting back here in Washington since then. | ||
| And we want to hear your thoughts leading into that meeting. | ||
| This is Don in California, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yeah, what I'm hoping to hear from the Zelensky-Trump meeting is a message of peace. | ||
| About the only person in this whole deal that's making any sense to me is President Trump. | ||
| You know, nobody seems to want to accept the fact that for years on this war with the Biden administration, we were flat, open-faced, lied to. | ||
| We were saying, oh, Putin's secretly in tears and about to get out of power, and the Russian economy's crashing. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| The Russian economy has grown. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It has grown with all these phony sanctions that Biden put on and all the talk about Putin is smelly and we don't want to talk to him. | ||
| Trump's trying to talk. | ||
| Trump's trying to make peace. | ||
| There are hundreds of thousands of people dying out there. | ||
| The media don't care. | ||
| Europe don't care. | ||
| Zelensky don't care. | ||
| There are hundreds of thousands of people dying in this war. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And now we're arguing over some spit of land that was disputed before the war even happened. | ||
| There were people dying out there on that spit of land that Putin's trying to get. | ||
| And I'm sick and tired of hearing that Putin wants to take over Europe. | ||
| I'm sick and tired of hearing about how we're going to have to keep giving money and fight this war to the last Ukrainian to save democracy. | ||
| The message has to be peace. | ||
| The message has to be stop killing the people. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| We've got a country, half the country of Ukraine looks like the Gaza Strip right now. | ||
| Millions of people are displaced. | ||
| Hundreds of thousands of people on both sides have died. | ||
| And we're whining about Putin getting a red carpet. | ||
| We're whining about Putin getting to ride in the car with Trump. | ||
| You know, I'm really sick of this petty, petty stuff that people are putting out. | ||
| Why don't you worry about the orphans? | ||
| Why don't you worry about the mothers whose sons have died on both sides, Russian and Ukrainian? | ||
| We need to stop this insanity. | ||
| And I would offer a ceasefire to Putin just to have a free and fair election in Ukraine so they can elect somebody who might find peace for the country because I'm sick of it. | ||
| I'm really sick of this whole mess. | ||
| That's Don in California, Walter, Cleveland, Ohio. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| Hi. | ||
| I would like to say when President Trump had Putin to fly over to our military base, Putin took films of all of those planes and stuff. | ||
| Trump showed strength that we had. | ||
| All he have to do is tell Putin that you see this military that we have, I would send it over to Ukraine if you don't back off Ukraine and stop the Biden and have some type of peace agreement. | ||
| Now, if someone would move your neighbor, move his fence, say, 10 feet on your property, what would you do? | ||
| You would let him keep it? | ||
| I mean, that don't make sense to me. | ||
| Trump had an opportunity to show strength. | ||
| And if he told Putin that he was going to send all them planes that he took pictures off when he went to the base, you know, he would back down. | ||
| And Trump would show strength. | ||
| He wanted to be a strong man, and he would have been stronger than Putin. | ||
| I'm waiting for your comments. | ||
| Anyone else? | ||
| Walter in Ohio this morning, just about 15 minutes left in this first hour. | ||
| The Washington Journal hearing from you, what do you want to hear from the Trump-Zielinsky meeting today? | ||
| The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal asking this question in their lead editorial today. | ||
| What kind of peace in Ukraine? | ||
| They write that it's encouraging that Mr. Trump invited Volodymyr Zelensky to meet at the White House on Monday and that European leaders will join them. | ||
| Maybe they can counter Mr. Putin's lies about who started the war and the security guarantees required to end it. | ||
| But the reality is that no one knows what the U.S. president will do or say. | ||
| They say the Europeans and Ukrainians aren't without some leverage here. | ||
| Mr. Trump would pay an enormous political price if he abandons Ukraine or tries to impose a deal on Mr. Putin's terms. | ||
| The president can say all he wants, that this is Joe Biden's war and not his, but like it or not, what happens next is on his watch. | ||
| A defeat for Ukraine will echo at home and across the world for the rest of Donald Trump's presidency. | ||
| The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| This is Lloyd West Virginia, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just like to say that it takes more than two people to get this thing settled. | ||
| I mean, just Putin and Trump meeting together. | ||
| That doesn't make no sense. | ||
| I mean, there's people putting pressure on Putin to do what he's doing, the old KGB committee people. | ||
| And they all got to get some kind of cabinet of each side gathered together and talk with some sense and try to get things settled. | ||
| I mean, so, Lloyd, the reporting is that White House officials are hoping that today's meeting could lead to a three-way meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, perhaps as early as later this week. | ||
| And it's not just Zelensky and Donald Trump today. | ||
| It is seven European leaders joining them as well at the White House. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But there's other people behind Putin putting pressure on him. | |
| And Just like Zelensky, he's got to have some backing with him when he goes to talk. | ||
| And Trump, he can take some of his cabinet and have a bigger meeting over it and come up with some better ideas and talk with some sense about the thing. | ||
| And besides, Ukraine causes a lot of this when they're right on the border of a communist country and didn't even build a military up. | ||
| I mean, you know, I mean, Putin, Russia figured they was either awful weak or awful stupid. | ||
| I mean, so, you know, and like someone else said some time ago, if the only way if Russia don't want to settle this is cut their supply line off, and that's going to take some more military action. | ||
| But, you know, I mean, you got a lot of, I don't know what the answer is, but if Putin wants to keep acting like this, I think he must have lost his mind or something. | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| To Lee in South Carolina, Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Lee. | |
| Yeah, what I'm saying is this is a national security issue. | ||
| It is about America's future. | ||
| Anybody that knows anything about the sea lens and commerce and the Mediterranean, they know that Russia needs that Black Sea. | ||
| And as it stands right now, Ukraine dominates the Black Sea, bottling them in. | ||
| Since the end of World War II up to today, well, excuse me, up to Putin, America's stance has been to overthrow communism and implement democracy. | ||
| And you have one chance at it right now. | ||
| You're at a point where everything can be changed. | ||
| Zelensky came in after a Russian cruelty had Ukraine, but Ukraine did have that non-proliferation agreement with America that we would protect it. | ||
| And Russia actually reneged on its part to protect it instead, trying to invade. | ||
| And again, this invasion started actually somewhere on or before Obama's watch, but him trying to resolve two wars on a credit card and not being able to truly engage, it went over onto Trump's watch, his entire watch, of which Zelensky begged him, and that's what Rudy Giuliani got in trouble for, | ||
| trying to throw the election instead of standing up for Ukraine, ending the war. | ||
| And when Biden came in, he actually put a halt to Putin's advance. | ||
| So Lee, bring me to what you're expecting today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What I'm expecting today is for a TV show. | |
| This is pure TV, nothing serious that will really change anything with Trump involved. | ||
| What did you think of the last time that Donald Trump and Vladimir Zielensky met in the Oval Office? | ||
| The blow-up that happened there and Zelensky being asked to leave in the wake of that. | ||
| What was your reaction to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was, as I said, Donald Trump's comment, this makes great TV, sums it all up. | |
| He ambushed Zelensky instead of having those meetings in private with his Secretary of State, those Intel folk and what have you, coming up with the right information and moving forward with it. | ||
| If the United States is not going to enter into, at least support Ukraine to if you take Russia, if you Russia is a nation that has fallen already and it's just standing. | ||
| Just if you put that Arndom and so forth, as some of all the callers said, then you'll find that Putin, when he realizes he cannot win, Russia will take him out of the picture. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Lee in South Carolina. | ||
| Let me bring viewers back to February of this year, that meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky in the Oval Office. | ||
| It was about 45 or 50 minutes. | ||
| Here's about the final two minutes of that meeting. | ||
| Mr. President, Mr. President, with respect, I think it's disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. | ||
| Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. | ||
| You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict. | ||
| I've never been to Ukraine. | ||
| Did you say what problems we have? | ||
| I have been to what happens is you bring people, you bring them on a propaganda tour, Mr. President. | ||
| Do you disagree that you've had problems bringing people into your military? | ||
| I have problems. | ||
| And do you think that it's respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country? | ||
| A lot of questions. | ||
| Let's start from the beginning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| First of all, during the war, everybody has problems. | ||
| Even you, but you have nice ocean and don't feel now. | ||
| But you will feel it in the future. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| You don't know that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God bless you. | |
| God bless. | ||
| You're not having a war. | ||
| Don't tell us what we're going to feel. | ||
| We're trying to solve a problem. | ||
| Don't tell us what we're going to feel. | ||
| I'm not telling you. | ||
| Because you're in no position to dictate that. | ||
| Remember this. | ||
| You're in no position to dictate what we're going to feel. | ||
| We're going to feel very good. | ||
| We're going to feel very good and very strong. | ||
| We'll feel influence. | ||
| You're right now not in a very good position. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've allowed yourself to be in a very bad position from the very beginning of the war. | |
| You're not in a good position. | ||
| You don't have the cards right now. | ||
| With us, you start having playing cards. | ||
| Right now, you don't have to be here, Mr. President. | ||
| You're playing cards. | ||
| You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. | ||
| You're gambling with World War III. | ||
| That was February 28th of this year, and now Vladimir Zelensky and Donald Trump will be meeting again in the Oval Office. | ||
| We're expecting it around lunchtime today. | ||
| Live coverage on C-SPAN of this summit begins at noon Eastern time. | ||
| And this time, Vladimir Zelensky will not be there by himself. | ||
| Seven European leaders joining him, including the head of NATO. | ||
| And that larger meeting expected to take place after a one-on-one with Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky. | ||
| We'll all watch it together today on C-SPAN. | ||
| Hope you join us. | ||
| And we've got about 10 minutes left here in this first hour of the Washington Journal as we ask you, what do you want to hear from the two leaders during today's summit? | ||
| This is John in Wisconsin Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I would like to hear more about the nuclear deal that why Ukraine gave up their nuclear armaments. | ||
| And I thought there was some kind of agreement there that we would protect Ukraine. | ||
| I wish you could comment on, I believe it was 94 or something like that. | ||
| The Budapest memorandum is what you're talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I don't hear enough on that. | |
| That was some kind of agreement. | ||
| And then, as far as Trump goes, what kind of a deal do you make with an administration every four years treaties are broken? | ||
| And it was very disgusting that how they handled Mr. Zelensky when he came to Washington, the time with Trump. | ||
| He said thank you many times to Biden and the United States for helping him. | ||
| And it was just a roughshod meeting, and it was a TV show. | ||
| Do you think today's meetings will go differently? | ||
| Or do you think, are you also expecting a TV show? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm expecting a TV show. | |
| It was a TV show when Putin came to Alaska, for that matter. | ||
| To haul out the red carpet for Putin and treat Zielinski, who was under siege, the way Trump did was just disgusting. | ||
| I'm sorry to be an American right now. | ||
| It's that bad. | ||
| That's John in Wisconsin. | ||
| You talk about the Budapest memorandum. | ||
| Voice of America did a look back 30 years later in 2024, looking back to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and those who were involved in it, the negotiations. | ||
| They noted that the then president of Ukraine, along with Russian President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Bill Clinton of the United States, along with British Prime Minister John Major at the time, signed the memorandum December 5th, 1994. | ||
| And they look back at the negotiation process and the results or lack thereof of the signing of the Budapest Memorandum. | ||
| This is Chris in Silver Spring, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Can you hear me okay? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| In my perspective, you got the old Soviet under Putin, and then you got the Zelensky and A's offer like the old Nazis. | ||
| So we're getting in the middle of that mess. | ||
| And I don't think there's a good outcome. | ||
| If we can get or remove ourselves as much as possible from the conflict, that would be good because, you know, to me, Putin was made by Yugoslavia, the breakup of Yugoslavia. | ||
| So it's always been a mess with the breakup of these territories and stuff like that. | ||
| Chris, how do we get ourselves out of this at this point? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Basically, remove a lot of our funding. | |
| I think Trump is removing our funding. | ||
| If they want weapons, the Europeans can buy them from us and they can sell them to the Ukrainians. | ||
| I mean, because like with the Yugoslavian thing, we ended up bombing the Chinese embassy. | ||
| What was in the Sarah A.M.O.? | ||
| That opened up with a whole other can of worms. | ||
| I don't think the Chinese have ever forgiven us for that. | ||
| So we have to tread carefully. | ||
| Peace prospect. | ||
| If we can get these guys to stop fighting, to talk to each other, that's about the best we can do. | ||
| But we shouldn't just go and say, well, we're going to start World War III defending Ukraine because the Ukrainians have no civil rights. | ||
| They have no human rights right now. | ||
| They're banned religion. | ||
| They don't have elections. | ||
| And the whole thing's a mess. | ||
| Is that what we really want to support? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| That's Chris in Maryland. | ||
