| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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And his concerns about HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s approach to vaccines. | |
| And the Washington Examiner's Christian Day Talk discusses White House news of the day. | ||
| Also, Alex Schroyer of the Washington Times talks about her book, Lawless Lawfare, which looks at how the legal system has treated President Trump. | ||
| Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Monday, September 8th, 2025. | ||
| The House returns at noon Eastern today. | ||
| The Senate's in at 3 p.m., and we're with you for the next three hours. | ||
| We begin on the rebranding of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. | ||
| President Trump, alongside his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, announced the move last week, saying that the name change represented an important message of strength. | ||
| This morning, we want to hear from you. | ||
| Does the Department of War name change matter to you? | ||
| Phone lines are split as usual for you to call in. | ||
| Democrats, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can also send us a text. | ||
| That number, 202-748-8003. | ||
| That's also the number when active and former military can call in this morning. | ||
| You can also join 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. | ||
| These are two of the headlines from today's newspaper, starting first with the New York Times. | ||
| President of Peace sends mixed signals with Department of War and this from the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| It's Andy Kessler writing that the War Department is a good start. | ||
| We want to hear your reactions this morning to that name change, that rebranding of the Department of Defense. | ||
| Phone numbers are on your screen for you. | ||
| Again, a special line for active and retired military. | ||
| 202-748-8003 is that number. | ||
| As you're calling in, this was President Trump from the Oval Office last week. | ||
| We've been talking about this Department of War. | ||
| So we won the First World War, we won the Second World War, we won everything before that and in between. | ||
| And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense. | ||
| So we're going Department of War. | ||
| And I'd like to ask our Secretary of War to say a few words. | ||
| Pete Heggseth, I think it's a much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now. | ||
| We have the strongest military in the world. | ||
| We have the greatest equipment in the world. | ||
| We have the greatest manufacturers of equipment by far. | ||
| There's nobody to even compete. | ||
| And you see that with this and so many other things. | ||
| The Patriots are the best. | ||
| Every element of the military, we make the best by far. | ||
| So, Pete, I'd like to ask you and maybe Dan Raising to say a few words, please. | ||
| Mr. President, thank you. | ||
| After winning a war for independence in 1789, George Washington established the War Department, and Henry Knox was his first Secretary of War. | ||
| And this country won every major war after that, to include World War I and World War II. | ||
| Total victory, Mr. President, as you said. | ||
| Then 150 years after that, we changed the name after World War II from the Department of War to the Department of Defense in 1947. | ||
| And as you pointed out, Mr. President, we haven't won a major war since. | ||
| And that's not to disparage our warfighters, whether it's the Korean War or the Vietnam War or our generation of Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| That's to recognize that this name change is not just about renaming. | ||
| It's about restoring. | ||
| Words matter. | ||
| It's restoring, as you've guided us to, Mr. President, restoring the warrior ethos. | ||
| That was Friday in the Oval Office. | ||
| This is Monday morning here on the Washington Journal. | ||
| We're asking you about this name change. | ||
| We'll go through some of the reaction over the weekend, but we mostly just want to hear from you on phone lines for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. | ||
| And a special line that we'll go to for active and retired military 202748-8003 is that number. | ||
| Meanwhile, this is Friday from Senator Jean Shaheen, Democrat, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. | ||
| Her reaction to that announcement. | ||
| I have real concerns about the impact of this kind of an effort on the readiness of our men and women in the military. | ||
| I sit on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate, and we are struggling for resources and dealing with conflicts around the world that we haven't seen in my lifetime. | ||
| It is a very dangerous environment. | ||
| And for the President and the Secretary of Defense to spend time and energy is a distraction from what we need to do to focus on the readiness of our troops who are serving. | ||
| And it's nothing more than an effort to distract from other issues that are going on in the country, as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| Democratic Senator Gene Shaheen, that was on Friday. | ||
| This was Senator Mitch McConnell, also from Friday, after that announcement. | ||
| On X, the former Senate Majority Leader wrote: if we call it the Department of War, we'd better equip the military to actually prevent and win wars. | ||
| We can't preserve American primacy if we're unwilling to spend substantially more on our military than Carter or Biden. | ||
| Peace through strength requires investment and not just rebranding, said the Republican from Kentucky. | ||
| Plenty more reaction in the editorial pages and opinion pages of newspapers over the weekend. | ||
| Like I said, we'll go through them this morning, but we mostly just want to hear from you. | ||
| This is Crystal, starting first in Hollywood, Florida. | ||
| What's your reaction? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't agree with it. | |
| I think it brings out a very negative light to it. | ||
| It's only promoting more, to me, more danger, more negative responses. | ||
| And all this doesn't breed, this breed detriment sounds like to me. | ||
| It's not breeding peace, it's breeding more war. | ||
| That's Crystal. | ||
| This is Chantel, Trinity, Texas, Independent. | ||
| Your thoughts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I think it's one, it's not a good idea because it gives a bad impression. | ||
| War is not an image that you want to project, especially in the situation. | ||
| And the cost to do this, all of the letterheads, all of the badges, all of the media, all of everything that has to be changed, it's going to cost a lot of money. | ||
| They've wasted enough money. | ||
| And I think it's a terrible idea. | ||
| That's Chantel on the name change on the cost politico with a story about it putting the potential cost in perhaps billions of dollars. | ||
| The details of the order signed Friday, still vague, they write, but officials may need to change the Defense Department seals on more than 700,000 facilities in 40 countries in all 50 states. | ||
| This also includes everything from letterhead for six military branches and dozens more agencies down to the napkins and chow halls and the embroidered jackets for Senate confirmed officials and keychains and tchotchkis in the Pentagon store. | ||
| A story about everything that this name change could mean. | ||
| The order coming from the White House, though congressional legislation may follow. | ||
| Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah, have introduced legislation to codify this into law. | ||
| And Rick Scott with his tweet, his ex-post from Friday saying the Department of War, the president is leading the way. | ||
| Now let's pass our bill to codify this name change as soon as possible. | ||
| And then Democratic Congressman Adam Smith, his reaction to this news. | ||
| Trump ran as a peace candidate. | ||
| The guy who would end wars, what a joke. | ||
| He wants a Department of Wars. | ||
| The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are worse than when he was elected, and he's after starting a new war in Venezuela, some of the congressional reaction. | ||
| This is Sonny in Newark, New Jersey. | ||
| Democrat, what's your reaction? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Go ahead, Sonny. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My concern, this guy changing names. | |
| He had bone spurs on his feet. | ||
| He's from Governor Saves. | ||
| This guy's a total disgrace. | ||
| This president is a disgrace to this country. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| He's a total disgrace. | ||
| I'm a child of it. | ||
| He came out of hospital in 82. | ||
| This guy is a total disgrace. | ||
| I was just surprised to see some stuff come out of his face. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's Sonny in New Jersey. | ||
| The New York Times in their piece today about this name change also made sure to note Donald Trump's deferments from being drafted into Vietnam, noting that he was granted five deferments from being drafted, including for a diagnosis of bone spurs, quoting the president as saying the country had never fought a war to win after World War II when Congress renamed the Department of War the Department of Defense. | ||
| We'll go through some of that history, but first here's Duga in New York City, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| As a Republican, I support the president, but this part right here, I do not support it. | ||
| Let's say in a few years when he leaves office, the next president comes in, if he's not a Republican, he will take that out. | ||
| So this is like a waste of time. | ||
| We should concentrate on other things. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Duga, what are some of those other things we should concentrate on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The economy, immigration, as always. | |
| I mean, so many things that we need to work on it. | ||
| For example, education, infrastructure. | ||
| I mean, the whole nine year, this is not an urgency. | ||
| This is just something that, I mean, he's the president, he can decide whatever he wants, but this is not urgent to me. | ||
| That's Duga. | ||
| The president already referring to his Department of War in a social media post on his true social page that got a whole lot of attention over the weekend, including from newspaper reporters in Chicago, his social post focusing on Chicago, quoting the movie Apocalypse Now. | ||
| I love the smell, and he says the president of deportations in the morning rather than napalm was the original quote. | ||
| The president saying Chicago is about to find out why it's called the Department of War. | ||
| Chapocalypse Now is the image that was posted alongside that. | ||
| President Trump in Apocalypse Now regalia there, the helicopters, and then the image of Chicago in the background. | ||
| Like we said, that got a lot of attention over the weekend, and the president was asked about it yesterday of whether he was declaring war on Chicago in that post. | ||
| This was the president's reaction. | ||
| Listen, you don't listen. | ||
| You never listen. | ||
| That's why you're second grade. | ||
| We're not going to war. | ||
| We're going to clean up our city. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going to clean them up so they don't kill five people every weekend. | |
| That's not war. | ||
| That's common sense. | ||
| That was the president yesterday. | ||
| This was the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, writing that the president of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. | ||
| This is not a joke. | ||
| This is not normal. | ||
| Donald Trump isn't a strong man. | ||
| He's a scared man. | ||
| Illinois won't be intimidated by a wannabe dictator, showing the image of the president's true social posting from Saturday. | ||
| Charles is in Tennessee. | ||
| Democrat, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| Thank you for taking my call this morning. | ||
| Well, here we go again. | ||
| The Democrats are falling right in. | ||
| They're hollering about all this stuff. | ||
| And I mean, I'm calling with them, and I'll get to my point. | ||
| This is just to get people's mind off this other upstate stuff. | ||
| Look at what the economy is doing. | ||
| Jobs is lost this quarter. | ||
| Unemployment's up. | ||
| It's about diversion. | ||
| That's all this is about, you know. | ||
| And this is a dictator-type move. | ||
| There's no doubt about that. | ||
| But it's just to divert. | ||
| The upstate stuff, we've clattened down about head. | ||
| Ain't nobody hearing about head. | ||
| The high unemployment numbers going up, inflation going up, John Deere moving out of the farther stuff out of the country this month or within the next year. | ||
| It's all about diversion. | ||
| Well, look at getting off of Ukraine. | ||
| Russia just slaughtering Ukraine now. | ||
| They're supposed to be pro-life over here. | ||
| They're just slaughtering kids and everything else over there. | ||
| But that's all it's about. | ||
| It's just a diversion. | ||
| It ain't about going to these cities. | ||
| And Claude. | ||
| If he did, he'd be down here in Tennessee, part of Tennessee, Georgia. | ||
| The South down here has got a higher crime rate or more than maybe not Chicago, but more absolutely more than Washington had. | ||
| So put them down here if you want to put them somewhere. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I'm not doing nothing that I'm going to get arrested for. | ||
| But this is all about diverting people from the real issues. | ||
| It's out there. | ||
| I mean, look at our health care thing. | ||
| It's a falling down. | ||
| Our old people six get cut off of Medicare and take care. | ||
| We're taking all these tariffs. | ||
| Everything is getting high. | ||
| Look at the price of food stuff. | ||
| It's getting high. | ||
| People can't afford it. | ||
| This is all just to divert off of that. | ||
| But thank you. | ||
| You fellas have a good night. | ||
| We appreciate you guys a lot. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Charles in the volunteer state. | ||
| Alex, that line for veterans from Bowie, Maryland. | ||
| Go ahead, Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Howdy, I'm from Bowie, Maryland. | |
| And yeah, I retired from the Air Force. | ||
| And I actually gave a false first name because of creeping paranoia. | ||
| I'm not psychotic or anything. | ||
| It's just these days you don't know who's going to track you down the way these Trumpian things are happening. | ||
| So I do believe we have a creeping dictatorship. | ||
| I've seen evidence of it. | ||
| I was in D.C. yesterday and saw the occupation forces. | ||
| But I'll tell you about this change of the name. | ||
| It does appeal to me in a way of the idea of having a Department of War because to me, the idea of a Department of Defense was a little dishonest in the first place because it was always about war. | ||
| And even we say, even watch clock, a broken clock is right twice a day, right? | ||
| So I believe this is one of those Trumpian ideas that was inspired by some good writer somewhere that actually does have a strong appeal, you know, like Heg Seth said today. | ||
| Alex, is it worth whatever billions of dollars it may take to make this name change? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not at all. | |
| Not at all. | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| It's just, like I say, my knee-jerk reaction was to say, yeah, that sounds pretty good. | ||
| And I'm afraid that's going to be the one that millions of people are going to have, millions of men in particular are going to have, and it's going to be what stays with them. | ||
| That's Alex or somebody else, Alex using the name Alex this morning in Bowie, Maryland. | ||
| This is Sid in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, also on that line for former military. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I think this is really foolish. | |
| Changing the name to Department of War. | ||
| What are we going to achieve? | ||
| And all the billions of dollars spent to do this when we have other wars going on around the world and we have important issues at home that need to be addressed. | ||
| Changing the name to Department of War really does not make sense. | ||
| It's stupidity. | ||
| Just like he ruined the relationship with India in just one week and created another world order. | ||
| This is just foolish. | ||
| That's my take on it. | ||
| That's Sid in Maryland this morning. | ||
| Garrett Graff is a historian. | ||
| His latest book is about making the atomic bomb. | ||
| He's also done a book on D-Day, a book on 9-11, and several other books. | ||
| He was at the National Book Festival over the weekend. | ||
| He also writes a substack and took up the history of the name change to the Department of War and the background here. | ||
| This is just some from his Substack post, and you can find it, the name of his Substack Doomsday Scenario. | ||
| He writes, the War Department was one of the first parts of the U.S. government dating back to 1798. | ||
| But what it really oversaw was just the Army. | ||
| There was a separate Department of the Navy, which was also established in 1798, which was the only military branch specifically authorized in the Constitution by Article I, Section 8, and which also oversaw the Marine Corps. | ||
| The founders, he writes, for obvious reasons, were deeply wary of standing armies. | ||
| And so the goal and plan for most of the country's history was that while we always would have a Department of the Navy chugging along, the War Department shrunk down massively in peacetime and only really bulked up during an actual war. | ||
| At the end of the 1800s, for instance, the Army was just 39,000 people, about 112th the size of the French Army. | ||
| And even on the eve of World War II, the U.S. Army ranked only 19th in the world, smaller than the standing army of Portugal. | ||
| He goes on to say it was after World War II that the U.S. began to think differently about its world obligations and what it meant for the military. | ||
| After the war, policymakers began to talk about a new concept called national security. | ||
| He writes, as the Cold War started, Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947, which created a unified structure known as the National Military Establishment, which brought together the War Department and the Navy Department, created a new Department of the Air Force, as well as created the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council and the CIA and other hallmarks of our post-war national security apparatus. | ||
| Interestingly, he writes, for the first time, all the nation's armed services were under the same roof and authority, but two years later, the so-called NME was renamed officially to the Department of Fence of Defense, in part allegedly because the acronym for the National Military Establishment sounded too much like the word enemy. | ||
| The Department of Defense, he writes, was something new at that time. | ||
| Some of the history there, Garrett Graff, historian, you can see him on C-SPAN, plenty of appearances in the C-SPAN archive. | ||
| Back to your phone calls. | ||
| That line for current and former military, this is Sean in Milton, Florida. | ||
| What are your thoughts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just wordplay again because these guys are insecure about their positions and about their effectiveness, and they feel that they have to make these grand gestures in order for them to become some kind of confident warrior. | |
| I was in the Navy for 21 years, and every time things got slow, they came up with new terminology to make us all feel better about ourselves. | ||
| And it's a waste of money, and it's a waste of time, and I think it's foolishness. | ||
| Beth is in Florida, Republican. | ||
| Your thoughts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'm a former DAD employee for 10 years. | ||
| My husband had 33 years since the DOD and his four years in service. | ||
| Both my parents are disabled veterans or were disabled veterans of World War II and go back in the family all the way back to the Revolutionary War with military members in the family. | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| If you look over the last couple of years, the Republicans have been talking about having a war machine, a lethal killing machine. | ||
| And Pete Hegseth took up that line when he came in as secretary. | ||
| And he's a little pissant that thinks working out in a gym makes you a warrior. | ||
| And Beth, you call in on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Are you a Republican? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I do. | |
| And I have been a Republican, a registered Republican since 1972. | ||
| I have been a Republican since I was five years old, and my father took me to vote for Eisenhower. | ||
| My parents suffered after World War II. | ||
| They know the cost of war. | ||
| We changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense. | ||
| We created a United Nations to not have any more wars. | ||
| We created NATO to be a defensive, not an offensive, but a defensive organization. | ||
| Pete Hegseth, the Republicans, they call their committees in the House weaponization committees. | ||
| Trump has gone to war with the American people. | ||
| He's going into cities, bringing in the National Guard, bringing in the Marines, talking about bringing the military into cities that he has no business doing anything with, because tell me where in Article II, the Commander-in-Chief can go into cities without the governor's request. | ||
| That's Beth in Florida on going into cities and the president's post over the weekend about Chicago saying that Chicago is about to find out why it's called the Department of War, that true social post that got so much of attention, so much so that it was the topic of conversations yesterday on the Sunday shows. | ||
| This is from CBS's Face the Nation, Senator Tammy Duckworth, a veteran Democrat senator from Illinois. | ||
| This is what she had to say. | ||
| I think he's renaming the Department of Defense or Department of War. | ||
| And did he not just say that Chicago will find out what it means to be at war? | ||
| I take what the President of the United States says very seriously because that is the respect you have to give to the office. | ||
| And if that's what he's declaring, then let me make it clear. | ||
| It would be an illegal order to declare war on a major city, any city within the United States by the President of the United States. | ||
| Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, yesterday, this is that line for veterans and military. | ||
| This is Darren out of Colorado Springs. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, John. | |
| Haven't talked to you in a while. | ||
