Washington Journal (03/05/2026) dissects the U.S.-led Iran strikes—six days of airstrikes killing 1,000+ civilians—while Congress debates a war powers resolution after a failed Senate vote. Trump defends "Operation Epic Fury" as defensive, targeting Iran’s nuclear/missile programs, but critics like Rep. Jamie Raskin and callers question legality, civilian casualties, and economic fallout ($80/barrel oil). Callers clash over historical grievances (1979 hostage crisis vs. 2023 JCPOA collapse), Trump’s moral fitness, and whether the strikes risk a wider war, with Pentagon reports showing 6 U.S. soldier deaths and 2,000+ Iranian targets hit—yet no clear exit strategy. [Automatically generated summary]
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Washington Journal starts now.
Today is Thursday, March 5th on this morning's Washington Journal.
Strikes continue in Israel, Iran, and neighboring countries as the joint U.S. and Israeli military campaign against Iran widens and enters its sixth day.
Over 1,000 civilians in Iran have been killed since the war began on Saturday, according to the U.S.-based human rights activist news agency.
The House of Representatives is expected to vote today on a war powers resolution that, if passed, would stop the president's attack on Iran.
And that's where we will begin this morning on the Washington Journal.
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A foggy morning here in Washington, D.C. as we start with Congress.
The House is set to vote on their version of a war powers resolution later today.
That comes after a similar version in the Senate led by bipartisan senators Tim Kaine of Virginia and Rand Paul of Kentucky failed yesterday on a margin of 47 who approved and 53 senators who did not approve.
Take a listen to some of that debate yesterday on Congress.
Democratic leader Chuck Schumer argued in favor of passing the legislation.
It is clear they are widening the war in Iran.
And I fear now more than ever that we are going to put boots on the ground.
And that's precisely what the American people fear.
We still don't know how long we'll be there.
We still don't know what Donald Trump is even trying to accomplish.
This is not how you conduct foreign policy.
This is not how you conduct defense policy.
And the fault for the chaos is entirely with Donald Trump.
Trump is manic.
Whatever pops into his head, he says immediately.
He picks one plan one day, then he picks the total opposite the other.
He doesn't think it through.
He doesn't check the facts.
And nobody around him has the guts to stand up to him and tell him, Mr. President, you're wrong.
He is surrounded by yes men.
This is dangerous.
Just yesterday, as Trump launches America into a war with Iran, he goes ahead and slams and critiques Zelensky and calls him a name the P.T. Barnum of Ukraine.
This is insane.
Donald Trump is manic, blasting one of America's friends as they fight for survival and are beginning to make gains against Russian forces.
Insane.
And certainly not how you conduct foreign policy.
Well, Mr. President, now this body, here in the Senate, we have a chance to say enough to Donald Trump's military insanity.
That was Democratic leader Chuck Schumer who argued in favor of that Senate war powers resolution vote before it failed.
Take a listen now to Lindsey Graham, a Republican, who has been influential in convincing the president that these strikes in Iran were necessary, as he argued against that war powers resolution yesterday.
If you don't like the war in Iran, say, well, not pay for it.
We have the constitutional power of the purse.
We can't become the commander-in-chief after 60 days.
You'll ruin the country.
Can you imagine Congress being the commander-in-chief?
Mr. President, can you imagine the debate we would have of what ships to send and what troops to send?
It'd be a nightmare.
And the founding fathers understood that.
They designated a single entity in the Constitution, the President, as Commander-in-Chief.
They gave power to Congress to declare war.
Does it mean that you can't have military conflict unless Congress declares war?
No.
We've declared war five times in the history of the country.
World War II, World War I, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, the War of 1812.
Five conflicts where Congress said we're in a state of war.
We've had over 130 conflicts since the War Powers Act, where Congress never authorized anything.
The norm in this country is not to declare war by Congress, but for the military to be used by the Commander-in-Chief, sometimes authorization from the Congress is requested, sometimes it's not.
More than not, it's not requested.
The president, as commander-in-chief, has the ability to use our armed forces to protect our nation.
And Congress, if we disagree with that choice, has the ability to terminate the action by taking the money away.
That was Republican Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina arguing against the Senate-led war powers resolution that did fail yesterday.
The House is expected to vote on a similar version today.
Let's turn to your phone call.
Steve from Michigan, a Democrat.
You are first.
Good morning, Steve.
Good morning.
I disagree with the bombing of Iran.
And as far as the Congress and the Senate go, they're supposed to authorize the money then.
If Republicans are saying that Trump's got the right to do what he wants, well, no, you've got to have the money too.
So the authorization needs to be done for the money.
Trump was guilty of sexually assaulting E.J. Carroll.
He's now known to be a pedophile as of last Friday, and I haven't heard a word about it in the last two days on the Washington Journal.
Pedophile.
Republicans, you've lost your way.
Good day.
Ray from Ithaca, New York, a Republican.
Sorry, Ray, you're on the line.
Okay.
I support the attacks that are going on.
Iran has been a problem for us since 1979.
The war, if you want to call it a war or if you're taxed, it doesn't matter to me.
But everything is being successful.
We've had very small casualties.
We have total air command.
We have a possibility to help the people of Iran, help our good friend Israel.
People seem to forget October 7th so very easily.
And I don't understand why the left constantly goes against this president, no matter what, when it's clear that they are a threat, except for John Fetterman.
God bless John Fetterman, having the courage just not to come out against anything that's against Trump.
It makes no sense at all to be against this when these people kill people all the time, including their own folks.
I was Ray from Ithaca, New York.
The first caller mentioned a court case against the president.
I just want to be clear here that the judge in 2023 found him liable for a lesser degree of sexual abuse.
Not exactly what the first gentleman on the call said.
Otis from Orange Park, Florida, Democrat.
Yes.
You're next.
Good morning.
We're talking about Iran.
Yes, talk about Iran.
I disagree.
Let me rephrase that.
I think that we should not approve the, we should not approve Trump attacking Iran.
However, the problem is now we have our elected officials who now decide to go on their own home team to say, I agree that Trump is right.
I'm saying Trump is wrong.
It always old people that's trying to put America, young Americans in jail.
I mean, they take them to their death, and that's not right.
We need to fix this.
And the best way to fix it is to tell Trump, you can't go send no more weapons in Iran.
We need to come and need to say, you got your 30 days.
You got your 30 days or 60 days after that, no more.
But we're going to see something that we don't like.
I'm from the military.
I understand what's going on.
May I ask where you served?
I was in the Army from 79 to 2002.
So you would not be in favor?
I did have a comeback tour in Iraq.
But I was in infantry and armor most of my 13 years out of 23.
So I understand what life is out there when rounds come across your head.
So, I mean, the war powers vote yesterday failed basically along party lines, 47 to 53.
But there are some Democrats who are saying that they don't want to support this resolution.
Would you be against them then?
Oh, yes, definitely.
John Settleman, what's the message to John Setterman?
If you look at the vote in North Carolina, you have a Democrat who decided to go along with the Republicans.
She almost lost by 50 percentage points, or 70 to 22 percentage points.
She lost.
John Setterman, do yourself a favor.
Don't run next year, the next time you're up.
All right, Otis from Orange Park, Florida, Democrat.
James from Hyattsville, Maryland.
I believe you are calling in on the military line.
James, good morning.
Yes, let me explain this to people who don't understand.
This will be their worst war that we ever got into.
Because of what's going on, we will lose most of our embassies.
We will lose most of our military bases.
And as people in the United States think it's about military dominance, how can we have military dominance if we don't have any military bases?
Instead of people seeing us as a friend, they're going to see us as a problematic entity in the region that will bring them chaos, which is exactly what we have done.
And for those who think the Iran regime is so bad, let me remind you Iran-Contra arms scandal and how they got those weapons in the first place.
Because we wanted someone to go up against Iraq.
Another bad decision.
The same thing happened in Iraq.
How did they become a problem?
Because we allowed them to get those weapons so they could fight back and forth against each other.
Every time we give someone weapons, it always comes back to haunt us.
The same thing in Syria.
People said we should help Syria.
Guess what?
That's how we got ISIS.
We need to stop helping people and funding wars.
Point blank simple.
And there are better ways for a person to have honor than to die in a war without honor that should not have happened in the first place.
There was a deal that Obama had.
Trump did not like it.
He tore it up.
He was about to get a better deal than what Obama had, and he still was not satisfied.
When are people going to be satisfied?
And as far as how many people that Iran has killed of their citizens, mind you not, that America has killed so much more people of black and Indian descent that are Americans as well.
So we can't point the finger at another country being worse than what we are ourselves.
All right, James from Heidesville.
William from Baltimore Democrat.
You're next, William.
Good morning, Jasmine.
Good to talk to you.
They say Iran is the sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East.
I, like many of the other callers, believe America is the biggest sponsor of terror in the Middle East.
Because Israel kills more people in more locations than any country in the Middle East, and America funds Israel.
Now, Israel will never have peace because the establishment was founded on the Palestinians who lived on that land upon thousands of years being expelled.
Modern Israel is predominantly European immigrants.
Netanyahu's parents were Zionists from Poland and East Europe.
They, like the majority of the originators of the Zionist movement.
And I did a little research.
Israel has conducted 35,000 attacks across five areas in the Middle East since 2023, October of 2023.
35,000 attacks.
Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran.
So they are the true state-sponsored terrorists.
35,000 Attacks00:09:36
Let's not get it wrong.
It's state-sponsored terrorists.
And let the truth be known.
Do your research.
History is not on the side of Israel.
Thank you for taking my call.
That was William from Baltimore.
Kent from Illinois, calling in on the former military line.
Kent, you're next.
Good morning.
I'm a 78-year-old man.
Between 1965 and 69, I did three tours to Vietnam.
Got married in 1970.
1979, I had three children.
I was working, selling cars.
Most people were buying Japanese cars.
I'd go home and have a couple beers, shot a schnapps, and listen to the news.
Day one, the Iranian hostage crisis.
Iran prior to that point was a lot of it was a beautiful country.
People went to Beirut on vacation, Syria, anywhere.
1979, the Ayatollah and his crew took over and took Americans hostage.
Hence, the program nightline, day one.
The student students are hostage.
The Iranians are out burning the flag, death to America, shaking their fists.
We did nothing.
I'd go to work next day, I'd come home, day two.
This went on for 441, 444 days.
This country drug America through the dirt, humiliated us, degraded us, took our confidence away.
We did nothing.
I had a mental and nervous breakdown during that time.
I could not believe that the country I loved and had served and fought for would stand for this.
47 years this went on.
So let me ask you, Ken, are you supportive of the conflict now and the president's actions?
I'm jubilant.
I couldn't be more.
It's like for 47 years, I wouldn't care if Bill Clinton had done this.
It needed to be done.
It was so right for the whole world.
People are jubilant all across the Mideast.
The only people sad are the Democrats with the TDS.
You can't cure TDS.
As I say, Clinton had done this.
I'd celebrate, but not Democrats.
They were quiet when millions and millions of people come into the country.
They knew it was terribly wrong.
All right, Ken, I'm going to keep us on Iran, but I am going to now turn to House Speaker Mike Johnson, who yesterday talked about public sentiment around the President's actions on Iran.
Take a listen.
Look, we don't make political decisions at a time like this.
We're making decisions that are necessary to keep American citizens and troops safe.
That is the first responsibility.
Unlike the Democrats, we don't sit around in a back room and decide what's politically expedient.
We do what we must do to protect the homeland, and we let the chips fall where they may, to protect our interests, to protect America first priorities and principles.
And that's the people of this great country.
And so I trust the American people.
I trust that they will evaluate all these things.
They will understand that this administration did the right thing.
I think they'll reward it politically.
But if people get a bad taste in their mouth for what happened back here in the first part of the year in Iran, they just do.
But we know, and history will record, we did the right thing.
I think passage of a war powers resolution right now would be a terrible, dangerous idea for all the reasons I've just explained.
It would empower our enemies.
It would kneecap our own forces.
And it would take the ability of the U.S. military and the commander-in-chief away from completing this critical mission to keep everybody safe.
Iran has attacked three of our U.S. embassies in the last couple of days.
Those are sovereign territories of the U.S.
They have declared war on us.
I don't believe in the semantics.
We've talked about the language this morning.
We're not at war right now.
We're four days in to a very specific, clear mission, an operation, Operation Epic Fury, which has two components, as you know, that we have articulated over and over.
The President has, the Commander of Joint Chiefs, everybody has explained.
Two points.
We had to take care of these ballistic missiles that they were producing at such a rapid pace that our regional allies could not keep up with.
We had to ensure that they can't fire all those barrage of missiles at our people, our troops, our assets, our citizens in the region and our installations.
We're taking that out.
We had to.
It's a defensive operation.
And secondly, we had to take care.
We had to take their Navy down.
That's effectively what, in layman's terms, that's what's happening right now.
That will be done quickly.
As they explained this morning, we almost have, we're, I think, hours away probably from having full operational control over the skies over Iran, which means that this mission could be completed quickly.
We expect that it will be.
And then we will hope and pray that the Iranian people take this moment of opportunity, rise up, take their country back, and that freedom can flourish there for the first time in generations.
That was House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday talking about public sentiment around the strikes in Iran.
Jerry from Connecticut, a Republican.
You're next.
Good morning, Jerry.
Hi, good morning.
I was watching a program called Jesse Waters Primetime last night.
And on the program, he had a guest named Bill somebody Schweitzer, Peter Schweitzer, or something like that.
And I have to tell you, I'm supportive of what's going on, but obviously when you look at all the death and the destruction that you have to be.
But what really frightened me is both men seemed to be trying to incite a war with China.
They were gleefully explaining how the U.S. now has operational control or almost or will be soon of the Persian Gulf and the choke point straits of Hormuz.
And they were very explicit that the flow of oil to China can now be cut off by the U.S. Navy.
And I just, between Venezuela a few months ago and now the Middle East, and I thought, you know, the Chinese, they watch these programs.
And if you were sitting in Beijing and looking at this, you were saying they're encouraging an act of war, a blockade at the source of energy going to China.
And I just think it's terrible that these two are barbering away like this is a good thing.
We're far from over in this.