| Sean's in North Carolina. | ||
| Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I hate to say it. | ||
| Did you see how Trump, Skinner and Grannon, red carpet, and then you got the vice president sitting up in there? | ||
| Trump is so ignorant that he can't even sit there. | ||
| He got to wait for someone. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know I was here alone. | ||
| Sean, you are still on. | ||
| Go ahead and finish your comment. | ||
| Running short on time here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And JD Vance sitting up there. | |
| Trump sitting up there, didn't know what to say. | ||
| JD Vance sitting up there. | ||
| You know, the vice president is sitting up there going to make an issue, pointing his fingers and everything. | ||
| And then here come Trump coming in. | ||
| But you didn't see he's skinning and grinning like a chess cat on Alice in Wonderland. | ||
| We got the biggest crook with the biggest pedophile and the biggest rapist in the United States running the government. | ||
| Now, how's that? | ||
| Sean in North Carolina. | ||
| This is Ron in Michigan. | ||
| Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| I think the entire mess that we're in right now would have been solved if Turkey would have not allowed Ukraine to be taken into NATO. | ||
| And that stopped the whole thing. | ||
| So that right now we're in a big mess. | ||
| And one of your comments made, one of your voices said that Turkey doesn't control the entrance to the Black Sea. | ||
| I mean, he said Ukraine controls the entrance to the Black Sea. | ||
| No, Turkey does. | ||
| Turkey controls the entrance to the Black Sea, and the Russians use that, and their ships go in there back and forth and go, and that's the big problem. | ||
| But the problem right now, I don't think there's going to be a problem. | ||
| I think Ukraine ought to get their land back. | ||
| I think the European country should have allowed Ukraine to become a part of NATO. | ||
| And they say, I don't know how long it takes to become part of NATO now. | ||
| And then move the troops into Ukraine because that'll protect the northern end of the European area. | ||
| And we wouldn't have to worry too much about it. | ||
| But right now, I just think we're going to have a lot of just mishmash back and forth, and it's not going to work out. | ||
| That would be like me giving my neighbor a half of my yard and say, well, you can keep it. | ||
| I want it back. | ||
| And then they fight back and forth. | ||
| No, this is nonsense. | ||
| Well, anyway, good luck. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Rona, Michigan, our last caller in this first hour of the Washington Journal. | ||
| Stick around, plenty more to talk about, including a little later. | ||
| We'll be joined by Adam Gelb of the Council on Criminal Justice to discuss crime trends in American cities. | ||
| But first, a deep dive into new surveillance tools that the military and other federal agencies are using to fight crime. | ||
| That conversation with Patrick Tucker, science and technology editor for Defense One. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
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This August, tune in to C-SPAN for highlights of our America 250 coverage. | |
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Defense One Science and Technology Editor Patrick Tucker joins us for a conversation about the future of government surveillance and law enforcement. | ||
| Here's his recent piece from Defense One, the headline, how Trump's D.C. Takeover Could Supercharge Surveillance. | ||
| Patrick Tucker, you write that the level of surveillance and intelligence gathering in D.C. could soon hit a level normally reserved for foreign war zones. | ||
|
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Explain. | |
| Yes, thank you for having me on. | ||
| So what we're seeing through this particular takeover, you have obviously the National Guard deployment, which is one aspect of it, but you also have the emergency declaration and the federalization of the DC police force, as well as the deployment of several different law enforcement agencies sort of commingled. | ||
| And what that does is it allows the deployment of technologies that have been used by the U.S. military in war zones. | ||
| For instance, we saw this during the last declaration of a national emergency in 2020, which happened here in DC. | ||
| The deployment, for instance, of military aircraft, Reaper drones, something that we're now seeing in LA. | ||
| And these are outfitted not only with cameras to, and often thermal sensors, capable of doing wide-scale monitoring of human movement, but also we saw the deployment of devices that are called stingrays and dirt boxes. | ||
| This is a term for a box that sits on an aircraft or can sit in a specific location. | ||
| It works like a cellular tower. | ||
| So it intercepts cellular traffic from the surrounding area, basically giving the operator a view of all the cellular activity that's going on. | ||
| So that is something that under normal conditions is not something that a law enforcement agent deploys. | ||
| There's certain guidelines against it. | ||
| There's local guidelines against it. | ||
| The Privacy Act sort of forbids it. | ||
| It is deployable under emergency or exegent circumstances. | ||
| The DHS OIG found that in 2020 it had been deployed in ways that did not meet fundamental legal criteria, but the defense for the deployment of that by DHS was the exigent situation, which is now something that we have. | ||
| But you take those incidents from 2020 and you build on them to new capabilities that have been developed over the last few years. | ||
| The big increase in the CBP DHS budget that specifically goes to new technology. | ||
| The arrival of large data sets you can purchase from data brokers that provide individual, like highly personal data that is anonymized nominally, but still speaks specifically to individuals. | ||
| And you also have, due to a March executive order from the president, a new authorization to combine and centralize this information across different agencies. | ||
| So all of those things together create an environment where large amounts of data are available at the sort of individual tactical level, joined some of it. | ||
| Like we said, there's cellular interception methods. | ||
| There is a deployment, we know, today by ICE of facial recognition technology. | ||
| And you have large databases of individual data that have been centralized that can then be pushed to the tactical edge and used there by officers at their discretion or can go to other legal entities for later use. | ||
| So the images of this National Guard deployment to Washington, D.C., it's the trucks, it's the Humvees, it's the soldiers in uniform. | ||
| If you read your story, it's not necessarily those folks that are running the system. | ||
| So all of this intelligence gathering that you're talking about, who's running it, who's operating it, how is it being coordinated? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So this would happen under the Attorney General and DHS. | ||
| The Pentagon has said that so far they haven't received specific requests for aircraft support as they had in 2020. | ||
| That could change. | ||
| The FBI has its own authority to fly aircraft that have carried, for instance, dirt boxes and stingray type equipment. | ||
| So this is coordinated under the Attorney General right now, and the ultimate authority to make a determination about a legal proceeding would be, in the case of Washington, D.C., her just based on the emergency order, which means ultimately the final authority on how any of this would be used would be the president himself. | ||
| And so what are they trying to gather here? | ||
| Donald Trump has focused on violent crime in Washington, D.C., juvenile crime. | ||
| We know that there's been a focus towards illegal immigrants in this city, homelessness. | ||
| What are these technologies have to do with solving those problems? | ||
|
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That's a very good question. | |
| Through the combination of the now, the data sources that are now available on an individual level, for instance, to ICE personnel, we know that they also include, for instance, because of a partnership with the U.S. Postal Service Inspector. | ||
| This is different from your postal person that gives you your mail. | ||
| The inspector that works under the post office, you have, can take photographs of individual packages, correlate that, for instance, to the anonymous consumer ID number that you have on your phone. | ||
| Like we all have this number that is useful for micro-targeting ads to us that reveals location. | ||
| That coupled with close-circuit surveillance camera footage that can confirm that, plus aerial footage, if necessary, reveals location. | ||
| It can reveal networking. | ||
| For instance, we know that there is a DHS contract for network analysis. | ||
| So who you associate with? | ||
| What further web extends from that association? | ||
| And all of that can be used potentially for finding an individual, but also finding who they know and establishing an understanding of their network, of their pattern of life, potentially, depending on if they're in the vicinity of one of these dirt boxes, their communications. | ||
| And that can be used to potentially create a case for arguing for a deportation order or some sort of prosecution for a criminal infraction that would otherwise be invisible. | ||
| You touched on this a little bit in your first comments, but a viewer might be asking, is all of this legal? | ||
| What about the Fourth Amendment right against illegal searches and searches and seizures, unreasonable searches and seizures is the word. | ||
|
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Right, we are protected by the Constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures. | |
| The nature of the emergency declaration makes all of this deployable in the short term. | ||
| And yet at the same time, there has been legal challenges. | ||
| In Los Angeles, for instance, there were legal challenges to the deployment of some of these technologies. | ||
| We also know that local ordinances, which are now suspended in Washington, D.C., prohibit the use, for instance, of facial recognition technology, but this is widely deployed by ICE. | ||
| So is it legal? | ||
| The D.C. City Council would say, no, you can't use facial recognition here, but the nature of the emergency declaration creates a kind of legal loophole. | ||
| So I think you're going to see a lot of legal challenges to the way this stuff has been deployed now. | ||
| But in terms of finding a court order to issue a stay or preventing it from its use right now, that's something that right now, as far as we can tell, especially within the confines of the D.C. with the emergency declaration, special status of D.C., meets a legal criteria for its wide use right now. | ||
| Does this all just go away in a couple days? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| No, no, no. | ||
| Depending on how long the emergency declaration lasts, then the Federalized Police Force new consortium could exist for as long as that lasts. | ||
| But the March 20th executive order that basically removes barriers for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to draw data from each other, that remains an executive order. | ||
| And there's nothing about that that, you know, in theory is particularly strange. | ||
| You do want your intelligence and your federal entities to be able to coordinate better. | ||
| You want them to be effective. | ||
| These are public institutions. | ||
| You want them to effectively meet their mission. | ||
| But it's not going away. | ||
| What has changed is the presence of really important oversight and accountability functions. | ||
| This is something that local ordinances in particular have always wanted to stay a big say in, particularly when it comes to the deployment of artificial intelligence. | ||
| We saw as part of the debate during the Big Beautiful Bill, there was massive bipartisan in the Senate refusal toward a provision that would have prevented local jurisdictions, states, and cities from regulating AI on their own. | ||
| Under the recent AI Act from the President, that's been basically removed. | ||
| So local jurisdictions no longer have, effectively, in terms of funding, they risk losing funding if they attempt to employ regulations specifically around AI. | ||
| They risk losing funding. | ||
| And so an additional oversight or accountability mechanism for the deployment of this stuff is now gone. | ||
| Government surveillance technology and law enforcement is our topic. | ||
| Patrick Tucker is our guest of Defense One, Technology and Science Editor, taking your phone calls, as usual, on phone lines for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. | ||
| 202748-8001 for Republicans. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| You write about this for a living. | ||
| What keeps you up at night when it comes to AI and surveillance? | ||
|
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Yeah, that's a very good question. | |
| I think that what keeps me most sort of concerned and that I think that most Americans might want to think about and look at a little bit is the way this same phenomenon, the broad spread of different technologies like closed cameras, et cetera, that can track human movement, the broad spread of personal digital data that we all create all the time through our daily digital interactions, the ability to associate all of that together. | ||
| Thinking about all of that and what it enables in the context of the way, for instance, China and Russia use those same technologies in a closed system to essentially create a system of political coercion and intimidation at the micro scale. | ||
| So imagine the way when you interact with your phone, you're shown ads that are sort of relevant to your activity, to your behavior. | ||
| Imagine a system where instead you are the subject of political coercion or intimidation. | ||
| Imagine a sort of social credit system extending beyond China and becoming a model for the rest of the world, including the United States. | ||
| So without proper checks, without accountability, without personal and public interaction with bodies to govern this, you have a situation where you could see a transition to a much more autocratic state where dissent, | ||
| where political protest can be perceived before it can even happen, where essentially it becomes impossible because attempting to create a political movement to challenge authority immediately exposes you at its earliest steps to intimidation or persecution. | ||
| And I should point out too that right now we're having a conversation about the use of this technology in the context of Donald Trump in the United States, but European countries, the European Union and the UK, are also looking at sort of provisions and new laws that would have a kind of similar effect such as a mandate to register online when you use online services. | ||
| So basically destroying anonymity as we understand it on the internet. | ||
| So this is a broad trend that is happening in much of the Western world. | ||
| And when you look to the way this has happened, what this has enabled in the context of, for instance, China and Russia, then I think that it's incredibly spooky and something that we as a nation should have a larger conversation about. | ||
| Andy writes in via X this morning as we're having this conversation. | ||
| How much is it costing the federal government to deploy these troops and all these different technologies? | ||
| And wouldn't it be a more permanent fix to just hire more DC law enforcement personnel? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that's a very good question. | |
| So in terms of the costs of these technologies particularly, that's sort of hard to quantify directly relevant to the costs of this operation. | ||