| I will say this man is the master of distraction. | ||
| Now we're talking about naming the Department of War. | ||
| I just wonder, is this some alpha male thing for him and Hags has to this and like the previous caller said about going into Chicago as a veteran, I find it disgusting. | ||
| We should be talking about maybe, I don't know, the economy, homeless people, housing, health care. | ||
| This man's health. | ||
| Look at his ankles. | ||
| Look at how he speaks. | ||
| I know Biden had his issues, but this man is going downhill fast. | ||
| And we really need to think about another president here. | ||
| This guy is scary. | ||
| Have a good day, Jeff. | ||
| That's Darren in Colorado. | ||
| That number for active and former military, 202-748-8003. | ||
| Otherwise, lines as usual, Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202748-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Let me come back to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Andy Kessler's column for today, the headline, War Department is a good start. | ||
| He says, let's avoid euphemism and give every agency of government an honest name. | ||
| Why stop with defense? | ||
| Let's tell the truth, he says. | ||
| Some name changes are easy. | ||
| The last administration's social justice department, the Federal Trade Constriction Commission, start with the Commerce Department, better labeled as the Department of Corporate Extortion, he says. | ||
| Treasury should become the dollar printing-like confetti department. | ||
| He goes on to say that the Federal Bureau of Investigation could be known as the Presidential Election Manipulation Organization. | ||
| And the Central Intelligence Agency is clearly the streaming TV plot development writers' room. | ||
| Netflix needs them because we need to compete against the British shows about the MI5 and MI6. | ||
| America first, he says. | ||
| And please, please, please rename Congress the Backbiting Stagnation Club. | ||
| What about the Postal Service? | ||
| Easy, he says, the slow, expensive, obsolete monopoly. | ||
| If we're honestly naming government departments, maybe the public will get behind some real cuts. | ||
| Andy Kessler writes in his column today on the War Department change, calling it a good start. | ||
| This is Steve out of Michigan, Republican. | ||
| Steve, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, morning, John. | |
| I bet you what we should do is maybe call it, maybe the Democrats might like to call it the Department of Weakness or the Department of Gays or the Department of Drag Shows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That might go over good for them. | |
| You know what, John? | ||
| How about we change C-SPAN Washington Journal to MSNBC-SPAN's Democrat Complaint and Hate Line? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That might be a good one. | |
| That's Steve out of Michigan. | ||
| This is Ed out of Florida. | ||
| Line for Democrats. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| You know, after World War II, after seeing more than 20 million casualties after ending the war with the dropping of atomic weapons and all of the devastation, Harry Truman did a couple of things, including changing the Department war name to the Department of Defense. | ||
| The presidential seal, which is the Eagle Rising, has the arrows that were in the right talent, the primary, and the olive branches were in the sinister one. | ||
| He switched that to say diplomacy has to be always our first and last approach until war is essential. | ||
| And this is not in that spirit. | ||
| after living through World War II, I think Truman's perspective was a little better than President Trump claiming settling seven wars in six months. | ||
| Not probably as credible in terms of understanding the meanings of these words. | ||
| God bless us all. | ||
| That's Ed in Florida. | ||
| Back to that line for current and former military. | ||
| This is Bill, Springfield, Virginia. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you for having me on. | |
| I'm a retired colonel, and this is just all show and distraction, as other people have said. | ||
| But what disturbs me the most is we've got a secretary who doesn't seem to understand we actually won the Gulf War, and we won in Panama and Grenada. | ||
| He's talking about we've lost everything since the end of World War II. | ||
| This shows ignorance. | ||
| And then the other problem is that if we ever do go to war, this whole group is just totally incompetent to actually run a war. | ||
| You saw what Trump did during COVID. | ||
| Imagine him doing the same stuff during the war. | ||
| He's just absolutely beyond his depth in managing and leading anything. | ||
| And that's pretty much where we're at with this. | ||
| Bill, how many years? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just think it's a ridiculous waste. | |
| How many years were you in the service? | ||
|
unidentified
|
30. | |
| And were you deployed in that time? | ||
| Where did you serve? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I served during the Gulf War, but not in the Gulf. | |
| And I served during Iraqi Freedom, but not in Iraq. | ||
| And did anybody care about the name of the department during your 30 years? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nobody cared. | |
| Nobody cared. | ||
| Most countries right now, it's a Ministry of Defense also, by the way. | ||
| I don't think other than maybe a dictatorship, it's got a Ministry of War. | ||
| So, you know, it just, it's ignorant. | ||
| It's not woke. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| That's Bill. | ||
| The name is really not the issue. | ||
| It's a waste of money. | ||
| Focus the money on actually preparing us for combat. | ||
| That's Bill in Springfield, Virginia. | ||
| This is Franklin out of California Republican line. | ||
| You are next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I don't see the logic or reasoning in this at all. | ||
| I voted for Trump three times. | ||
| I did not vote for this. | ||
| I voted for, you know, securing our southern border, stopping the flow of dangerous drugs, killing 100,000 Americans each year, ending wars, not starting them, especially the one in Ukraine. | ||
| What else? | ||
| Energy? | ||
| I mean, there's so many important issues that we have to deal with. | ||
| This is, I don't know, this seems illogical and pointless. | ||
| I really don't get it. | ||
| As many, you know, echoing the sentiments of previous callers. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| That's Franklin in California. | ||
| Go ahead and keep calling in. | ||
| I want to show you John Elliott, former chief spokesman for the National Security Council, deputy assistant to President Trump. | ||
| He was on this program last week, and he was asked about the name change when he appeared on Friday. | ||
| This is what he had to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What he's doing there by renaming it the Department of War is going back to where it was right, in fact, all the way through World War II. | |
| So it's nothing new. | ||
| We've had the Defense Department only since World War II. | ||
| And so if you look at the executive office building that's right next to the White House, part of the White House complex, that was the Department of War building since the 1800s when it was built. | ||
| And so this is something where, look, it's historically been the Department of War for most of our history. | ||
| And this is a smart move by the president because what he's doing is he's demonstrating that we are on an offensive footing, not because we want to have endless wars the way other administrators have had, but showing that our capability is to be on our front foot as a nation militarily to be able, such as he did with that very good strike that he did on the cartels who were bringing illegal drugs toward our country. | ||
| And this is something where he's demonstrated that that is to be on an offensive footing, and that sends a strong signal. | ||
| But when you look at whether it's the Department of War or Department of Defense, it's the same men and women in uniform. | ||
| And those are the most capable military on the planet. | ||
| And he's demonstrating that by showing that we're on offense, not defense. | ||
| It was John Elliott last week on this program. | ||
| If you want to watch his appearance in its entirety, you can do so at our website at c-span.org. | ||
| Here's an image from the Department of War over across the Potomac River at the Pentagon. | ||
| Pete Hegseth's name plaque has officially been changed to Secretary of War, an image that you could have seen on the C-SPAN networks and tweeted out on X there by our own Craig Kaplan. | ||
| This is Michael in Texas on that line for current and former military. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, my name is Michael, and I am former military. | |
| And all I'd like to say is how can we support a convicted sailor? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This is Andrew out of Missouri. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think my frustration comes because we're all talking around all the issues, the name changes, all the military and everything. | ||
| But what we're not talking about is the Heritage Foundation overstepping the separation of church and state and writing 2025 and turning this country into a white nationalist country. | ||
| That is the beginning and the end of every single issue we are talking about today. | ||
| Thank you for listening. | ||
| This is Cheryl on the Republican line out of New York. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not sure why people are surprised. | |
| This is what you get from Trump. | ||
| He's not a smart man. | ||
| Remember when he wanted to sue the school if they said they would release his grades? | ||
| He doesn't even know about history. | ||
| And Heg says is an alcoholic, woman abuser, talk show person. | ||
| I mean, this is what we get. | ||
| Do you feel this way about the president and the Secretary of War as a Republican calling in on the Republican line? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, John. | |
| Republicans can have different views. | ||
| I vote for the person, okay? | ||
| I voted for Trump the first time, but after what he did on January 6th, there was no way I was going to vote for him because I don't know how people can call themselves patriotic and vote for him after what he did with the insurrection. | ||
| And the other thing is Trump is not, you know, the Christian coalition, the conservative Christians, he is an atheist. | ||
| He's never been a person to go to church. | ||
| You saw him with the Bible upside down. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Our country is becoming a mockery to the world. | ||
| It's just, I'm just shocked at where we have become. | ||
| That's Cheryl in New York. | ||
| This is Mike Horseshoe, North Carolina, Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, John. | |
| Good morning out. | ||
| I hope you're having a good day. | ||
| I'm going to throw this one to the Republicans, I guess. | ||
| I mean, the Department of War, I mean, that's what the Department of Defense is all about anyway. | ||
| It's war. | ||
| That's their number one job. | ||
| And I think Pete Pesek has the right idea of getting our military back in shape where it needs to be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We need a strong fighting force to fight wars because that's their only job. | |
| And the former caller had said Trump start wars like Ukraine. | ||
| I don't recall Trump starting the Ukrainian war. | ||
| I believe that was under Biden's watch when Putin was piling up forces on the Ukrainian border. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I heard Biden say, Well, if it's one thing, it was just a minor incursion. | ||
| In other words, you gave him the green light. | ||
| You go ahead and do that. | ||
| Putin even said himself he wouldn't have done that if Trump was president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the Gaza thing that happened under Biden as well. | |
| But, you know, Trump's trying his best to make peace. | ||
| I mean, when you're dealing with liars and evil, dangerous people, I mean, there's only so much he can do. | ||
| You know, just sort of a military situation. | ||
| And thankfully, that hopefully won't happen. | ||
| The Venezuelan boat thing, gun-ho, you know, take these people out. | ||
| They're killing Americans with all these drugs. | ||
| We have no choice but to do that. | ||
| Strong military, a fighting force. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call, John. | ||
| That's Mike in Horseshoe, North Carolina. | ||
| Go ahead and keep calling in on issues of war and peace. | ||
| Here's a story out of the Washington Times today. | ||
| It notes that law enforcement officials yesterday removed a peace vigil that had stood outside the White House for more than four decades after President Trump ordered it taken down as part of the clearing of homeless encampments in the nation's capital. | ||
| A volunteer who's run that vigil for years said it was removed early Sunday morning and said that Park Service Park Police officials justified the removal by labeling the memorial as a shelter. | ||
| The difference between an encampment and a vigil is that the encampment is where homeless people live. | ||
| As you can see, I don't have a bed. | ||
| I have signs. | ||
| This is covered by the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. | ||
| The volunteer said the White House confirmed the removal, telling the Associated Press in a statement that the vigil, which had stood there since 1981, was a those visiting the White House and the surrounding areas. | ||
| That story out of Washington, D.C. yesterday. | ||
| Another story out of Washington, D.C. late last week was the jobs numbers in Washington, D.C. Certainly a topic that Congress is likely going to take up when they come back to work today. | ||
| The House is in at noon Eastern. | ||
| The Senate's in at 3 p.m. Eastern today. | ||
| The jobs report, 22,000 jobs added last month in August. | ||
| The unemployment rate now at 4.3%. | ||
| It was also the topic of some of the Sunday shows yesterday. | ||
| It was Treasury Secretary Scott Bassent, who was on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday talking about the jobs numbers. | ||
| This is what he had to say. | ||
| You know, we look, we're not going to do economic policy off of one number. | ||
| We believe that good policies are in place that are going to create good, high-paying jobs for the American people. | ||
| Two, let's look at the efficacy of this number. | ||
| August is the noisiest month of the year. | ||
| Typically, the highest revisions come in August. | ||
| That's why it's important that we have good data. | ||
| Austin Goolsby, who's head of the Chicago Fed and probably the most partisan person at the Federal Reserve in leadership, came out and said, I don't know if these numbers were that weak. | ||
| I don't know if I'm going to vote for a cut in September because it may have something to do with the immigration deportations. | ||
| So this is why we need good data. | ||
| Three, if in fact these numbers are true, it shows that President Trump was right about the Federal Reserve. | ||
| They are too late. | ||
| And because of the bad numbers, they likely would have been cutting in June. | ||
| And if we believe the numbers, and four, I can tell you the one thing this administration is not going to do, and we are not going to let the Democrat media surrogates do, is during President Biden, President Harris's campaign, they told the American people, it's a vibe session. | ||
| You don't understand how good you have it. | ||
| President Trump was elected for change, and we are going to push through with the economic policies that are going to set the economy right. | ||
| I believe by the fourth quarter, we are going to see a substantial acceleration. | ||
| Treasury Secretary Scott was sent on the Sunday shows yesterday on that jobs report that came out on Friday. | ||
| Just one of the stories that we were tracking with you last week. | ||
| 4.3% was the unemployment rate in the month of August, 22,000 jobs added in that month. | ||
| One other story that certainly got a lot of attention on Capitol Hill last week, the continuing effort to release the Epstein files. | ||
| Here's a story from Capitol Hill in this morning's papers. | ||
| This is the Washington Post this morning. | ||
| House Speaker Mike Johnson yesterday backed off his claim that President Donald Trump was an FBI informant in the case of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| Last week, Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill that Trump cares deeply about the crimes that Epstein committed and said that Trump was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down. | ||
| On Sunday, his office released a statement modifying that claim. | ||
| Quote, the speaker is reiterating what the victim's attorney said, which is that Donald Trump, who kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, was the only one more than a decade ago willing to help prosecutors expose Epstein for being a disgusting child predator. | ||
| That's the statement out of Johnson's office. | ||
| The issue likely to be back in the spotlight this week on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Back to your phone calls on this question that we asked you this morning, the name change for the Department of Defense, now the Department of War. | ||
| Does it matter to you? | ||
| This is Catherine out of Dover, New Hampshire, on that line for current and former military. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I am a Navy veteran of 22 years. | ||
| I served in the Persian Gulf. | ||
| I am a nurse and still am a nurse on the hospital ship Comfort, both for Desert Storm, Desert Shield, and Iraqi Freedom. | ||
| I have never voted for Trump. | ||
| He has no concept of what he's doing. | ||
| And remember, he worked his way out of ever serving in the military. | ||
| And this is a huge distraction, a huge distraction from what our mission is. | ||
| And when I was on active duty, no one had time to discuss things like this or even it was never discussed. | ||
| We were too busy doing our jobs. | ||
| And in my case, was trying to save people's lives. | ||
| And part of the problem here is that we have low information voters in this country and so few people that do not have never served and have no real idea of what goes on. | ||
| I'm not including family members of military, but a lot of folks just do not have a good idea of how our country, how the military works. | ||
| And the history is there, and George Washington would be the first person to be so infuriated. | ||
| And by the way, Secretary Hagseth now can have an acronym of S-O-W before his name. | ||
| Instead of being the SECDEF, now he might be the SOOW. | ||
| So be careful what you wish for. | ||
| But this is all distraction against what Trump really wants to do, which is basically enrich himself at the cost of destroying this country. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Catherine in New Hampshire this morning. | ||
| This is Doug out of Illinois, Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and thank you for taking my call. | |
| I just would like to touch on one point. | ||
| Like I said, we're about 120 miles south of Chicago. | ||
| I want to touch on Cameron Duckworth, the senator, of her comment on what Trump said about coming to Chicago and they're going to find out what war is all about. | ||
| Well, unfortunately. | ||
| The quote on its true social page, Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of War, followed by three helicopter emojis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, and also she said they're going to find out what war means and stuff. | |
| Okay, well, unfortunately, they're taking this out of context. | ||
| What they mean is they're going to find out what the war on crime is going to be all about. | ||
| Okay, Chicago is the number one city in the United States with the highest murder rate per people. | ||
| Okay, that's a known fact. | ||
| You can look that up. | ||
| Okay, now, unfortunately, most of your people that listen, okay, have never had their house broken into, have never had their car stolen, have never been assaulted in their own home. | ||
| I have. | ||
| I know what crime is. | ||
| Okay, it's terrible. | ||
| I am a senior citizen, and I'm disabled, and I will not have anything. | ||
| My son moved in with me to take care of me. | ||
| He's my caregiver. | ||
| He went out and got an FOID card. | ||
| He is going to sit here and protect me until somebody comes in this state and takes care of this crime. | ||
| It's out of control. | ||
| The Democrats are making it like our Governor Pritzker, oh, no, we got this under control. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm tired of this stuff in this state. | ||
| A lot of people have moved out. | ||
| Hundreds of thousands of people have moved out of Illinois. | ||
| And the governor's still denying this. | ||
| But when we lose a house in the Senate, he's going to find out it's the truth. | ||
| But we need to stop this crime. | ||
| I'm a victim many times of crime. | ||
| And we've got to do something about this. | ||
| And we can't have these Democrats play it down. | ||
| They're playing crime down. | ||
| And there's so much black on black crime up in Chicago. | ||
| They're not doing anything about it. | ||
| And I hope when he goes for election next year, the people of Chicago are not going to vote for him because that's how he got elected last year, or the last term he got elected by most of the people in Cook County. | ||
| There's millions of people up there. | ||
| You're talking about Governor Pritzker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes. | |
| And one more thing. | ||
| The mayor of Brandon Johnson, okay, signed an executive order of not having the police work with other law enforcement up there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, you know, every day you turn on the TV, here's another immigrant killed a woman. | |
| There was a woman that was killed last month on a bus by a guy that had been convicted of crimes 25 times. | ||
| And the problem is, I live in a state, there's no cash bail. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, this is crazy. | |
| They don't call, they call nonviolent crimes an assault on a person a nonviolent crime. | ||
| That's when somebody comes and knocks your head off walking down the street or pushes your head into a sidewalk, and they call that a nonviolent crime. | ||
| So the guy that goes to jail for two hours is let back out and convict, they make more crimes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, these people have been arrested 10, 20 times, and they keep letting them out. | |
| And the prosecutors and judges, they're trying to do their jobs. | ||