And they seem to be encouraging China to get into a war with us rather than, you know, and I just, people need to, especially those in the media, need to be careful about what you say because, you know, it can have repercussions that this thing suddenly gets to be a wider war.
Anyway, I just thought it terrible that these two were gleefully talking about choking off China's energy supplies as if their words had no consequences.
And it's just shameful, in my opinion.
All right, Jerry from Connecticut.
Ray from Aurora, Colorado, an independent.
You're next, Ray.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Can you hear me?
I sure can.
Okay, thanks for taking my call.
I'm affiliated with the Libertarian Party.
This past Sunday, I watched a 60 Minutes interview with Reza Pahvi, son of the former Shah of Iran from the 50s to the 70s.
Opposition leader, yep.
Yes.
So they talked about what they talked about the relationship they had with the former Shah.
They talked about 79 and the hostage crisis and all that came after it.
Not once did they bring up Mosadegh, the former prime minister Mosadec.
This was someone who was chosen through democratic means, but Because he had sentiments about nationalizing the oil industry there, and because there were whatever concerns they had about the Soviet Union, the U.S. engaged on an operation called Operation TP Ajax,
a joint operation with the UK to have him overthrown.
And in declassify, and in documents that were declassified by the CIA many, many years ago, they talk about the operation and they make reference to blowback, unintended consequences, simply put.
I'm really concerned about what's going to happen as a result of the strikes from a few days ago.
All right, Ray from Colorado.
Bill from Arizona, Democrat.
Bill Yournaks, good morning.
Good morning.
War's Unintended Consequences00:04:22
What I don't like with Trump is he doesn't listen to the judges.
He starts wars that he's not supposed to.
With Congress, it's supposed to do that.
And he puts Bill, are you still there?
Oh, yeah.
I was turning the TV down.
Okay.
But this president doesn't, he doesn't go by the Constitution or anything.
I'm sure he's never read it.
Along with his cabinet, they were asking him questions about the Constitution, and none of his cabinet could answer those.
So I'm extremely disappointed in this guy.
He just does what he wants.
I don't know how you feel about it, but he seems to have no guidelines.
So that's all I have to say.
Bill from Arizona, Democrat.
Ruben from North Carolina, an independent.
Reuben, your Nax, good morning.
You're not going to win no war.
You're not going to win a war because you're using airstrikes.
That's not going to happen.
You can't win no war.
Airstrikes cannot win a war.
Killing the Ayatollah will not win a war.
Killing children and bombing schools is not going to win you no war.
You know what I'm saying?
And then you have two Navy fleets out there on thousands of miles away.
They're not going in where it's hot at.
They're not going into that Gulf.
And that person got shut off.
So, I mean, you can't win.
A war is a war with them is unwinnable in a place the size of Persia without boots on the ground.
You can't win a war like that.
That's not going to win anything.
Destroying the country isn't going to win a war.
You've already fought a war of jihad against the Sunnis in Afghanistan and you lost that one.
This country is three times as bigger as Afghanistan and has a population of 90 million people.
You're not going to win the war over there without boots on the ground.
And the people here in this country are tired of war.
They went through a war for the last 20 out of the last 25 years.
You're not going to win the war, yo.
Road.
All right, that caller mentioned oil.
I turn now to a New York Times article.
The headline is how war in the Persian Gulf Could Spill into the U.S. Economy.
That was posted today.
If you scroll just a little bit down, if you bear with me here, it mentions oil, and it says, in the days after the war began, tankers stopped entering the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran controls and through which 20% of the world's oil is channeled.
About 200 ships are stranded in the Persian Gulf region, according to Lloyd's List, and oil shipping rates have shot up.
Saudi Arabia's largest oil refinery and Qatar's largest liquefied natural gas export facility shut down after drone attacks.
Oil prices have surged and are up about 10% since the fighting started at about $80 a barrel.
Diesel prices rose over $4 a gallon on average, their highest level since April 2024, according to AAA.
The average gasoline prices jumped to $3.21 a gallon from $2.99 last week, according to Gas Buddy.
Even if the fighting stops, oil prices will remain elevated through the rest of the year, Goldman Sachs estimates.
And if the strait remains closed for weeks, they could reach $100 a barrel.
Of course, it goes on to say, this is in the 1970s when turmoil in the Middle East led to fuel shortages that sent inflation skyrocketing and created lines at the gas station.
The U.S. economy has become less dependent on oil because of the rise of wind and solar-generated electricity, as well as the shale boom, which has made the United States a net energy exporter.
Some American gas companies have already sought to capitalize on higher prices.
So that is about the gas that that one caller spoke about.
Why We Left Oil00:15:44
Jerry from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, calling on the former military line.
Good morning, Jerry.
Hey, good morning.
I'd just like to give a comparison, if I may, from what's happening today and what happened after World War I. Germany signed a treaty at Versailles in June 26, 1919, which restricted Germany of having a military, no Navy, no submarines, no Air Force, no tanks.
And then in 1933, Hitler came into power and he tore up the treaty.
And in 1939, Germany invaded Poland.
Now, what would have happened if someone could have stopped Hitler in 1933, as Trump is doing today in Iran?
It would be a better world today.
And the common ground between Hitler and Iran is to kill Jews to do away with Israel.
In the end, America will come out as a winner by preventing World War III.
And that's about all I have to say, the comparison between the two.
And I think Trump's doing the right thing.
Stop it before he gets any bigger dude.
All right, God bless.
Thanks for having me, and stay well.
Thanks for calling in, Jerry, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Greg from Pennsylvania, a Republican?
Yeah, good morning.
Good morning.
Ms. Wright.
Yes, I'm calling in.
I call in a lot.
I try to yell and scream a lot, which probably you don't hear, I guess, not from Mechanicsburg.
I don't understand the standards of what is allowable comment with C-SPAN.
You and most of the other women host let people say whatever about Donald Trump, whatever.
And then when someone wants to say something about a Democrat, you refer them back to the issue.
So I would appreciate C-SPAN at some point defining what your standards are.
As to the topic today, I don't think there is any doubt that Mr. Trump is playing, President Trump is playing chess, and a lot of the rest of the world, including the Democrats, are playing checkers.
He can do multiple things at one time.
Just because Chuck E. Chi Schumer doesn't understand his strategy doesn't mean he has no strategy.
Give the man credit for what he has done.
Just because you hate him is not a good reason to oppose everything he does.
C-SPAN should have a TDS panel.
Is TDS a real thing?
I think it is.
I've read articles that it is.
Have a panel about TDS.
Also, rotate the independent number to the top and put in the comment line.
When you put in Republican, Democrat, Independent, and former military, I'm former military.
I went to West Point.
I was a Vietnam veteran, Airborne Ranger.
So some of your callers have said, well, I know something about war.
Yeah, I know something about war.
It doesn't mean I'm an expert on this one, nor does it mean I know what President is doing.
So just because you're a veteran doesn't entitle you to any particular inside information.
C-SPAN is getting flooded with calls from people who hate Donald Trump.
It's like the crowds on demand.
I hope C-SPAN is trying to do something to make sure that doesn't continue.
Thank you.
Thanks for calling in, Greg from Pennsylvania.
Richard from Pennsylvania Independent.
You're next.
Hey, hi.
Hi, good morning.
I want to agree a little bit with the last gentleman with: I'm a veteran of Vietnam, and I mean, Vietnam sucked, but I mean, I don't know what's going on over there.
But anyway, my point is for we the people, if we don't pay attention to who's going to be running our country as in Congress, there's got to be something that everyone sees about the state of the United States with the illegals.
You know, they fight ICE.
I think ICE goes to these places because there's people not only protesting, they're intimidating.
And I think that we, the people, need to pay attention to who's running for office and what they really stand for.
As far as this war goes, I believe we need it.
Thank you.
All right, Richard from Pennsylvania.
Robert from Texas, calling in on the former military line.
Good morning, Robert.
Good morning.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing.
That's good.
You know, I'm sitting here listening.
I do not hate President Trump.
I do not hate him.
I don't like some of the decisions that he's made, but I do not hate the man.
I think he's an idiot, but no, I do not hate him.
I want Trump lovers to understand that I do not love him.
Hello?
You're online.
We can hear you.
Okay.
All right.
You know, the idea of war, the people Americans understand that at war, people die.
Innocent people die on both sides.
The people that are doing their dying aren't the ones making decisions to go to war.
They're the innocent ones.
That's those little girls in school.
You drop a bomb on the country.
You can't kill that bomb, not to blow up innocent.
War is bad.
War is evil.
If you want to make America great, stop going to war, reading with your enemies, doing like Jesus said, love your enemy.
I did 22 years in the Navy.
That doesn't make me no expert on anything.
But I know war is evil.
I know killing people is evil, and we need to stop that.
And that's all I have to say.
Thank you very much.
Robert of Texas, thanks for calling in.
Cabrini from Los Angeles, a Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning.
I bet if Trump's son wasn't going to the Army, he wouldn't do what he's doing.
And he didn't kill 150, about 58 of those kids over there.
I mean, you know, if he wanted to go after that gent, that man, you know, that leader, they could have done it without doing what they're doing.
America already killed up a whole lot of people.
They killed up the Indies and stole their land.
Disgusting.
All right, Cabritti from Los Angeles.
Joseph from Kalamazoo, Michigan, a Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning.
Morning.
I'm guessing we're talking about this Iran.
We are talking about Iran this morning.
Yes, since we were talking about that this morning, this man is over here in Iran, right?
Now, we got a war going on in Iran.
Where's that other country?
Brazil, Yemen, all these little countries he's over here.
Technically, we keep going like this.
Sooner or later, Russia, North Korea, Japan, China, I mean, they're going to do their thing.
I mean, they're waiting around because we dog on square wasting a lot of stuff.
Our food prices are going up because of the war.
The gas prices are going up because of the stuff here.
It didn't damage the healthcare.
We're paying more.
I mean, you do.
I mean, if they turn around and look and see he's doing more damage to the United States than good.
But these rich folks going offensively, you know, mainly the white ones got money because they don't care because they're going to affect them unless the war comes here.
So that's what I'm saying.
It's going to bother us.
Then you got these ISIS people coming up in here with face masks on.
United States police officers get paid half as much.
They're paying them twice as much to cover their face and come in here kill.
To this day, we still don't know who the Long Ranger is.
Hell, he even killed how many people they would have killed.
Shot him in the back of the head, shot him in the backs.
I mean, there ain't nobody getting paid for.
There's no answer.
I mean, this is a lawless country.
You're making it a lawless country.
He's knowing what the hell he wants.
I seen this in Russia when he jumped out of the doggone little funny old car with the steering wheel on the wrong side, jumped out.
Six of them jumped off.
Gang banged this guy with the hood and banged his head on side of the door and throwed him in the car and rode off.
It's the same thing this man's trying to bring here to something that happened 30 years ago.
If you don't stop this man sooner or later, I guarantee you, come 2027, into 2028, if he's still in office, you can't get him out.
I mean, who won't stop it?
He got the army, the navy, the Marine.
He got the January 6th boys, the KKK, the Area Nation, the Proud Boys.
I mean, what don't this man got?
He could tell you, the Supreme Court already degraded the Supreme Court, the new Seasman.
I mean, what station has he not degraded?
And then when it comes time for y'all to sit up there and let it happen, so I'm guarantee you.
Come 2028, this man's healthy.
Who going to stop him from coming out?
He ain't coming out of the office here.
You see what he did back then, January 6th?
What he won't do now.
All right, Joseph, I think we got your point there.
Alan from Connecticut, a Republican?
You're next.
Good morning.
Nice to make your acquaintance today, Ms. Jasmine.
This is not pleasant, though, I'm going to say, but I'll be polite.
I have to balanced comment.
The title of this is belief systems have consequences.
Now, the belief systems that people in Iran have are similar to what is happening in Nigeria.
Now, we just had Black History Month.
Everybody's life is precious.
And I'm just going to say that the belief system in Nigeria, it's called the people committed to the propagation and the teachings of jihad.
Now, what does that do?
Jihad has killed tens of thousands of innocent people, blameless, in Nigeria.
And this killing, they think is a religious worship or Ishtibhad.
And when it was September 11th, they were instructed, there was killers, which is tragedy, to say, Allahu Akbar, their God is the greatest.
Well, I'm going to get back to that.
Now, the reason it's very difficult to deal with Iran is called Tikiyah, which means they can betray their word.
They can be guileful.
They're really impossible to deal with because of that.
And we say, on my Christian faith, God is the greatest when we do merciful and saving things.
And they say God is the greatest when they kill people.
So let me ask you, Alan, let me hop in here because I just want to focus it on the specific conflict.
I know you're talking about the wider context, but saying what you said.
Right.
Saying what you said, are you supportive of the president's actions?
I'm going to use the word intractability.
These people think they're doing God a service when they're doing this.
I'm going there.
It's not pleasant.
Nazism was a belief system.
They had to be defeated.
They tried to do diplomatic and it's not working.
I hope this will end soon, but they have to be stopped because this belief system is toxic to the whole area.
And we stay on September 11th in Nigeria with our precious African friends toxic to them.
Thank you for listening.
Alan from Connecticut.
Paul from California and Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning.
How are you today?
Good.
How are you?
Good, good.
Can I just take a step back first?
And I don't want to go off topic too much.
And I was a former Republican.
I voted for John McCain and Barack Obama.
77 million people voted for a convicted felon who still hasn't conceded the last election.
Five officers died, four by suicide.
He calls women fat and piggy.
He's found liable for abusing women.
Are we really surprised that he's trying to play God?
Like, that's the bigger issue here as a country.
And I think that we're normalizing what this has done.
He is actively defying court orders to protect child molesters.
Like, what has happened to the morality of this country?
And not to, I'm not attacking the last board, but I'm a person of faith.
What kind of person of faith can these people say that they're pro-life votes for a man who assaults women and watches officers get beaten on January 6th?
What have we become as a country?
Now we're just kidnapping people from other countries.
We're invading Iran.
We're completely abdicating our commitment to the Budapest memorandum.
We're supposed to be protecting Ukraine.
This is the thing guy that says, I'm going to end the war in one day.
We're a year into this.