| But we do know the expanded DHS, CBP, ICE budgets, which allow for a sort of permanent acquisition of this stuff was like $630 billion. | ||
| It's a huge amount of money that just goes to like science technology and software. | ||
| So these things sort of stick around. | ||
| And also, there is that relationship between the development of these things in a military context, and they do perform important functions in a military context. | ||
| If you're going to conduct an operation in the Middle East or in Africa where you're looking for perhaps a particular insurgent or a terrorist or someone that is targeting the United States or U.S. troops, you want to be able to establish pattern of life and do this stuff. | ||
| It helps save people's lives. | ||
| The transference of that to law enforcement or intelligence entities, that's something that traditionally has had more oversight. | ||
| There are rules that govern it. | ||
| And certainly, there are a lot of rules that govern, for instance, the transfer of like an MRAP to a local police department. | ||
| This stuff is very different. | ||
| And so in terms of the cost, I think that the argument on the other side is that what this does is enable police departments and intelligence entities to operate much more effectively. | ||
| But yes, if you look at, for instance, that increased in the Big Beautiful bill, the increase in budget for DHS, CBP, and ICE specifically, you get a sense of how much this costs and will cost on a sort of continual basis. | ||
| The numbers are probably going up. | ||
| So that was like $633 billion for new ST for ICE, CBP, and DHS. | ||
| Priscilla, out of New York, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Thanks for calling. | ||
| You're on with Patrick Tucker. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello. | |
| Go ahead, Priscilla. | ||
| It's easier if you turn down your television and just speak through your phone. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| So my question is: I want to know: Donald Trump is deploying all of these troops to all red states. | ||
| I have did a study and I have seen that the top 10 states or cities with crime, the top nine, are red states. | ||
| Mike Johnson of his city is definitely in there. | ||
| Baltimore is 10. | ||
| How come there are no troops anywhere in any red state? | ||
| How come all the troops are all in blue states? | ||
| It's obvious that this is just a ploy. | ||
| And Priscilla, we just note, and I'll let Patrick Tucker respond, but Adam Gelb of the Council on Criminal Justice studies urban crime rates for a living, and he's actually going to be joining us at 9:15 this morning. | ||
| We're going to talk through crime rates in various cities and states. | ||
| So you might want to tune in for that one. | ||
| But go ahead, Patrick Tucker. | ||
|
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Yeah, I would say that there is, I think, a lot of people that are questioning the premise, for instance, of this emergency declaration for Washington, D.C. on the basis of fighting crime, criminal activity. | |
| Crime in Washington is at a 30-year low. | ||
| There was an incident in July where an MPPD officer was suspended, claiming that MPD was deliberately manipulating crime records, and yet records from the FBI back up that claim, and that's independent because they're looking at a broad trend around the country of big cities and declining crime rates. | ||
| Yes, to your point, there are, on a per capita basis, other cities, cities in red states that have higher violent crime numbers. | ||
| The numbers in D.C. are not, do not represent a major, either an increase or, and it's not within the number of cities that are experiencing the most crime. | ||
| So if you also look at Los Angeles, part of the reason this is to enable ICE operations, which is part of the reason why ICE, Los Angeles, was selected as a place. | ||
| It is a kind of central point for a lot of immigration activity in the United States. | ||
| But Washington, D.C. specifically lends itself to this sort of experimentation because of its special status and as being neither a state nor a city per se within a state. | ||
| It has a representative, but it doesn't have representation that can hold to account the White House. | ||
| It essentially is a very easy place to federalize because of the sort of strange mesh of different authorities that exist here and the role that the federal government plays. | ||
| So that's another part of the reason that it's happening here. | ||
| And I think that you could also say that given the deployment of the National Guard and the emergency declaration in 2020, which arose specifically around protest activity, that suggests that there is within the confines of D.C. an opportunity to pre-deploy forces in anticipation of large-scale protest activity. | ||
| And that might be a factor as well, though he hasn't said that explicitly. | ||
| You understand when you walk around D.C. the number of people that are engaged in protests all the time. | ||
| And so I think that those two phenomena together lend to a justification or a plausible understanding of why this is happening here. | ||
| Dean in Hazard, Kentucky, wants us to go back to specifically AI here. | ||
| So he asks, can your guests just explain how AI can help in the future making streets safer? | ||
| And does he think AI is a good idea or not in this context? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, is AI a good idea? | |
| It's sort of like asking, is the sun a good idea or the wind? | ||
| This is going to be a part of your life for the rest of it and mine and everyone else's. | ||
| And the thing about AI is that you have to, I think most people already have a kind of vision of it in their head that perhaps comports to something from Hollywood or something from their past in terms of a malevolent force, et cetera. | ||
| Think of this as a tool. | ||
| The tool lets you do a few things. | ||
| It helps you to scale up a process much faster. | ||
| So if you take something that's kind of mundane for people to do, that takes a lot of time, what AI allows you to do is do that much more effectively. | ||
| In the context of combat and U.S. military operations abroad, a program called MAVEN has been incredibly effective in bringing down the amount of time that it takes for, for instance, an analyst who's watching drone footage to make sense of that footage. | ||
| So you don't have to have an analyst watching hours and hours of drone footage a day. | ||
| And AI does that for you and then gives you a tip when you're seeing something. | ||
| So it really depends on the amount of oversight that is employed, whether there is an ethical framework and what accountability the operator has to that ethical framework. | ||
| It absolutely can do everything that we're just talking about here. | ||
| If you want to, for instance, vet the number of people that are seeking entry into the country for potential criminal history, then you can do that using AI in a way that shouldn't infringe on civil liberties. | ||
| If you want to, for instance, find someone who has committed a crime, that is now much easier when you can collate all of this data together, potentially predict patterns of movement, et cetera. | ||
| So I would say that it is a tool. | ||
| You want federal and you want your local authorities to have tools at their disposal because they're public institutions. | ||
| You want them to operate more effectively. | ||
| What matters is the framework and the ethical accountability around deployment. | ||
| And that's the thing that I would start asking, because that's what's going to enable these things to be used by public institutions at the local or the federal level in a way that comports with the public interest. | ||
| You talked about rulemaking for cities and states when it comes to AI and that discussion around the One Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| Just remind us where Congress is on this. | ||
| Are they up to date on the rules of the road here as we go forward? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| In terms of rules of road, there are not really them that exist. | ||
| The Biden administration put in place some ethical guidelines as part of an executive order to kind of govern the development of AI in the United States broadly. | ||
| Those were rescinded by Donald Trump when he very first came into office. | ||
| They saw it as burdensome. | ||
| There was, as I mentioned, a debate during the Big Beautiful Bill legislation where they were going to pass the Big Beautiful Bill. | ||
| There was a provision that was entered that was voted down by almost like 99% of the Senate. | ||
| And that provision would have made it illegal for local for states and cities to regulate AI. | ||
| And overwhelmingly, across partisan lines, Congress and the Senate were against not allowing states and cities to regulate AI on their own. | ||
| But the effect of the most recent executive order on AI kind of steals potential grant and seed money away from cities and states and jurisdictions if they try to do that. | ||
| So it's a workaround to that veto vote on that provision. | ||
| Frank in Maryland wants to go to cell phones. | ||
| Please confirm that our cell phones are not considered to be secure devices by the Supreme Court. | ||
| What has the Supreme Court said about cell phones and privacy and security? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, you're, so I'm not exactly sure. | |
| I know that you're, just in terms of a practical matter, I don't consider my phone to be incredibly secure. | ||
| And nobody should. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, so like encrypted messaging, your private information that is encrypted, that is, depending on where you are, if you're at the border, if you're at a U.S. port of entry, then that is something that you must relinquish when asked by a border security official. | ||
| A police officer can ask you for your phone. | ||
| And depending on the situation, you might relinquish it through force or you can give it to them. | ||
| Depending on your security settings, they might be able to bypass that and see your messages. | ||
| They can get a warrant or court order. | ||
| So all of the things that you create are accessible at least by warrant through your digital devices. | ||
| But your private communications that speak specifically to you, again, I'm not exactly sure what the Supreme Court says. | ||
| I just know that I don't consider my phone to be the ultimate secure device. | ||
| And I think it's probably better off that more people don't consider it to be that. | ||
| There's no amount of privacy and security that we now have that prohibits with 100% certainty anybody from looking at your phone. | ||
| And law enforcement has the best tools to do that. | ||
| And they operate under a variety of authorities now and an increasing amount of unilateral authority. | ||
| I think I read this in your story that was the lead-in to this discussion. | ||
| Guidance to police officers when it comes to civilians using their phones to tape, to record police officers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what sort of guidance they're being given on that? | ||
| And do they consider that a threat? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, there has been guidance that has been issued that suggests that the activity of recording ICE officers is a potential precursor to violence. | |
| That is guidance that has gone out. | ||
| So it's seen as threatening, potentially threatening behavior. | ||
| And you also have anecdotally a lot of footage that shows up now on social media of ICE officers then recording the recorders. | ||
| So it's kind of an absurdity when you look at it from the perspective of Beckett, you know, like people on the street surrounded by cameras recording ICE officers and then ICE officers recording them back and everyone shouting at each other. | ||
| But we also know that ICE has purchased, has a contract with various facial recognition companies to, and as a federal agency, they're allowed to do that. | ||
| Local rules apply to local police use of facial recognition and many jurisdictions are not in favor of it. | ||
| But as a federal entity, ICE can have facial recognition running on all these phones, enter your face into a database. | ||
| They've recently, in the last week, entered into a contract for iris recognition, which is actually more accurate and cuts down on the number of false positives. | ||
| And it is usable at like 10 feet away. | ||
| So yes, the amount of tools that are at the disposal of an individual agent has certainly gone up. | ||
| And It reduces the amount of anonymity that you have. | ||
| And much of the activity that we consider to be a First Amendment right, protest activity, recording, can be classified as potentially threatening, entered into a database. | ||
| And while prosecution for recording might fall under First, you can't because of First Amendment protections, there's a chance that there's something else in your activity that can be used to coerce you. | ||
| And we've also seen in LA a situation where several protesters were arrested and brought up on charges that were then dismissed as false. | ||
| So in that case, it's a Guardian story. | ||
| ICE officers were not honest about what the activity that we saw that they engaged with in different protests. | ||
| Like they accused protesters of things like resisting or assault or sort of scuffling with police officers or impeding in different ways. | ||
| And the actual camera footage, which was available to the public, showed that that was not true. | ||
| So that's another thing to keep in mind here, I think, when we think about all of this stuff. | ||
| Take, for instance, body cameras. | ||
| Where that body cam footage goes, that varies depending on local ordinances. | ||
| Does your city, does your state have a police oversight council? | ||
| Does a civilian board get to review that footage or does it go directly to the police department and then the police department relinquishes it upon what federal request or based on a criminal proceeding? | ||
| Or do they not have to relinquish it at all? | ||
| These are the sorts of things that make the difference between having charges thrown out that have been proven to be false or perhaps having them stick. | ||
| I know we're a little bit past our time. | ||
| Do you need to run? | ||
| Because I've got plenty of questions here. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no, no, I'm running. | |
| People are using their technology to send in questions. | ||
| So, Kristen, Portland, Maine, will we ever know how much personal information Doge has on us? | ||
| I understand they acquired a lot, so much so that I've been nervous about some of my anti-Trump administration posts, is what she writes in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I think that that is a cause for nervousness. | |
| I think this is something that people should write to their elected representatives about requesting an audit. | ||
| I think that you want a full, I think that it's probably in the public interest to have a full forensic audit of all of the activities that were executed by Doge workers, employees, personnel when they went to various agencies. | ||
| In some cases, in spite of local guidelines for how to securely transfer information, just sort of sticking flash drives into, you know, according to reports, just sticking flash drives into different PCs, uploading information, and then centralizing it somewhere else. | ||
| And again, the centralization of data does allow for certain operations to proceed much faster, but we don't understand yet at this time exactly how much of our personal information. | ||
| We know that there's social security information. | ||
| We know that ICE, for instance, now has access to Medicaid data and health data that is also collected by the federal government. | ||
| So until there is some large-scale audit or investigation, we're not going to know the exposure of that data. | ||