| Some of them, you know, some of them are, and some of them are the ones that let these criminals out. | ||
| But crime is rampant in the United States. | ||
| And a lot of these organizations are paying these protesters to go out there and sticking up for the Democrats saying we have no problem with crime here. | ||
| That's exactly what Governor Pritzker said in Illinois. | ||
| We have no problem. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| They're going to find out elections next year. | ||
| And National Guard, that they say that's coming here, okay, they're here to protect law enforcement because, like I said, the mayor of Chicago said, we are not going to have our police. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Doug in Illinois this morning. | ||
| It was Tom Homan, the White House Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations. | ||
| That's his official title. | ||
| He was on CNN this weekend, and he was talking about Donald Trump's post about Chicago. | ||
| This is part of that exchange. | ||
| Is President Trump planning to go to war in Chicago? | ||
| Look, I think it's worth being taken out of context. | ||
| If I said we're going to war, we're going to war with the criminal cartels. | ||
| We're going to war with illegal aliens, public safety threats that raped children, that raped citizens, that committed armed robberies, that distribute narcotics that kill Americans. | ||
| We're at war with the criminal cartels. | ||
| And Governor Prisker protects illegal alien public safety threats every day in that state, along with Mary Johnson. | ||
| We proved that. | ||
| The first week of the administration, I went to Chicago. | ||
| I started an operation there. | ||
| The first day, we arrested nine sexual predators, most of them child rapists. | ||
| We arrested nine members of TDA. | ||
| Several of those TDA members had an illegal pistol with a switch on it, which makes that pistol fully automatic. | ||
| We arrested two illegal aliens that had a homicide conviction. | ||
| That was the first day in Chicago. | ||
| So, you know, President Trump and his administration, yeah, we're at war with the criminal cartels and those who want to murder and rape American citizens. | ||
| You're damn right. | ||
| Tom Homan on CNN on Sunday. | ||
| Back to your phone calls on the Washington Journal this morning. | ||
| This is Ed out of Jacksonville, Florida, on that line for current or former military. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, John. | ||
| This is Ed from Florida. | ||
| I'm the old guy that has talked about the National Guard, but saying that I was born at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which people talk about changing things around how much money that costs us. | ||
| And saying that also, the issue about war, I think it gives an image or clearly defines the mission of the soldiers. | ||
| They clearly understand now what the uniform is for and what they're there for. | ||
| And I will tell you this: people that have fought in the war, which I think you understand my history with the military, is that they hate it. | ||
| They don't want war. | ||
| So I want to clearly state, too, that they talk about the National Guard in Chicago. | ||
| People will forget with the National Guard years ago, we were doing riot control, if they remember right. | ||
| Thank you, John, for your time. | ||
| Ed, before you go, do you think before this name change that people who wore the uniform didn't fully understand what they were there for? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I would say it clearly defines what they're there for in the sense that, you know, you had people sitting there saying, well, this is not my job being guard, having guard duty or whatever. | |
| You know, this would give you clearly a definition of what you're there for is to defend your country. | ||
| And by the way, that's why you learn how to use your weapon. | ||
| You know, it's all how you see life from where you sit in a foxhole. | ||
| And if you allow me to say that, during night qualifications, we fire our weapons downrange and with tracers. | ||
| And my younger soldiers used to always say to me, isn't this great? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| They were all enticed by the tracer rounds. | ||
| And I explained to them, yes, it's really nice because they're going downrange and not coming in. | ||
| Thank you, John, for your time. | ||
| That's Ed out of Florida. | ||
| This is Perry out of South Dakota. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd like to just call and thank you for taking my call first. | |
| I really believe in C-SPAN. | ||
| But that man from Illinois, he described it exactly as the way it is. | ||
| He called in here a few minutes ago. | ||
| And, you know, if you had a bad flood in Illinois, what would they call it? | ||
| Well, they call it the National Guard. | ||
| We have a problem there with just getting things done because you can't go out in the streets because of the people that take advantage of you. | ||
| I don't believe in people running into a store or anything like that and just carrying stuff out. | ||
| But they say, oh, I have it coming. | ||
| I have it coming. | ||
| That just isn't so. | ||
| A good life has to do with working and doing something positive and not going out and taking advantage of people in the street. | ||
| And that's what the National Guard, I would guess they would work with a local law. | ||
| And I can't, I was in the National Guard for a year and a half before I went into Air Force. | ||
| And what we did, we just took care of local problems. | ||
| And if you think Chicago doesn't have a local problem, you have to be kidding yourself. | ||
| So thank you very much for let me call. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| That's Perry out of the Mount Rushmore State. | ||
| This is the Wall Street Journal editorial board from last week after this announcement was made. | ||
| The editorial board writing that the president loves nothing more than a rebrand. | ||
| The name change, they write, is supposed to echo the era when America was victorious. | ||
| No more Vietnam's, Iraq's, or Afghanistan's. | ||
| But the obvious point is that the U.S. won the terrible conflicts of the 20th century, World War I and II, because it built the most fearsome military power and it had the political will to use it. | ||
| They write, neither are in abundant supply. | ||
| Despite Mr. Trump's assertions and his B-2 bomber flyovers at diplomatic summits, the U.S. spent 16.9% of its economy on defense in 1952 during the Korean War and north of 8% during the Vietnam War. | ||
| But after the explosion of government domestic spending on health care, retirement, and education, and much, much more, the Pentagon now gets a mere 3% of GDP. | ||
| Mr. Trump's one-time cash infusion in his reconciliation bill this year can't bend that downward trajectory. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal's editorial board asking the question, can Trump's War Department actually win a war? | ||
| This is Laurel out of Wallingford, Connecticut. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Instead of Department of War, I think it should be called Department of Deciding of Peace. | ||
| And it should start with a prayer. | ||
| Now, Father, now, let your presence kneeling. | ||
| Our spirits turn to feel thy kidding love. | ||
| Now make us strong. | ||
| We need thy deep revealing of love and faith and calmness from above. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| That's Laurel out of Wallingford, Connecticut. | ||
| Taking your phone calls, just a few minutes left this morning. | ||
| A special line for current and former members of the military. | ||
| That number, 202748-8003. | ||
| Otherwise, Democrats, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| A reminder of the schedule on Capitol Hill today. | ||
| The House is in at noon Eastern. | ||
| You can, of course, watch that here on C-SPAN. | ||
| The Senate is in at 3 p.m. | ||
| You can watch that over on C-SPAN too. | ||
| Plenty going on on Capitol Hill throughout the day. | ||
| We hope you stay with the C-SPAN networks for all our coverage. | ||
| Just a few more calls here. | ||
| This is Robin out of Iamsville, Maryland. | ||
| Republican, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for taking, thank you for taking my call. | |
| My, I don't really care about the name change. | ||
| I understand it's being done to show America has the greatest military in the world, and we do. | ||
| But a point that I haven't heard from anybody is soldiers are no longer called soldiers as sailors. | ||
| They're called warfighters. | ||
| They've been called warfighters for a really long time. | ||
| And it's because that's their job. | ||
| It's to fight wars. | ||
| They're not defense defenders. | ||
| They're warfighters. | ||
| So the change makes sense to me. | ||
| And I appreciate you taking my call. | ||
| That's Robin. | ||
| This is Roberta out of Emerson, New Jersey, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I have a question. | ||
| I would like to know how much did this cost the taxpayers to take all of this down, all the wording down? | ||
| He changed it from defense to war. | ||
| No one is talking about how much this cost. | ||
| It wasn't necessary. | ||
| Trump likes to do things in big ways. | ||
| Very big ways. | ||
| He's a bully. | ||
| So my question is: how much did this cost? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Roberta, plenty of stories on that front that you can find, including this one from Politico. | ||
| Some estimates upwards of billions of dollars. | ||
| Pentagon officials fume over the Trump's Department of War rebrand. | ||
| Employees could find themselves changing Defense Department seals on more than 700,000 facilities around the world. | ||
| The politico story also going into the various business cards and napkins and embroidered seals on clothing that would all need to be changed. | ||
| If you want to read that story, politico.com. | ||
| This is Christina out of the Hawkeye State. | ||
| Independent, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so I just woke up and I got on here, but I think it's really important for all of us Americans to realize that, you know, we try to war, we try to get a division. | |
| It's not working. | ||
| And I think really we need to come together. | ||
| And about what that guy was talking about that chat on there, that they're going to Chicago and they're going to, you know, get all these pedophiles and all that, I really truly think that they need to start with the White House and our government. | ||
| And I don't care what anybody says. | ||
| We are the largest child trafficking industry in the world, United States is. | ||
| And I watch other news from the other countries. | ||
| We have got to get our shit cleared up and cleaned up because it's not working. | ||
| Got your point, Christina. | ||
| This is Amanda out of the Bay State. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you today? | |
| Doing well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm just calling. | |
| There was a gentleman that was calling said to look up the most dangerous cities. | ||
| He was saying Chicago was one of the most top most dangerous city for crime. | ||
| And I just wanted to let him know that Memphis, actually, Tennessee is. | ||
| And then after that, it's St. Louis, Missouri, Little Rock, Arkansas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Detroit, Michigan. | ||
| So, you know, we're getting information from all different places, and that is our problem. | ||
| We don't figure out what the truth is. | ||
| We come on, we talk. | ||
| He did say to look it up, so I looked it up. | ||
| Amanda, what's the source you went to? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I went to Safe and Sound Security. | |
| It is 20 Most Dangerous Cities in the U.S. | ||
| It was by Anisha DeVasia, updated on July 23rd, 2025. | ||
| And where do you usually go when you're looking for information? | ||
| What are your sources? | ||
| What kind of newspapers do you get in Massachusetts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Actually, the only source I have, believe it or not, is Heather Cox Richardson. | |
| Her Daily Post. | ||
| I read her Daily Post every day, and I do not get myself into the tunnel, into the hole, because if you keep, it's just too stressful. | ||
| So I am currently, and I'm telling everyone, please follow her and follow people that she endorses because she's an amazing historian in Massachusetts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And she has been doing this for, gosh, for a decade, at least now. | |
| But yeah, that's where I get my information from. | ||
| And then I sometimes will do a search to try to figure out information to try to figure out what that person was talking about and if it's true or not. | ||
| And honestly, I'll be perfectly honest with you. | ||
| I have been wrong. | ||
| But I admit when I'm wrong. | ||
| I'm not going to fight with someone. | ||
| I'm going to be like, oh, yeah, you're right. | ||
| I didn't read that correctly. | ||
| And I think that's the biggest thing. | ||
| We need to say, well, yeah, oops, I didn't realize this. | ||
| I am wrong. | ||
| And work together. | ||
| We're not working together anymore. | ||
| And that's why this administration is able to do whatever it wants. | ||
| We have a rogue executive branch. | ||
| And I hope we can get us back on track for every American. | ||
| That's Amanda in Massachusetts. | ||
| A good source here on Capitol Hill is the Hill newspaper. | ||
| It's been around for a long time. | ||
| And they just did a story last week on the 10 cities in the United States with the highest murder rates. | ||
| Their list a little bit different from the one the caller just brought up, talking about the 10 cities in the U.S. with the highest murder rates per 100,000 people. | ||
| Jackson, Mississippi is at the top of that list. | ||
| It goes on to Birmingham, Alabama, and the list moves to St. Louis, Missouri, and Memphis, Tennessee. | ||
| You can go on thehill.com to check out their list. | ||
| Number five is Baltimore, according to that list. | ||
| It's thehill.com if you want to check it out. | ||
| That's going to do it for this first segment of the Washington Journal today, but stick around. | ||
| Plenty more to talk about. | ||
| Later this morning, a look at the U.S. legal system and cases against President Trump during the 2024 election cycle. | ||
| Alex Sawyer is the author of the new book, Lawless Lawfair. | ||
| But first, a discussion with Dr. Paul Offutt on the Trump administration's approach to vaccines. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
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This week on the C-SPAN Networks, the House and the Senate are in session. | |
| The House and Senate will work on their versions of 2026 defense programs and policy legislation known as the National Defense Authorization Act. | ||
| On Tuesday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett launches her latest book, Listening to the Law, with a book signing hosted by the Reagan Foundation Center on Civility and Democracy. | ||
| And then on Wednesday, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratzios, will testify before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on President Trump's artificial intelligence strategy. | ||
| And on Thursday, watch C-SPAN's live all-day coverage of the September 11th commemoration services for the National 9-11 Memorial in New York City, the National 9-11 Pentagon Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Watch live this week on the C-SPAN networks or on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app. | ||
| Also, head over to c-SPAN.org for scheduling information or to watch live or on demand anytime. | ||
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| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
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|
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We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
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Washington Journal continues. | |
| Dr. Paul Offitt joins us now via Zoom. | ||
| Until recently, he served on the Food and Drug Administration's Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, a federal board that serves what function, Dr. Offitt? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, see, it's that that board is composed of experts in the field of virology, immunology, statistics, epidemiology. | |
| They're clinicians, and we advise the FDA on issues related to vaccines or related biological materials. | ||
| Why are you no longer a member of that board? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, so I was a member for two four-year terms from 2017 to 2025. | |
| As far as I knew, I was off in January of 2025, but I was asked by a senior FDA official to please stay on for another four years. | ||
| I agreed to stay on for another two years. | ||
| So I was then back on the roster as being on until 2027. | ||
| I was asked to do what we always have to do when you're on the next rotation, which is submit your special government employee forms, which I filled out, sent in. | ||
| And then sort of weeks went by, and this person who had asked me to extend my stay said that things were getting held up at Health and Human Services, that I was on the committee, but that for whatever reason he didn't know that this was being held up by HHS. | ||
| And then I heard that because they wouldn't basically approve those pretty much pro forma forms, that I wasn't on the committee anymore. | ||
| Has your opinion changed when it comes to the recommendations that you make to that committee? | ||
| Why do you think you're no longer on that committee? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| I mean, I have been a pretty plain-spoken critic of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and maybe that's the reason, but I don't know that. | ||
| I just know that while it's true that I've been a plain-spoken critic of him, and I know that it's HHS that ultimately blocked my coming back on, I mean, they asked me to come back on. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe those two things are related. | ||
| RFK Jr. has also been a critic of you as well. | ||
| He's along with members of the CDC's vaccine advisory board accused you and members of that board of conflicts of interest when it comes to recommendations about vaccines and vaccine schedules in this country. | ||
| What has been your response to that criticism over the years? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I'm not his problem. | |
| The science that consistently shows is wrong. | ||
| That's his problem. | ||
| But when anybody stands up for vaccines, vaccine safety, vaccine science, vaccine efficacy, vaccine value, he always says the same thing. | ||
| He's a one-trick pony. | ||
| He always thinks everybody's in the pocket of industry and that nobody's being honest except for him. | ||
| What did you think about his appearance on Capitol Hill last week? | ||
|
unidentified
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I was encouraged by it, actually, because there were three Republicans that stood up and said, you know, that what he was doing was harmful for the American public. | |
| It's the first time really I've seen that happen in that clear of a manner. | ||
| And my understanding for why that happened was that there was a Trump-friendly poll that was produced that showed that, not surprisingly, most Americans support vaccines. | ||
| Most Americans were troubled by the fact that we may not have vaccines. | ||
| I'm talking about vaccines other than the COVID vaccine. | ||
| And it was independent of partisanship. | ||
| It was Democrats and Republican. | ||
| Parents all want vaccines. | ||
| And I think that's what they were standing up for. | ||
| We'll see how it plays out. | ||
| What is the message the American people are receiving right now on vaccines and when and why they should get vaccines? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's been confusing. | |
| I mean, we have a Secretary of Health and Human Services and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has for 20 years been an anti-vaccine propagandist, science denialist, and conspiracy theorist. | ||
| And so we're getting a lot of confusing recommendations. | ||
| I think one thing is clear. | ||
| I think you can no longer trust the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practice, which advises the CDC, because he fired all 17 members who had an expertise, claiming, as he always does, that they're in the pocket of industry. | ||
| Then he replaced them with seven people, and now it's going to be another seven more, all of whom have anti-vaccine views for the most part, with the exception of possibly one person. | ||
| And so I think the medical community, the scientific community no longer looks to the ACIP, or frankly, by extension, the CDC, for advice. | ||
| So where should the American people look in your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
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So there are these consortiums that are being put together in the Northeast and in the West of states that are saying, okay, we are going to provide good information about what vaccines children should or shouldn't get. | |
| And we're going to make sure that that advice is followed up by insurance company coverage. | ||
| So you don't have to worry about liability. | ||
| You don't have to worry about insurance company coverage. | ||
| And then in addition, there are groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology that also put out good advice. | ||
| And then there's another group called the Verity Project out of Minnesota, headed by Mike Osterholm, that also puts out good information. | ||
| So there are sites of good information. | ||
| The problem is, you know, it's very fragmented. | ||
| So we used to be able to look to one source, the ACIP, the CDC, and now we can't. | ||
| What is the vaccine education center at CHOP, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So we started the Vaccine Education Center at CHOP about 25 years ago, again, to provide good, up-to-date, scientifically accurate information for the public and for the press and for physicians as well. | ||
| So, and people do look to us. | ||
| We get certainly many, many different views every day from folks. | ||
| That's where Dr. Paul Offit works. | ||
| He's working this morning by taking your phone calls on phone lines split as usual in this segment. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| Children and vaccines, very much a part of that hearing on Thursday on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Dr. Offutt, this is about a minute of Secretary Kennedy testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. | ||
| So could you explain what steps you're going to be taking to ensure vaccine guidance is clear, evidence-based, and trustworthy? | ||