Like, the reality, and along with my fight, so I don't want to get public here, but let's just be real.
77 million people just didn't want to vote for the damn black woman.
We're 250 years into this experiment.
51% of our country are women.
Women had no rights until the early 1900s.
Black people had no rights until the 1960s.
And we still haven't had a woman president.
We can go back and forth and have these conversations, which you're having, which are great, but the reality is that we don't want to have that conversation, that this country would rather suffer under a white man than thrive under a black woman.
Have a good day.
Paul from California.
Brian from Kansas, a Democrat.
You're next.
Hello.
Yes, I just wanted to two or three topics here.
The facts for starting this war is just unclear to me.
Trump said that their nuclear capacity not six months or so ago was obliterated.
His own intelligence has stated that it would be nine years before their ballistic missiles could even reach America.
This was an 86-year-old man with cancer.
The country's already on the precipice of falling.
Why would we not use the CIA to help these people overturn their own government?
We could have done this.
We know the CIA was there because they were telling them where to drop the bombs.
That's what they're doing now.
So I cannot understand why we would go to war.
And so now what we have done is essentially he's opened Pandora's box because there are going to be repercussions.
It's already spreading around the whole region.
And we cannot control what happens.
We will not be able to control what happens.
But we will suffer here economically.
You already see the gas crisis are skyrocketing.
There will be other repercussions.
People are already having a difficult time.
And I thought we were supposed to be trying to not spend as much money.
How much money have we spent in all these efforts around the world trying to control everything?
And I wanted to say something about TDS.
Why We Can't Control Consequences00:08:33
I believe that the Republicans are the ones with TDS.
I think that if Trump was to say, we will conquer, we'll take and bomb Canada, they would find a reason to support this.
And I would like one other thing.
I'd like to say one other thing.
All right, Brian, I'm going to give you 10 more seconds since we're coming up on a break here.
Go ahead.
Okay.
Okay.
Could you have a segment where you ask Republicans, is there anything, anything that they would not support Trump doing?
Anything, just anything.
All right.
Thank you so much.
Thomas from Virginia, calling in on the active military line.
Thomas, we've got about 30 seconds before we had to break.
Good morning.
Yes, Jeff.
Madam Staff, and I would like to comment about the West Point graduate that criticized you earlier for allowing Democrats to criticize Trump.
Well, I'm a veteran myself, and I would like to say that only Republicans will support Donald Trump, basically.
But if he's such a military strategist, why didn't he go to war or at least serve the country when he was called?
Also, he has three sons.
Neither one of them has served.
He has one now that's the age that he could serve, and he would never serve because all three of them, in my opinion, are cowards like their father.
All right, Thomas, I'm going to have to end it there.
We are at our time for right now for the break.
After the break, we will be in open forum where you can talk about any policy or political issue that you want.
Start calling in now.
Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000.
Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
We'll be right back.
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Washington Journal continues.
Welcome back.
We are an open forum where you can talk about any political issue or public policy issue that is on your mind this morning.
First, we'll start from yesterday's briefing with Press Secretary Caroline Levitt at the White House, who discussed, who responded to a question about what imminent reason did the president have to strike Iran.
Take a listen here.
I completely reject the premise of your question.
You have had the President of the United States, the Secretary of War, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Vice President of the United States, the Secretary of State.
And now I am out here today to explain to you exactly what led the President to make the decision to launch Operation Epic Fury.
And President Trump does not make these decisions in a vacuum.
This decision to launch this operation was based on a cumulative effect of various direct threats that Iran posed to the United States of America.
And the president's feeling based on fact that Iran does pose an imminent and direct threat to the United States of America, based on the fact that they are the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism,
based on the fact that they were rapidly and aggressively building up their ballistic missile program to give themselves immunity within their country alongside their Navy so that inside their country they could continue to create nuclear weapons and nuclear bombs which would of course pose a risk to Americans in the region and even Americans one day here at home.
And then another point on this is the president found that through these extensive exhaustive failed negotiations with Iran that they were hell-bent on death and destruction.
So again, the president was not going to be just another president on a very long list who sat back and stood by and passed the buck of this direct threat to the next administration.
The president had a feeling again based on fact that Iran was going to strike the United States, was going to strike our assets in the region, and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons.
And I would like the media to actually report on all of them rather than just picking sound bites from one person in this administration and saying, oh, they're contradicting the other person.
No.
Again, these decisions are not made in a vacuum.
They are made by the president's feeling that Iran was going to strike the United States and our assets in the region, and he was not going to sit back and watch that happen.
That was White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt.
When asked by a reporter why the administration can't produce a fact of an imminent threat that allowed the president to strike Iran, she said that she rejected that question.
Here's a live shot of the White House on a foggy morning in D.C. Turning back to your questions.
Peggy from Texas, a Democrat, you're next.
Good morning.
It's open forum.
Hi.
This is my first time to call, and I've watched him about six months.
Welcome.
And there's so many things I'd like to comment about, but I just take what this woman just said, this spokesperson for Donald Trump.
All I can say is that I feel like I'm watching Bush talk about weapons of mass destruction.
And of course, we all know that was a big fat lie.
And we end up spending over a trillion dollars in the Iraq war for 20 years and then all the added costs of veteran benefits and trying to take care of people that were harmed in the war.
And all we know right now is that a man that's in president of the United States, a convicted felon who lies every day, is telling us more lies.
And the only people that are going to benefit from this war in Iraq is the oil and gas industry and the armaments industry.
And the rest of us are just going to be played for fools.
And the man that called in a few minutes ago about the Democrats that hate Trump, we don't hate Trump.
We hate what he does.
He divides people.
He sits back, creates conflict.
He's not good at what he does.
He's a hack.
And so we need to get somebody in there that's experienced, that's a real leader, and that we need to get a Congress in there that can control what this out-of-control president does.
We're sick of him.
We don't care that he's the Donald Trump.
He's just a person that can't do a job without being extremely divisive.
And he plays with other people's lives.
And right now, he's got really low ratings.
He's got unpopular programs.
And even members of Congress are horrified by him of both parties.
They're afraid to speak out against him.
And he's just terrible.
He's a terrible policymaker.
He's not a good leader.
All right, Peggy.
I think you get your point there.
David from Hilton Head, South Carolina, Republican.
You're next.
Good morning, David.
Good morning.
I'm going to straighten something out with y'all.
This is, you know, everybody's saying we hit the school.
We hit the school.
Guess what?
It was a Rainier missile that misfired that hit that school.
So let's straighten that out.
Do you have any other comments about the war or any other public policy issue you want to talk about?
Seth Moulton's Concerns00:11:52
Well, I mean, I mean, that's what happened.
Every CNN, every station is saying that.
It was a misfired missile from Iran that hit that school, not America.
Period.
Well, David, David, I will just say that yesterday, Secretary of the DOD Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked about it.
He said there's an active investigation going on to who is responsible for that.
The White House Press Secretary yesterday at the press conference parroted those comments, said that an investigation is ongoing.
She did say that the U.S. does not intentionally target civilians.
But I think that there is still a question out there about who or what country fired on the school.
And I don't believe that there is an answer yet, according to both the Department of Defense and the White House.
David, are you still there?
Yeah, I'm still here.
Yep.
So I think that there's still a question out about that.
Okay.
But like I say, we didn't do it.
Promise you that.
How many misfired missiles did they fire at and landed in their own country going after Israel?
Bunches.
That's all I got to say.
All right.
David from South Carolina, Republican.
Thanks for calling in.
Joseph from Connecticut, a Democrat.
Yes.
You're on.
Good morning.
I find it personally hard to understand how Americans can follow a so-called leader who goes after his political enemies with trumped-up charges and avoids prosecution of people that were intimately involved with Jeffrey Epstein and are probable paedophiles.
And Trump could have had a deal with Iran if he had just followed Barack Obama's lead and accepted the agreement that was negotiated under Obama's leadership.
And America does not have clean hands when it comes to Iran because in 1953, the Eisenhower administration had deposed a democratically elected leader in Iran, Mosabek, and replaced him, the CIA replaced him with the Shah of Iran, who was extremely brutal and aggressive towards his own people.
So I don't think that you can just look at the recent history of Iran and declare that Iran He's the evil actor in this situation, and there's enough guilt to go around on both sides of the table to avoid something as precipitous as an ugly war.
Thank you.
John from Massachusetts, a Republican.
Yes.
Good morning.
John.
Hi, John.
Military.
Well, the military.
Korea, 1975, 1976.
If you all recall the Operation Paul Bunyan, it was a show of force-truth strength.
We made Kim L strong and all the communists backed down because of peace-truth strength.
We could have done it with the Iranians, too, but they weren't smart enough to take our deal.
Too bad.
One more thing.
Seth Moulton, you're a coward.
You should resign.
You put the military uniform on, and you're the biggest coward in this country.
I represent the United States.
You represent the John from Massachusetts.
Renee from Florida, Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning, Renee.
Good morning.
That was funny.
I don't know who that guy was that he was talking.
Did he say Seth Rogan?
No, he said Seth Moulton.
I do love Seth Moulton, though.
He said Seth Moulton, Congressman.
Okay.
Well, first.
How funny would that be if it was Seth Rogan?
I know.
I know.
Anyway, first of all, I just want to say thank you for what you do because your parents should have named you Patience for what you put up with from these people.
And the one guy that was telling you about you winning on here doesn't realize that Trump only has a 36 or 7% approval rating.
How many people is going to call in loving him?
Not very many.
But anyway, about the war they started, their plan is going according to plan.
It's been going on forever.
Russia's part of it.
You know, they're all autocrats.
Trump wants to be an autocrat.
He's been with Putin since, you know, the pageant days.
And Putin gives him money when nobody, no bank would give him money.
And Epstein, you know, Epstein met with Putin and is real Netanyahu.
I want to know what's going on in that thing.
I think we can find out a lot about what goes on in our world.
But we have this propaganda channel that can't even list themselves as the news.
Their LLC has to say they're an entertainment channel, and that would be Fox.
And they love Russia, love Fox.
They love to show stuff in Russia that, you know, Fox is saying.
And I could go on and on and on, but I'm going to try to, you know, be calm today.
So thank you again.
You're doing a great job, and I hope you stick around for a while, like Greta and Mimi.
Have a great day.
Thanks for calling in, Renee, and I love to talk to all people who call on this program, no matter their viewpoint or criticism of me in general.
Jay from Rochester, New York, an Independent.
You're next.
Good morning, Jay.
Hey, good morning.
Good morning.
Hey, I just want to say thank you for your patience, too, as well.
You do such a great job.
So just stay encouraged.
I just want to make a few points real quick.
You know, from a point of view as a Christian, you know, I really feel like this administration is actually trying to fulfill a lot of the Bible prophecy of people out there that understand it.
As far as like this, causing these wars, rumors of wars, rebuilding the temple, the third temple back in Israel.
It's a lot of prophecy that's being fulfilled.
And I remember Steve Bannon said, only if these people knew who we were and what we came to do.
This is something that they're very passionate about.
I believe that this says he is the man of sin.
And this is just my opinion.
But again, God said no one knows the day or the hour when the Lord is coming back.
But from an independent point of view, it's so sad.
We are in the new world order.
Now, whatever we grew up with, and Marco Rupio said this the other day, everything we grew up with and knew is now passed away.
This is a new world order, something that Republicans have always feared.
They thought it was coming in from the Democrats.
They were going to try to come and destroy them and everything else like that.
And there's actually Trump.
Trump has no empathy, no anything.
The man is hollow.
Money is what he served.
And yes, this was planned a while ago.
And how he got back in office after being a 34-count felon, which people don't believe because the algorithms are actually separating our news, right?
What we see on social media.
So the things that goes to my feed, I see that might be live, come out of Trump's mouth, but it doesn't show up in a lot of MAGA or Republicans' feeds.
They see nothing but the positive things.
And this is how America is divided.
We're more divided today than what the North and South was divided back during the Civil War.
And the divided kingdom cannot stand, unfortunately.
Where we end up in, just read your scripture, ask ChatGPT.
This is not going to end very well, unfortunately.
So I just tell people, just get to know the Lord.
I don't know how much time we have left, but this is why they're moving so fast and overlooking the Constitution.
The Constitution is now just a suggestion to them.
Okay?
They respected it.
He'll follow it.
But he doesn't.
He wants to change it because he wants to change America at the same time.
telling you that he loves it so much.
No, he's not going to step down.
I really.
All right, Jay, let's actually hear from the president himself yesterday talking about the strikes in Iran.
We're doing very well on the war front, to put it mildly, I would say.
Somebody said, on a scale of 10, where would you rate it?
I said about a 15.
And we're going to continue to do well.
We have the greatest military in the world by far.
And that was a tremendous threat to us for many years.
47 years they've been killing our people and killing people from all over the world.
And I think we have great support.
And I think if we didn't do it first, they would have done it to Israel and give us a shot if that was possible.
And if we didn't terminate the worst deal, one of the worst deals ever made, the Obama nuclear deal.
I call it the Obama nuclear deal, where he gave everything to Iran, including a nuclear weapon.
It was a road to a nuclear weapon.
Bad things would have happened four years ago because they would have had a weapon four years ago if I didn't terminate that deal.
So we're in a very strong position now.
And their leadership is just rapidly going.
Everybody that seems to want to be a leader, they end up dead.
And it's an amazing thing that's taking place before your eyes because for 47 years we were pushed around and we shouldn't have been.
And I think I can say, and you see it as well as I do, you see the tremendous progress that's being made.
Their missiles are being wiped out rapidly.
Their launches are being wiped out.
They're attacking their neighbors.
They're attacking their, in some cases, allies or not so long ago, allies.
And, you know, it's really a nation that was out of control, and they would have used it on us if we let them.
If we waited any longer.
A big factor was Soleimani, the killing of Solomony in my first term.
And maybe the biggest factor was the rebuilding of the military in my first term.
And then the B-2s hit the, and I use the word obliterate because it really was, it was a complete obliteration of their nuclear potential.
And that set them back very, very seriously.
If we didn't hit within two weeks, they would have had a nuclear weapon.
If we didn't do the B-2 attack a number of months ago, they would have a nuclear weapon.
And when crazy people have nuclear weapons, bad things happen.