| And we're also not going to know the security parameters of where it is now or how it was taken and whether that created an additional vulnerability to potential foreign cyber intrusion. | ||
| As we know, it has happened in the case of a couple of instances where Doge interacted with an agency and then all of a sudden material that was federal, like data that was federal, was we saw intrusion attempts from the Russian government almost as soon as there was unauthorized access of that data, that agency. | ||
| Since you don't need to run, I know you often write about science and technology on the battlefield and have done a lot when it comes to the war in Ukraine and drone technology and new technologies emerging. | ||
| Just what's the most interesting thing development in your mind? | ||
| What are you looking at right now on that front? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, yeah, the Ukrainian war, which I've been covering since 2014, is a really, I think, fantastic window into the future of warfare in general, and particularly how quickly two opposing forces are creating new technologies on the battlefield. | |
| That's probably the most important thing. | ||
| So as one tactic that the Russians are using against the Ukrainians, for instance, drones that are connected by fiber optic cable, like long lines of fiber optic cable, because then they're invulnerable to electromagnetic jamming. | ||
| So the entire field is characterized by massive electromagnetic warfare activity. | ||
| So the signals that you would use as an operator to steer a drone towards its target, collect the feed, all of that is under constant jamming. | ||
| And you're seeing the two sides sort of fire things at each other in terms of drones particularly, but also really a large variety of other effects. | ||
| See how they fail and then go back and retool them almost immediately. | ||
| This is the sort of thing that takes a defense contractor working under a program of record because of the way U.S. Defense Department or the services acquire things. | ||
| It takes them like five years to do an update like this. | ||
| You're seeing contractors working with Ukrainians and Ukrainians themselves do what takes a defense contractor five years almost overnight. | ||
| And that is creating a massive acceleration for things like, for instance, battlefield autonomy, the amount of intelligence you can put on a specific platform, on a specific drone, not open AI connected to large enterprise cloud services, on the thing itself and what you can allow that to do. | ||
| That's also accelerating as a result of this cat and mouse sort of competition for advantage in areas where sometimes it's a matter of advantage of miles or feet. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| I know you do have to run. | ||
| Let me try to get Andrea. | ||
| She's waiting in Connecticut and then we'll let you go and start your Monday. | ||
| Andrea, Independent, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I have a question. | |
| I know you were talking about surveillance and how people are very scared now that ICE is surveilling everything. | ||
| But what happened with the Biden administration? | ||
| We, as independents and Republicans, were scared to death. | ||
| We weren't allowed to put anything on Facebook. | ||
| We'd be put in Facebook jail if we mentioned anything about COVID or Biden or how we felt. | ||
| As a Christian, I was almost investigated per my church because they wanted to know how much money I was donating. | ||
| Why is that the government during the Democrats' time? | ||
| Why is it their business what I donate to any charity that has to do with Christianity? | ||
| This is how I felt. | ||
| I was being surveilled, and I wasn't even doing anything as a middle-aged woman. | ||
| My friends were scared to death to put any signs out for Trump. | ||
| We were being investigated as Republicans. | ||
| I think you forget that. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Patrick Tucker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think that what you're perceiving is a kind of cultural atmosphere that you maybe experienced when you interacted with certain social media companies and also broad, voluntarily adopted guidelines for around the issue of COVID versus the trend that you're speaking of and the fact that you felt perceived that you felt overly scrutinized and that that scrutiny that you were perceiving on the sort of emotional level lent. | |
| It's a. | ||
| to a feeling of vulnerability and sort of self-arrest. | ||
| And there is no evidence to suggest that the Biden administration was deploying surveillance at this scale that we're now seeing in DC for the sake of political persecution, intimidation. | ||
| But I think you should keep your energy because here's the thing. | ||
| If you're watching what's sort of happening now in places like DC, and for reasons that are your own, you're broadly in favor of it, consider exactly the caller's point, that at some point there will be a change in government. | ||
| And the same capabilities that are now existent and used by an executive that you voted for, that you favor, will fall to a different president. | ||
| And the thing that is pretty consistent across administrations is that they tend not to relinquish power and authorities that are granted to them by their predecessor. | ||
| It doesn't really work like that. | ||
| So if this is something that, if you're speaking from a point of view, you're remembering how you felt at that time, take that feeling and apply that lens to what's happening now. | ||
| And then think about how you and perhaps other people in your environment, other people that agree with you politically, how this is an issue that affected you and now affects a broader swath of Americans. | ||
| And what is the public interest and the individual liberty interest in doing something about it, creating public accountability at the local, state, and national level. | ||
| The piece in Defense One, if you want to read it, how Trump's DC Takeover Could Supercharge Surveillance. | ||
| Patrick Tucker is the author. | ||
| DefenseOne.com is where you can go to read it, a fascinating read. | ||
| Always appreciate you coming by. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, thank you. | |
| Thanks, everybody. | ||
| Coming up in about 30 minutes or so, we will be joined by Adam Gelb of the Council on Criminal Justice. | ||
| We're going to talk about urban crime rates, juvenile crime statistics on that front. | ||
| Stick around for that conversation. | ||
| But until then, it's our open forum. | ||
| Any public policy, any political issue you want to talk about, now's the time. | ||
| Especially want to hear from you about today's meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky. | ||
| Phone numbers are on your screen. | ||
| You can go ahead and start calling in now, and we will get to those calls right after the break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Past president. | |
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a kangaroo clause. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity, ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Join Political Playbook Chief Correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns as host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue to find common ground. | ||
| ceasefire this fall on the network that doesn't take sides only on c-span have been watching c-span washington journal for over 10 years now This is a great format that C-SPAN offers. | ||
| You're doing a great job. | ||
| I enjoy hearing everybody's opinion. | ||
| I'm a huge C-SPAN fan. | ||
| I listen every morning on the way to work. | ||
| I think C-SPAN should be required viewing for all three branches of government. | ||
| First of all, if you say hello, C-SPAN, and how you'll cover these hearings. | ||
| Thank you, everyone at C-SPAN, for allowing this interaction with everyday citizens. | ||
| It's an amazing show to get real opinions from real people. | ||
| Appreciate you guys' non-biased coverage. | ||
| I love politics, and I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices. | ||
| You and C-SPAN show the truth. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Here's where we are today in Washington. | ||
| A major focus today on the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. | ||
| President Trump is meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House. | ||
| We're expecting that to happen around lunchtime. | ||
| Also joining the two leaders are seven leaders from European nations and the NATO Secretary General Mark Rudy Ruda is joining them as well. | ||
| And our coverage begins at noon Eastern here on C-SPAN. | ||
| You can watch throughout the afternoon. | ||
| We're expecting perhaps a press conference later in the late afternoon. | ||
| We're not quite sure how long this will go today, but we'll all find out together on C-SPAN. | ||
| For now, it's our open forum. | ||
| You can talk about today's meeting or any public policy issue that you want to discuss. | ||
| 202-748-8001 for Republicans to call in. | ||
| Democrats, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| As you're calling in, one of those European leaders, the UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer, was flying into Washington and recording a video that he posted on his ex page about what he's expecting today. | ||
| His tweet saying, I'm on my way to DC to meet the President and Vlodimir Zelensky and other leaders, and here's why. | ||
| This war in Ukraine has been going on a really long time now, three plus years. | ||
| It's hugely impacted the Ukrainians who've suffered hugely, but it's also impacted Europe. | ||
| It's impacted every single family and community in the United Kingdom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so everybody wants it to end, not least the Ukrainians. | |
| But we've got to get this right. | ||
| We've got to make sure there is peace, that it is lasting peace, and that it is fair and that it is just. | ||
| And that's why I'm traveling to Washington with other European leaders to discuss this face to face with President Trump and President Zelensky, because it's in everyone's interests. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's in the UK's interests that we get. | |
| Keir Starmer posting that on his social media. | ||
| Many of those who are meeting today posting their thoughts on social media ahead of their various meetings. | ||
| It was President Donald Trump last night on his Truth Social page that laid down this marker when it comes to his meeting with Vlodymir Zelensky. | ||
| President Zelensky of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, he wrote, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight. | ||
| Remember how it started? | ||
| No getting back the Obama-given Crimea 12 years ago without a shot being fired. | ||
| And in all capital letters, no going into NATO by Ukraine. | ||
| Some things never change. | ||
| President Trump, that was yesterday, just after 9 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| They're set to meet today just after noon, and our coverage begins at noon here on C-SPAN. | ||
| This is Tony in North Carolina, Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, hi, good morning. | |
| I'm trying to find out some more information about the Afghan translators that are being deported. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're being detained by ICE. | |
| There's been some kind of an immigration status change. | ||
| It's on the internet, but I haven't seen it other than one story on CBS. | ||
| These guys saved our military personnel, put their lives on the line. | ||
| And I don't know how this could have gone backwards like this. | ||
| I'm sure viewers would contact their representatives in the White House, anybody else they can to try to get this out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can't have people buying for your country and then doing the best they can to try to make things better, and then once you get them in the country, tell them that things have changed and they have to go back. | |
| And that's about it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Tony in the Tar Hill State. | ||
| This is Mariah, Houston, Texas. | ||
| Democrat. | ||
| Mariah, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes. | ||
| I'm calling regarding the meeting today between Kelvinsky, Donald Trump, and the other people coming in for the meeting. | ||
| I just want to say I am 71 years old. | ||
| I have experienced a lot of things here in the United States through my childhood and my adulthood. | ||
| And I'm almost, I don't know what country I'm living in anymore. | ||
| This is not the America that I used to be proud of. | ||
| It has become so political, so partisan. | ||
| If a Democrat says something, it's wrong. | ||
| If a Republican says something, it's wrong. | ||
| I voted Democrat all my life. | ||
| I probably should be an independent because I have, I take both sides. | ||
| Republicans have some good issues. | ||
| Democrats have some good issues. | ||
| But we used to be able to sit down and talk. | ||
| Now, politicians can't talk to each other. | ||
| People can't talk to each other. | ||
| I'm almost afraid of what's going to happen today at the White House. | ||
| I was ashamed of the way Selvinsky was treated in February. | ||
| I felt it was a setup that they attacked being that, and President Trump attacked Selvinsky, but they have no words for Putin. | ||
| I don't know how we as Americans can be so accepting of everything that's going on with our country right now. | ||
| Not just crime. | ||
| There is no Congress. | ||
| There's supposed to be three distinct bodies of government. | ||
| Where has Congress gone? | ||
| That's Maria in Texas. | ||
| In terms of the meeting today, some details emerging, an expectation of security guarantees, Article 5-like security guarantees, referring to the NATO Article 5. | ||
| That was what Steve Wickoff said on Fox News Sunday yesterday, the special envoy for President Trump speaking on the Sunday shows, this Steve Wickoff from yesterday. | ||
| So let's talk about the security guarantees because you mentioned those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does that mean in practicality? | |
| What is the U.S. willing to commit to that effort to give Ukraine the assurances it needs to come to the table? | ||
| It means that the United States is potentially prepared to be able to give Article 5 security guarantees, but not from NATO, directly from the United States and other European countries. | ||
| That is big. | ||
| I mean, really big. | ||
| Does it mean boots on the ground? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does it mean? | |
| But logistically. | ||
| I think part of the discussion that we're going to have on Monday throughout the day, because there's going to be breakout sessions there, is exactly the specifics of what the Ukrainians feel that they need. | ||
| Because remember, as mediators, we were at this summit to advance the Ukrainian position, and we did that. | ||
| And we did it successfully. | ||
| Now it's for us to drill down on the granular details of exactly what the Ukrainians need to give them a sense of security in the future. | ||
| And by the way, what the Europeans need as well. | ||
| And we were fully committed to be there for that purpose. | ||
| Steve Witkoff yesterday, also yesterday, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ahead of today's meetings. | ||
| This is some of what President Zelensky had to say about his expectations for today. | ||
| First, we have to stop the killings. | ||
| Putin has many demands, but we do not know all of them. | ||
| And if there are really as many as we heard, then it will take time to go through them all. | ||
| It's impossible to do this under the pressure of weapons. | ||
| So it's necessary to ceasefire and work quickly on a final deal. | ||
| We'll talk about it in Washington. | ||
| Putin does not want to stop the killing, but he must do it. | ||