| We're going to make it clear, evidence-based, and trustworthy for the first time in history. | ||
| For most, right now, you know, when I was a kid, I got three vaccines. | ||
| I was fully compliant. | ||
| Today's children have to get between 69 and 92 vaccines in order to be fully compliant. | ||
| Between maternity and 18 years. | ||
| Only one of those 19 vaccines, 92 doses, only one of those vaccines has ever been tested against an inert placebo. | ||
| And what we're doing now is any new vaccine that before it's approved and licensed will have to show, demonstrate safety against inert placebo. | ||
| And we're going to go back and do observational studies on the existing vaccines to see if they're linked to any of these chronic disease epidemics so that people can understand the risk profile of those products and make good assessments for their own health. | ||
| Secretary Kennedy last week on Capitol Hill, what's your response to that, Dr. Offen? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| He is a fire hose of misinformation. | ||
| First of all, children in the first 18 years of life get 17 different vaccines, not the number he said, which was like 90. | ||
| They get a total of 33 doses of that vaccine. | ||
| In terms of placebo-controlled trials, any new vaccine, meaning for which there's not an existing vaccine, will always be tested in a prospective placebo-controlled trial, always. | ||
| And that has been true for 80 years. | ||
| Now, if you have a new vaccine that is considered to be an improvement on an existing vaccine, so for example, we have a pneumococcal vaccine. | ||
| The first pneumococcal vaccine contains seven different serotypes. | ||
| So pneumococcus is a bacterium. | ||
| It's a bacteria that causes sepsis, which is bloodstream infection, meningitis, pneumonia, and death. | ||
| So that was a valuable vaccine, and it was shown to work. | ||
| Then you had a company that said, okay, I'm going to add another six different serotypes. | ||
| So it's not seven, it's 13. | ||
| Well, you can't test that against placebo because you know you had an existing product that worked. | ||
| So what you do is you test it against that existing product to show that at the very least it's no worse and at best it's better. | ||
| So I guess that's what he's talking about. | ||
| He's talking about the fact that you don't have placebo-controlled trials for vaccines for which there's already an existing product. | ||
| But certainly all vaccines, all new vaccines are tested against placebo control. | ||
| For the COVID vaccine, just go back to the development of the COVID vaccine. | ||
| In people's minds, you know, it was Operation Warp Speed that's moved very quickly. | ||
| Does that mean that the COVID vaccines were also tested as thoroughly as the process that you just laid out? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| First of all, the COVID vaccines were tested in two large placebo-controlled trials. | ||
| Pfizer's was a 40,000 adult one-to-one placebo-controlled trial. | ||
| Moderna's was a 30,000 placebo one-to-one control. | ||
| But you know, people don't realize that those, that Operation Warp Speed was a tremendous advance. | ||
| And we were able to do two very large prospective placebo-controlled trials, the size of any typical adult or pediatric vaccine trial, in a fairly short period of time, 11 months really, from the isolation of that virus. | ||
| But we had a lot of information going in because when SARS-1 raised its head in China in 2002, 2003, NIH started working on an mRNA vaccine against SARS-1. | ||
| So SARS-1 never came into this country, so it was moved. | ||
| But we learned a lot from doing that. | ||
| So although Operation Warp Speed was a tremendous success, it was the tip of a much bigger iceberg of research and development. | ||
| Do you think President Donald Trump should get a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed? | ||
|
unidentified
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I think Operation Warp Speed was a value. | |
| I think the Nobel Prize that was given for that vaccine was given to the right people, which was Drew Reisman and Katie Carrico, who formed a collaboration in 1997 that taught us how you could actually use mRNA as a vaccine. | ||
| So I think the Nobel Prize was given to the right people. | ||
| So that's what I would say. | ||
| Who should get the COVID vaccine today? | ||
|
unidentified
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So I think any child who has not received the vaccine should get it, especially young children, because still every year thousands of young children are being hospitalized and one in five are going to the ICU. | |
| We had 150 children die last year of COVID, half of whom were previously healthy. | ||
| So any young child who has not received the vaccine should receive the vaccine. | ||
| I think otherwise, for a yearly vaccine, we should target high-risk groups because the goal of this vaccine is to keep you out of the hospital, keep you out of the intensive care unit, keep you out of the work. | ||
| So the question becomes who's getting hospitalized and who's dying. | ||
| And it really falls into four high-risk groups. | ||
| So people who are elderly, meaning those over 75, people who have high-risk medical conditions like chronic lung disease or chronic heart disease, people who are immune compromised, either because they're getting immune suppressive therapy for their autoimmune diseases or their cancers, and then pregnant women, I think, also should get a yearly vaccine. | ||
| Was the CDC during COVID good at explaining to people what the COVID vaccine did and didn't do and who should get it and who shouldn't get it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, in retrospect, it's always easy, but I would say no. | |
| There were some things that were not clear. | ||
| I think people, when they were asked to get a vaccine or be mandated to get a vaccine, it should have been made very clear very early on that four to six months after you get this vaccine, you're not going to be particularly well protected against mild disease or moderate disease. | ||
| The goal is to keep you out of the hospital. | ||
| So some people were mandated to get a vaccine and then they got a moderate illness, which is not trivial. | ||
| You're still home for a few days, you know, coughing with fever and chills. | ||
| So that was one. | ||
| I think we should have made it clear what the expectations were. | ||
| Two, I think we should have made it clear that while this vaccine will reduce transmission, it doesn't eliminate it. | ||
| It will lessen the amount of virus, infectious virus that's shed and the length of time that it's shed for, but it doesn't eliminate transmission. | ||
| This is a short incubation period, mucosal infection. | ||
| You lessen, but don't eliminate transmission. | ||
| I think that that was important. | ||
| I think we should very early have done what other countries did, which is target high-risk groups instead of recommending this vaccine as a yearly vaccine for everybody over six months of age. | ||
| Do you think we are at a modern time in which there's more distrust in vaccines than you've seen in your lifetime? | ||
|
unidentified
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I would argue than ever before. | |
| I think what happened was those first two years of the pandemic when we did things that really upset people. | ||
| We closed schools for too long. | ||
| We shuttered businesses for too long. | ||
| I think that we oversold the vaccine in terms of saying that it would prevent transmission or that it would protect all disease. | ||
| I think that that was confusing to people. | ||
| And I think we lean into this libertarian left hook and I think we're feeling the punch. | ||
| Dr. Paul Offitt is with us for about 20, 25 more minutes. | ||
| And he's always happy to take your phone calls and the phone lines we'll put on the screen for you. | ||
| Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, as usual. | ||
| John is in Baltimore, up first on that line for independents. | ||
| John, you are on with Dr. Offitt. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, hi, Doctor. | |
| I'd just like to point out, and I think you've explained it very clearly, the politicization of vaccines and health in general. | ||
| And I think we can trace this back to the origins or when the COVID epidemic started. | ||
| I think it came in a perfect storm because it came during the time when we had one of the most polarizing presidents in our lifetimes. | ||
| And when the vaccine came out, it was actually the other side, the liberals, the Democrats, who are the vaccine skeptics, claiming that, you know, referencing Operation Warp Speed, that there's no way you can come up with an effective vaccine in less than a year. | ||
| These things take decades, I mean, years, if not decades. | ||
| And then when it did come out and the efficacy was above, what, 98% and such, we had Democrats and Republicans lining up, like getting on wait lists for the vaccine. | ||
| As I remember, late December, early January. | ||
| And then we had a switch in an administration that really was in charge of now bringing these vaccines to market. | ||
| And I think then you saw the polarization where the Republicans, it was a switch. | ||
| Now the Republicans, the conservatives were attacking the vaccine because this was now a Democrat issue. | ||
| And you had the Democrats now basically enforcing really severe mandates across the board. | ||
| And I think that's the environment that kind of perpetuated what we live with right now, where just our basic health has become so politicized. | ||
| And for example, like Florida just eliminating all vaccine requirements in schools, which is which we considered lunacy, like maybe four or five years ago. | ||
| I mean, is that where we're at right now? | ||
| Dr. Offitt? | ||
|
unidentified
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I have to consider it lunacy now, actually, John. | |
| But I think, first of all, as a fellow Baltimorean, I appreciate your comments. | ||
| Here's what I would say. | ||
| I think there was never a politics to the anti-vaccine movement. | ||
| On the left, it was kind of, I wanted, it's unnatural. | ||
| I just want to be inoculated with, I don't want to be inoculated with these things that contain manufacturing additives or residuals or inactivating agents. | ||
| It's the kind of bib overall, all things natural crowd. | ||
| And so that was the left. | ||
| On the right, it was this, which is this sort of libertarian, I don't want the government to tell me what to do. | ||
| And that's where we are now. | ||
| This is all primarily that. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| I think Joseph Ladapo, the Florida state surgeon general, has now said that he's not going to mandate any vaccines because it's a matter of bodily autonomy. | ||
| But, you know, they have a religious exemption to vaccines in Florida. | ||
| You don't have to get a vaccine. | ||
| What he's saying is he's going to eliminate mandates. | ||
| Well, if there's an outbreak, and there was an outbreak in a Catholic school in Florida last year, if there's an outbreak, he has just tied his hand behind his back in terms of how to control that outbreak because that's where mandates come in. | ||
| I mean, you don't want to say anybody in this school that now is having an outbreak can choose not to get a vaccine, which is to say you can choose to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection to some people who may not be able to get a vaccine for whatever reason, because they're getting cancer chemotherapy or immune suppressive therapy for their autoimmune diseases. | ||
| So I think it's a rough time. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| I've never seen anything like this. | ||
| Brian is next out of Minnesota, Republican. | ||
| Brian, you're on with Dr. Paul Offitt. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Dr. Paul, how many COVID shots have you gotten your time here? | ||
| And then with all these vaccines for infants, back in the 80s, it was everybody got like five jabs, and now it's up to like 30. | ||
| Is this what's causing all the autism? | ||
| That's all I got to see. | ||
| Okay, Brian. | ||
| So here's what I would say. | ||
| The vaccines don't cause autism. | ||
| All the evidence is that you're born with autism. | ||
| And there's a number of genetic factors. | ||
| So for example, if you were an identical twin and you're diagnosed with autism, the odds are very high that your identical twin will also be diagnosed with autism. | ||
| Whereas if it's a fraternal twin, the odds are much lower. | ||
| So there is clearly a genetic stautism. | ||
| There are maternal factors like obesity and diabetes, which contribute to autism. | ||
| There are things you can take during pregnancy, like valproic acid, which is an anti-seizure drug, which increases your risk of autism. | ||
| There are certainly infections during pregnancy, meaning when the child is in utero, like rubella, which is German measles or cytomegalovirus, which increase your risks of autism. | ||
| Certainly, maternal age at the time of conception, and especially paternal age at the time of concession, all of that increases your risk of autism. | ||
| And so, what that says is that you're born with autism. | ||
| And we've sort of gone through a lot of rounds on this vaccines, whether it was the measles-monts or Bella vaccine that caused autism or thimerosol, an ethyl-containing ethylmercury-containing preservative in vaccines that caused autism. | ||
| I think that's all been clearly disproven. | ||
| So, I mean, I understand how people will say, look at all these vaccines that you're getting, but you know, it's really not the number of vaccines that matter. | ||
| It's what's in the vaccines that matter, meaning the number of immunological components in vaccines. | ||
| That's what matters. | ||
| And by immunological component, I mean a viral protein, like the one protein in the hepatitis B vaccine, or bacterial proteins, like the two to five bacterial proteins in the hooping cough vaccine. | ||
| That's what I mean by immunological components. | ||
| If you add up all the immunological components that children are getting today in the 17 vaccines they get up to the age of 18, it adds up to about 170 immunological components. | ||
| That's fewer than the number of immunological components we got in vaccines 100 years ago, which was the smallpox vaccine, which has 200 immunological components. | ||
| So, I think, although I can understand how people are nervous when they watch their child get 25 different inoculations in the first few years of life or five shots at one time to prevent diseases most people don't see using biological fluids most people don't understand, I get the pushback, but I'm just saying from an immunological point of view, it doesn't make sense. | ||
| And I think for everything we know about autism to date, it's that you're born with autism. | ||
| In terms of what's in a vaccine, remind viewers what an mRNA vaccine is and what's your reaction to HHS moving to cancel some mRNA research. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So, mRNA, messenger RNA, is something that we have in all our cells. | ||
| There's about 200,000 pieces of messenger RNA in most of our cells. | ||
| And that piece of genetic material is used. | ||
| It is then translated into a protein by the genetic machinery in our cells. | ||
| So, we all have mRNA in our bodies. | ||
| So, what this mRNA vaccine is, it's an mRNA that codes for the SARS-CoV-2 virus fusion protein, spike protein, protein on the surface of cells. | ||
| So, you give the mRNA, it enters your cell, it's translated to that protein, which is the spike protein, which is then seen by your body as foreign. | ||
| And then you make antibodies to the spike protein, which will prevent the virus from binding to cells, because that's the part of the virus that binds to cells. | ||
| So, that's how that all works. | ||
| Vincent is in Middletown, Connecticut, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, doctor. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| You actually answered half my question. | ||
| I was going to ask the difference between mRNA and recombinant vaccine. | ||
| I believe I'm saying it right. | ||
| How would you explain what a recombinant vaccine is as opposed to an mRNA vaccine? | ||
| And I don't think they're the same thing. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| They're not the same thing. | ||
| So, the mRNA is you're giving this piece of genetic material that's taken up into cells. | ||
| That genetic material is then translated to a protein, which then you respond to. | ||
| The recombinant DNA vaccines, like the hepatitis B vaccine or the human papillomavirus vaccine, there you actually give the viral protein. | ||
| You give one viral protein for the hepatitis B vaccine, which is the hepatitis B surface antigen. | ||
| You give one protein for the human papillomavirus vaccine, which is the so-called L1 protein. | ||
| But I think you raise an important point because what's happened over the past hundred years is we've had major advances in things like protein chemistry and protein purification and recombinant DNA technology that enables us to give really pure and frankly safer vaccines than the one vaccine we got 100 years ago with the smallpox vaccine, which had was a pretty dangerous vaccine, all in all. | ||
| But then again, smallpox was a dangerous virus. | ||
| So, the benefits still outweighed the risk. | ||
| But that was a tough vaccine. | ||
| I mean, people who got that vaccine often had this sort of, you know, major systemic reactions associated with that vaccine. | ||
| But again, because smallpox was so devastating, it was a value. | ||
| You talk about that the vaccines are purer and more developed. | ||
| Are they as effective today as an mRNA vaccine, an effective vaccine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it was highly effective. | |
| I think the previous caller alluded to something that was really important, saying that the vaccine was like 95% effective when those studies were done and presented to our committee, the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, in December of 2020. | ||
| And that was misleading because what you saw in those studies is you saw that you had 95% protection against mild disease, 95% protection against moderate disease, 95% protection against severe disease. | ||
| And I think when people saw those data, they thought, great, this vaccine is highly effective, even against mild disease. | ||
| But those were three-month studies. | ||
| Those participants had just been given their second dose. | ||
| So they had high levels of antibodies then for the period of time when they were investigating or evaluating this vaccine. | ||
| You know, four to six months later, when those antibody levels declined, you weren't as well protected against mild to moderate disease. | ||
| You were still protected against severe disease for other reasons, but you were not as well protected. | ||
| And I think that gave a false sense of what this vaccine could or couldn't do. | ||
| John in Georgia, Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Doctor, when COVID was at its highest level, I went to the CDC website. | ||
| And on the website, you could calculate the number of people that died of COVID only. | ||
| According to their website, only 6% of all the deaths attributed to COVID died of COVID only. | ||
| All other deaths, 94% of all the people that died, had other underlining health issues. | ||
| One of the problems is that we never hear all of the information. | ||
| We only get partial information. | ||
| I also looked up just a few days ago how many children between the ages of 5 and 17 died of COVID. | ||
| There were 77 deaths in the United States of children between 5 and 17 that died of COVID, and half of those had underlying health issues. | ||
| You said that you recommend COVID vaccines for children over the age of six months. | ||
| Yet how can we know the long-term effects of a COVID vaccine if it's only been around for about four years? | ||
| I have a son. | ||
| He's a vascular surgeon. | ||
| He has four children. | ||
| None of his children have been vaccinated for COVID or for hepatitis B. | ||
| He said there is no reason to vaccinate infants if you have the mother in the hospital and you can test the mother for hepatitis B. | ||
| He said there's no reason for it. | ||
| Additionally, now you may or may not agree with Kennedy, but I'm 68 years old. | ||
| My generation as children were far healthier than the generation today. | ||
| In my generation, 2% of children had chronic diseases. | ||
| Now it's up to about 50. | ||
| Something's going on. | ||
| Right or wrong, something's going on. | ||
| We're continuing being sicker and sicker as a society. | ||
| John, got your point. | ||
| Dr. Offitt, let you respond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so there were a number of statements that were made in there. | |
| Let me try and go through them one by one. | ||
| So you raise an important point. | ||
| When the CDC was reporting deaths or cases or hospitalizations from COVID, was that people who were safe, for example, dying with COVID or from COVID? | ||
| Because that's the critical difference. | ||
| Did they just happen to have COVID at the time that they died? | ||
| So, you couldn't tell from the CDC statistics the way that was reported. | ||
| So, the only way to know that was to go examine hospital records in a variety of hospitals to look at each of those records to answer that question. | ||
| Because if you die from COVID, you know you've died from COVID because it's from COVID pneumonia or from COVID myocarditis, meaning the virus causes myocarditis. | ||
| So, what they found was about two-thirds of the cases that were diagnosed as dying from COVID actually died from COVID. | ||
| So, your 6% number is wrong. | ||
| I'm not sure where that comes from, but I can tell you that you're right in saying that there's a difference between dying with COVID or from COVID, but really two-thirds of those people who were dying, certainly in those first two years, were dying from COVID, which makes sense. | ||
| Secondly, in terms of long-term problems, when vaccines have serious side effects or occasionally fatal side effects, so for example, influenza vaccine can cause Guillain-Beret syndrome, which is this ascending paralysis in about one per million people. | ||
| The COVID vaccines could cause myocarditis in about one in 50,000 people. | ||
| The Johnson Johnson vaccine, COVID vaccine, which was on the market for less than two years because it was found to be a rare cause of clotting, including fatal clotting. | ||
| When you look at these serious side effects, they all occur within a few weeks of getting the vaccine because they're all based on the immune response of the vaccine, which happens 7, 10, 14 days later. | ||