That was President Trump at the White House yesterday giving an update on the Iranian strikes.
Strength and Peace00:09:37
There's a White House on your screen looking very foggy this morning.
Susan from Florida, Republican.
You're next.
Good morning, Susan.
Yes, I'm from Florida, and yes, I am a Republican.
Good morning, Susan.
Thanks for calling in.
Good morning.
It's open for us.
Yes.
And I'm very, very happy with the job that Trump is doing.
He's trying to clean up a mess.
It's very difficult to clean up a mess.
But when we've had four years of mess, we're going to get this done.
We'll clean it up and prices will go down and things will go back to normal.
It's going to take a while.
And I do say one thing.
I'm waiting for Pfizer or one of the other companies to do a Trump derangement syndrome vaccine for the people because they're having a real hard time with that.
All right, Susan from Florida.
Thanks for calling in.
C from Virginia, Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning.
Yeah, this country is built off hate now.
And it's going the wrong way.
And it's a shame.
You know, whatever the president do, it's okay.
You know, and they're talking about the deficit.
All this money they're spending, you know, for all these different things.
I don't like to know what the deficit is now.
All the prices are going up.
You know.
The deficit the last time I checked it was about $30 trillion.
$38 trillion, excuse me.
Right.
Okay.
But I'll check for you right now.
Yeah.
And then they talk about the election with fraud.
Okay.
The president had won two out of three elections.
Then they try to go back to the 2020 election.
You can't go back in time and say you're going to start the presidency when 2020 is gone.
You know.
So I don't know what they plan to do.
I hope we get more love in this country.
And then there was something about like the Latino.
They brought the Latinos over here.
I used to work in D.C.
I used to live in D.C.
Now, I never seen.
There you go.
On the screen there, if you can see it, that's the U.S. national debt about $38 trillion.
That ticker is going up.
Keep going.
Sorry.
Yeah.
So I used to live in D.C., and I used to be a construction worker in D.C.
And when I was working, it was like only three Spanish guys on our job at the time.
Then they started hiring for the hole.
But it was all to take the way jobs of Afro-American.
I hate to say that.
Take away the jobs of Afro-American.
And now you see a lot of people on the street, not black people, used to be called Chocolate City.
But does not chocolate city more.
So I don't know why they had to have National Guard and the Army in there and spending a million dollars a day to have them there.
Because what we did, I hate to say it, but what we did, like, they was never going into a white neighborhood to see.
They always done it to their soul, ourselves, you know.
So that's all I have to say.
All right, see from Orange, Virginia, Democrat.
James from Harvey, Louisiana, an independent.
Good morning, James.
Good morning.
I got two issues.
One, first, short.
For my fellow citizens that call in and complain about you guys letting people complain about Trump, I want to congratulate you.
This is one of the most democratic public forums for any idiot like me to call in and voice our opinion.
Please continue to do so.
And if my fellow citizens are complaining about the number of people complaining about Trump, this is America.
That's my first one.
Second one is: I want to talk about one of the craziest things that the Republicans keep repeating, and I think it's idiotic, and that's this peace through strength.
This country is about to become 250 years old.
And 250 years ago, the superpower of the world was Great Britain.
We had 13 colonies that didn't even speak the same languages, and we beat their butts.
Kaiti beat Napoleon.
Vietnam whipped our behind.
The U.S. beat Afghanistan.
Israel is the most powerful nation of all of its neighbors, and none of them had peace.
Strength is just the beginning of peace.
Respect, cooperation, and a whole bunch of other things are the beginning of peace in addition to being a strong military.
And by the way, Ukraine is a lot less stronger than Russia, and they're hanging in there.
We need to watch what we're doing.
All right, James from Louisiana.
Barbara from North Carolina, Republican.
You're next.
Good morning, Barbara.
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I think you do a wonderful job on C-SPAN.
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
I'd like to just present a couple of things to see.
Of course, we have disunity in our country, but I think some information is missing that might be helpful if there is a point of understanding to reach.
I think there are many things people don't know about Donald Trump.
He is a very transactional person, and he executes what he believes in.
From his youngest age, he attended a church, a Methodist church, and the minister was Norman Vincent Peale.
And you probably are quite familiar with Norman Vincent Peale, but he did always emphasize the great, great gifts that God did give to all of us and how we can actualize those gifts.
I see Trump as a very convicted man.
I see him accomplish so much each day.
We see his visibility and communication, and of course, he has education from Wharton in finance, which I'm seeing as a person who both taught school humanities and literature, but also owned a large automotive supply, equipment supply business.
I truly respect what I see, his impetus for improving the private sector and giving the private man a chance for economic mobility.
In the 1950s, our citizens were able to open so many private businesses.
And I always thanked God, you know, for our parents who were born into the Depression, who were given that economic mobility in the 1950s.
And I would just maybe have us consider that peace does equal, or that prosperity equals peace.
And I think we can be a happy nation when we're all given equality of opportunity to accomplish and to maximize our God-given gifts.
I think that I see these traits in this man, and I'm a very open-minded person.
I don't consider myself really a Republican.
I always look at the candidate and look at their preparation.
And my last comment would be, when I saw Donald Trump come down the escalator when he first declared his presidency, immediately after that, he sat down with Anderson Cooper, and he was asked one question, which I found most definitive.
When Anderson said, can you tell us the mistakes you feel you've made in your life?
And I was not familiar with Donald Trump, but I saw him hang his head and clasp his hands with a long, long pause of consideration.
He said, you know, Anderson, I must say to you, in business, business in the private sector is so competitive.
You really cannot afford to make a mistake.
And I had this experience.
My business was competitive.
I represented companies like Pittsburgh Paint and Glass, BASF, 3M, Fiberglass Ever, Kodak, Sonobel, and DuPont Denamurs.
And we were required to maintain a certain base of customers when we were given these contracts with these manufacturers.
And I really put in 18 to 20-hour days and had to compete, but I thank God for the opportunity this country gave me.
And I sincerely hope that we can overcome these.
I really think they're superficial impressions we seem to be acting upon and look deeply into.
There's so many Democrats I admire and respect, and so many independents.
And many of my best friends dislike Trump immensely.
But we have lovely conversations about this, as you do when you are conducting your program so eloquently.
Domestic Terrorists Debate00:10:45
And I thank you for what you do.
But I'm supportive of Donald Trump, and I do see this war.
I hate war.
I think that peace is God's way.
However, sometimes I do believe assertion, execution, and transaction are necessary.
And I do see these things in this man.
I believe he also, in that conversation with Anderson Cooper, said the one thing I regret most were my failed marriages.
He said, but I had to put so much focus into my business that I was not there for my children.
But I did have good, wonderful women who did contribute as mothers.
So I thank you, and I say God bless everyone who calls into this program, and God bless you, and God bless our country.
But I do have a lot of feeling for this man.
I think he is representing us in his godly way.
And thank you so much for listening to me this long.
Thanks for calling, Barbara.
I appreciate the comments there.
And I know that we've talked a lot about Iran and the war this morning, but I want to turn to some other things that we saw happen on Congress yesterday.
I turned to a Hill article that says the headline is Raskin presses Noam on whether she'd still label Predi Goode as domestic terrorists.
If you go down just a little bit, it says that the top Democrat, Jamie Raskin, on the House Judiciary Committee, asked Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam whether or not she knows today whether or not she would still label Renee Good and Alex Predi as domestic terrorists.
That was in a congressional hearing yesterday.
Take a listen to how she answered.
Based on what you know today, Madam Secretary, based on what you know today, were Renee Goode and Alex Preddy domestic terrorists.
As you know, there's ongoing investigations that are being led by the United States.
Oh, but you didn't wait for the investigation, did you?
You didn't wait for the evidence.
You proclaimed that they were domestic terrorists at the time.
Why did you do that?
And you didn't wait to attack our law enforcement.
Why did you do that?
Why did you call them domestic terrorists?
Because our ICE officers and our HSI officers that day risked their lives to protect that scene.
So evidence could be reclaimed.
So it could be used in the investigation because those violent rioters that were there.
So you're proud of the fact that you called them domestic terrorists?
Is that what you're telling America?
HSI officers put their lives on the line to protect that scene so evidence that we could have.
Yes, they do.
But you told a lie about them.
You said that they were domestic terrorists.
That was Chrissy Noam on the Hill yesterday in a fiery exchange with Representative Jamie Raskin over her calling Alex Predi and Renee Goode, domestic terrorists, asked to repeat it.
She did not say she said an investigation was ongoing.
At the same time, there was another heated exchange with Nancy Mace, a representative from South Carolina, when she pressed Governor Tim Waltz from Minnesota on welfare fraud in his state.
Take a listen there.
How much money was spent on autism in Minnesota in 2017, Governor?
I don't have those numbers in front of me, Congresswoman.
Did you prepare for this hearing today?
Did you do that?
I take Congress seriously.
And you've seen the numbers about autism fraud in Minnesota.
So we're going to do some Minnesota math with you today, okay?
Are you ready?
How much money was spent on 2017 for autism in Minnesota?
How much?
I don't know.
I wasn't the governor.
Okay.
Did you not just say that you prepared for this hearing today?
$1 million, okay?
A quick Google search or using your AI could tell you $1 million was spent.
How much money was spent on autism in Minnesota in 2024?
I don't have the number in front of me.
As governor?
Was you governor in 2024?
I was, but I'm not the.
Okay, so your excuse before that you didn't know what 2017 autism numbers were because you were not governor, and today you can't answer the numbers about 2024 as governor, and you still said you prepared for this hearing today.
It's unbelievable.
That was Representative Nancy Mace in a fiery exchange with Governor Tim Waltz over a welfare fraud in Minnesota at yesterday's congressional hearing.
You can find both of those hearings on C-SPAM.
Pat from Pennsylvania, Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning, Pat.
This is open forum.
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I'd like to kind of toggle back to the Orion matter.
My concern with this government is they I don't believe they are a government of peace, our current government.
Negotiation is usually the best way to avoid the death of our military and other people in other countries.
We have a country right now that is mistreating anyone who is not a white Christian nationalist.
And God had never, ever, ever let this be the way he wanted us to live our lives.
But looking at the negotiations that were occurring regarding Iran, there are two real estate moguls that were doing the negotiation, Witkoff and Kushner.
They are the two that have been negotiating all these conflicts throughout this administration's lifespan.
We have two real estate moguls that are trying to show that the world needs to consolidate the powers that be in our world.
Donald Trump has looked at Iran, Ukraine, Venezuela, Greenland, all of which have oil or minerals that he wants his hands upon.
And I guess I want to say that if you take the entire oil production of the world and have it in the U.S. hands, then you pretty much have power over the world.
This is a man who wants to have, who is so greedy, and as well as his administration, that they will do anything to remain in power.
And it is very scary to me that they used Christianity as their cause when Christianity, by Jesus' name, is not what we have.
Killing others is not what God wants us to be doing.
And I thank you for listening to my call.
All right, Pat from Pennsylvania, Democrat.
James from Canton, Ohio, a Republican.
You're next.
Good morning, James.
This is open forum.
Good morning.
It's happy to turn the TV on to see your smile.
Please.
Hey, James, your audio sounds a little distorted.
Are you, can you shift your position a little bit?
Maybe it's your reception.
It's a little better now.
It's still a little break-up-y, but go ahead.
I may have to cut you off if it sounds a little bit too bad.
Are you on?
James, are you on speaker?
No, I'm not.
Okay.
Actually, it sounds much better now.
Go ahead.
Okay, I went on the front deck.
All right, I'm glad we worked that out.
Go ahead.
I know it's open forum.
It's open forum.
The gentleman that said what Trump sent his son, Trump doesn't go ahead and admit that Barrett is his son.
It's Melania's son.
But in 81, they went ahead and put the Secret Service Act back in.
Is he going to go ahead and make him sign up or any of his millionaire friends, billionaire friends?
Sons, probably not.
But I'm a disabled vet, and they went ahead and took 10% of my disability because I had an operation on my back that was for my leg, for my disability.
And then they sent me an unemployment form.
Last five years worked, who I worked for, who I was, what I made.
They will go ahead and send me gainful employment to make up the difference.
I'm 67 years old and retired, and he wants me to go back to work to take my disability away.
All I know is Trump's a punk who sat on a stump next to a skunk and is stumping a skunk Trump stunk.
Is that his jobs?
Jobs thing is send disabled veterans back to work.
He's a moron.
Thank you for your time.
Z from Arizona and Independent.
Once I find you.
Hi.
You're next.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I've heard a lot of speaking, and I wanted to encourage us as Americans and people around the world.
This message that I'm about to say is not for everyone, but it's for those who have ears to hear and a heart to receive what I'm about to say.
God says, let not your heart be troubled, people, neither let it be afraid.
Believe these things must come to pass.
So you believe that God sits high and he looks low.
His eyes run to and forth throughout the earth, beholding the good and the evil and showing himself strong on behalf of those whose hearts are made upright before him.
The earth belongs to God and the fullness thereof, the world and they, us that dwell therein.
So don't put your confidence in powerful people, for there's no help for us there.
For when they breathe their last and return to the earth, all their plans die with them.
So God has absolute ultimate power.
The Supreme Court may have given immunity and unlimited power to the press, but his arms are still too short to box with God.
Now, God can get butter from a duck, and do we know anyone on earth who can do this?
Absolutely not.
Focus our attention on getting our souls right.
God said that if my people who are called by my name would humble themselves and pray and seek my faith and turn from their wicked ways, then God will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land.
Are we God's people?
Ask yourself that.
Am I a people of God?
This is the script, among others, that we are called to do.
So we need to, as Americans, sweep around our own front and back porch before we sweep around anyone else's.
Get your souls right.
Let our sins go before us and not trailing us.
So we have to go in peace, God's people.
God bless this land and may God have mercy on us all.
Sweeping Our Own Front Porch00:05:45
Thank you for taking my call.
All right, see you from Arizona.
Carl from West Virginia and Independent.
Good morning, Carl.
It's open for him.
Yes.
I guess people's got most people in this country got biased remorse now.
It was never an election.
It was a movement due to the fact that America was losing its whiteness.