| Second, we need real negotiations, which means they can start where the front line is now. | ||
| The contact line is the best line for talking, and Europeans support this. | ||
| And we thank everyone. | ||
| Russia is still unsuccessful in Donetsk region. | ||
| Putin has been unable to take it for 12 years. | ||
| And the constitution of Ukraine makes it impossible, impossible to give up territory or trade land. | ||
| Since the territorial issue is so important, it should be discussed only by the leaders of Ukraine and Russia at the trilateral Ukraine, United States, Russia. | ||
| So far, Russia gives no sign that trilateral will happen. | ||
| And if Russia refuses, then new sanctions must follow. | ||
| This word, it's important that America agrees to work with Europe to provide security guarantees for Ukraine. | ||
| And we are very thankful to the United States and to the President for such a signal. | ||
| Vlodomir Zelensky, that was yesterday. | ||
| He's going to be here in Washington, D.C. today, expected to arrive at the White House around lunchtime. | ||
| And our coverage of the events at the White House today began at noon Eastern time. | ||
| And they will see if they have a joint press conference and how much they come out and talk to the press. | ||
| We'll all find out together today. | ||
| Also, today, just before our coverage begins, 11 a.m. Eastern Time, we will take you to a conference hosted by Foreign Policy Magazine, a discussion on the initial results of the Trump-Putin summit from Friday. | ||
| Sure to be plenty of discussion and speculation about what's going to happen today as well at that discussion by Foreign Policy Magazine. | ||
| Live coverage, 11 a.m. Eastern here on C-SPAN, C-SPAN.org, and the free C-SPAN Now mobile app. | ||
| So stay with us throughout the day and with us here on the Washington Journal for another hour and 10 minutes. | ||
| We're in open forum right now. | ||
| This is Carmine in New Rochelle, New York. | ||
| Republican, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Regarding the summit in Alaska, the world held its breath, as I did. | ||
| And after it was over and they gave their speeches, I don't think people are reporting that Putin did want to ceasefire. | ||
| He wants to cease fire against the crippling sanctions that President Trump was about to impose on his country. | ||
| They're not gonna happen. | ||
| After all is said and done, the only person that came out of this with anything was Vladimir Putin. | ||
| Sad to say, I do not trust my government and what they say you would do. | ||
| And I thank you for listening. | ||
| Here's USA Today White House Bureau Chief Susan Page today on the results of that meeting in Alaska. | ||
| This is what she writes in her column. | ||
| There's no wonder why Putin looks so pleased in Alaska. | ||
| The summit was a windfall for him, ending his isolation from the West since the Ukrainian invasion with a red carpet welcome and a rare ride in the back seat of the armored presidential limousine nicknamed the Beast. | ||
| The Russian leader could be seen through the window talking and laughing with the president. | ||
| He looked delighted to be back on U.S. soil for the first time in a decade. | ||
| Susan Page, if we read her column today, this is CJ Arlington, Virginia, Democrat. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, John. | |
| I don't know how Americans, patriotic Americans, can feel like our president is doing patriotic things for us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, Putin has a track record. | |
| And actually, President Trump has a track record. | ||
| I mean, you know, we all have a track record. | ||
| But this is beyond the pale to rehabilitate his, meaning Putin, to rehabilitate his, you know, status as like sort of an equal. | ||
| It's, you know, you know, I none of us probably were born in 1939, but this is like a singular Neville Chamberlain type movement where you just give signals this way. | ||
| I just want peace. | ||
| Well, everybody just wants peace. | ||
| But I want peace on my terms. | ||
| And the U.S. has been really bad at judging by what a just peace is. | ||
| And I'm so embarrassed as an American to see my president literally clapping like a schoolgirl, cheerleader in middle school, say, as a war criminal was walking to him. | ||
| CJ, we'll take the point that CJ in Arlington, Virginia. | ||
| Keep calling in and happy to hear your thoughts, your expectations ahead of today's meeting between President Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. | ||
| As you're calling in, we're going to take you to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where time politics reporter Nick Popely joins us. | ||
| Nick Popley. | ||
| Set the stage today at the White House. | ||
| What more have you been able to find out about timing and sort of sequence of events here for this series of meetings for the President today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, good morning, John. | |
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| It's certainly shaping up to be a very consequential day here at the White House. | ||
| As we continue to follow the fallout from President Trump's summit in Alaska with his Russian counterpart, we know that President Trump has sort of backed down from his earlier demand for a ceasefire and is now pushing for a final peace deal in order to end the war between Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| And this is something that has really raised eyebrows in Europe and particularly amongst Zelensky and his officials in Ukraine who are visiting the White House today, who will be speaking with the President at around one o'clock. | ||
| And then the President will be meeting with the European leaders who are here to sort of give support for Putin, for Zelensky. | ||
| And they hope to find out more information from the President about what he really wants out of this and how he plans to end the war in Ukraine. | ||
| He's floated this peace agreement, so the question is now, what does that really entail? | ||
| Does it involve giving up territory? | ||
| Does it involve security guarantees for Ukraine? | ||
| And if so, what would those security guarantees look like in practice? | ||
| Past security guarantees have not worked as well as Ukraine would have hoped. | ||
| So the vision, the hope today is that Ukraine can get some answers and that President Trump can explain his position a little bit more clearly. | ||
| And so there'll be a lot of eyes on how that meeting goes. | ||
| The leaders of those countries may speak with the press afterwards. | ||
| And so it'll be very interesting to see what they have to say and the tone coming out of that meeting, especially after President Trump was in Alaska and met with President Putin and did not take questions from reporters afterwards. | ||
| Certainly all eyes on the White House, which is probably why it sounds like they're cutting the grass there this morning to make sure everything looks ship shape ahead of these meetings. | ||
| For the White House folks that you've been talking to, how much concern are you hearing about a potential repeat of the sequence events that happened in February when Vladimir Zelensky was in that infamous Oval Office meeting and it ended with him being asked to leave the White House? | ||
| Is there concern about a repeat of that happening? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think there's a whole lot of concern about that happening and I think that's part of the reason why the European presidents are coming here. | |
| So President Starmer will be here, Macron will be here and I think they're largely here to put the pressure on the President of the United States and to show their support for President Zelensky and so I think the goal for them being here is to really ensure that that type of February meeting where it devolved into a shouting match does not occur this time. | ||
| And so I don't think the White House is preparing for something like that to happen, but you never know. | ||
| Are you and your fellow colleagues going to be able to ask questions of Vladimir Zelensky and Donald Trump? | ||
| Have you been given any guidance of a press conference this afternoon? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have not been given any guidance about a press conference, but it does appear that the press pool will be allowed in at least for a spray at some point during the Zelensky meeting as well as during the meeting with European leaders. | |
| And there could be an opportunity there for the press pool to ask questions. | ||
| And it's not uncommon for the president to take questions. | ||
| He didn't do this, of course, in Alaska with President Putin, but certainly it is a very likely possibility that they will take questions at some point. | ||
| And then of course the European leaders and President Zelensky will be able to comment afterwards on their own. | ||
| And one of the things about having several leaders involved in these discussions is that if any one leader is to put a spin on the talks, they can sort of provide a more holistic review of how the discussions went. | ||
| And that's part of the reason why I think last week, last Friday in Alaska, they made it, instead of being a one-on-one meeting, made it a three-on-three meeting so that additional people in the room could provide their account of what happened. | ||
| Certainly plenty of action going on at the White House today. | ||
| There's some reports that at least from the Washington Post today, it might be in other newspapers as well, that the White House is hoping for potentially a trilateral meeting, if this goes well with Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Zelensky, and Donald Trump, perhaps as soon as later this week. | ||
| Are you hearing anything on that front? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the trilateral meeting was always dubbed by President Trump as the most important meeting that would take place in order to reach a lasting peace deal. | |
| So we're going to be watching this closely to see how the meeting goes today. | ||
| President Trump will certainly be facing calls for a trilateral meeting between Zelensky, Putin, and himself. | ||
| So we'll see how that goes. | ||
| But from what I'm hearing, it seems like it could happen as early as this Friday. | ||
| Unclear on where that meeting would take place. | ||
| Of course, the last meeting was in Alaska with President Putin. | ||
| So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. | ||
| And we'll hopefully get more details on that later today. | ||
| If you get a chance to ask either president a question today, what are you going to ask? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, probably about the security guarantees. | |
| You know, President Trump has claimed that Putin has agreed to give some security guarantees to Ukraine as a condition for ending the war. | ||
| But we don't know a whole lot about these security guarantees. | ||
| They're so-called Article 5-like security guarantees that would, in effect, protect Ukraine against future attacks or future advances by any country. | ||
| And, you know, Ukraine is not a NATO member, but Article 5 essentially says that an attack on one country is an attack on all. | ||
| And so the United States and its allies in Europe would, in effect, get involved militarily, perhaps, if Ukraine were to be attacked. | ||
| And so what I'll be looking for is, you know, for any information the president can share on that, is this a legally binding document? | ||
| Is the United States contractually obligated to help Ukraine fight Russia or future attacks? | ||
| Or is this more of a, you know, we'll give financial aid or we'll give ammunition to Ukraine? | ||
| So, you know, any details about how far the president is willing to go to protect Ukraine would be something I'm very interested in hearing, and I would probably ask the president about. | ||
| Well, Nick Popely, we will let you get to it. | ||
| Thankfully, not as hot of a day in Washington today as it was hot and humid last week. | ||
| So if there's a lot of standing outside, it won't be so bad for you. | ||
| Thanks so much for your time, starting your day with us on the Washington Journal. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Back to your phone calls. | ||
| It is open form and certainly want to hear from you specifically about your expectations for today's meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky. | ||
| Mike's been waiting. | ||
| Paducah, Kentucky, Republican. | ||
| Mike, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you know, Trump had that meeting with Putin, and all you hear about how Putin walked all over Trump and how bad of a meeting it was. | |
| And Trump didn't get nothing. | ||
| You know, does the U.S., why do we have any skin in this game anyway? | ||
| Why do we care what Ukraine does? | ||
| I mean, if Russia took Ukraine completely over, how's that going to affect every other American in this country? | ||
| I just don't understand. | ||
| And Trump's the only one trying to do anything. | ||
| What did Biden do? | ||
| Say don't? | ||
| As he watched Russia invade Ukraine? | ||
| You know, he said a little skirmish. | ||
| That won't bother anything. | ||
| Well, it looks like it bothered a whole lot. | ||
| That's all I got to say. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| It's Mike in Kentucky. | ||
| This is Stanley in New York. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Independent line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, okay. | |
| I have a problem. | ||
| I hated to have to call this number, but I ordered the congressional directory back in March, and I never received it. | ||
| And I've been calling customer service, and all they can do is let you leave a message, but they never get back to you. | ||
| So I'm just sorry for the issue. | ||
| Not really customer service line here, though. | ||
| We're talking about today's news on the Washington Journal today. | ||
| Anything you want to add on that front? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I understand that. | ||
| I'm just saying I had no other choice because I call the customer service line and nobody ever gets back to you. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Stanley in New York. | ||
| This is Susan out of Columbia, Tennessee. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I only have one comment. | |
| Putin is Trump's daddy, and Trump is not going to go against Putin. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| That's Susan in Tennessee. | ||
| Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met Friday in Anchorage, Alaska. | ||
| A much anticipated news conference at the end of that meeting turned into just a 12-minute affair. | ||
| Donald Trump speaking for a little over two minutes after Vladimir Putin spoke first at that press conference. | ||
| Here's President Trump's remarks from Friday. | ||
| I will say that I believe we had a very productive meeting. | ||
| There were many, many points that we agreed on, most of them, I would say, a couple of big ones that we haven't quite gotten there, but we've made some headway. | ||
| So there's no deal until there's a deal. | ||
| We really made some great progress today. | ||
| I've always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin, with Vladimir. | ||
| We had many, many tough meetings, good meetings. | ||
| We were interfered with by the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax. | ||
| It made it a little bit tougher to deal with, but he understood it. | ||
| I think he's probably seen things like that during the course of his career. | ||
| He's seen it all. | ||
| But we had to put up with the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax. | ||
| He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal. | ||
| But it made it harder for us to deal as a country in terms of the business and all of the things that we'd like to have dealt with. | ||
| But we'll have a good chance when this is over. | ||