| So, there really is no example of any vaccine that causes a long-term problem. | ||
| I mean, the hepatitis B vaccine, for example, has been around in children for 30 years, and there has never been shown to cause any sort of problem that would occur, say, 20 or 30 years later. | ||
| But speaking of the hepatitis B vaccine, when you say the only people who get hepatitis B are those who are born to mothers who have hepatitis B, that is absolutely wrong. | ||
| When that vaccine came out in 1991, at that time, between 18,000 and 24,000 children less than 10 years of age had hepatitis B. | ||
| And if you get hepatitis B in the first year of life, you have a 90% chance of going on to develop cirrhosis, which is chronic liver infection or liver cancer. | ||
| So, let's say the lower number: 18,000 children less than 10 got hepatitis B. Half of it got it from passing through a birth canal in a mother that was infected. | ||
| The other half didn't get it from them. | ||
| They got it from people who were infected with chronic hepatitis B and didn't know it and had relatively casual contact with those children. | ||
| These were children less than 10. | ||
| They're not going on to become sex workers less than 10 years of age or intravenous drug users. | ||
| They're just having contact with someone who had hepatitis B, chronic hepatitis B, and didn't know it from sharing toothbrush or sharing washcloth, as an occasional kiss from Uncle Bob. | ||
| So, thank goodness for the hepatitis B vaccine as a birth dose because now we basically eliminated that virus in children less than 10. | ||
| In terms of what else would you say, long-term COVID deaths, right? | ||
| I think that's it. | ||
| I think that answers most of your questions. | ||
| Can you explain what the rotavirus is and your history there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So, rotavirus is a virus that is postally affects the intestinal tract, causes fever, vomiting, diarrhea, primarily in children less than two years of age, and it can cause severe dehydration, primarily because it's a vomiting illness. | ||
| So, it's very hard to rehydrate children orally who are vomiting. | ||
| So, every year in this country, we would see about 70,000 children who were hospitalized with that virus from severe dehydration. | ||
| It certainly dominated my residency. | ||
| We would admit about 400 children every year with severe dehydration and maybe 20 to 60 deaths. | ||
| In the world, it's a killer. | ||
| In the world, it is the single biggest killer of infants and young children, causing about 500,000 deaths a year, about 2,000 deaths a day. | ||
| So, I was fortunate enough to work with a team at Children's Hospital Philadelphia that created the strains that became that vaccine, which was then licensed and recommended for all children in this country in 2006. | ||
| And it's pretty much eliminated hospitalizations in this country, you know, from rotavirus. | ||
| The most residents in our hospital have never seen an inpatient with rotavirus. | ||
| And in the world, it's estimated to save about 165,000 lives a year. | ||
| So, it's the professional accomplishment of which I'm most proud. | ||
| Out to California. | ||
| This is Karen Lynfer Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| So, hi. | ||
| I'm calling because I just recently had a vaccination through my doctor's office at UCSF. | ||
| I think it's a pretty prominent medical center out here in Northern California. | ||
| And I believe I'm not an anti-vaxxer. | ||
| I got a vaccine a couple years ago, and my doctor recommended, since I'm 70 years old, that I get a vaccine. | ||
| This is five weeks ago. | ||
| Later that night, I noticed my right foot was swollen. | ||
| And I believe it had to do with the vaccine. | ||
| I guess we don't know for sure, but I don't have a bad foot. | ||
| I did not injure my foot that day or the days before. | ||
| So I'm asking this question for other people that have had a reaction to the COVID vaccine, the new vaccine, as of a few years ago. | ||
| And what you can say to us, I'm thinking this is a limited reaction, although I'm still having problems five weeks later, some pain in walking and standing. | ||
| So if you could just address that question for those of us that have had a reaction, even if it's not a very serious reaction, I would appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Dr. Officer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So it's hard for me to comment because I don't know your medical history, so it's hard for me to say anything, I think, definitive. | ||
| But, you know, it's as a general rule, when you have an immune response to the vaccine, that's when you have the symptoms. | ||
| So for example, people that get the mRNA vaccine in their arm will often have swelling of the lymph nodes under their arm, which is the immune response of that vaccine. | ||
| But that usually takes time. | ||
| It takes seven days, 10 days, 14 days to develop an immune response. | ||
| Something that happens that night is kind of hard to understand on the basis of the vaccine. | ||
| And I think this is the issue with vaccines. | ||
| I mean, vaccines are designed, in this case, to prevent COVID. | ||
| It doesn't prevent everything else that happens in life. | ||
| And I think, you know, when you're older, and I'm an older person, and so I get the vaccine now every year because I'm 74. | ||
| You know, as you get older, you have more signs and symptoms of a variety of problems. | ||
| And there's always going to be those temporal associations that are not necessarily causal associations. | ||
| My wife is in private practice pediatrics, and she was in the office one day helping the nurse give vaccines. | ||
| So there was a four-month-old sitting on her mother's lap, and my wife was drawing the vaccine up into the syringe. | ||
| And while she was drawing it up into the syringe, she hadn't given it yet. | ||
| The four-month-old had a seizure and then went on to have a permanent seizure disorder, epilepsy, and was dead at age five of a chronic neurological condition. | ||
| I think if my wife had given that vaccine five minutes earlier, the mother would have been convinced that the vaccine caused it, right? | ||
| You think I'm stupid? | ||
| I mean, I got the vaccine, now my child has a seizure, and now my child is dead. | ||
| The vaccine killed my child. | ||
| And I think it's understand that, understanding that people would feel that way, because I think anecdotal experiences are powerful emotional experiences, but they're not always causally related. | ||
| Time for just a couple questions with Dr. Paul Offett. | ||
| He's with us for about another five or six minutes. | ||
| This is Nancy out of Georgia, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Hi, I wanted to follow up on the previous caller who talked about 94% of the COVID deaths involved comorbidities. | ||
| Now, this is based on the CDC data that was posted online. | ||
| So of those deaths, the average number of comorbidities was four. | ||
| So his claim that the deaths were with COVID, not from COVID, is a little bit disingenuous. | ||
| Obviously, the comorbidities reduce the body's ability to combat COVID. | ||
| So I would like him to address that a little bit. | ||
| But also, the vaccine efficacy studies. that were posted on the CDC site were all based on statistical modeling using very small samplings, like 140 people or 80 people. | ||
| And those are predictive results, which are claimed to be very reliable. | ||
| But why have I not seen any studies that were done based on actual outcomes? | ||
| It does make me skeptical when there are millions across the world who've been getting vaccines that there aren't any actual outcome studies. | ||
| They're all statistical modeling based on tiny samplings. | ||
| Dr. Officer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so you're right. | |
| I think that the comorbidities, your statement that comorbidities increases one's susceptibility to the disease and therefore the likelihood of being hospitalized. | ||
| Dying is exactly right. | ||
| I would point out one thing, though. | ||
| For young children, the studies that were done by Fiona Havers that were reported to the CDC found that for children less than two years of age who were admitted to the hospital or the intensive care unit, 60% did not have any risk factor. | ||
| For children two to four years of age, 40% did not have any risk factor. | ||
| So healthy young children can be hospitalized and go to the ICU and die from COVID, which is why young children should be vaccinated. | ||
| The second thing is in terms of other studies. | ||
| So every year, at least for the past few years, researchers at CDC like Ruth Link Gellis and others have done sort of that analysis looking at people who did or didn't get the vaccine to find out whether there was efficacy in terms of preventing mild or moderate disease or severe disease. | ||
| And so you do have those studies every year. | ||
| They get reported in Morbidity, Mortality Weekly Report. | ||
| And for the most part, the vaccine is very good at keeping you out of the hospital, not as good at preventing mild or moderate disease. | ||
| A question from Andy watching and tweeting along on X saying, I'm in my 60s. | ||
| As a child, my friends and I went outside and played daily. | ||
| Nowadays, kids stay inside on their computers and their phones playing games on their Xbox. | ||
| Could it be that there's no exposure to germs or too much exposure to germs from things like the air conditioning? | ||
| Kids need to go outside and play in the dirt more. | ||
| What would you say to Andy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's actually a New England Journal of Medicine, op-ed, that was published years ago called Eat Dirt, Please. | |
| The point being the so-called hygiene hypothesis, that the more likely you are exposed to a variety of organisms and pathogens at an earlier age, you're less likely to go on to develop things like asthma, allergies, et cetera. | ||
| The so-called hygiene hypothesis. | ||
| So for example, the incidence of allergies and asthma in the developing world is much less there than it is here. | ||
| So I think there's something to that. | ||
| I too, as a 74-year-old, certainly was playing outside every day. | ||
| Interestingly, we had a group of ever since the age of like seven to 13 would meet at this abandoned lot and play softball and touch football. | ||
| And we get together every 10 years or so to celebrate the fact that we knew each other as seven-year-olds. | ||
| Do you still play that game when you get together now or no? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we did the last time. | |
| I'm not sure as we're getting older, we're still able to get around as easily, but yes. | ||
| Time for one or two more calls. | ||
| Morgantown, West Virginia. | ||
| Sally, go ahead. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Yes, hello. | ||
| I have several things. | ||
| One, I'd like to push back on the conspiracy theories that pharmaceutical companies are getting wealthy from these vaccines. | ||
| They most certainly are not. | ||
| These are loss for the pharmaceutical companies. | ||
| Two, that chronic diseases have increased because actually it is rather the counting of chronic disease and the classification. | ||
| I grew up with asthma. | ||
| It wasn't even classified as a chronic disease. | ||
| It was an emotional disorder. | ||
| Secondly, our state of West Virginia is being attacked by our own governor and out-of-state corporations. | ||
| Our legislature, which is a super-majority Republican legislature, has upheld our strongest. | ||
| We have one of the strongest immunization laws in the country, and they have upheld that. | ||
| Our boards of education have upheld that. | ||
| And our governor is consistently appealing this and trying to get it overturned and weaken our laws. | ||
| And finally, this will not stop at vaccines. | ||
| If you think vaccines are the end of Kennedy's attack on our health care, you would be wrong because he will be coming after our medications next. | ||
| So, oh, I've got one more thing. | ||
| Well, Sally, I'm running short on time. | ||
| Let me give Dr. Offitt the final two minutes here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree with everything you just said. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| And the only thing I would add is that I remember there was a child of my elementary school class who definitely would be considered on the spectrum, but we just didn't use that term then, even though the term was first, autism was first put forward in the 1940s. | ||
| And I think, you know, we've broadened the definition. | ||
| We have better diagnostic tools. | ||
| And I think that's why there's this increase in autism. | ||
| It's not that there's, I think, an actual increase of autism, except to the extent that I think paternal age and maternal age do contribute to the likely diagnosis of autism. | ||
| And we are, I think, older when we have children. | ||
| But, boy, I agree with everything you said. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| On that last point, that she thinks RFK Jr. is going to come for medications next. | ||
| Do you agree with that as well? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Completely. | |
| I think that we are in this midst of this reign of terror under his administration. | ||
| And I just am waiting for Congress to stand up and stand up for the health of American people, and they haven't done it yet. | ||
| Dr. Paul Offutt works with the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, a longtime doctor there. | ||
| And we always appreciate your time on the Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Coming up in about 30 minutes this morning, we will hear from Washington Times legal affairs reporter Alex Sawyer. | ||
| Her new book, Lawless Lawfair, is the topic of discussion. | ||
| But first, it's our open forum. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue you want to talk about, now's your time to call in. | ||
| Numbers are on the screen. | ||
| Go ahead and start calling, and we'll get to those calls right after the break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This fall, C-SPAN invites you on a powerful journey through the stories that define a nation. | |
| From the halls of our nation's most iconic libraries comes America's Book Club, a bold, original series where ideas, history, and democracy meet. | ||
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| Among this season's remarkable guests, John Grisham, master storyteller of the American justice system. | ||
| Justice Amy Coney Barrett, exploring the Constitution, the court, and the role of law in American life. | ||
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| Henry Louis Gates, chronicler of race, identity, and the American experience. | ||
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| America's Book Club, premiering this fall only on C-SPAN. | ||
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| From the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the voices shaping our nation's future, we bring you unprecedented all-platform coverage, exploring the stories, sights, and spirit that make up America. | ||
| Join us for remarkable coast-to-coast coverage, celebrating our nation's journey like no other network can. | ||
| America 250. | ||
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| 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. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| It's time now for our open forum. | ||
| You can call in with any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about. | ||
| To do so, here's the phone numbers, 202-748-8000 for Democrats. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| As you're calling in, here's the schedule for the day here on Capitol Hill. | ||
| The House will be in at noon Eastern. | ||
| You can watch live here on C-SPAN. | ||
| The Senate returns at 3 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| You can watch that, of course, on C-SPAN2. | ||
| Also, today at noon Eastern, the head of the Alliance on International Exchange will be speaking about the future of education and cultural exchange programs in the wake of funding cuts by the Trump administration. | ||
| That event is hosted by the Public Diplomacy Council of America, and you can watch live. | ||
| Again, noon Eastern on C-SPAN2, C-SPAN.org, and the free C-SPANNOW video app. | ||
| Also today, over on C-SPAN, this is about 1240 p.m. Eastern Time, a discussion set to take place on Saudi Arabia's economy with the governor of Saudi Arabia's public investment fund. | ||
| That event is being hosted by the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., and you can watch that on C-SPAN. | ||
| 1240 p.m. is when we're expecting it. | ||
| Also, C-SPAN.org and the free C-SPAN Now video app. | ||
| With that, open forum, your calls, any public policy issue, any political issue. | ||
| This is Mark out of Silver Spring, Maryland, Line for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for the opportunity. | ||
| I'd like to briefly state, Secretary Kennedy was quite deceptive in the numbers he presented. | ||
| He claimed HHS has saved $14 billion from fraud. | ||
| What he did not state was the report to Congress fiscal year 2023 submitted October 2024 stating CMS integrity activities saved Medicare $14.9 billion. | ||
| This is an ongoing effort within Medicare, HHS, to go after fraud. | ||
| The second point I'm concerned about is the use of AI in Medicare. | ||
| When people go after fraud, previously, they try to minimize false alarms, which means you don't want to accuse someone who's honest, particularly the providers. | ||
| That's where the investigations are. | ||
| And the baseline is not zero. | ||
| The baseline is $14.9 billion nationally. | ||
| And also for the states, whatever the fraud was beforehand. | ||
| And last, thank you, Dr. Offitt, for his fight for vaccines, because measles alone, before COVID, the vaccine saved 47 million lives across the world. | ||
| And most of the people who died were children under five. | ||
| Vaccines are necessary. | ||
| Vaccines saved lives. | ||
| Please let's avoid deception. | ||
| Thank you for your time. | ||
| That's Mark in Silver Spring, Maryland, over to Temple Hills, Maryland. | ||
| Jay, Republican, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning, John. | |
| Hey, John, there's a small group of growing avid C-SPAN watches. | ||
| We call ourselves the Crazy 88s, and we have been raiding the host. | ||
| you have been rated as the frilliest host. | ||
| The reason being... | ||
| So, Jay, any comments on public policy issues that we're talking about today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I wish I would have got on with Dr. Offitt because former heads of NIH, Ron Verguillis, former head of CDC, Julie Gerber Gerbadine, and former FDA, former head, Robert Coliff. | |
| He was a commissioner twice. | ||
| All three of them now work for Big Pharma. | ||
| So when R.K. Jr., it's an uphill battle. | ||
| When he talks about they are compromised or they are conflict of interest, I wish I'd have been able to ask Dr. Offitt because he's been on, he went on the tour, the Sunday tour with different platforms this last couple of days. | ||
| You know, Big Pharma has honeycombed all of these institutions. | ||
| And the resistance coming from politicians left or the right and so-called doctors and physicians, you have to check to see what funding are they getting from pharmaceutical companies like JNJ or Osazeneka. | ||
| So, Jay, when it comes to your healthcare, your healthcare decisions, where do you go for recommendations that you can trust? | ||
| You say it's honeycombed throughout the process. | ||
| So, what do you do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am fortunate enough that my physician gives me consent advice, telling me the pros and cons against a vaccine or a medication, and then I can make my own decision. | |
| So, you trust your own physician, Jay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I trust my own physician who's honest with me. | |
| My physician told me, well, I asked him, I said, do you know what's in those vows for the vaccine? | ||
| And my physician told me, I have no idea. | ||
| I can only go by the label. | ||
| And he told me that a lot of physicians get kickbacks from the pharmaceutical companies when they push a medication or they push a vaccine on the back end. | ||
| They get bonuses from these companies. | ||
| And the lady who called is saying that these pharmaceutical companies are not making big money. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| That's Jay in Temple Hills, Maryland. | ||
| Jay, hope you and the, what'd you call them? | ||
| The crazy 88s are doing well? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The crazy 88s. | |
| All right. | ||
| John, can I just say? | ||
| That's Jay in Maryland. | ||
| We'll talk to you next month. | ||
| Jay, Timothy is in Larchmont, New York, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, and thank you for taking my call. | |
| Let me begin by saying I'm a recently retired 30-year veteran, New York City High School history teacher. | ||
| I started at a vocational high school in the Bronx in 1989 when all the kids had were beepers and flip phones. | ||
| And I was lucky enough to have my 30 years in when de Blasio closed the schools in March 2020 due to the pandemic. | ||
| Now, the one thing that I want to begin by saying is the scientific revolution was started in the 1500s. | ||
| And the debate between science and religion was settled then. | ||
| Okay, whether you want to bring up the heliocentric, geocentric theory and the trial of Galileo, for those of you who don't understand that, whether or not the earth or the sun is the center of our solar system was decided. | ||
| And it was at that point that everybody on planet Earth should have gotten on board. | ||
| But we all know, if we understand history, it took almost 200 years for Catherine Romanov to convince her ignorant masses of peasants to take the smallpox vaccination, which essentially saved her country. | ||
| One-third of the population was dying of smallpox. | ||
| We could segue that into George Washington having his troops take the smallpox vaccination as well. | ||
| And what I'm leading this into is: why is it in 2025 in the United States of America, are we still having a debate about the man in the sky? | ||
| It's the cause of all of our major problems if we look at it seriously. | ||
| Why was abortion overturned? | ||
| Because of religion. | ||
| Why don't people take vaccinations? | ||
| Because of religion. | ||
| Why aren't we funding FEMA against hurricanes and natural disasters? | ||
| Because those people believe it's God's will. | ||
| Wake up America and wake up the world. | ||
| I could even segue into the Middle East and what's going on over there. | ||
| Timothy, I mean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's not a religious man, but he's feeding into the religious zealotism that's going on. | |