So Trump was the reason why he became president to save America so that the 68% white people that are here in this country would not go any lower than that.
So here we are.
We're in the mix now.
Y'all asked for this.
Y'all got it.
And one more thing, all you Foundation blacks, I got a message for y'all.
All right, that was Carl.
Larry from Pennsylvania, Democrat.
Good morning.
And I'm a United States Naval veteran, and I support various animal shelters, you know, within the state and out of the state.
But I wanted to talk a little bit about during the Senate hearing of Christy Noam, Senator Tom Tillis had said, why did you, you know, kill her puppy, the 12 or 13-month-old puppy, cricket?
And because basically, the way I was informed that the puppy growled, well, couldn't Christy Noam take cricket to a veterinarian to see a medicine or having cricket spayed, that this would help?
And I think this is horrible.
And basically, I think she should resign.
And I'm poor peace in the world.
I think Trump is doing the right thing.
I want to thank you for your time.
She span.
I watch it occasionally.
It's very interesting and informative.
Thank you, Larry.
And I'll just read a little bit more about the Tillis comments.
I turn now to an NBC News article.
The headline is: GOP Senator compares Christy Noam's DHS leadership to that time she shot her own dog.
If you scroll just a little bit further down, it says, during a tense public hearing, Tuesday, Republican Senator Tom Tillis called on Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam to resign over her handling of the deadly Minneapolis immigration operation.
And he blasted her for killing her dog, which she had described in her memoir, in her memoir, as untrainable, as well as a goat.
Tillis of North Carolina argued that the killing of animals reflected bad judgment and compared it to DHS's fatal shootings of two American citizens, Renee Goode and Alex Pretty in Minneapolis.
My wonderful producers have actually found that clip.
So here you go.
Take a listen.
Now, Secretary, I read your book last week.
And honestly, some of the parts of it impress me, but some of it distresses me.
And I'll give you a good example of one that does.
The passage where you talk about killing a dog that was 14 months old.
I train dogs, all right?
And you are a farmer.
You should know better.
You should know that if you're going out to a hunting lodge and you're putting pheasants out and you're putting dogs out, you don't take a puppy out there.
A 14-month-old dog is basically a teenager in dog years.
You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time in training.
And then you have the audacity to go into a book and say it's a leadership lesson about tough choices.
It's in your book.
We could play it if we had time.
At that same lunch hour, you killed a goat.
And you killed the goat because you said it was behaving badly.
You are a farmer.
You don't castrate a goat.
They behave badly.
You should have probably done that before.
But my point is, those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment.
Not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis.
Now, there was Senator Tillis on Tuesday during a heated exchange with DHS Secretary Christy Noam talking about how she wrote in her memoir that she killed a dog, linking it to her leadership in Minneapolis over those immigration enforcement operations.
Carol from Florida and Independent.
You are next.
Good morning, Carol.
It's open forum.
Yes.
Hello.
How are you?
Thank you for C-SPAN.
It's great to have both sides talking.
I think people are too one-sided.
There is the media pushing people to one side or the other, and nothing is black or white.
So no matter what's happening, is that we have a pendulum swing.
And you have people very concerned about what happened in the last four years with the gender problem and the release of criminals too soon or not picking them up and the overflow of people coming in without being vetted was a concern with crime as well.
And they voted for Trump and we reversed the whole idea.
Vetting and Trust00:02:22
We do want immigrants.
We're an entire country of immigrants.
And we want those that can contribute.
So vetting is important since the very beginning of this country.
Also, the geopolitical is very complicated.
And you have a country that gives problems to the Arab region.
And when you trust them and give them money, there's still the fear that they will follow through with what they desire to do to destroy Israel.
The Bible does talk about protecting Israel and assassinating kings that are ready to attack Israel.
The prophecies of the Bible, if you believe them, will come true, evidently.
But in the meantime, we're trying to preserve a country of freedom in the free world with Europe.
The EU has been established, which will create possibly a one-world government because Christine, I think it's Lagarde, being the head of the EU Monetary Fund, has indicated the digital currency will be more prevalent.
And when that comes in the future, it relates to the Bible thing, no one will be able to buy or sell without the mark.
So that may mean that.
All right, Carol, I'm going to give you 20 more seconds here before we move on since we're coming up on time.
You want to wrap your comments?
The digital currency may be the way everything is going to go, which, you know, we don't particularly like that idea, but I think Trump is showing strengths, protections or strengths, and, of course, bringing the people together, the regions together.
All right.
Carol from Florida.
Frank from Maryland, a Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning, Frank.
Yes, ma'am.
Frank On Enriched Uranium00:14:40
This is just a primer.
Whereas Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1 makes COTUS Commander-in-Chief of our military and grants him power to defend us against imminent attacks.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11, grants Congress the power to declare war.
The War Powers Act authorizes POTUS to make war only if Congress declares war, specific statutory authorization like an AUMF, a national emergency created by attack upon the United States or military or territories.
And meanwhile, the president has yet to tell us why he started what Trump himself calls a war.
Iran's nukes, regime change to protect our troops because Israel is using, is going to bomb Iran with our weapons, the weapons that we supplied them.
Or Trump's latest excuse is that he had a feeling Iran was about to attack us.
This is ridiculous.
Negotiations reportedly were going well.
They were just needing to hammer out how there were going to be inspections of the Iranian nuclear facilities.
This is an unjust and illegal war.
And I want to thank you, ma'am.
And I just wish Congress would do its job and restore constitutional order.
All right, that was Frank from Maryland.
And over the last few days, the administration has actually come out and said that the talks were not going well.
Steve Wickoff was on Fox News a few days ago, made that point.
Of course, he was one of the lead negotiators.
And yesterday, Caroline Levitt said that the president had a feeling that Iran was going to attack based on fact.
Now, after the break, we'll hear from the other side of the aisle with a Democrat, Greg Lansman from Ohio, who has offered an alternative Iran war powers resolution.
We'll hear about it next after the break.
In a divided media world, one place brings Americans together.
According to a new MAGIT research report, nearly 90 million Americans turn to C-SPAN, and they're almost perfectly balanced: 28% conservative, 27% liberal or progressive, 41% moderate.
Republicans watching Democrats, Democrats watching Republicans, moderates watching all sides.
Because C-SPAN viewers want the facts straight from the source.
No commentary, no agenda, just democracy.
Unfiltered every day on the C-SPAN networks.
C-SPAN is as unbiased as you can get.
You are so fair.
I don't know how anybody can say otherwise.
You guys do the most important work for everyone in this country.
I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices.
You bring these divergent viewpoints and you present both sides of an issue and you allow people to make up their own minds.
I absolutely love C-SPAN.
I love to hear both sides.
I've watched C-SPAN every morning and it is unbiased.
And you bring in factual information for the callers to understand where they are in their comments.
This is probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country.
You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruptions.
Thank you, C-SPAN, for being a light in the dark.
Washington Journal continues.
Joining us now to talk about the latest of the Iran strikes is Congressman Greg Landsman from Ohio, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Congressman, thanks so much.
Thanks for having me.
All right, let's dive right in.
Yesterday, the Senate took an initial vote blocking their version of that war powers resolution that would stop the president from ordering further strikes on Iran and require him to go before Congress to do so.
The House has set to vote on a similar version today.
You are opposed.
Tell us why.
So we have an alternative war powers resolution, which I think makes much more sense.
That you are right, but that's not what's being voted on.
No, I just go through the differences really quickly.
Ours says no troops.
This is not clearly stating that.
Number two, ours says you got a couple weeks to finish this operation.
This resolution says you got to be done now.
Do not finish the operation.
Ours is very clear about staying in the region in order to defend our troops and our allies.
This is not clear.
So I'll be voting against this one today.
Already failed in the Senate, so it's kind of a moot point, but I think it's important to say: look, this is not good policy.
What's better policy is to allow the military and our allies to finish this particular operation, which has targeted just the missiles and the launchers and the ships.
That's it.
And then be done.
And so that Senate vote failed yesterday, a 47 to 53 margin, roughly around party lines.
Do you believe that after you take this vote today in the House, which you say you're opposed to, that the 30-day measure that you are talking about, will that also get a vote in the near future?
Yeah, it has to ripen.
That's the legislative term.
So in order for it to be a privileged resolution, meaning it comes directly to the floor, time has to pass and it won't be ready until the 24th.
But at that point, I think most people will want to work with us and get that done if it looks like this operation is going to take more than a few weeks or it's changing in any way.
Now, I believe you have about six Democrats, including you, that's leading that second version of a war powers resolution, a more limited version, some would say.
How has leadership responded?
I think they understand the complexity of this and the fact that this is based on my conviction that Iran has posed not just a threat.
Iran's been a chaos machine.
They caused mayhem and violence and they've killed not only their own people, I mean tens of thousands of their own people in January during the protests, but Lebanon, which I believe would be free.
Beirut would be a place that we would be talking about, people would be going to.
They fund Hezbollah, which has destabilized Lebanon.
They're obviously going after Israel.
They fund Hamas and Gaza.
I think the Palestinians would have Gaza on their own with some sort of peace with Israel, but for Iran.
They meddle in Iraq, Syria.
They want this nuclear weapon or enriched uranium so that they can cause more mayhem.
And what they were doing was they were stockpiling or building up their missile capabilities and drones to protect their enrichment activities.
And so the window was closing in terms of our ability to stop them from, one, getting a nuclear weapon, but two, from building up such an air defense and missile capability.
But how does that connect with the president who says that after the B-2 bombers last June, that those nuclear capabilities and their nuclear ambitions were obliterated?
I mean, he continues to say that to us.
Yeah, it was the wrong word.
And, you know, it's frustrating to deal with something so serious and complicated with this president.
Let me be very clear.
I don't trust him.
He has lost the trust, that whatever trust he had with the American people, a lot of the American And so it's tough.
But what was true about the strikes was it did enormous damage to their enrichment facilities.
In June.
Yeah, sorry.
But they have enriched uranium, and they are trying to build up a shield around that so that they continue to enrich so that they can have a weapons grade.
They get to weapons grade levels and they have a weapon that they can either use to destroy, kill hundreds of thousands of people, including Americans, or they start to extort us.
I mean, they start to use that to cause more mayhem and chaos.
I want to ask you more about some of the evidence that you've seen, but to your specific version of that more limited war powers resolution, yesterday Leader Jeffries said that he had not seen it.
Have you spoken with him since?
Have you showed it with him?
Do you know?
We've talked to Leader Jeffries about it and made our case.
He made his case on his position, but no, I feel very strongly about this.
I mean, I desperately want peace.
I've wanted this since I can remember.
When I was young and I was thinking about what am I going to do, you know, career-wise, I remember very specifically watching Clinton shaking hands with Arafat Rabin.
I was in high school.
And I thought that would be a wonderful thing to do to work in that kind of way.
Not president, but in that crew of solving something so complicated.
And peace, you can pray for it and you can hope for it, but at some point you have to act on it.
And diplomacy is first.
The diplomacy, the diplomatic work was not going anywhere.
I'm happy to get into that.
And then the question is: would a targeted set of strikes help to achieve peace?
I believe the answer is yes.
Now, the president has said that the war could last several weeks.
Looking now at a New York Times headline, it says, Trump says war could last several weeks and offers contradictory visions of new regime.
Pete Hegseth has said it could last four weeks, five weeks, six weeks, two weeks.
So the timeline here is obviously fluctuating.
Your extension would be for 30 days.
That would theoretically be voted on by the 24th.
So 30 days from there.
Are you concerned about the potential for it to go longer?
Yeah, I am, although I'm not terribly concerned at the moment.
I think the objectives, as I understand it, and the way the Secretary of State and others have explained, including the Joint Chiefs.
So I'm listening to the generals.
They're saying the objective is this.
Destroy the air defenses, the missiles, the launchers, the ability to go build more missiles, and the drones, and then the ships.
That's it.
And so if that's the mission, they're looking at the number of ships and missiles and launchers and where they are and how quickly they can get to them.
And they're saying weeks.
That's it.
And once they're done, they're done.
Let's talk about ground troops for a second because the White House is not ruling it out.
The President is not ruling it out.
I wonder, in your bill, it prohibits a president from deploying ground troops without explicit congressional authority, except for cases of search and rescue missions and intelligence activities.
Talk about why.
Ground troops suggest a different operation, and this operation is limited.
It makes sense.
He has the authority, the administration has the authority to take a limited action without Congress voting, though Congress is going to have to vote on some sort of supplemental to backfill the munitions.
But the ground troops suggest that we would be getting into nation building and regime change, and that's not something I would support.
Well, the president has talked favorably about regime change, although the White House says that that is not one of their four objectives.
He has mused about this idea of regime change.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think everyone in the world would like a different regime, except for China and Russia.
I think we would like to have a regime that is like others in the region, that is wanting to be part of the world, that denounces terrorism, that doesn't fund terrorism, that builds some sort of defense with its partners, right?
That would be great.
I think it is a huge opportunity, but it's not something that the United States should be putting on the list of objectives.
Like, that's not on us.
That is on the Iranian people.
And we can create the conditions by essentially defanging, as Secretary of State Rubio said, getting rid of the military assets of this regime that weakens them to such an extent that, yeah, there could be change.
Now, before we continue our conversation, Congressman, I want to invite more of our viewers to join in on the call.
Let me repeat your lines.
Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000.
Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001.
Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
Start calling in.
We'll turn to questions in just a few minutes here.
I want to ask about lawmakers who are growing more concerned about Americans that are effectively stranded in the Middle East.
Inevitable Conflict?00:09:09
We know that the administration says that they're working hard to get some of these folks out.
They've already been able to bring home thousands of people and are urging others in the region that want to leave to reach out.
Senator Andy Kem said this week that the number of Americans who need to get out of the region could grow if the war intensifies in countries now being attacked.
He said that up to a million Americans may be at risk.
Do you believe that that is the accurate number and could no?
No.
Why not?
Well, because you only have a few thousand who are saying they're looking to leave now.
And I think this is the heat.
This is the most intensive it's going to be.
Maybe it'll get more intense in the next couple of days, but you're seeing them working through our allies, the United States and our allies working through the launchers, the missiles, the ships, at which point you'll see, I think, less and less conflict and the airspaces starting to open up.