| So just to put it very quickly, I'm going to start making a few phone calls and tell them what happened. | ||
| But we had an extremely productive meeting, and many points were agreed to. | ||
| There are just a very few that are left. | ||
| Some are not that significant. | ||
| One is probably the most significant. | ||
| But we have a very good chance of getting there. | ||
| We didn't get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there. | ||
| I would like to thank President Putin and his entire team, whose faces, who I know in many cases, otherwise, other than that, whose faces I get to see all the time in the newspapers. | ||
| You're almost as famous as the boss, especially this one right over here. | ||
| But we had some good meetings over the years, right? | ||
| Good productive meetings over the years, and we hope to have that in the future. | ||
| But let's do the most productive one right now. | ||
| We're going to stop really five, six, seven thousand, thousands of people a week from being killed. | ||
| And President Putin wants to see that as much as I do. | ||
| So again, Mr. President, I'd like to thank you very much. | ||
| And we'll speak to you very soon and probably see you again very soon. | ||
| Thank you very much, Vladimir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Next time in Moscow. | |
| Oh, that's an interesting one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I'll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening. | ||
| Thank you very much, Vladimir. | ||
| And thank you all. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
| President Trump and Vladimir Putin, that was Friday. | ||
| Today, it's President Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House. | ||
| Live coverage begins on C-SPAN at noon Eastern Time. | ||
| Luis is waiting in Fredericksburg, Virginia. | ||
| Republican, thanks for calling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I noticed on C-SPAN whenever you had the speech with President Putin that the voice was you could hear Putin, plus you could also hear what the translator was saying, and it made it very garbled. | ||
| And C-SPAN was the only channel that did that. | ||
| Louise, we were using the White House pool feed, which is the feed that comes in, the shared media pool from that Alaska visit. | ||
| So that was the feed that we had to air. | ||
| Actually, I agree with you that it was a little bit tough to hear just because it was so loud, but I appreciate the feedback on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, okay. | |
| I think that President Trump's bottom line was: if there's no peace, then he's out. | ||
| And that he's just not going to deal with the Europeans deal with Ukraine. | ||
| And that's what I think should happen. | ||
| Because, I mean, Zelensky insists on taking Crimea. | ||
| And, you know, the deal they made in the Budapest thing was with a drunk, with an absolute drunk. | ||
| Boris Yeltsin was a drunk. | ||
| I mean, staggering drunk. | ||
| And he really destroyed a lot of Russia. | ||
| And with the deals they made and the kleptocrats that went to Russia and claimed 90% of their resources, natural resources, five people went to Russia. | ||
| Bring us to today. | ||
| You want the U.S. out of this completely, to wash its hands of it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| And I would be done with it and forget about it. | ||
| Move on to other things. | ||
| There's too many other things, the Middle East, everything. | ||
| They need to concentrate on other things. | ||
| It's a shell game with the Europeans. | ||
| How many wars are we going to fight with the Europeans? | ||
| That's Luis in Virginia. | ||
| This is Bob Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I heard your interview with a woman that wrote the book about Trump's assassination attempt. | |
| Selena Zito, Butler, is the book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| And during the course of the call-in Trump haters that are claiming that it was all staged, you know, staged, and I was waiting for you to, you know, respond to them with a couple of questions. | ||
| We know the bullets were real, right? | ||
| Yes, sir, Bob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
From the shooter. | |
| But whatever comes up. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What never comes up is the second. | |
| So we're to believe that the shooter was involved in this stage and was willing to take a bullet for Donald Trump. | ||
| Selena Zito gets into that in her response to those callers about just the conspiracy theory of this all sort of falls apart and that she was sick of those kind of questions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You would say, well, so If it stays, where did they find our shooter willing to take a bullet in the head for Donald Trump? | |
| Okay, that's Bob. | ||
| Mike Queens, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just have a question. | ||
| I don't know who or if you can answer it for me. | ||
| But in the news a few weeks ago, they were talking about freezing assets, Russian assets in banks and accounts to help put pressure on Putin to end this war. | ||
| And the one they said that amazed me was that England has not frozen anything. | ||
| I mean, we've frozen things and other countries have frozen things. | ||
| But England has not frozen any of this Russian money, any of the oligarch money. | ||
| And they're doing business with them hand over fist. | ||
| And a lot of Russians and the very rich Russians are all moving to London. | ||
| So I'm thinking, why are they doing that? | ||
| Let's put a little pressure on them. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| That's Mike in Queens, New York. | ||
| There's stories about EU sanctions. | ||
| You can Google that for yourself if you want to do that, because we just have a little bit of time left in open form. | ||
| Let me get to Alan in Arkansas, Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my. | |
| Well, I've been waiting for you to be on. | ||
| I have to think you expect me to call every week. | ||
| When I don't call, I like to think you're a little disappointed. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| So I have a quick couple of points to make. | ||
| You know, I brought up Anna from Ukraine ten times over the last year, and you were patient enough to let me mention that. | ||
| But I noticed a few days ago she was on Piers Morgan on his national YouTube channel along with two or three other guests. | ||
| So I'm a little disappointed that C-SPAN didn't get on that and be the first, well, in the U.S., to at least have a formal interview with her. | ||
| But I'm putting that up again. | ||
| She now has this international recognition on that program, which should open the door for whoever's saying no to that there in your admin folks for choosing guests. | ||
| So that's one area. | ||
| And the other is, I tell you, it's a criticism, and I've tried to not level it, but I think the time has really come. | ||
| You know, C-SPAN loves to show all the things about George Washington. | ||
| And I've made this point a little bit before, but, you know, Washington Journal and the fame and reputation of George Washington, you guys are happy to use his name. | ||
| But I've asked several occasions before that we let off of this partisan push that seems to be driving your agenda. | ||
| And I've asked before to choose, there's at least five or six or seven subject matters that would divide people up into categories that would really get their actual opinions rather than drive this division where you hear this ridicule, really. | ||
| And I have to say, I'm an independent, but the heavy ridicule is coming from the Democrat Party. | ||
| And when you look at their numbers now nationally, it's about 20% of the country. | ||
| But the way you structure it, they get half the talking points. | ||
| And it's always so slanderous that George Washington would never allow that kind of slander. | ||
| Alan, got your point. | ||
| Always appreciate feedback. | ||
| And that's going to do it for us in this open forum. | ||
| About 45 minutes left this morning. | ||
| In that time, a closer look at crime trends and American cities. | ||
| Adam Gelb will join us with the nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice. | ||
| Stick around for that discussion. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Honor the person who first showed you democracy in action and Ignite America 250, C-SPAN's 18-month ad-free celebration of our nation's story. | |
| Give $25 or more by August 31st at c-span.org slash donate and add your democracy hero to our online wall to keep these vital stories alive for viewers and learners everywhere. | ||
| As our thanks, you'll receive an exclusive democracy unfiltered decal. | ||
| Your gift helps make C-SPAN possible. | ||
| Visit c-span.org slash donate today and join us in keeping America's story alive. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| In our earlier discussion with Zakir Tamiz about his full biography of Charles Sumner, he discussed his differences with Professor David Herbert Donald on the same subject. | ||
| On December the 24th, 1995, Professor Donald talked about his book called Lincoln on the television program BookNotes. | ||
| David Donald died in 2009 at age 88. | ||
| During his teaching career, which he finished as a professor of history at Harvard, Professor Donald was praised for his Lincoln book by historian Eric Foner. | ||
| Quote, it is often considered the best single volume of Lincoln ever. | ||
| It's the most balanced of the biographies out there, said Foner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We discuss author David Herbert Donald and his book, Lincoln, on this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | |
| Book Notes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Nonfiction book lovers, C-SPAN has a number of podcasts for you. | ||
| Listen to best-selling nonfiction authors and influential interviewers on the Afterwords podcast and on Q ⁇ A. Hear wide-ranging conversations with the non-fiction authors and others who are making things happen. | ||
| And BookNotes Plus episodes are weekly hour-long conversations that regularly feature fascinating authors of nonfiction books on a wide variety of topics. | ||
| Find all of our podcasts by downloading the free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts and on our website, c-span.org slash podcasts. | ||
| And past precedent dominance. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is outrageous. | |
| This is a candle root. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity, Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Join political playbook chief correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns as host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue to find common ground. | ||
| Ceasefire this fall on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| With National Guard troops now policing Washington, D.C. and President Trump suggesting he could do the same in other American cities, a discussion on urban crime rates. | ||
| Our guest is Adam Gelb, President and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, an organization whose mission is what, Mr. Gelb? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, our mission is to shed light rather than heat on all these issues of crime and criminal justice. | |
| We are two parts to our organization. | ||
| We're a nonpartisan, non-ideological think tank. | ||
| That means we call balls and strikes and we produce information, data, and research that is credible and found credible across the political spectrum. | ||
| And we're also an invitational membership organization. | ||
| We have about 325 members who have been elected by our board as the top experts, innovators, and leaders in the criminal justice field. | ||
| And the core of what we do, John, is put our members together with our research and information, and we produce strategic policy roadmaps for reducing violence, for reducing crime, for attacking the size of the prison population, women's justice, veterans' justice, and a whole host of issues. | ||
| And I think just to lead it off, and perhaps where you're headed with this conversation, I think one of the reasons why we've become such a credible organization in such a short time, we were only launched in 2019, is that there is such a thirst out there right now for credible information from sources that are trustworthy. | ||
| And unfortunately, that's a byproduct of the lack of trust and declining confidence in information that's coming out of the government. | ||
| So urban crime trends is something much debated right now. | ||
| How is that usually quantified before we get into specific cities in Washington, D.C.? | ||
| How do you look at this data? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there are two main sources of crime data in the country. | |
| There are police reports and victim surveys. | ||
| And we look at both. | ||
| They're needed to look at both. | ||
| But the vast majority of what determines what people think is happening in the country with crime comes from police departments. | ||
| It comes from officers getting called to scenes, writing reports, those reports being tallied by individual departments, then sent up to the state level, and then from the state level to the FBI, which aggregates all of this and puts out every year what's called a uniform crime report. | ||
| And unfortunately, that's what has been so politicized in recent days. | ||
| What is that report saying about urban crime rates right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, all of this depends a little bit, John, on what crimes you're looking at and what period you're looking over. | |
| So our most recent report from the Council on Criminal Justice, we looked at the first half of 2025 compared to the first half of 2024. | ||
| And when you have that short look back period, you're finding fairly significant drops in homicide, other violent crimes, and most property crimes as well. | ||
| As a matter of fact, the only category of the 13 that we track that we found increased in the first half of 2025 was domestic violence. | ||
| If you expand the lookout back period a little bit further, which we've done consistently to try to understand how things have been moving since before the onset of the COVID pandemic and the social justice protests of 2020, then you find that what we had was a big spike in violence in 2020 and 21, peaking cresting in 22 and coming down. | ||
| We had a drop in most forms of violent crime as people were staying home and so homes were hard to burglarize and stores were shutting down or closed. | ||
| And so you had this mirror image up violent crime, down and property crime. | ||
| And those trends now are sort of bending back together and things are basically back to where they were with both violent crime and property crime compared to 2019, just before the pandemic. | ||
| Is Washington, D.C., a city that sticks out specifically on one kind of crime trend? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does with respect to one piece, John, and that's the lethality of the violence in Washington. | |
| So let me put a placeholder there and say a few things about what's happening with crime in Washington. | ||
| I think the first is that we have a lot of people talking past each other right now. | ||
| And that's because, I think, a lot of reasons, some of them certainly political. | ||
| But if you're just focused on the numbers, we have some people who are focused on the level and some people who are focused on the direction. | ||
| That is some people saying, well, it's going down, so it's okay. | ||
| We shouldn't take extraordinary measures. | ||
| The district is doing the things that are needed to drive those numbers down. | ||
| Other people who say, fine, the numbers may be down, but they're still high. | ||
| And just because the numbers are down doesn't mean that they're good. | ||