| And I wish people would just wake up. | ||
| Timothy, on the history, as a history professor, I think I heard this correctly. | ||
| You mentioned that the smallpox vaccine. | ||
| Benjamin Franklin's, we go back to the sequicentennial, the 250th birthday, Benjamin Franklin's four-year-old son died of smallpox. | ||
| And I think he wrote in his memoirs that one of the things he regretted the most was not getting him inoculated. | ||
| Do you know that story? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, actually, I didn't know that. | |
| But I think of all the founding fathers and how so many of them were atheists. | ||
| And, you know, that's one of the reasons we wanted to have, I know it's not written directly into the Constitution, but the separation of church and state. | ||
| And I just, you know, again, I'll just sum it up. | ||
| Why was abortion overturned? | ||
| Because of religion. | ||
| Why isn't FEMA being funded for natural disasters? | ||
| Because people in middle America are going to say, well, it's God's will. | ||
| No, that's not what we've got here. | ||
| Vaccinations. | ||
| Oh, listen, you want to make your own informed choice? | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
| But send your kids to private school. | ||
| I heard the story yesterday about an Army veteran who had a kid who was immunodeficient. | ||
| And he's sitting in the classroom, I think, in Florida, where now they got rid of the vaccination laws for public schools. | ||
| And he's surrounded by kids who may not be vaccinated. | ||
| Now his liberty and his freedom is being infringed upon. | ||
| And that so-called health and human secretary guy, not Kennedy, but the guy in Florida, forgive me for getting a little tongue-tied here. | ||
| That guy's got to go, and Kennedy's got to go. | ||
| All right, that's Timothy in New York. | ||
| This is Everett in Colorado, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| I got a couple things. | ||
| One is the number of guns that people own. | ||
| And the second one would be during the draft period time back in the 1970s. | ||
| I was in the National Guard at that time for eight years. | ||
| Let me take the first one first. | ||
| A couple weeks ago, you had mentioned that there were some statistics that you read off, said like 80% of the gun owners have like 80 or 90 guns per capita. | ||
| And I think that number must come from. | ||
| I don't think it was that high. | ||
| I think we were talking about the countries with the most guns per capita. | ||
| And the U.S. was leading that list by quite a big margin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I believe that the number there is kind of skewed because they've got to be counting gun shops that have hundreds of guns on their shelves, literally. | ||
| The other thing was draft dodging with the president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And during that time period, Trump's birthday allowed him to not be drafted. | ||
| If you know anything about the draft, you go to buy your date of birth and the number that comes up on that particular date for the number of years that you're eligible for being drafted. | ||
| And Trump wasn't, he wasn't eligible. | ||
| I had a high draft number myself, as well as a college deferment at that time. | ||
| Most people didn't know anything about the draft in the 1970s. | ||
| Being in the military was not a very pleasant thing. | ||
| And we did practice for riot control. | ||
| The New York Times today, in their story on the president changing the Department of Defense to Department of War, makes this point in the seventh graph of the story. | ||
| Mr. Trump, who was granted five deferments for being drafted to fight in Vietnam, including for a diagnosis of bone spurs, said that the country had never fought a war to win a war after World War II when Congress at that time renamed the Department of War to the Department of Defense, the New York Times this morning. | ||
| Speaking of President Trump, we want to take viewers now to the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. | ||
| We're joined on the White House lawn by Christian Daytock, White House correspondent for the Washington Examiner. | ||
| Good morning, Christian Daytock. | ||
| The week ahead at the White House, this is a week that is going to include the anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks in this country 24 years ago. | ||
| That's going to be Thursday. | ||
| What do we know about what the White House is doing this week to commemorate that event? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we expect President Trump to attend the customary memorial services here in the greater DMV area. | |
| Of course, there will be a ceremony at the Pentagon. | ||
| But talking to folks at the White House and in the extended Trump circle, there is a chance that the president heads up to D, or excuse me, heads up to New York, not necessarily to attend those memorial services, but to potentially attend a New York Yankees game. | ||
| Now, he was slated to throw out the first pitch at a Yankees game back in 2020 during his first term. | ||
| He scuttled those plans. | ||
| So this might be a bit of a redemption arc for a president who is currently living in Florida, but of course, born and bred in New York City. | ||
| He attended the U.S. Open this past weekend. | ||
| So perhaps this is an attempt for President Trump to try and take up the mantle of New York's greatest son once again. | ||
| That'll get certainly a lot of attention in the anniversary. | ||
| We'll get a lot of attention. | ||
| Is there room in this week from the White House for a policy focus of the week? | ||
| What else messaging-wise are they working on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think the big thing that they're looking at right now is how to avoid a government shutdown. | |
| Of course, we just got back from recess here in D.C. Lawmakers are up on Capitol Hill, but they have a very short deadline to meet this end of September window. | ||
| And to be quite frank, I think Democrats might be giving Republicans a little bit of a gift here based on what we're hearing behind closed doors. | ||
| It does seem that Democratic leadership is willing or at least open to the possibility of a 45-day extension on a bipartisan basis so that both sides can try and hammer out the FY26 budget at length and not rush this thing through. | ||
| There are a couple of flies in the ointment. | ||
| Of course, Thomas Massey might rally a little bit of Republican opposition. | ||
| And of course, the president's push for this so-called pocket rescission, which is already being challenged in courts. | ||
| If Democrats object to this, this could, again, endanger a continued funding of the government and potentially plunge us into a shutdown. | ||
| But I would have to say that other than 9-11, the government shutdown obviously is the number one focus of the White House right now from a policy standpoint. | ||
| On that government funding extension, is the idea for Democrats simply to keep the government function? | ||
| Is that functioning? | ||
| Is that why they're doing it? | ||
| Or are you hearing something about being able to extract some conditions for being open to allowing that to happen and giving the votes that would be needed for that to happen? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You hear a lot of things. | |
| It's hard to know what's real and what's smoke. | ||
| Obviously, Democrats do want to eat concessions out of this White House. | ||
| But I do think, like in March, there is a fear that based on Donald Trump's messaging prowess, that the Democrats would be the party to shoulder the blame for a government shutdown. | ||
| And of course, there are concerns that if the deadline is not met, it would be OMB Director Russ Vogt who is determining who in the federal government is essential and essentially cherry-picking which institutions, which agencies, which departments could still be coming into work, even while the rest of the government would be furloughed. | ||
| So on the one hand, Democrats do want to see concessions, but ultimately I think they are afraid about what a Trump administration, unchecked by Democrats or career bureaucrats within the executive branch, how they might advance the president's agenda in a very short amount of time. | ||
| And then bring me to the economic front and to jobs numbers in this country. | ||
| There was that jobs report on Friday that showed just 22,000 jobs created in August and then revisions once again for previous months. | ||
| The Treasury Secretary was on the Sunday shows yesterday. | ||
| How is the White House handling those numbers that now have the unemployment rate in this country at 4.3%? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's sort of a two-fold strategy. | |
| On the one hand, the president and his top allies are saying, look, this is still part of the lingering Joe Biden hangover. | ||
| They're trying to claim that the current economic status quo, any of these negative numbers, has to do with the former president's policies. | ||
| Now, on the other hand, Donald Trump is using this jobs report as an opportunity to, again, renew pressure on Jay Powell and the Fed to cut interest rates. | ||
| And the president is throwing a little bit of red meat to his base, saying, look, the numbers next year, once we've had a full year of my policies in place, that's when you're really going to see a labor market boom. | ||
| I think at the White House on Thursday, he said those are the real numbers. | ||
| And it is just a little bit of hiding the ball from Trump and his top allies right now. | ||
| Because to be quite frank, the August numbers were abysmal. | ||
| The revisions down for June, obviously a sign that some of these big firms in the country, on top of the crackdown on immigration and the potential hiring of illegal immigrants there, they're concerned about the president's tariffs and the total payroll that they will have if they have to raise prices on consumers and potentially shrink their operating pool of capital for which to grow their businesses like the president is hoping his policies will engender. | ||
| And then one more topic and how you expect it to be handled this week. | ||
| Do you see Jeffrey Epstein and the Epstein files once again dominating headlines? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think as long as Thomas Massey is in Congress, you're going to hear a lot about the full release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. | |
| Now, we have heard a little bit of placading from the Trump administration, from Jim Comer and the Oversight Committee about they're going to release some of these new documents. | ||
| But look, to be quite frank, this is a story that the president does not want to talk about anymore. | ||
| I'm not going to say the president is in the Epstein files or there are particularly damaging documents about his involvement with the disgraced financier, but it's certainly not what he wants to be talking about. | ||
| And I can give you evidence to prove that. | ||
| The president and the White House counsel, they're pumping out information about this new investigation into former President Biden's use of the auto pen to approve these pardons in his last few weeks and months of the White House. | ||
| If the president wasn't trying to hide, excuse me, overshadow this Epstein story, which, to be quite frank, does still have a significant amount of pickup from folks on the right, he wouldn't be looking back to the past. | ||
| Because again, you talk about Joe Biden, you can link it directly to the current economic status quo. | ||
| I do think the president simply wants this to go away. | ||
| And some of his top allies on the Hill, like Speaker Johnson, are going to do everything they can to make sure that that full vote, a full floor, excuse me, House floor vote on the release of the entire Epstein file does not come to pass. | ||
| Plenty of stories for a White House correspondent to cover this week. | ||
| Christian Daytock and his colleagues at the Washington Examiner do it all. | ||
| It's WashingtonExaminer.com. | ||
| If you want to see their work and Christian Daytock, always appreciate your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Back to your phone calls in open forum. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue? | ||
| This is John Ohio Independent. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
| Yes, I agree with the woman who said it's ridiculous to say that the big pharma drug companies are making massive money off of these so-called vaccines. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I saw an article in Global Research, GlobalResearch.ca, Just, I think, yesterday, entitled Pharma's Coup Attempt, How Big Pharma Cartels, Insiders, are plotting to oust RFK Jr. | |
| And a lead memo from one of the cartel's trade groups has revealed a desperate plan to push RFK Jr. out of his role as U.S. Secretary of HHS. | ||
| Do you think that would happen? | ||
| Do you think Donald Trump would allow that to happen? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that he's not a tough guy as he tries to posture, especially after changing the name to the Department of War. | |
| In a way, it is more honest because the Democrats and the Republicans are bipartisan on every important issue of war and peace. | ||
| They're for it. | ||
| And that bipartisanship means nothing. | ||
| And they're bipartisan support in staging this pile-on ambush of RFK Jr. just yesterday or recently. | ||
| That's how you would describe the hearing last week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, it was a pile-on from the beginning. | |
| In fact, the chairman of the committee, before he even allowed any questions or comments by the people involved, gave his pile on bashing of RFK in the introduction to the committee hearings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it was just one after another. | |
| And they really took advantage of the crippled speech of RFK Jr. with smooth talking politicians who interrupted everything he said and made it impossible for him to get his points across. | ||
| It was just scandalous. | ||
| We'll take the point, John. | ||
| I'm running short on time. | ||
| I want to get some more callers in. | ||
| This is Lisa out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I had a couple of things. | ||
| Well, when I went to go get a COVID shot, I didn't pay for it. | ||
| So that's one thing there. | ||
| And I'm getting really sick of people that say, oh, it's my body. | ||
| I should be able to know what goes in it. | ||
| But those same people are telling other people what they can and cannot do with their body. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, you can't get an abortion. | |
| You can't be a trans person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not saying I support either, but, you know, where do they get off saying that they should have the right to their own body, but somebody else shouldn't. | |
| Another thing that I'm annoyed with is for the last four years they said the border was open even when the Democrats were trying to say that it was closed. | ||
| And then what did they do? | ||
| They shipped them all around, and now they're just picking them up. | ||
| And Trump isn't strong. | ||
| If he was strong, if he really cared about stopping the war in Ukraine, he would put on the sanctions on Putin and he would give the Ukrainians what they needed to defend themselves because this is really disgusting how he's just letting Putin do whatever he wants. | ||
| But we knew when they did that summit that it was just biding Putin more time to take up more of Ukraine. | ||
| That's Lisa in Massachusetts. | ||
| This is Anton out of Florida, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yes, good morning, John. | ||
| I want to come back to this COVID one more time. | ||
| At the time, I talked to you, you're my favorite host, by the way, but at the time, you reported that 291,000 Americans had died of COVID. | ||
| And I pointed out that's hardly possible because four days earlier you had a not you, a different host, there was a lady, a doctor on the program, and she said, that's impossible. | ||
| You must have some kind of an underlying issue. | ||
| So, you know, it was kind of dubious, at least in the beginning. | ||
| Later on, I talked to Dr. Schaffer on C-SPAN. | ||
| And I say, a guy like me at the time, 78 years old, I said, I haven't been sick a day in my life. | ||
| I don't know whether Tyler knows an aspirin, whatever. | ||
| What happens to me if I take that shot? | ||
| Because I was supposed to do it. | ||
| I'm still working, 82 years old. | ||
| Anyway, so he told me I will suffer extreme discomfort. | ||
| So I'm not so sure about this if it was a good thing to take that shot. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's all I wanted to say. | |
| That's Anton in Florida, our last caller in this open forum. | ||
| Stick around, 45 minutes left in this morning's program. | ||
| In that time, we'll be joined by Washington Times legal affairs reporter Alex Swoyer. | ||
| Her new book is Lawless Lawfare: Tipping the Scales of Justice to Get Trump and Destroy MAGA. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This week on the C-SPAN Networks, the House and the Senate are in session. | |
| The House and Senate will work on their versions of 2026 defense programs and policy legislation known as the National Defense Authorization Act. | ||
| On Tuesday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett launches her latest book, Listening to the Law, with a book signing hosted by the Reagan Foundation Center on Civility and Democracy. | ||
| And then on Wednesday, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratios, will testify before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on President Trump's artificial intelligence strategy. | ||
| And on Thursday, watch C-SPAN's live all-day coverage of the September 11th commemoration services for the National 9-11 Memorial in New York City, the National 9-11 Pentagon Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Watch live this week on the C-SPAN networks or on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app. | ||
| Also, head over to C-SPAN.org for scheduling information or to watch live or on demand anytime. | ||
| c-span democracy unfiltered cspanshop.org is c-spans online store Browse through our latest collection of C-SPAN products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. | ||
| There's something for every C-SPAN fan, and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. | ||
| Shop now or anytime at c-span shop.org. | ||
| And past president. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is a kangaroo quarter. | |
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity, Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Join Politico 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 this fall c-span invites you on a powerful journey through the stories that define a nation From the halls of our nation's most iconic libraries comes America's Book Club, a bold, original series where ideas, history, and democracy meet. | ||
| Hosted by renowned author and civic leader David Rubenstein, each week features in-depth conversations with the thinkers shaping our national story. | ||
| Among this season's remarkable guests, John Grisham, master storyteller of the American justice system. | ||
| Justice Amy Coney Barrett, exploring the Constitution, the court, and the role of law in American life. | ||
| Famed chef and global relief entrepreneur Jose Andres, reimagining food. | ||
| Celebrated biographer Walter Isaacson, chronicling history's most remarkable lives. | ||
| The books, the voices, the places that preserve our past, and spark the ideas that will shape our future. | ||
| America's Book Club, premiering Sunday nights this fall. | ||
| Only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Joining us now on C-SPAN, it's Washington Times legal affairs reporter Alex Swawier. | ||
| She's the author of this book, Lawless Lawfair, tipping the scales of justice to get Trump and Destroy MAGA. | ||
| Alex Swoyer, start by defining lawfare. | ||
| What does that term mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So usually it's going after an opponent through legal resources, right? | |
| Through the courts. | ||
| In my book, I describe it as the courtrooms are now somewhat of a political battleground. | ||
| We see Republicans and Democrats looking to the judiciary to target an opponent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that was especially so during the 2024 election. | |
| We had an unprecedented event where the leading Republican presidential candidate was going from rally to rally and then from courtroom to courtroom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so I thought it needed to be documented properly. | |
| Where did the term lawfare come from? | ||
| And is it something in your mind that is uniquely related to Donald Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that's a really good question. | |
| Historically, there's different explanations of the use of the word lawfare where it originated. | ||
| But I think to your point, it's really, I guess, ballooned. | ||
| You hear it more and more often, especially in the media and from, you know, I hear it from my readers about the past, I guess, 10 years. | ||
| And some people say even a little bit before President Trump took office the first time. | ||
| I make the argument in my book that it started maybe around 2015, 2016 when we kind of saw some of these investigations into the first Trump campaign start. | ||
| And then it kind of graduated from special counsels to impeachments, from impeachments, then we had indictments. | ||
| One of the things I think is lost on a lot of people is that we had four indictments come down against Donald Trump in only four months. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was really like April to August that we saw those unprecedented criminal indictments from Manhattan and then of course Fulton County, also the two federal indictments with Jack Smith, the election fraud case in D.C. and then the classified documents case down in the Mar-a-Lago area. | |
| So, you know, it's just, it was overwhelming. | ||
| I wasn't sure what to title the book, if Lawfair was the best one, Lawless Lawfair, or if Overkill was, because that seemed to be when I was talking to a lot of people and doing research for the book, that's like the feedback I was getting, that it was just so much overkill, the strategy that the Democrats kind of went with here, that voters were turned off. | ||
| I want to get to that. | ||
| You write in your book that I did not necessarily set out to write a pro-Trump book, but Democratic lawmakers, progressive lawyers, and biased judges made it all too easy to compile lawless law files. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and I'm a lawyer and a journalist. | |