Do you believe that military forces could be required to rescue civilians in the region if you see a more widening, not protracting?
I would hope not.
No.
And I wonder, in your first statement since the attacks on Saturday, you said that these strikes are targeted military infrastructure with warnings to Iranian civilians to take shelter away from these military targets.
But the U.S.-based human rights activist news agency said that now more than a thousand civilians have been killed in the first five days since the bombing started.
181 are under the age of 10.
Do you believe that civilian casualties are inevitable?
Gosh, I hate to believe that they're inevitable, especially with the kind of precision that some of this stuff now has.
So I would like to get to a place where it is inevitable.
Sorry, not where it is not inevitable.
Every attempt should be taken to not just limit, but to avoid any civilian casualty.
And right now you have Iran indiscriminately, for the most part, launching missiles and rockets and drones, and they are killing civilians.
And it's not just in Israel.
It's not just in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem.
It's in Gulf states.
They just hit an airport in one of the countries for the first time.
It's Kuwait or Dubai.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, they're indiscriminately doing it.
The United States and our allies, very precise.
It should be more precise.
That's something that should happen moving forward with all the technology.
But yeah, the civilian deaths are terrible.
No one, I mean, I don't like the idea that any of it is acceptable.
I don't.
And have you heard anything else about the school that was hit?
I know that the Department of War said that they are still investigating.
Yeah, they're still investigating.
I keep trying to find out, you know, on my own because it's awful what happened.
It was, you know, the school was right next to a base.
Did the base, this is an Iranian missile silo or base, did the missile backfire and hit the school?
Did somebody shoot at the base and miss the base and hit the school?
Either way, it's awful.
And I got to tell you, it's one of those things that it's hard to think about because it's so, I mean, I've got kids.
They're not that young anymore.
But the idea of, it's just awful.
It's awful.
All right, let's turn to some phone calls.
Billy from Texas, a Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning, Billy.
Good morning.
And I want to commend you all at C-SPAN.
Y'all do a great work because you let the world hear what's going on.
And as far as America, we have to be the world's leader because we've got a lot of people out here in these different nations that are kind of corrupt and crooked.
And that's why America has its role.
And we will continue to do that because we're doing it in the right way.
And we're doing it on the protection and guidance of God.
And I just want to tell everybody that C-SPAN is number one as well.
Thank you, thank you.
All right, Billy.
I'm not sure there was much to respond to this.
I don't.
Go ahead.
Yeah, no, I think he's right, both about C-SPAN and about our role in the world.
I mean, you can either sit back and watch what happens unfold.
And there is a protectionist, you know, isolationism type of sort of thinking emerging in the United States.
And it's happened before.
It happened before World War II where people said, you know, whatever happens in Europe, you know, that happens in Europe, let's just focus on us.
And that is right in the sense that we need our leaders focus on our economy and our public safety and our roads and bridges and those kinds of things.
However, as the world's largest superpower, I think the most significant superpower, we have the ability to make things better around the world.
We should do that.
We should do it with USAID and help get rid of starvation and HIV and AIDS.
And no one should have anything but good drinking water.
And when it comes to these kinds of conflicts, and Iran has been a conflict for decades, we have a role to play to say, look, we can make this better.
We can end this, the chaos and the violence.
That's what I believe our armed forces are doing is they're saying, look, we're going to end this.
And hopefully that creates space for a lasting peace and a transformed Middle East to be able to fly to Dubai.
I mean, when I was a kid, I took the Europass.
I didn't have much money, but I was able to get over to Europe and do the thing where you go from city to city and you can see a good chunk of Europe.
I want to be able to do the same in the Middle East.
I want to be able to go to Dubai and then go to Tehran and then go to Damascus and then Beirut and Tel Aviv and Gaza City and Cairo.
Like that's the future of the Middle East if we can sideline Iran.
Yeah, I think that there are very few people who are saying that they don't want to see a better Iran.
I think that the question that you guys are discussing on Congress is about what was this imminent threat or pretext for the president to launch what you say is a limited strike.
And I wonder something that the White House said yesterday was that the president had a feeling based on a fact that there was going to be an imminent threat.
And I wonder, do you know what that fact is?
Have you seen that fact in evidence?
Yeah, well, I don't know what he's talking.
I mean, this is part of the challenge of doing this with Trump.
But if you listen just to Kane and the generals, it's very clear.
What was happening was they wanted to enrich uranium.
They wanted to do it underground.
Those were red lines for them in the negotiations.
They wanted to keep their ballistic missile program.
They wanted to continue to fund terrorism.
Those were all red lines.
So then what they saw, our folks saw, was the hemming and hawing, the sort of extending out of the diplomatic talks, building up their missile defense, ballistic missile capabilities and their drones.
So they were getting to a place where it would have become increasingly difficult to go in and do what we're doing right now, which is stop them from ever enriching the kind of uranium that would lead to a big bomb.
So there was a threat, but you're saying you don't know if it was imminent.
I mean, imminent is a question, right?
Imminent in the sense that did they have their finger on the trigger?
I don't know.
Were they building this back up so that they could attack?
100%.
So if you know somebody's going to attack, you just don't know when, don't you go in and say, look, I'm not going to let you do this.
I mean, I think this is one where it does require a certain level of toughness and conviction about what you believe to say, look, I don't want to go do this.
I'd rather not do this.
I'd rather have Iran and the regime be a peaceful nation that is cooperating like everybody else in the world order.
But I don't have that here.
And I don't want this to continue for another 30 or 40 years.
I want, because I think there's a window here, to get rid of these weapons.
Jared's Call for Presidential Action00:15:41
And I think I can.
I'm told I can.
This is, I think, you know, if I'm sitting in the Oval Office, I'm told I can.
It's limited.
Do it, get it done, be done.
And hopefully that leads to some big transformation in the Middle East.
Okay, Joey from Columbus, Ohio, a Republican.
Good morning, Joey.
Hi.
Nice to talk to you, Mr. Lansman.
As a Buckeye, if I close my eyes, I'm almost amazed because it sounds like I'm listening to a Republican in the way you're talking about this effort.
I missed the first couple minutes, but to be honest, you know, before today, I had wanted to see you gerrymandered out of existence.
But are you saying that you support what Trump is doing in the initiative in here and you're going to vote that way, like against your party?
You know, Mr. Hakeem got in front of a microphone the other day and said that he was expecting this to end in failure, which I found in a horrible thing to say while our men and women are in harm's way.
I'm just curious to how you're going to vote, maybe.
Yeah, I support the operation.
I think the president has to come to Congress if it is going to change, if the operation changes and/or it goes on for more than a few weeks.
And certainly if there are ground troops, he's got to come to Congress.
But in terms of whether or not I support the operation, I do support this operation, which is limited, strategic, and I think the right thing to do.
And we'll be voting no today.
Okay, Jesse from Maryland, a Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning, Jesse.
Now, did I hear him say he agreed with what Trump does?
I agree with the operation.
Yeah, I do not support this president.
Let me say this.
So if Trump wasn't so gung-ho firing everybody and cutting special people off in special places, then he wouldn't have to rely on his, or we would have to rely on his feelings that's my part of tech.
We'll know for a fact that we'll be in attack.
Now, he doesn't destroy Classroom Hess country over here on his feelings.
Can you repeat it?
Sorry.
Jesse, can you speak a little bit more clearly into the phone?
They were having a trouble hearing you.
I was saying who he was saying that he agreed with what Trump was doing.
Yes, we can hear you now.
Yeah, if it were me, this is the way sometimes I try to sort through a question like this.
If I were given the same option, would I have made the same decision?
And in this case, I would have made the same decision, which is this is a limited but aggressive set of strikes that could defang the regime's and to end the regime's ability to cause mayhem, chaos, violence, which they've been causing for years, if not decades.
I would have made that same call.
So I can't turn around and then say I oppose it.
That would be political or disingenuous, dishonest.
Do I believe in our constitutional democracy where you got to come to Congress?
Absolutely.
I was glad that they started to, they returned to this practice of briefing Democrats and Republicans.
They came and briefed everybody a couple days ago.
I was in that briefing.
And if this thing goes beyond the initial limited set of strikes, as aggressive as they are, he's got to come to Congress for a vote.
I believe that.
Now, I want to ask, because I know you're saying that these are limited, but there is reporting that obviously it is widening out outside of Iran.
We kind of talked about it a little bit earlier.
But this Axios piece I'm looking at now, the headline is, here are all the countries now involved in the Iran conflict.
I'm going to scroll real quickly, but they obviously say the U.S., Israel, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iraq, Cyprus, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
Obviously, there are not strikes in all these places, clearly.
But are you concerned about it widening out to more of the Middle East if this is not as limited as the White House has been?
our strikes are limited i mean our strikes are very targeted and and and and right but iran's are not No, Irans are not, but remember, you know, every few hours, they're losing launchers, they're losing missiles.
So their ability to cause more damage lessens.
The widening here with all of those countries, that's all anti-Iran.
Those are all folks jumping in to say we're done.
We see an opportunity to be done with 40 years of this.
And they want a very different Middle East.
That's what they've been working on for years with the Abraham Accords and all of the work to get the World Cup and be part of the world community.
They want to have their countries back, their region back, and they want to be part of the world.
And so they're stepping up and saying, well, maybe this is the opportunity.
Craig from Ohio, an independent, you're next.
Craig, you want a line?
I'm going to ask you one more time.
He's got a great name.
Mary from Philadelphia, a Democrat, you're next.
Hi.
I was just wanting to respond to, you said diplomacy was going nowhere.
From what I understand and from what I saw, I don't know who said it, but they said that there were no diplomats at the table.
There was Jared Kushner and Witkoff.
They're not diplomats.
They do got rid of, and the Trump administration got rid of most of the people that were in that department.
So then you're saying that basically this war started?
Because you want Iran to be a tourist destination?
No, I want Iran to be free.
Well, that's so and nobody wants to live under a regime as horrible as the Ayatollah, I imagine.
And I know someone who left Iran, and she and her husband are here.
And they had to go back last year.
And it was very scary to hear that they had to go back to settle some family things.
I have a nephew that was in Iraq, did a few tours in Iraq.
I have a nephew that guarded the Israeli embassy.
You know, there's not anything.
So I'm not pro-Iran.
I'm just saying the way this came down, it seems very, you know, knowing that the president is a quid-pro quo kind of guy, you know, put a bar of gold on the desk and you got a deal.
So maybe sending two real estate developers to do some diplomacy wasn't a great idea.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with the issues with this president and his trustworthiness or his lack of, or the fact that he's just, he seems to be mostly interested in money and the, you know, the transactions, as you mentioned, that seems to be his priority.
I don't disagree.
That is one of my biggest complaints about this administration.
It's just how corrupt it's become.
And then you have this question of like, why is Witkoff and Jared Kushner leading this?
I've been pushing on this for over a year.
They have to have a huge diplomatic team of actual professionals, not just in Iran, but as it relates to Ukraine and China.
Like, this is a huge moment in global history.
This is absurd that it's coming down to people that do business with and/or are related to Donald Trump.
That said, we do have other folks in the room who were part of the diplomacy.
There were red lines.
They wanted to continue to enrich underground.
Can't do that.
They wanted to keep their ballistic missile program and continue to stockpile and build that up.
I don't think you can do that.
I think that should have been a red line for us, and I'm glad it was a red line.
They want to continue to fund terror in the region and upend stability and the prospect of peace in Lebanon and in Gaza, Syria, Iraq.
That was a red line.
Joel from Massachusetts and Independent.
You're next.
Good morning, Joel.
Representative Landsman, do the Republicans realize that the war with Iran affects Russia and China?
It stops China from getting oil, and it stops Russia from getting drones for Iran to use against Russia to use against Ukraine in the Ukrainian war.
Yeah, I mean, you know, look, Iran's really only had two allies here, Russia and China.
And, you know, Russia has been preoccupied, if you will, in Ukraine, and it's one of the reasons why this window was a window.
They're not there.
It's why Syria fell in many ways, because Syria had Iran to help them when times got tough, or sorry, Russia.
And Russia wasn't there to help folks in Damascus.
And that's one of the reasons why the Syrian regime fell.
And it may be one of the reasons why this regime falls here or it fundamentally transforms into something that the world can work with, which is ideal.
Tony from Reading, Pennsylvania, a Republican.
You're next.
Good morning, Tony.
Good morning.
I totally support President Trump.
I think he did the right thing.
As we always know, Iran has always been hollering and screaming, death to America, death to Israel.
It was about time that we had a strong president like President Trump to take action against them.
This was an ongoing thing.
And I would have to say that 90% of President Trump's term this time is cleaning up the mess that Joe Biden left behind.
Biden gave $6 billion to Iran, lifted sanctions.
And what did Iran do?
That money, give it to their proxies, and they attacked Israel.
That's why we're in the situation we're in now.
Of course, Iran has always been a serious threat to us, but with the previous administration helping them along, you can see what happened.
They attacked Israel.
And I would also like to say is we need a strong president like President Trump.
And I will say this to you, Representative.
I am very proud to see a Democrat that has a brain, that has common sense.
And on the Senate side, I'm very proud of my own senator, Senator Fetterman, that he also has common sense.
He doesn't have to agree, you don't have to agree at all that any president does, and including President Trump.
But I love seeing that you have common sense and you take it apart and look at the issues individually.
All right, Tony, we're coming up on time here, so I'm going to let the congressman respond to your points there.
Well, you know, it's I do think we need strong leadership across the board.
And I don't think our Iran policy has worked.
I do think that, you know, you do diplomacy first, but they, you know, they have reacted better when you show them strength, when you show them that there are consequences.
And I am glad that this operation is underway.
I do want it to be successful, and then I want it to end.
I don't want it to become something else.
And I think it was the right call.
And I do agree that elected officials should break these things down based on the facts and then say what they believe is true, having talked mostly with their constituents, the people they represent, because we represent a certain group of folks, and those come first.
And I think we would all do better if we had more and more people who really work the issue as opposed to working the politics.
All right.
We've got to leave it there.
Congressman Lansman of Ohio, a Democrat, member of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Thank you so much for coming this morning.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
And more of your calls after the break on the Iran conflict or any other political or public policy issue you want to talk about.