| And so when you look at Washington from that perspective and compare it to other cities as we do in our reports and as the FBI does as well, you find that Washington's homicide rate, its violent crime rate, is, well, definitely elevated compared to the national average and certainly among the highest among large cities, which makes it somewhat more comparable. | ||
| But it is nowhere near the highest in the country. | ||
| There are a number of cities, unfortunately, Detroit and St. Louis and New Orleans and Memphis among them, that have homicide rates that are substantially higher, double and triple the rate that we see in Washington, D.C. | ||
| And there are some other large cities where the homicide rate is a fraction of what it is in Washington, and that would include New York City. | ||
| President Trump has also talked about other aspects of crime trends in D.C., juvenile crime in particular. | ||
| What can we say about juvenile crime and cities? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there's one main thing I think to know about juvenile crime in this country, which is that it has plummeted dramatically since the 1990s. | |
| Many of your viewers are probably not going to believe this given what they're seeing and feeling today, but juvenile arrests peaked in 1996. | ||
| And by 2020, we're down 85%. | ||
| Let me say that again. | ||
| Juvenile arrests in 2020 were 85% lower than they were in 1996. | ||
| And that includes an 80% drop in arrests for juvenile violent crime. | ||
| Now, just because things were way worse then doesn't mean they're okay now. | ||
| And just because things are relatively low now doesn't mean they might not be increasing and they certainly seem to be. | ||
| At the Council on Criminal Justice, we took a deep dive into juvenile crime trends between 2016 and 2022. | ||
| And we found that that overall downward slide continued both in violent and property crime. | ||
| But juvenile homicide is increasing. | ||
| In fact, between those years, 16 and 22, there was a 65% jump in homicides involving juveniles. | ||
| And that's just very disturbing. | ||
| And so it depends, like all of these, like all these numbers, you can pull out ones to tell the story that you want to tell if you're so inclined. | ||
| We're talking about crime statistics in American cities. | ||
| Adam Gelb is our guest with the Council on Criminal Justice joining us this morning, taking your phone calls. | ||
| It's 202-748-8001 for Republicans to call in. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| As you're calling in, we noted that President Trump is not only making this deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., but suggesting he could do it in other cities as well. | ||
| This was President Trump from a week ago today. | ||
| This issue directly impacts the functioning of the federal government and is a threat to America. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's a threat to our country. | ||
| We have other cities also that are bad. | ||
| Very bad. | ||
| You look at Chicago, how bad it is. | ||
| You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. | ||
| We have other cities that are very bad. | ||
| New York has a problem. | ||
| And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. | ||
| We don't even mention that anymore. | ||
| They're so far gone. | ||
| We're not going to let it happen. | ||
| We're not going to lose our cities over this. | ||
| And this will go further. | ||
| We're starting very strongly with D.C., and we're going to clean it up real quick, very quickly, as they say. | ||
| I was President Trump from Monday. | ||
| Mr. Gelb, when you watched that, what was your reaction to the cities that he mentioned and thoughts on how much a deployment by National Guard troops for a certain limited amount of time for reducing overall crime trends? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there's a lot in there, John. | |
| I think the first thing is to note that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should necessarily do it. | ||
| The question for public policy generally and the question here in these circumstances is not just what can work, what might work, and how do I deploy the tools that I have at my hand. | ||
| It is actually what will be most effective, what will be most cost-effective as well. | ||
| Most effective, meaning what will help bring crime down both in the short term and the long term. | ||
| And what's cost-effective, meaning both what will cost taxpayers the least and what will cause the least infringement on constitutional rights and liberties. | ||
| And where do you come down? | ||
| You talk about policy recommendations that you've made. | ||
| Is a National Guard deployment a recommendation that you have made to reduce crime trends? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it is not, not specifically. | |
| But I think there's one most important thing for people to understand about reducing crime and deterring crime in particular, and that is that there are three aspects to deterrence. | ||
| It is certainty, swiftness, and the severity of punishment. | ||
| And we have this obsession in our country, unfortunately, with the severity of punishment. | ||
| Whenever we think we're going to try to reduce crime, we try to make punishments stiffer. | ||
| And actually, it turns out that sort of longer prison sentences are the most expensive and least effective way to reduce crime. | ||
| What really does it is the certainty and swiftness, the confidence that people have that if they commit a crime, they're going to be caught, and that if they are caught, justice will be delivered swiftly. | ||
| So, from just a straight-up analysis point, augmenting the size of the police force, police force in Washington, and there are a lot of arguments about how the National Guard is being deployed, whether it's in federal buildings or whether it's in actual crime neighborhoods, increasing the chances that people who are committing crimes get caught can probably help crime in the short term. | ||
| President, your clip was just showing saying he might want to extend this beyond 30 days, understanding that 30 days you can have some impact, but that would need to be longer. | ||
| There's not going to be very much tolerance in Washington for a much longer deployment, let alone in other cities where the federal government doesn't have the same authority as it does in Washington. | ||
| But really, the most important point is that long-term sustainable reductions in crime, and particularly violent crime, are going to take a partnership between the federal government and local jurisdictions that involves a comprehensive whole-of-government approach, not simply one that says we're going to go out and surveil people and lock them up. | ||
| I should note for our viewers on your screen: we've been showing some live shots of Union Station, the camera on the roof of our building. | ||
| We can turn and point towards Union Station. | ||
| It's been a focal point of a lot of the pictures that you've been seeing at the National Guard deployment in D.C. that have shown up in newspapers there on Friday. | ||
| Several Humvees there. | ||
| There's obviously military vehicles there today, National Guard members in uniform. | ||
| So those are live pictures this Monday morning, the 18th of August, here in Washington, D.C. Taking your phone calls with Adam Gelb as we talk about urban crime rates. | ||
| This is Kyle, Buffalo, New York, Republican. | ||
| Thanks for calling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, John C-SPAN, the host. | |
| The host talked earlier about the 90s crime rate. | ||
| And I know a lot of people don't realize, but it dramatically has changed, probably because of drugs crack. | ||
| Marijuana is pretty much legal in most states. | ||
| So I think, you know, the economic opportunity isn't there like it used to be. | ||
| So, and then he also talked about COVID, how the numbers went down and they're back up. | ||
| My question is, though, we see a lot of recent years of the youth offender status being removed. | ||
| Do you think that has a lot to do with the young youth crime rates going back up with the whole cash bail and can't be charged as an adult until 18 for most crime, I think all crimes, really? | ||
| And I think that's pretty much it, really. | ||
| I just have seen as an educator for 24 years, I've seen it go up and down. | ||
| The violence was not there like I saw it when I first entered in the early 2000s. | ||
| And again, I always say that the drugs game is much different than it was back then. | ||
| I would think most of the crimes back in those days were drug-related. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| Kyle, thanks for the questions. | ||
| Always appreciate the calls from Buffalo, New York. | ||
| Mr. Gelp. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A few things to going on in that question. | |
| I would say first that to augment what I said earlier about trends in juvenile crime, I want to note that in addition to the rise in juvenile homicide in recent years, while the overall trend of violence is down, we're seeing a bit of a split in terms of the age trends. | ||
| That is still trending down for juveniles age 15 to 17 and pretty substantially, but trending up by about 9% in terms of involvement and violent crime for kids as young as 10 to 14. | ||
| And so, you know, when you think about what defines the difference between being a child and adult, there are lots of ways to do it. | ||
| I think of it pretty frequently as the ability to defer gratification. | ||
| When does your brain form enough that you are not acting so impulsively? | ||
| And when we see kids as young as 10 to 14 committing crimes, it's very disturbing. | ||
| It hits people. | ||
| And I hope we're going to be able to talk a little bit about the difference between some of these numbers and how people are actually perceiving what's going on with crime. | ||
| But when you have acts that are committed by very young children who people just have a very different image about what kids that young are up to, it hits them very differently. | ||
| And it really speaks to, I think, the caller's ultimate question is: well, what the heck do you do about this? | ||
| And I think it is precisely because kids of that young age and even up into the older teens are not thinking necessarily rationally. | ||
| They're not weighing pros and cons and the future implications of their activities that the responses have to be, they have to be very swift and certain, and they have to be really speaking to what is driving these kids' behavior. | ||
| On juvenile offenders, D.C. Federal Prosecutor Jeannie Piro also spoke at that same press conference on Monday from the White House about juvenile crime. | ||
| This is a little bit of what she said. | ||
| And I'm not going to stand here and go over and over the cases, but what I can tell you is this: I see too much violent crime being committed by young punks who think that they can get together in gangs and crews and beat the hell out of you or anyone else. | ||
| They don't care where they are. | ||
| They can be in DuPont circle, but they know that we can't touch them. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because the laws are weak. | ||
| I can't touch you if you're 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, and you have a gun. | ||
| I convict someone of shooting another person with an illegal gun on a public bus in the chest, intent to kill. | ||
| I convict him. | ||
| And you know what the judge gives him? | ||
| Probation. | ||
| Says you should go to college. | ||
| We need to go after the DC council and their absurd laws. | ||
| We need to get rid of this concept of, you know, a no-cash pail. | ||
| We need to recognize that the people who matter are the law-abiding citizens. | ||
| And it starts today. | ||
| But it's not going to end today because the president is going to do everything we need to do to make sure that these emboldened criminals understand: we see you, we're watching you, and we're going to change the law to catch you. | ||
| Adam Gelb, on the laws, specifically how they apply to juvenile offenders. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't want to speak to exactly what has happened in D.C., but there's no doubt that over a long period of time that there's been a bipartisan consensus in this country that our laws, as they were in the 80s and 90s, in particular, had gotten just unnecessarily restrictive and that there were more effective and less expensive ways to deal with many juveniles. | |
| And that's borne out in the statistics that we talked about earlier. | ||
| We have this 80-plus percent drop in juvenile violent crime. | ||
| We have a proportionate drop in the number of kids being held in residential facilities. | ||
| And so, you know, at the end of the day, there's a lot of variance in jurisdictions and what their laws are. | ||
| But in most places, the courts do have the ability to hold juveniles who have committed serious violent crimes and to put them in secure facilities for at least up to two years. | ||
| The difference between whether the law says 17 or 18 can be significant. | ||
| Don't want to trivialize that, but there are much bigger things that are happening in our neighborhoods and our communities that are going to be solved by whether that age of adulthood for purposes of criminal trial is going to make a big difference here. | ||
| Just about 20 minutes left with Adam Gelb of the Council on Criminal Justice. | ||
| On a day we're talking about urban crime trends and also a day that the National Guard troops are back. | ||
| You can see them at Union Station today, a live picture from just across the street here from our C-SPAN studio, the military vehicles, the National Guard members back at Union Station in Washington, D.C. Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., sending this ex-post this weekend saying American soldiers and airmen policing American citizens on American soil is un-American. | ||
| Taking your phone calls, Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| This is Sylvia out of the Keystone State Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| When I was a child, we had a whole lot of things to do. | ||
| Church program, after school program. | ||
| We had a lot of games, swing sex, swine pools, swim pools. | ||
| We had lots of things to do. | ||
| But now, everything, lots of gone now. | ||
| That's what Washington and other states try to keep kids busy with things. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| They need to spend money on that. | ||
| Adam Gelb on the idle hands argument. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, idle hands or the devil's workshop is something that is a very common phrase in the criminal justice community. | |
| I think everybody understands that kids need to have things to do and positive, positive activities and adults and role models to engage with. | ||
| Back during the crime bill, when I was working on the Senate Judiciary Committee, we had this debate between prisons and policing and prevention, and folks sort of derided the notion that there should be after-school programs as midnight basketball and midnight basketball became kind of a joke. | ||
| But that was the early 90s. | ||
| And I think along the way, almost everybody has recognized the crime control value of having pro-social activities for kids after school when actually arrests are highest for kids and into the evenings. | ||
| And that includes summer jobs. | ||
| And one of the interventions that has the strongest research base behind it is trying to make sure that during the summer months that kids are gainfully employed and don't have the learning loss that's associated with sitting around having nothing to do all summer. | ||
| Let me come back to a topic that it sounded like you wanted to talk about the numbers on crimes and juvenile crimes specifically and how people perceive them or also how people consume them via social media, how they see them. | ||
| It sounded like you wanted to talk more on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think it's really important. | |