| I went to the University of Missouri for journalism and went to Auburn Maria School of Law down in Florida, and I'm a licensed attorney. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the one thing I don't like to see is the abuse of what, like, justice is supposed to be blind. | |
| And unfortunately, when I was in the courtrooms, I didn't feel like it was. | ||
| I can give you a perfect example. | ||
| So I was in the courtroom with Judge Chutkin, who was handling the election fraud case here in D.C., the federal case against Donald Trump. | ||
| And it was right after the Supreme Court delivered a couple wins for the president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So one was on the immunity issue, right? | |
| And so that was largely seen as a win for him because they basically laid out certain criteria of how to determine if something was personal in nature or an official act. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if official, then basically presumed immune. | |
| And when we got back in the courtroom, in Judge Chuckkin's courtroom after Jack Smith issued his superseding indictment, he kept some charges that I thought were suspect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For example, one was on the obstruction, one of the obstruction charges that the Supreme Court struck down with January 6th defendants. | |
| They narrowed it where it'd be really hard to bring that case, especially against someone like Donald Trump, unless you had some sort of evidence that he was destructing documents, that sort of witness tampering. | ||
| And that didn't seem to be the case, yet Jack Smith kept that. | ||
| And we were in the courtroom, and the government's lawyers, so Jack Smith's team, went to Judge Chucken and said that they understand after you issue an indictment, usually the next step is for a defendant to have the chance to file a motion to dismiss. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that they wanted to go ahead and put out, and this is October, their massive filing. | |
| It's an oversized filing, laying out their case and why they kept these charges. | ||
| And the judge said, I recognize this is abnormal, that usually the defendant would have the turn now to issue their filing, but I'm going to go ahead and let this happen. | ||
| And to me, I was like, you know, if this was a different defendant with a different last name, I don't think this would be the next step, you know? | ||
| And there was also, of course, everyone knew November was right around the corner. | ||
| So there was this timeline. | ||
| And it just, it made, it made me feel like this was not fair. | ||
| So that's the lawfare aspect of this. | ||
| So what's the lawfare aspect, the lawfare argument in the case that made Donald Trump a convicted felon, the New York Hush Money business record case? | ||
| Yeah, so there's a few things that were abnormal, I think, about that case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Specifically, we could compare it to John Edwards, right? | |
| And venues, I think, is a good example. | ||
| Remind people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So with John Edwards, it was a very similar kind of, but that was, of course, FEC violation. | ||
| It was a federal case. | ||
| But that was in North Carolina, where you have more, I write about this in that chapter. | ||
| A venue really matters. | ||
| When you're in a deep blue county or a red county or a purple county, I guess if you were ever going to want to be a defendant, maybe going in a purple county might be the best luck of the draw for a jury. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I think that's probably what Edwards got when he was looking at his FEC case. | |
| Now, those were mostly acquitted, right? | ||
| Here with Donald Trump, he was in a very, very unfriendly venue. | ||
| And he also had an unfriendly judge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary Committee Chairman, is currently actually investigating some of the handling of the case by Judge Murshon. | |
| One rule in New York is that if you are a judge and you have a family member within the sixth degree that could possibly be profiting from a case that you're overseeing, then you must recuse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And there's been allegations that his daughter ran a marketing firm which was fundraising millions off of the trial against Donald Trump that Judge Murshawn was overseeing. | |
| Since of course that's within the sixth degree, that would raise red flags for some people trying to remove him from the case. | ||
| Do you think the 34 felony convictions, do you view them as less of a felony conviction than other cases that you've covered? | ||
| I ask, because Judge Mershon makes the point when he's giving his order on these convictions. | ||
| He says at the end of the trial, the significance of the fact that the verdict was handed down by a unanimous jury of 12 of the defendants' peers after trial cannot possibly be overstated here. | ||
| Indeed, the sanctity of a jury verdict and the deference that must be accorded to it is a bedrock principle in our nation's jurisprudence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, everybody wants to look to a jury and always reminds it's unanimous. | |
| Well, it has to be unanimous to get a conviction, right? | ||
| That's kind of how the legal system works. | ||
| But I don't think it's, you know, I don't dismiss like the convictions, right? | ||
| I think that the way it came down, it's something I also kind of draw attention to is we have prosecutors like Alvin Bragg, elected district attorneys, we have elected attorney generals, Letitia James, and some of the statements that are made, | ||
| and I, and this is also for Republicans too, during campaigns, I think it's very important to watch what's said because you don't want to come across like you're going to spend your whole time in office hunting someone down and making sure you do good on your promise to get a criminal conviction, which we saw Alvin Bragg make those promises before he ended up indicting the president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We saw Letitia James too. | |
| I think one of the exact quotes I have in the book is that she was going to shine a bright light into all of his real estate dealings. | ||
| Obviously, we saw that with the civil fraud case that she brought against him with that massive judgment. | ||
| I think that's that a problem with the system that we have set up of how those folks get that job. | ||
| I think it's unfortunate, you know, I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If I was ever going to go into a courtroom with the last name Trump, one of their courtrooms, I'd be a little worried if I heard those statements ahead of time and then be like, oh, maybe I'm not going to get a fair shake. | |
| Of the four indictments that Donald Trump faced when he was running for election in 2024, which case in your mind was the best case or had the most legal merit, do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's a really interesting question. | |
| So from my research, the court watchers really thought the Fulton County case might be the strongest one. | ||
| That really was what they had built up as being, you know, potentially the best because you mentioned the felony counts in New York. | ||
| Those were kind of suspect and that people thought, oh, it was really a misdemeanor violation that was used, kind of resurrected in a way to get by the statute of limitations. | ||
| Here, people thought that he really, that Fonnie Willis had a good case against Trump and his co-defendants just because, one, it was in state. | ||
| State courts are obviously harder for the feds to do anything with, right? | ||
| If Trump were to win, he can't just get rid of this Georgia case. | ||
| The other aspect of the Georgia case, too, is that Governor Kemp, a Republican, doesn't have the ability to pardon these people or do away with it. | ||
| Basically, in Georgia, he would have to get convicted and then go before a pardon board. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's set up a little different. | |
| I think it's more complex, and it was much harder for the president to maneuver. | ||
| And it's still floating out there. | ||
| Who'd you interview for this book? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, quite a few people. | |
| I interviewed Laura Trump and Don Jr. | ||
| One because I wanted to hear what the family kind of went through during this aspect. | ||
| I found it surprising that one, Laura Trump told me that even trying to get a mortgage was hard for them during this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You would think with that last name and all the money that they have that that wouldn't be a problem. | |
| Don Jr. talked about them having issues with like insurance, that sort of thing, that they were being dropped debanked. | ||
| I talked to others in the Trump circle, like Trump defenders, for example, Attorney General Ken Paxton. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He had his own legal issues, Steve Bannon. | |
| I had interviewed Peter Navarro before, people who had gone to jail in this whole circle. | ||
| One I found particularly interesting, Rod Blagojevich. | ||
| Remind me of who he is and what his view is on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You had a really good point. | |
| I'm glad you bring him up. | ||
| So I did interview Governor Rod Pogojevich. | ||
| He spent 14 years, I think he was a 14 years sentence, and he was pardoned by the president, President Trump. | ||
| But he talks about how during his, he says he was politically prosecuted when he was governor and of Illinois, and that his prosecution was actually, the criminal probe was led by Robert Mueller, and that he sees this kind of as like a, if you go against the establishment, no matter if you're a Republican or Democrat, that this is what happens to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But what one of his really good points was is I asked everybody who experienced some sort of lawfare from this, this whole past year or so during the campaign, what lesson they think could be taken from it. | |
| Like, how do we stop this from happening again? | ||
| And his suggestion was a presidential commission that's bipartisan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He would like to see President Trump set that up. | |
| And I thought that was very thoughtful because a lot of times when I asked this question, like General Michael Flynn was like, oh, close the CIA, right? | ||
| And Steve Bannon wanted public hearings. | ||
| I think a lot of people want to see indictments. | ||
| I'm not sure if that does settle the problem of what you and I were kind of getting at earlier is like, are we going to see Republicans and Democrats kind of just wage this law affair against each other going forward? | ||
| Are you more concerned about it happening in federal law enforcement agencies or on the trial side, the judges and the juries and the prosecutors? | ||
| You know, I think that for me as a lawyer, my focus is usually more on the judiciary and how things are handled in the courtroom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
To be like completely honest, I haven't worked inside a police station or inside the CIA or FBI. | |
| I think there's obviously red flags that have been raised through some of our watchdog groups that have flagged things going forward, I guess, especially when we talk about Russia, what's going on now. | ||
| It's kind of crazy that it's full circle. | ||
| But I pay attention a lot to how judges handle cases and also how lawyers are bringing them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And forum shopping is a real problem. | |
| We see conservatives run to conservative courts where they know they're going to get a beneficial ruling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then the same is what Democrats do. | |
| You know, there's a reason some of these cases against Trump and his allies were brought where they were brought. | ||
| One more thing, you asked me some people who I interviewed. | ||
| I was really troubled with, like I talk a lot about the First Amendment in this book. | ||
| There were Trump supporters, just an average couple out in Texas, that counter-protested the Biden campaign bus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they had to go to trial under the Ku Klux Klan Act. | |
| Basically, they were alleged to have violated the right to vote, interfered with someone's right to vote. | ||
| And they used the First Amendment as their defense, and they won. | ||
| But this is a couple, you know, that had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal fees. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Basically, what they said was defending their right to protest on public streets just like somebody else. | |
| And I saw that Ku Klux Klan Act come up again with some other cases, some other people. | ||
| I was like, I think there was also a case in Colorado. | ||
| Some of the January 6th defendants obviously had faced Ku Klux Klan civil cases, Act civil cases. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it was just, it was one of those things that was very widespread. | |
| But when you look at someone like a little couple out in Texas that probably doesn't have that $300,000 to pay an attorney to have to fight this First Amendment case, I found that troubling. | ||
| So you talked about Rod Blagojevich, his recommendations for depoliticizing the legal process. | ||
| What are yours? | ||
| What's your conclusions after writing this book? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, my conclusion is that I might need to write another one because it looks like it's just going to keep going forward. | |
| We see, since I turned in my manuscript right after the president was basically sworn in office at the end of January, we've seen so many executive orders that have come out and been challenged in court. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think this is unbelievably probably the most, the administration that's faced the most lawsuits of any administration, at least in recent history. | |
| I think it's more than 500 by our count. | ||
| The Article III Foundation actually has a map kind of listing some of these hundreds of lawsuits. | ||
| I think like a third is all immigration related, which kind of mirrors some of these executive orders and what the focus out of this administration seems to be. | ||
| There's one aspect there, but then there's also this, I think what a lot of Democrats worried about was the president coming in and looking to get revenge on some of these people who have brought cases against him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mortgage fraud allegations against Letitia James. | |
| Adam Schiff led a lot of the Russia investigation and was one of the impeachment managers against the president. | ||
| He's also facing mortgage fraud allegations. | ||
| You have Lisa Cook from the federal board that's looking at mortgage fraud allegations too, going after law firms, targeting them for their work with the federal government. | ||
| Have those actions made you think differently about any sort of sympathy that you felt at the time to Donald Trump and MAGA? | ||
| It makes me worried about what I'm seeing in Washington, how you're going to start seeing, I fear, DOJ go after their political rival through our courts. | ||
| You know, I believe in America, we're supposed to defeat our opponents at the ballot box and not try to lock them up. | ||
| You're a member of the Supreme Court bar here in Washington. | ||
| Do you think this Supreme Court is going to be busier than past courts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a very good question. | |
| So they're getting ready actually next month to kick off their new term. | ||
| They are busy. | ||
| I think given that I just mentioned there's like 500 or so lawsuits against this administration, I think they're going to have to deal with a lot of more Trump cases. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I think those will probably be the biggest ones of the term that haven't quite yet been granted, you know, oral arguments and whatnot. | |
| The big thing is what we're looking at is like what's called the shadow docket or the emergency docket. | ||
| And that's when these justices have to make a decision based off of just filings, no real hearing in an emergency context, like if an injunction is issued by a lower court judge, what to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wrote down some numbers just to kind of give you an idea how busy it's been. | |
| So in the 2023-2024 term, there was like about 44 matters on the shadow docket. | ||
| Those are cases? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, like emergency cases. | |
| Like this lower court judge has blocked this. | ||
| What do we do while we're fighting over the merits of the case? | ||
| Like can we still implement this order while we're, can we start working on it? | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| From 2024 to 2025, 113 matters just since in June. | ||
| That was where those numbers came from. | ||
| It's wild how it's exploded. | ||
| And 75, Soda's blog says about 75% of those are going the conservative way. | ||
| So, you know, we'll see it's going to be a busy shadow docket and also merits term. | ||
| Who determines whether something gets on the shadow docket? | ||
| Who determines how important a matter it is that it needs to be decided sooner than the regular process that we're used to? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| We have the case argued in the fall and then we hear in June. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so that's a good question. | |
| It's the justices. | ||
| So it's usually the end of the term is June. | ||
| The oral arguments usually stop around April. | ||
| They leave May kind of open and we had to schedule one this last term. | ||
| So you never know what's going to happen. | ||
| I'm guessing they'll be busy now, especially with what we're just talking about, the shadow docket thing. | ||
| So what happens is they decide whether or not they need to intervene early in a proceeding. | ||
| So usually when this case comes to be, it's because there hasn't been a decision on the merits by a judge, but there's been an order, like a temporary restraining order. | ||
| There's been an injunction involved where that might mean the justices have to take it up sooner rather than later. | ||
| So they might issue a order directing the lower courts to here's how to handle it for now, and then it eventually will work its way back up to them and likely will end up getting hearings. | ||
| The book, it came out this past June, Lawless Lawfair Tipping the Scales of Justice to Get Trump and Destroy MAGA. | ||
| Alex Swoyer of the Washington Times Legal Affairs Reporter is the author of that book, and she's taking your phone calls and with us until the end of our program in about another 20 minutes. | ||
| It's 202-748-8000 for Democrats to call in. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll start on that line for Republicans. | ||
| Alex is in St. Paul, Minnesota. | ||
| Alex, you're on with Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thanks for taking my call. | |
| I think it's an important topic. | ||
| I wanted to bring up something that I think really highlights the extent to which law fare is a problem. | ||
| We learned from an Inspector General report just this past week that the head of FBI counterintelligence in New York, who was looking into the organization that was paying the Biden family, was actually also leaking information to that same organization. | ||
| We found out that the FBI was aware that he was leaking. | ||
| They learned about his leaking in 2022, and they did not charge him. | ||
| They, in fact, hid it, and they charged him with other things. | ||
| And this all came out just this past week in the Inspector General report by the DOJ. | ||
| It's important to keep in mind that actually the idea of law fare is a part of Chinese Communist doctrine, their doctrine of unrestricted warfare. | ||
| One of the angles that they use is to basically control the courts. | ||
| And the fact that you could have somebody who is essentially leaking classified intelligence or arrest warrants to a foreign adversary and they not be charged. | ||
| But then you have somebody brought in and charged on whatever the Stormy Daniels stuff was, it shows you how sick our system has become and how much trouble the Senate District of New York has in terms of compromise. | ||
| They've hidden this for about eight years now if you'll go through and look at the whole records of it. | ||
| Let's take your point, Alex Sware. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think Alex has a great point. | |
| Love the name. | ||
| But also, the issue with leaking is something that should be more explored. | ||
| Because the problem I noticed with, here's a perfect example, James Comey. | ||
| He left his notes with one of his colleagues. | ||
| He says he did this as a trusted issue during his, he was worried about retaliation. | ||
| That's a leak. | ||
| He also, we have new reports out that he was signing off on certain leaks. | ||
| During a congressional hearing, he was asked, have you ever leaked to the meeting? | ||
| And he said no. | ||
| So there's questions about, was that true at the time? | ||
| You know, I have to go back and look at his timeline there. | ||
| Maybe he hadn't at that point. | ||
| Maybe he did not, to be fair to him. | ||
| But it just looks to voters, and that was something I explored in the book. | ||
| I talked to a pollster about how this plays. | ||
| And a lot of people say it just feels like, you know, one person is treated differently than another. | ||
| And that was a lot what was said when I was exploring the classified documents case with Trump. | ||
| A lot of people, the pollster I talked to said it was just lost on them that others have had classified documents but haven't had criminal charges. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, these, for example, they're not lawyers. | |
| They might not read all the court documents or see all the facts behind like why, why he took them or how many times they had to come back and try to get them. | ||
| But that was something that they thought was real troubling. | ||
| And it just became so much that it was lost on the voter. | ||
| And I think that's kind of what Alex was just hitting on. | ||
| To the Buckeye State, this is Keith in Dayton, line for Democrats. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hello. | ||
| What's your question or comment for Alex Ware, Keith? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just want to know why every time Donald Trump gets caught with something, it's always somebody else's fault. | |
| It's the jury, it's the prosecutor, it's the judge. | ||