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And we're back.
This is open forum.
So we just spoke to Congressman Greg Landsman, a Democrat, about Iran.
I want to let you know that we did also have Republican Don Bacon book to talk about the same subject, but he had to cancel due to unforeseen circumstances, and we will get him rescheduled soon.
This is open forum where we can talk about anything.
I'll take a few of your calls before we bring in a Zoom guest, Dan from Maine, an Independent.
Your line is open.
Good morning, Dan.
Hi.
Good morning.
How are you?
Good.
How are you?
Getting along a little crazy here.
It's an intellectual discussion of the subject of war, whether or not we should do this or that, is really totally oxymoronic.
I mean, it's below our human dignity to be discussing the best things or the right things or the wrong things, whatever, having to do with war.
War is insanity.
War is killing.
That's what war is killing.
Let's go kill some more Persians, okay?
Or who are they?
I don't know.
or something like that.
I don't know what religion there are, but it's absolutely insane that we can have.
There is no such thing as an intellectual discussion with regards to the merits of war.
Just look at the U.S. record for the last 20 years and how many wars did we win in Afghanistan?
How many wars did we win in Iraq?
How many wars did we even knew that we were destroying Syria in the process?
And the whole Middle East is boiling like a cauldron of boiling water.
And we sit around whether or not we should hit this target or that target.
And we'll be absolutely accurate on our targets because we're really smart about what we're doing.
But oops, we killed 150 little girls.
Well, you know, that's the fog of war.
All right.
That was Dan from Maine.
Rashad from Virginia, a Republican.
You're next.
Good morning, Rashad.
Yes, how are you doing?
Can you hear me okay?
I sure can.
Hi.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you very much for taking my call, and I appreciate C-SPAN.
I wanted to comment on what the Republican person said before when you had your last caller on.
I have voted for Trump the first time, but after I realized his leadership is not what any sane person would want, I decided to vote against him.
I never thought I'd see a day where I'd be voting for Democrats, but I wanted to say basically to all Republicans, Democrats are not our enemies.
They want the same thing we want.
We want a strong nation.
We need to work together and not be divided by our leader.
This is not the way.
There used to be a day when strength, according to the caller before, used to be attributed with toughness, the ability to take a criticism.
We don't have that as far as our president is concerned.
Democrats, all Republicans aren't your enemy.
I voted for Abigail Spanberger because I felt she can do the job.
Quite frankly, I'd rather have Liz Cheney as a presidential candidate, but that's just not the way it was.
So, and considering the war, the topic of the day.
U.S. Targets Iran's Nuclear Capabilities00:15:00
Rashad, I'm going to have to cut you off because we are turning now to our next guest, Laura Seligman, a Wall Street Journal National Security Reporter.
Laura, thanks so much for being with us this morning.
Thank you so much for having me.
All right, we'll be talking about Iran and Israel and the U.S. Your latest story on Iran is about the U.S. sinking a Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean.
Can you describe to us what happened and what your reporting found?
Yes, of course.
So, there was an American submarine that was hunting the Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean in international waters, and they used a single torpedo to blow a hole in the side of the ship.
And this was a major loss for the Iranians.
It was a ship named after General Qasem Soleimani, who the U.S. killed years ago in an airstrike.
And that was one of their most modern ships.
So, that's a major loss for the Iranians.
But it's not the only loss, as the CENTCOM commander and Secretary Hegsteth have spoke about in recent days.
The Iranians have lost more than 20 ships during the recent airstrikes, and that significantly impedes their ability to mine the Strait of Hormuz, for example, which has been a major concern for years.
The other targets that the Americans and the Israelis are destroying right now is focused on Iran's ballistic missiles, short-range and long-range, medium ballistic missiles.
They're going after launchers and warehouses.
They're also going after headquarters and facilities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
They are also going after Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon.
And the U.S. and Israel have struck over 2,000 targets in Iran thus far.
And we're only a few days in.
And I think we have quite a few more weeks to go of these operations.
Right.
And the administration has said that they are close to basically gaining operational control of the airspace there.
We know that, of course, as you said, they've been focused on some of these warships.
To what degree, though, Laura, do you believe that this conflict is crossing geographical boundaries?
For instance, NATO air defenses said that they shot down an Iranian missile that was on its way toward South Turkey.
Yes, that's true.
That did occur.
And also, just in the last 24 hours, Iran sent missiles and drones potentially to Azerbaijan's airspace as well.
So I do think that this conflict is expanding geographically, and there's certainly concern from our allies in the region that they could be collateral damage.
But I think that's something that's to be expected when you have a conflict of the scope.
I mean, this is the largest buildup of air power, the largest air operation that the U.S. military has done since the 2003 invasion of Iran, or sorry, excuse me, of Iraq.
And I think that that is something to be expected.
I think the Trump administration has tried to say that they're trying to contain this conflict to Iran, to the Middle East, but we've already seen the consequences, including the breaching Turkish airspace, as you talked about.
We've also seen the U.S. military has had several losses.
There were six American soldiers that were killed when an Iranian drone struck a commercial port in Kuwait the other day.
Several more grievously wounded.
They also lost three F-15 fighter jets in Kuwait that were shot down by friendly forces.
According to our reporting, it was a Kuwaiti F-18 fighter jet that shot down these jets.
So it's certainly not without risks.
And as the COFA continues to expand, we're likely going to see more casualties.
And you mentioned the Strait of Hormuz earlier, but I wonder what importance do you believe it plays going forward?
Obviously, they've been sinking some of these ships so that the Iranian cannot block, I mean, Iran cannot block it.
But I wonder, just focus on that.
Where do you believe it stands and the importance of it going forward?
Well, obviously, the Strait of Hormuz is a very critical waterway.
Much of the world's oil and gas supplies goes through that choke point.
And so Iran really does hold key leverage in that point.
And any type of ship, vessel, boat can drop a mine in the Strait of Hormuz.
So until the U.S. and Israel destroy all of Iran's vessels that can drop mines, then there is still a threat in the Strait of Hormuz.
And Iran has also threatened to fire on any commercial ships that try to go through.
Now, the U.S., Donald Trump has said that he's considering allowing U.S. naval warships to escort commercial ships that are going through the strait, but we're not quite at that point yet.
Of course, the other issue is that if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, that's also their own lifeline.
A lot of their oil and gas goes through the strait as well to reach the rest of the world.
So I don't think we're quite there yet.
And I think that once the U.S. and Israel, as they have been, manages to eliminate Iran's naval forces, then I think that will be much less of a concern for us.
Laura, you reported yesterday that General Kane said that the U.S. had fired more than 500 ballistic missiles and over 2,000 drones over the course of the last five, six days that this has been happening.
Is there concern about the stockpile, about which weapons we still have and whether or not they are getting low or perhaps too low to fulfill this mission that the president says could last four to five weeks?
Sure, that's always something that's of concern to the Pentagon.
Secretary Hegseth and General Kane said that we could sustain this pace of offensive operations for indefinitely, I believe is what they said.
It's probably not quite accurate, but certainly we do have a very large stockpile of offensive weapons, missiles that are shot from fighter jets.
We have many, many Tomahawk missiles that are launched from American destroyers and submarines.
I think what there is most concern over right now is the stockpile of defensive weapons.
Air defense interceptors, particularly missiles for the FAAD, air defense interceptors, as well as SM-3 standard missile 3s, which are the which shoot down incoming missiles from U.S. destroyers.
So there is certain concern that we're getting a little bit low on those defensive weapons, but it's still not at a critical point.
And the Americans believe that they can sustain this pace, especially as this opening salvo is over and Iran is firing way fewer missiles on launch.
I think USNCOM said that missile launches, Iran's missile launches, have dropped by 86%, its drone launches by 73% in four days.
So now that the Iranians are firing many fewer missiles and drones, they strategically are able to reduce the number of American missiles that are fired as well.
So I think there is less concern about that right now.
And I think General Cain said that they expected that number, 86%, to go down even further in the coming days.
He said that yesterday at a press conference that was Pete Hegseth's, he led that defense secretary.
That was a second in two days.
We hear that he's expected to talk later on today.
Can you talk about what his message is and how his message is fitting in with the other messages that we hear from the administration, administration, specifically from President Trump?
Well, yesterday he said, he opened the press conference by saying America is winning.
So his message is that we are winning this war.
It's not going to be an endless war.
It's not going to be like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which of course he fought in.
So that is his primary message to the American people.
He also has been tasked with explaining the military objectives of this mission, less so sort of the political objectives, but he's talked pretty clearly about the main military objectives, which are one, taking out Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon, two, taking out Iran's ability to build and launch ballistic missiles and drones.
And then three, as we spoke about, mine, the Strait of Ormuz.
In broad terms, he said the goal is to eliminate Iran's ability to attack Americans.
And from a military perspective, that is a defendable goal.
I think what he has been less successful in conveying is the administration's political goal and the end state that they want to see in Iran.
There seems to be not really a clear day after plan for once this military operation ends.
Perhaps the regime is gone.
Perhaps it isn't.
There's discussion in the administration of potentially providing some aid to the Kurdish militias, which might then try to overthrow the regime and take over.
But I've spoken to experts about this and they said that that force is too small and not well armed enough to march on Tehran.
Really unclear in terms of the political goals of this operation.
All right, my last question for you here, Laura: What are you watching for in the days ahead?
Well, certainly I'll be watching for what is going to be said at this press conference this afternoon.
Secretary Hegset is traveling to the Tampa, Florida headquarters of U.S. Central Command to brief with Central Command Commander Admiral Cooper.
So I'll be watching what he says there.
I expect they will talk about the shift in the mission from taking out the missile launch sites to potentially more strategic goals.
Perhaps they're going to be looking at taking out the nuclear sites as they did in June.
So I'll be watching the shifting goals.
I'll be watching for any additional casualties and friendly fire.
And I'll be watching for when this war is actually going to end.
All right, Laura Seligman, National Security Porter with the Wall Street Journal.
Thank you so much for joining us this morning.
Thank you so much.
We're looking forward to more of your reporting.
Back to Open Forum, where you can talk about any public policy or political issue on your mind.
Brad from Savannah, Georgia, a Democrat.
Your line is open.
Good morning, Brad.
Good morning.
My concern is we haven't talked about the what next.
There have been sputterings about, but as a veteran of Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again, and then Iraq again, and then every one of the Gulf states, we are creating a forever war.
I do not shed a tear for the Iranian regime at all.
You did have a guest on the other day that delved a little bit into the IRGC.
The IRGC is essentially the Iranian economy.
They run every facet from electrical power to the internet to the news.
So if you go back in time, remember debathification and what a whopper of an idea that was.
I don't want to see us go down the same path.
And I don't want to see a slaughter of more Iranian civilians because we didn't do anything to facilitate their survival.
We have the ability to turn their internet back on right now today.
There's no indication that we've done that.
It is not our job to pick their next government, but it should give all Iranians a moment of pause to figure that out.
But we haven't done anything to facilitate that.
There are many non-kinetic things that we could be doing to help facilitate the chapter next.
We never ever do that.
This is how you start forever wars.
If you recall back during the Gulf War I, we made promises to the Marsh tribes in the south of Iraq.
And what did we see?
Saddam drained the marshes and murdered all of them.
That's what I don't want to see.
There's the right thing to do, which I believe this operation was.
It probably wasn't facilitated in the right way.
And I hope that dramatic Democrats like you had on your show will take note and say, hey, we will do a supplemental funding, but it has to be used in this way.
There will be a point where we run out of things to bomb.
I don't think Iran has a nuclear capability left, but if we continue to bomb, they also won't have the ability to build a loaf of bread.
And I hope my fellow citizens are thinking about that.
Thanks.
Brad from Savannah, Georgia.
Kevin from Massachusetts, a Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning, Kevin, as open forum.
Yes, good morning.
My biggest concern is what happened to our collective memory in this country that we would want to descend into the chaos that we see right now.
We had a great president years ago, President Clinton, who said the last, absolute last resort is to go to war with anyone.
We should sit down and do as much as we can with diplomacy before even picking up a weapon.
We, under the previous administration and the first Trump administration and the current administration, we have been Israel's wacky.
We keep giving them all kinds of weaponry to continue the war effort on Israel's part so that Netanyahu will not face justice and be taken into custody and stand trial in the world court for his war crimes.
Instead, we join forces with them to create a threat that didn't exist.
Iran was no threat to us.
Executive State John Kerry negotiated the joint comprehensive plan of action years ago in the Obama administration, which they got Iran to agree to not generate or develop a nuclear weapon.
The only nuclear program was for peaceful means.
And I want to remind Americans that that was not just the United States speaking, but it was China, France, Russia, the UK, Germany, as well as the rest of the European Union that were all in agreement on that agreement.
Robbie's Quick Comment00:14:59
And what did Trump do as soon as he was elected?
He tore it up.
And all right, Kevin, I'm going to give you 20 more seconds to wrap your thoughts up here.
All right.
So then the other thing is, why have we dumbed down in America?
Why don't more Americans understand what the Constitution is and what it means and have a better sense of our history so that we can all learn from it?
Thank you very much.
Heather from Alabama, an independent.
You're next.
Good morning, Heather.
Good morning.
I just wanted to kind of come off of what the last caller just said and then the fact that, yes, I think that this is Netanyahu's deal and that America is, I think, just being, what's the term that they use?
Fearmongering is what's going on.
And there are many people, and I don't see it in the press.
You guys are always talking about, well, you know, his ratings are low because they don't like what's going on in Iran and this or that.
No, baby.
We are looking at these Epstein files and they are bad, bad.
And so many of us feel that as long as he can keep war going on, this, that, the other, I mean, every country should have the right to protect themselves, especially if they're being attacked, which they were attacked first.
But isn't it ironic that we're not that concerned with what North Korea has and what Russia has?
Nobody's talking about that.
And even, what's his name, Hedgehog Hedgeworth, or, you know, the Department of War guy.
Pete Hegseth.
Yeah, Hegset.
So he was being questioned by one of the reporters.
And so she had asked him the question, you know, well, North Korea, you know, says that if need be, they will help, you know, Iran.
And, you know, blah, blah, blah.