| Thanks for returning to that, John, to talk about the difference between perceptions and tolerance and fears here. | ||
| We started at the top talking about how if the numbers are going down, that doesn't mean that they're good. | ||
| But we have a lot of people who are saying just because something is coming down, then we shouldn't, not that we shouldn't care about it, but that it's not a serious problem. | ||
| And I think the point that most people recognize, but you don't hear that often, is that people's perceptions are not really determined by what they're seeing in graphs and charts, if they actually ever see those things. | ||
| What people see is what they have on their social media feeds, what leads on their local news, what they're seeing on the streets and from their friends. | ||
| And that's what largely is going to drive what they're thinking about, along with what I would call the quality of crimes rather than the quantity, right? | ||
| All this debate about statistics is about how many murders or robberies there are. | ||
| But I think a significant part of what is going on here is the quality piece, which is, are these incidents that we're hearing about, are they random? | ||
| Are they brazen? | ||
| Are they particularly brutal? | ||
| Are they close by to me? | ||
| Are they at some place that I can easily remember? | ||
| And it's those qualitative aspects of some of the incidents that we're seeing, including the attack on the Doge staffer in Washington that at least was the immediate precipitator of what we're seeing in Washington. | ||
| That just strike people in a different way and that people find very disturbing. | ||
| And so the question is, I think not so much are people misperceiving the problem because the numbers are moving down. | ||
| It's just that people think about and calculate their fear and concern based on a whole other host of factors than what their objective risk of victimization is. | ||
| By the way, if you're interested in the charts and the numbers that Mr. Gelb was just referring to, you can go to counseloncj.org and see the charts that show overall crime trends for things like homicide, aggravated assault, aggravated assault, gun assault, sexual assault, domestic violence, robbery, carjacking. | ||
| You can see the trends over the years. | ||
| Those charts also, if you go farther down the list, break down the numbers by city, by year. | ||
| So if the charts are something you're into, there's plenty of information all available. | ||
| Again, counciloncj.org. | ||
| This is Christine in Holland, Michigan, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| I was just calling because of that clip that you showed about that lady that's over everything in DC trying to do something about crime. | ||
| And President Trump was standing right beside her. | ||
| And he is acting like a juvenile delinquent. | ||
| And he was there on January 6th, 2021. | ||
| And he let all those people out that had been convicted for these very same crimes he's trying to stop now. | ||
| So I would say that he is the problem. | ||
| And seeing less of his bad behavior in the news would help tremendously because he is the problem. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Christine in Michigan. | ||
| Adam Gilbert, it brings up an interesting point. | ||
| Did January 6th skew crime numbers in DC for that year? | ||
| Did you see, was that reflected in the numbers that you look at every day? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't think so. | |
| Certainly there was some effect, but it's a good question overall about the role of our leaders and set an example of what kind of behavior is acceptable and tolerable in our society. | ||
| And then if I could just careen to the sort of the opposite and far nerdier end of that question, there have been Some questions raised about the validity of the DC crime numbers. | ||
| And I think it's important for viewers to understand a few points about this as it seems that the notion is building that all these numbers are just made up. | ||
| So there are a few things about this. | ||
| First, that the most reliable numbers, sort of widely considered the most reliable numbers in the criminal justice world, are homicide numbers. | ||
| Bottom line is it's very hard to hide a body. | ||
| And almost everybody seems to believe that the homicide count in any jurisdiction is going to be highly accurate, the most accurate. | ||
| The second thing is that a lot of these other crimes don't necessarily follow homicide and lockstep, but robberies and car thefts and other types of violence do tend to follow somewhat in the same pattern. | ||
| So when you see those trends in Washington aligning very closely with similar trends in other cities, it becomes a lot more plausible that this is what is happening in DC. | ||
| And then finally, and I think really importantly in this conversation, I haven't seen much of this yet, there is data from other sources about homicide and firearm industry from the health side of the equation. | ||
| And if you poke around a little bit, you can find that hospital emergency rooms in Washington are reporting a 25% drop in firearm injuries in the first part of this year from January to May. | ||
| And so that number and that drop aligns very closely with the police numbers as well, suggesting here again that what we're seeing in the numbers that are being widely discussed by the mayor, the police department, and others reflect what is happening on the ground there in Washington. | ||
| Staying on homicide for a minute, this chart from the Council on Criminal Justice website shows various crimes and various cities, the city's different numbers along this chart. | ||
| So we went to just homicide here. | ||
| Washington, D.C. is sort of online with a lot of the same cities on the bottom, but there's one city that sticks out above them all, and it is the city of Chicago. | ||
| It's that blue line that keeps bumping up through the top. | ||
| Can you discuss homicide rates in Chicago and why they're so much higher than other cities? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Chicago is a very big city. | |
| I can unfortunately can't see the screen you're looking at right now, John, but it's likely that you're looking at the counts rather than the rates because Chicago, yeah, in terms of the rate, I believe is a good bit lower than some of the cities we mentioned earlier in the show, including Detroit and St. Louis and Memphis, which interestingly are blue cities in red states, where Chicago, a blue city, and a blue state. | ||
| So when you look at the rate, which I think is a better way to look at it, you see a different picture for Chicago. | ||
| And there have just been massive efforts by city leadership, state leadership, a number of fantastic nonprofits, and a huge coming together of the philanthropic community in Chicago to apply some very innovative approaches with respect to working with young men who are involved in violence. | ||
| And they seem to be starting to have some effect as we see the significant large drops in homicide in Chicago too since the pandemic peaks. | ||
| This is Benny in Albany, Georgia, Independence. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to ask your guests, the top 10 states in the United States for crime. | ||
| How many of those states are Republicans? | ||
| And I also have a second question. | ||
| Since Congress has passed all these laws and the NRA has released all these guns on the streets, why is it that wouldn't that increase the crime rate in America? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Caller asked a very interesting question, I think a tough one for the field, which is that there was a huge spike in gun purchases in 2020 and 21, the height of the pandemic. | ||
| I believe somewhere on the order of 5 million more guns purchased in those years than on the average in previous years. | ||
| And at the time, a lot of the explanation for why we're seeing the increase in violence in 20 and 21 was we're washing guns. | ||
| We have all these guns out there. | ||
| Now, coming off the other side of the pandemic in 23, 24, and into 25, our numbers show crime coming down. | ||
| We still have all these additional guns out there. | ||
| And so I think it's a real challenge for folks to try to explain what is happening and not with respect to firearm ownership and how it's affecting these trends. | ||
| Wilmington, Connecticut, this is Greg, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| Good morning, guests. | ||
| So from my perspective, and I think many people in the circles that I follow and the news that I pay attention to, this is all about taking the eye off the Epstein situation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It would be nice if Joan Zero would go after Epstein's co-conspirators with the same vigor that she seems to want to go after a 14-year-old child. | |
| I just wanted to get your guests' opinion on this. | ||
| Mr. Gellman, any thoughts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't know if it's anything surprising. | |
| I mean, President Trump is a whirlwind of activity and is doing all kinds of things morning, noon, and night. | ||
| I guess you could say that about anything, whether or not what he's doing in Washington has anything to do with Epstein or the timing of it, I don't know. | ||
| I think there are a lot of people who, excuse me, who believed that this was coming, that he's been talking about it even in his first term, and that it was just inevitable at some point. | ||
| So, yeah, real hard to say. | ||
| A topic that Genie Piro brought up and that has come up over the course of the past week, especially when it comes to juvenile crime, but also crime rates in general. | ||
| No cash bail or cashless bail. | ||
| Can you explain what that is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, sure. | |
| When you're arrested in this country, you are innocent until proven guilty. | ||
| But laws for a long time have allowed the court to hold you if you are perceived to be a risk to public safety or what's called a risk of flight. | ||
| That is, you will not show up for court. | ||
| And what it turned out is over the years, people began to realize that what we had was a system that locked people up based on their wealth. | ||
| That is, bail is set if you are held pretrial. | ||
| And if you can make bail, you get out. | ||
| If you can't afford to pay, you get held. | ||
| And that that was a situation that both violated our constitutional principle of innocence until proven guilty, and our sense that there shouldn't be two systems of justice, one for wealthy people and one for people of less financial means. | ||
| And so there was, over the past 10 years or so, a wave of reform at the city level and in many states to say, let's move away from a wealth-based system to a risk-based system and get bail and how much money you have out of the equation and say the court should do an objective assessment of the level of risk that you pose to public safety and the level of risk that you pose for not showing up to court. | ||
| And exercise that presumption of innocence. | ||
| and say all but the most dangerous and folks should be held pre-trial. | ||
| And what's happened, the research shows, is that it's basically worked, that there have not been increases in the overall crime rates in the jurisdictions that have done this. | ||
| Now, there are certainly individual instances, and whether it's the police department or the prosecutor's office or reporters, absolutely you can find cases and in some cases, horrible cases of people who you're just thinking to yourself, how was this person let out pre-trial, given their prior record and the crime that they were accused of? | ||
| That should have never happened. | ||
| There's plenty of that happening and too much, I think. | ||
| But overall, what we're seeing is a system that has gotten, I think, more fair and generally more effective. | ||
| Because when people are jailed, even for just a few days, let alone for several weeks or months while they're awaiting trial, it can obviously disrupt their jobs, it can disrupt their childcare and cause a whole bunch of problems that would have been far worse for society in general than if the person had been released. | ||
| And the real thrust of what's trying to happen here is to interrupt these cycles and not exacerbate them by deepening people's challenges in getting and keeping their lives on track. | ||
| Time for maybe one more call here. | ||
| This is Jeff, Bayville, New York Independent. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
| You're on with Adam Gelp. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Mr. Gelb, I have a question about the correlates of information of evidence for prevention of crime based on poverty and education. | ||
| It's widely known that poverty is associated with poor academic performance. | ||
| And it's also widely known that poverty is associated with crime. | ||
| And my question to you is: has there been studies to specifically look at elevating academic performance in impoverished areas and reduction of crime and its programs that are most effective at doing so? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Gelb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I think one of the longest held findings in our field is for high-quality preschool education. | |
| You set a kid off on the right foot before he or she reaches age five. | ||
| Then there are all kinds of benefits down the line for education, educational attainment, employment, and reduction in crime. | ||
| Same thing with very early what's called nurse-family partnerships and having some help with parenting skills, also long-term benefits. | ||
| Your question, though, prompts a bigger thought here, which is that there are at least two parts of this equation, which is these big structural, societal things, and then very situational things on the other hand. | ||
| And we've got to attack both the structural and the situational. | ||
| The structural being poverty and concentrated poverty and economic immobility, as well as the things that just happen in communities and the dynamics that occur between human beings and groups of human beings and cycles of retaliation that need to be broken. | ||
| For instance, you have a city like Detroit with a homicide rate of somewhere around 40 or north of 40 per 100,000, and then a place like New York that is 10 times lower than about 4 per 100,000. | ||
| And so the poverty rate in Detroit is not 10 times higher than it is in New York. | ||
| And that's oversimplifying, but I hope you see the point. | ||
| There's a lot else that's going on here with respect to what is happening in the local criminal justice system, in the local schools, with the behavioral health system. | ||
| How well is that working with people who have substance abuse and mental health challenges and so on? | ||
| What is the level of community violence interruption activity that's going on by the police, by community organizations? | ||
| How well are police and community organizations working together? | ||
| And I invite you to visit our Council on Criminal Justice website and look at our 10 essential actions for ways that cities can reduce violence now, which was put together by a group of about 15 of the top experts, law enforcement and community experts in the country. | ||
| And that website is counciloncj.org. | ||
| Adam Gelp is the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, and we do always appreciate your time in the Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks so much, John. | |
| That's going to do it for us today. | ||
| A reminder: our coverage of the Donald Trump Vladimir Zelensky summit today at the White House begins at noon Eastern time, just before that, 11 a.m. Eastern, a discussion on the results of the Trump Putin summit from Friday. | ||
| That's taking place at Foreign Policy Magazine, also on C-SPAN. | ||
| And we'll be back here tomorrow morning on the Washington Journal. | ||
| That's 7 a.m. Eastern, 4 a.m. Pacific. |