| Didn't Donald Trump call Georgia and say, can you find me these votes? | ||
| Didn't he tell his followers on January 6th and storm the Capitol? | ||
| Then wasn't he the one who got caught with fraud in New York? | ||
| Why is all this evidence and it's not Trump's fault? | ||
| Always someone else's fault. | ||
| If he's guilty, he's not above the law. | ||
| I get tired of people continue to defend him for what he does. | ||
| And it's always, this law, this is, it's always a Democrat. | ||
| It's always someone else's fault. | ||
| Can we say Donald Trump did these things? | ||
| That's all I need to say. | ||
| Alex, where? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, I think he brought up the Georgia case. | |
| And did Donald Trump say, find me these votes, and what that would mean criminally, right? | ||
| And that's still ongoing. | ||
| We're waiting to see if a prosecutor is going to pick that up after Fonnie Willis was booted from the case for paying her boyfriend at the time, the special prosecutor, money from it was supposed to be COVID backlog money that was used to process cases, but she was paying him heavily to prosecute this case while taking vacations with him. | ||
| Obvious conflict of interest. | ||
| So she's kind of put on hold. | ||
| She's appealed that ruling, and that's kind of what we're waiting for from the Georgia Supreme Court. | ||
| Is she going to stay on it or not? | ||
| And the way it would work in Georgia is there's a nonprofit group of other prosecutors, other district attorneys that could take it over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think Cobb County was one that was considering it. | |
| I talked to John Eason, obviously another co-defendant in that case. | ||
| To remind everyone, he was one of the lawyers that worked for Trump around the whole January 6th protest and how to contest it in court. | ||
| And he said that he thought for sure that it was going to be taken over by someone else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So all of that is still on hold, and we'll see what happens there. | |
| You know, there could be more, another trial. | ||
| You take up another case in this book, the E.G. and Carroll. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do, yes. | |
| What is your take on that case? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a very interesting case the way that came to be because there was actually two defamation cases. | |
| It was very complicated. | ||
| First, it was that the president was denying the allegations when the book came out that she said that he had raped her inside the Bergdorf or Nordstrom Bergdorford Goodman's, I think it might have been, and Manhattan in the 90s. | ||
| And he was asked by reporters as president about this book that was making news. | ||
| And I think part of the First Amendment is that he should be able to answer that question. | ||
| But that was the basis of a defamation suit, right? | ||
| That denial. | ||
| And then that's kind of put on pause because since he was president at the time, there was a legal fight about whether the DOJ is supposed to defend him in this. | ||
| So then she ended up having to file another defamation case and tie in after New York had passed the Survivors Act, allowing for rape allegations, kind of doing away with the statute limitations there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's really the one that I think got speed. | |
| But again, it was using the president's denials as a basis for defamation. | ||
| When you say it got speed, what do you mean? | ||
| I think that's the one that moved through the courts more quickly. | ||
| More quickly than it should have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, more quickly than the other one, right? | |
| Because the other one was kind of held up about who's going to defend Trump. | ||
| Is it the DOJ or not? | ||
| And that kind of, like, that went away after the Biden DOJ came in because they're like, we're not defending him, right? | ||
| So that kind of took care of that one. | ||
| To Lee in Rockville, Maryland, Independent, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| Good morning, Alex. | ||
| Enjoying the show. | ||
| I'd like to ask something. | ||
| There's a common misconception that President Trump was acquitted of charges. | ||
| He wasn't acquitted of anything. | ||
| He had a bunch of lawyers file frivolous and time-consuming motions over and over and over again in all these spec against all these special prosecutors that Merrick Garland was tardy in appointing. | ||
| And what happened was they ran out the clock. | ||
| They ran out the clock repeatedly. | ||
| Isn't that what happened, Alex? | ||
| So, yes, twofold, if I can jump in. | ||
| Okay, so a couple things. | ||
| One, the timelines of some of these cases were sped up. | ||
| I have in the book, I can't remember the exact dates, but it usually takes like 26 months from indictment to trial in D.C. | ||
| And that would have put his actual trial after the election. | ||
| But we know everybody was trying to get him on trial before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So in that respect, I think that, you know, his lawyers were successful delaying things for sure, but also a normal defendant wouldn't have had that tight of a timeline. | |
| That's one thing. | ||
| The other aspect I think is that was important to mention that I wrote about in the book is that these other charges that were brought by Jack Smith, these cases, obviously, the caller mentioned that these charges weren't acquitted. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| The cases were actually dismissed without prejudice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that means that a new, say, a new Democrat Attorney General could come in in 2028 and decide to revive some of these cases. | |
| Now, the question would be if some of these charges lapse because of statute limitations, some of them I don't think would. | ||
| I think there's like eight to 10 years for some of these because of, especially the classified documents ones. | ||
| And so these cases and charges could come back. | ||
| There's a possibility. | ||
| It might be unlikely, but there is a possibility. | ||
| Remind viewers who Eileen Cannon is. | ||
| Eileen Cannon is the judge down in the Southern District of Florida who was the one who basically issued a ruling that was a major win for the president right after the assassination attempt in July where she said that special counsel Jack Smith did not have standing to bring these cases. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And essentially, like to just kind of dumb down a ruling, it was based on the fact that he was not Senate confirmed, that he was a civilian at the time that he was appointed by the Justice Department, so that he didn't have authority to bring these charges. | |
| Now, the D.C. Circuit views special counsels very differently. | ||
| This was the Southern District of Florida that feeds the 11th Circuit. | ||
| So basically what we were looking at, I think, is a potential issue on special counsels, whether or not how they have to be confirmed. | ||
| Do they have to be confirmed? | ||
| How are they selected in order to bring these types of charges? | ||
| That issue could have had split rulings from different circuit courts and eventually had to force the justices to hear it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We aren't there. | |
| We aren't there now, but that could come back. | ||
| You said at the beginning of the book, you didn't necessarily set out to write a pro-Trump book, but Democratic lawmakers, progressive lawyers, and biased judges made it all too easy to compile this book. | ||
| Do you think Eileen Cannon in any way is a biased judge? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I know a lot of people say because she's a Trump appointee that that's why she issued the ruling she did. | |
| I was not in the courtroom when she heard these oral arguments. | ||
| I interviewed Josh Blackman, who was one of the lawyers who argued it on behalf of basically against Jack Smith's standing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he said that he thought she was thoughtful and that she actually asked harder questions than he had been prepared. | |
| He thought that she, tough questions of him too, and so he was surprised that things actually went his way. | ||
| But for me, when I talk about biased judges, I have to talk about what I see when I'm in the courtroom and what I know to be abnormal. | ||
| And for the most part, to me, it was what I mentioned with Judge Chucken. | ||
| One of the statements she had was that she's aware there's an election, but that doesn't matter. | ||
| Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like that's the case when she allowed the defendant not to have his time to respond right before the election. | ||
| That was alarming to me, just from a fairness procedural standpoint. | ||
| And then I mentioned also the Judge Mershon issue with, I think, potential conflict of interest with his daughter and fundraising off of the trial that he was overseeing. | ||
| When you walk into the Supreme Court, do you see biased justices? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, not on every case. | |
| I don't. | ||
| And I think that they do try to issue or recuse themselves when necessary. | ||
| There has been, well, lately there's been more effort to do so. | ||
| Now they don't always know why, which leaves you wondering exactly what is the conflict. | ||
| But since there's been some of these reports by ProPublica, you know, and whatnot on some of these past trips that were taken. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly, yes. | |
| There's been more efforts to disclose why one is recusing. | ||
| Now, I can't recall. | ||
| I think it might have been, it was Justice Barrett recused, and it was one of the major cases last term, but there was not really an answer given. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it was believed to be because she was actually, you know, I think it was actually the charter school case where were we going to have a first religious charter school? | |
| And that was out of Oklahoma. | ||
| And I think it was because, says a bunch of court watchers, the rumors were that she knew one of the advocates working on one of the sides. | ||
| And so that seems fair. | ||
| That would be a good reason to recuse. | ||
| And I know Sotomayor has done the same in the past. | ||
| I do think that they should be more transparent and give statements as to why. | ||
| I know we're talking about your book, Lawless Lawfair, but Amy Coney Barrett, who you just mentioned, is out with a new book. | ||
| Have you had a chance to read that book? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have not yet. | |
| I did read some of the reporting about the book, and I thought it was interesting some of the stuff she said. | ||
| One in particular is about her being Catholic and against the death penalty, but yet she chose to vote to reinstate the Boston bombers' death sentence. | ||
| So I thought, you know, that's a good example of a judge kind of putting their own personal bias aside. | ||
| Listening to the Law is the Justice's new book, and she talked about it at the National Book Festival over the weekend. | ||
| We were able to record that event, so we'll be airing it on book TV in the weeks to come. | ||
| Back to your phone calls. | ||
| This is Lee in Garrison, New York, Independent. | ||
| You are on with Alex Warrior. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, folks. | |
| I was wondering who pays for all the court actions that are being brought by the Democrats, lawmakers, and other Democrats against these Trump executive orders. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I think that's a very good question. | ||
| And one that should be explored is just how the money behind these cases, who's funding them, that was one of the issues actually that Donald Trump's lawyers wanted to provide in the Eugene Carroll case. | ||
| They were saying that she was being funded by basically a Democrat activist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he was not allowed to present that at that point. | |
| So I'm not sure if that'll change on appeal or how that whole situation may play out if it works its way all the way to the justices. | ||
| We will see. | ||
| But, you know, who's funding these cases that go against these executive orders? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Many of them are coming from advocacy groups. | |
| A lot of them are based out of Washington. | ||
| We've had so many of the orders related to immigration that a lot of immigrant rights groups are fighting them, and those are the ones that are being funded to do so. | ||
| But yeah, I think that the money behind this litigation and also just judicial campaigns and campaigns for district attorneys, it's something that I think the public should have more information about and it should be more transparent so you know what you're getting. | ||
| David is in McLean, Virginia, line four Democrats. | ||
| You're on with Alex Foyer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I would like to ask your guest how she accounts for the fact that even before Trump became involved in politics at all, he was still the subject of thousands of lawsuits, literally thousands of lawsuits for lying, cheating, and stealing. | ||
| If you go to Wikipedia, they break down the various lawsuits. | ||
| And these aren't lawsuits bought by a government agency. | ||
| These are business partners. | ||
| These are employees. | ||
| These are women who accuse him of attacking her, teching them. | ||
| You have thousands of students from the Trump University for whom Trump had to pay $25 million because he defrauded them. | ||
| That wasn't lawfare by an agency. | ||
| That was private litigants. | ||
| And so it shouldn't be surprising, should it, that he continues to have legal problems from government oversight and DOJ and other agencies now that he is involved in politics. | ||
| Alex Warrior? | ||
| Yeah, I think that that's something I hear from a lot of Democrats is like, well, this is the type of man he is. | ||
| Eventually he's going to get caught. | ||
| He's going to have to answer to that. | ||
| I think when you're a businessman dealing with what President Trump was with the Trump organization, there's no surprise that there would be lawsuits. | ||
| Even small business owners have to face lawsuits and settle cases just because of the cost of going to actual trial. | ||
| So I'm not too surprised about that given who he was and especially the celebrity nature of him. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, for many Democrat voters, they found this to be the writing wrong. | ||
| They thought that these cases should have seen all been finished and should still be ongoing. | ||
| And we'll see if they are revived and what happens with Georgia. | ||
| But for the most part, you know, there are some Democrats I've talked to that said they agree that it was overkill, that Democrats would have been smarter to choose one of their strongest lawsuits and stick with that one rather than, like I said, four indictments, four months. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was unprecedented, and the American people saw through it. | |
| He didn't only win the Electoral College, he won the popular vote. | ||
| People were tired of the weaponization of government. | ||
| Just a few minutes left with Alex Warrior. | ||
| If you have a question or comment, phone lines are open. | ||
| You had mentioned, and we've talked about the Supreme Court. | ||
| You already talked about the shadow docket and what that means, what could be on it. | ||
| But what else are you watching for this term in the Supreme Court? | ||
| There's a couple cases that I think could give the justices a chance to overturn precedent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One is the precedent around gay marriage. | |
| We saw Obergefell issued in 2015. | ||
| After that, if you remember, there was a county clerk in Kentucky that refused to issue the licenses out of a religious obligation, she said. | ||
| She was ended up giving some exemption. | ||
| She was sued by a couple who said that they wanted her name on the certificate. | ||
| She has now taken that case to the Supreme Court and said, I was a government official, like I'm immune to be sued like this. | ||
| And also, will you overrule Obergefell? | ||
| So that was another issue she threw in there. | ||
| The justices have to conference on that. | ||
| It would take four of them to vote in favor of hearing it. | ||
| They could choose just to hear her immunity claim that, hey, I shouldn't be sued because I'm a government official. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or they could also choose to take up the Obergefell issue and whether they're going to overrule it. | |
| I find that unlikely, but you never know. | ||
| I've given up trying to guess what they'll do. | ||
| When do we find out when they make that decision? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, it could take months. | |
| So the way I know if there's interest to see a case is I go onto the docket and you can see like when it's scheduled for conferencing. | ||
| And if they don't make a decision at that conference and in their next orders, I know they're relisted it because there might be some people who are, some justices are interested in this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they might be like, we're going to continue this conversation next conference. | |
| And so that kind of, when things are relisted and relisted and relisted, it tells me it's most likely it's going to get a hearing. | ||
| So we'll have to see what happens with this one. | ||
| Now, the other aspect is you and I talked about previously was Trump's firing of agency heads, independent agency heads, and that has gone to the justices on the emergency docket. | ||
| Like, what do we do? | ||
| Do we reinstate this person or not? | ||
| So there's a 1935 case that basically limits a president's ability to fire independent agency heads. | ||
| That was the FTC. | ||
| So that's really Humphrey's executor. | ||
| It's being tested. | ||
| And I wouldn't be surprised if during this next term we see it, the justices have to consider overruling it or not. | ||
| Time for just maybe one or two more phone calls here. | ||
| This is Mark out of New York line for Democrats. | ||
| Mark, go ahead. | ||
| You're on with Alex Swair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| When you were speaking about the Supreme Court with the guest, you asked her a question about how many or how the cases on the dockets were settled or made a decision of. | ||
| And I looked it up and it looks like it's normally five they do a vote. | ||
| Of the nine, five will pull the case forward. | ||
| But it has been known that one justice can pull it forward. | ||
| And I'm wondering of the 120 plus cases, does she know how many the votes were to pull them forward? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Pull them forward with them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think what he's talking about is like what we were mentioning with the emergency orders. | |
| So what happens usually is with the circuit courts, they're addressed to one judge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So like one, you know, Chief Justice Roberts oversees the DC circuit, right? | |
| And so that appeal goes to him. | ||
| He can make a decision on his own or he can refer it to the full court. | ||
| And that's how it works for all of the justices. | ||
| Normally on major issues, they refer it to the whole court. | ||
| And that's kind of where I was getting at with the SCOTUS blog data where 75% tend to be the conservative side. | ||
| Why would they want to give up deciding it on their own? | ||
| Why refer to the full court where there's a possibility a decision may be made that you don't agree with? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What I've noticed is it usually they issue, a lot of times with like death sentences like that are being appealed, they get them all the time. | |
| One justice will take a look at it and be like, this is pretty cut and dry and not take it to the colleagues. | ||
| Others, like a lot of this that we're talking about are unprecedented cases, and so they take it to the full court. | ||
| And that's also part of the shadow document. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| That's what we, that's why everybody's kind of like, it would be much more interesting, I think, for people if we had a little bit more intel on what goes on and why they make the decisions they do. | ||
| Usually when they issue orders, you know, we don't know the exact breakdown on those emergency docket decisions unless they actually all write or tell, you know, who agreed with who. | ||
| Sometimes we're just left in the dark. | ||
| We just know a majority thought this, it should play out this way. | ||
| Maybe worth another book in your future? | ||
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unidentified
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Oh, absolutely. | |
| I think there's going to be more and more lawfare to write about. | ||
| Alex Foyer is the author of this book, Lawless Lawfair, Tipping the Scales of Justice to Get Trump and Destroy MAGA. | ||
| And she has been with us this morning on C-SPAN. | ||
| We appreciate your time. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you for having me. | |
| And that's going to do it this morning on the Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll, of course, be back tomorrow morning. | ||
| It is 7 a.m. Eastern, 4 a.m. Pacific. | ||
| Today, if you're watching the House and the Senate, the House is in at noon and the Senate's in at 3 p.m. | ||
| We'll see you tomorrow. | ||
| So you interviewed the other night. | ||
| I watched it about 2 o'clock in the morning. | ||
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unidentified
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There was a little thing called C-SPAN, which I don't know how many people were watching. | |
| Don't worry, you were in prime time too, but they happen to have a little rerun. | ||
| Do you really think that we don't remember what just happened last week? | ||
| Thank goodness for C-SPAN, and we all should review the tape. | ||
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unidentified
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Everyone wonders when they're watching C-SPAN what the conversations are on the floor. | |
| I'm about to read to you something that was published by C-SPAN. | ||
| There's a lot of things that Congress fights about that they disagree on. | ||
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unidentified
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We can all watch that on C-SPAN. | |
| Millions of people across the country tuned into C-SPAN. | ||
| That was a major C-SPAN moment. |