You know, what's your response to that?
And he just was like, oh, well, he goes on and on and on about all the other countries in the region, but just mum about North Korea.
So at the end of the day, I think that until we get to the November elections, our president is going to throw everything in the kitchen sink in the news to keep us from talking about those Epstein files.
And they, like I said, they're bad.
And I cannot believe that they're not being talked about as much because I remember a time.
Oh, and Heather, I'm going to cut you off here because we actually have a clip from the authors of the bill that Congress voted on last year that compelled the DOJ to release the Epstein files in full.
Representatives Rocana, Republican Tom Massey, introducing their own war powers resolution, talking about it on the floor of the House yesterday.
Take a listen here.
Why are we going to war with Iran?
We owe our military service members a clear mission.
And American families in my district want to know how this is going to help them pay for groceries.
How does this make them any safer in their schools or in their neighborhoods?
How does this help them pay for housing?
Have we learned nothing from the laundry list of wars and regime change experiments we sparked across the Middle East that have racked up a total of at least $8 trillion of debt in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan?
A sustained war with Iran will not stabilize the region.
It's already ignited the region.
Today, this vote on Iran is not a procedural vote.
It is a profoundly moral vote.
It is a vote to direct our resources towards healing our own people, towards health care that saves lives, jobs that restore dignity, housing that shelters families instead of raining destruction on other nations.
It is a vote to renew an America that leads once more through diplomacy, statesmanship, and principle.
An America that strives to end cycles of violence rather than ignite them.
You just heard from Congressmans Ro Khanna and Tom Massey as they introduced their own war powers resolution.
That's expected to come up for a vote later on today.
Robbie from New York, a Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning, Robbie.
It's open forum.
Good morning.
You know, Israel has probably some of the best intelligence in the world.
They know where the Ayatollah was at all times.
And also, remember, it was Israel who killed the nuclear scientists while they were in their beds.
They sent drones in and it killed all those nuclear scientists while they were sleeping.
So they destroyed the capabilities of building a nuclear weapon.
Finally, Trump said, well, Iran don't have nuclear capabilities anymore.
So which is it?
Is it them not having nuclear weapons, or are we going to sit there and destroy all their capabilities to defend themselves out of whether missiles or with a navy or any other way?
I mean, please, let's not be stupid about this.
Let's not be ignorant here to know where this is really going.
Kishna is not there to do anything about the Iranians' freedom.
They are there to say, look, we can make some money out of this deal.
Remember also, it was Donald Trump who looked at the Gaza Strip and said, wow, this would be great for high-end hotels and casinos.
They're looking at it in a money way.
Maybe Iran don't want to play ball with them.
But I want to be able to go to BJ's Sam's Club or Target.
I want to be able to go to those places without having them, somebody walking there with a bomb, because that's the only way they can defend themselves is put terrorists in our country here.
All right, that was Robbie from New York.
A quick note on something that he said: it was actually the CIA that shared location intel with Israel that moved the timing of the strikes forward according to media reports.
So it was the CIA that shared the information about the Ayatollah's location.
Bill from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a Republican.
Good morning, Bill.
It's open for you.
Good morning.
Hi.
Thank you.
I was just thinking, listening to some of the comments.
The Iranians launched a missile on Cyprus onto a British military facility the other day, and they've reached Cyprus.
A few more years, who's to say that they're not going to have the capability of reaching the United States?
That's why we have to go in and stop completely 100% of all of this.
And as far as the regime change goes, that's up to those people.
Let's just go in, take out everything, all their infrastructure that has the capabilities of attacking us and let them decide for themselves, but don't get bogged down in Iran like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That's all I have to say today.
Thank you.
Bill from Pittsburgh.
James from California, an independent.
You're next.
Good morning, James.
It's open for him.
Yes, ma'am.
A lady called and said that there's going to be a vaccine for Trump derangement syndrome.
I want a double portion of that because he gives me deranged syndrome the way he acts sometimes.
But I will say on this, I do believe that Trump should send those bombs in because remember 1981, was it?
When they blew up 200 and something Marines?
Do you remember that, America?
Payback.
And last one is, let's see if you guys are going to be dancing on the street.
Death to America, death to America.
It's going to be death from America.
Goodbye.
Mark from New York, a Republican.
Good morning, Mark.
It's open for him.
Yeah, no, fantastic discussion.
So first of all, it's very ironic that Ro Khana and Congressman Massey, they're actually now the America First isolationists.
They don't want to fight a war against a nuclear Iran.
They just want to focus on what we do here, America First.
A sort of inversion where President Trump is out there trying to destroy the nuclear aspirations of that regime.
Now, interestingly enough, I think his policy has been very successful.
Look at the fact that many of the Arab states that you would have thought would be opposed to this are actually now victims and targets of Iran.
Iran's malevolence, even attacking United Kingdom bases on Cyprus at Akratiri, this thing is inverted.
And I do agree that you have to remember what they did to us in 79-80 and taking our diplomats hostage and holding them for 444 days and, of course, bombing the barracks.
So, adding it all up and putting it together, to my mind, the priority is helping the Iranian people get a chance to breathe a little bit of the air of freedom.
And I don't disagree with RoChanna and Congressman Nasse that healthcare is important, but we can't put your head in the sand and go, like, well, I don't know that this is not American policy to fight the rise of a nuclear power like Iran that wants ballistic missiles to attack Europe, Cyprus, United States.
I mean, I think actually what they're doing is negligence on their part as congressmen.
They're not doing their job properly.
And to the last point, the Constitution.
The Constitution does not prohibit this action.
I'll tell you why.
I teach in a college and I can tell you this: the War Powers Act was never accepted by any president, Democrat or Republican, not Obama, not Bush, not Biden, and not Trump, that limits the president's authority as commander-in-chief.
No president has agreed to be subject to it.
Presidents have reported to Congress, which President Trump has done, but no president has ever agreed to be subject to it.
So I don't think that all of these senators, who, by the way, lost their resolution yesterday, it wasn't passed, really understand other than the point that they're trying to do politics.
The Democrats are doing politics, and they should get with a program to brought the president and try to get the Iranian people a little bit of freedom after 47 years under the tyranny of people who kill protesters in the street.
Anyway, and I'm hoping Always in America will prevail.
All right, Mark from New York.
Excuse me.
A programming note for in just about 17 minutes.
Defense Undersecretary for Policy Elbridge Colby argued this week that the conflict with Iran is targeted and not about nation building.
Despite the killing of Iran's supreme leader, today the Undersecretary will give an update to the House Armed Services Committee on the U.S.-Israel strikes against Iran and the rapidly changing global threat landscape.
You can watch that live at 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3.
Matt from Falls Church, Virginia, a Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning, Matt.
It's open forum.
Hello.
Hi.
I am very pleased to be listening to this conversation this morning.
I guess I have two comments and then a question.
My comments are: first, I heard two callers mention something that happened in the 1970s and 80s, which is before I was born, as a reason we should be doing this.
If we're constantly holding grudges as policy, I feel like that's bad for America.
Like, we need to be present and look at what is happening globally now and use that as the reasons for things, not because of some grudge that happened before I was born 40 years ago.
The second comment is the previous caller talked about freedom and how we want to bring them freedom.
And I really want people to know what does that look like?
What will the cost be of that?
What will the cost and lives be for that?
What percentage of Iranians support the Ayatollah currently?
And what does that mean for freedom for them and what it looks like for them?
Like, there's no easy flip a switch and suddenly there's freedom through bombing.
And I guess my question is: when was the last time the war powers were changed for the presidency?
Well, the last caller was correct, in which that most presidents, this obviously came up during the Venezuela conversation, that most presidents, if not all, have rejected any type of war powers resolutions against them, whether they've been successful or unsuccessful.
So I don't have an answer to your question, but I can tell you that presidents generally do not like when Congress takes these war power votes because it does limit their ability to act independently or do some of these limited strikes.
Murray from Ohio, an independent, you're next.
Good morning, Murray.
It's open forum.
Yes, thanks for taking my call.
I just wanted to make a quick comment.
I understand now why they changed the Defense Department to the Department of War, because they were going to just have wars.
And I'm proud to announce the replacement of the USA democracy name.
I guess they're going to change it to the Thugmocracy.
Thug USA Declaration00:04:49
So just wanted to say that.
So Thug USA, Thug USA.
Thank you.
Carol from Florida, Democrat.
You're next.
I'd like to speak.
Thanks for taking my call.
When Kevin called the service members who died in war losers and suckers, what does it say about the one six that were just killed?
Furthermore, this administration doesn't know anything about, they can't even be trusted with the truth.
None of them have the required knowledge of starting a war.
He dodged the war five times.
He has no family in the service, but it doesn't hurt him.
Death to him doesn't mean a thing, especially when it's, you know, I just don't understand how this man gets away with what he gets away with.
He pardons 1,500 criminals.
It just goes on and on and on.
So I'm so glad you took my call because I worry about the servicemen, why he thinks they are losers and suckers.
Thank you.
That was Carol from Florida.
Take a listen to one of the few Republicans who will be supporting the War Powers Act, Warren Davidson of Ohio, and his reasons for doing so.
That vote, of course, is expected later on today.
Make no mistake, Iran is an enemy of the United States.
As our military engages them, they do so justly.
Unfortunately, they are not yet doing so constitutionally, and that's why we're here today.
For some, this debate will be about whether we should even be fighting in Iran.
For me, the debate is more fundamental.
Is the President of the United States, regardless of the person holding the office, empowered to do whatever he wants?
That's not what our Constitution says.
Is he empowered to do whatever he wants for 60 or 90 days?
That's not what the War Powers Act says.
Is there any limit to executive authority whatsoever?
I rise in support of this war powers resolution today because the moral hazard posed by a government no longer constrained by our Constitution is a grave threat.
That was Warren Davidson of Ohio, a congressman who says, a Republican who says that he will be supporting the War Powers Act later on today.
That vote is taking place in the House.
One of the few Republicans to say that they will do so.
Judy from North Carolina, a Republican.
Good morning, Judy.
It's open forum.
Good morning.
I think most of your callers are not familiar with warfare tactics.
Therefore, their opinions reflect more on their personal viewpoints concerning killing or murdering people.
Do we have to wait until another 9-11 happens or for the Iranians to be able to reach our shorelines with ballistic missiles before we realize we must or should have stayed ahead of the enemy?
We are not privy to war tactics.
Understanding everything this administration is doing is not for us to figure out.
You would have to be a very hard-hearted person to watch and see human lives destroyed.
But if someone was breaking into your house or you knew they were going to break into your home, would you not put all the protection you could in and around your home before tragedy happens?
Diplomacy did not work.
Iran was given the opportunity in this peacefully, but evidence is there to prove, no doubt, we would be an obvious target for them in the near future.
If you want to trust thieves and burglars not to come into your home and do you harm, that is your prerogative.
But if your president chooses to protect our country from harm, then we must give him liberty to do so.
And to lead God out of this whole decision-making is foolish for your callers.
God sets men in high places.
That is scripture.
God placed him there through the government and the way that the government has set up to elect officials.
Now, if you have an argument, have it with God in your privacy.
And that's all I have to say, but thank you for taking my call.
All right, Judy from North Carolina.
Kevin from Texas, an independent.
You are next.
God's Role in Elections00:08:27
It's open forum.
Good morning, Kevin.
Yes, I want you to fact-check me.
I can understand why people are surprised about the war in Iran.
Everybody should know that this has been playing ever since 1997.
Look up the project of the new American century.
Gerald Wesley Clark came out in 2002, talked about the seven countries that the United States were planning on invading.
The last two countries on the list is Sudan and Iran.
Another fact is, it doesn't matter what president is in office, a Democrat or Republican, you have to wonder who set this plan up and who's forcing these presidents to implement it.
That can easily be looked up.
Everybody should know about this.
Tudan has been catching hell for the last two years under President Biden.
Libya and Syria was hit on Obama.
George Bush hit Iraq and Afghanistan and Samaria.
Look it up.
Tell me I'm wrong.
All right, Kevin from Texas.
Loretta from Cleveland, Ohio, a Democrat.
You're next.
Good morning, Loretta.
It's open forum.
Oops, I didn't press it.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning, Jasmine.
Good morning, America.
I don't know where to begin.
I am really, really upset that Trump wants to free the Iranian people while indigenous black people here in America is only free on paper.
It seems like only people who can get into sports and show their skill or into music and perform, showing their now, those people are free.
But I look at the 300,000 black women that was fired through Doge.
I'm wondering how Trump decided to go along with Netanyahu when we've been paying for Israel for 75 years.
When are we going to get our money back?
I mean, where's our reparations?
I mean, this is going on 500 years that black people have been suffering.
And I don't see Trump or anyone, Republican or Democrat, trying to fix the original problem here in America.
Nothing is going to work out for America because of what they've originally done.
And that's all I have to say.
Thank you.
That was Loretta from Cleveland.
A number that she referenced at the top of her remarks.
300,000 black women, perhaps more now.
This is back in October, have left the workforce, both public and private sector.
Not that they were specifically fired by Doge, but of course, some of those factors of that unemployment included the rollback of DEI efforts that have been pursued by this administration and across private companies as well.
Ronald from New York and Independent.
You're next.
It's open forum.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I have a comment, a question, and another comment.
All right, Ronald.
We're coming up on time now, so I'm going to ask you to do it a little bit quickly.
I was very impressed by the Democratic representative from Ohio that you had earlier.
Greg Lansman.
Yes, I thought he was decent, very fair-minded, not the type of person who would hate Republicans per se.
Also, I just want to ask you, there was someone who gave his name and Lansman said, oh, that's a beautiful name.
Unfortunately, I missed that.
Oh, Craig.
His name was Craig from Ohio.
Uh-huh.
Finally, I just want to say that the previous corps who mentioned the election of 2020, and this should be forgotten the way it happened, but I feel it is very important to really get the facts of what really did happen.
There's so much indication that there was so much fraud, and it really needs to be looked into 100% rather than have it swept under the rug as if it didn't actually occur.
Find out.
Thank you.
That was Ronald from New York.
Gina from Mount Vernon, New York, an independent.
You're next.
Good morning, Gina.
It's open forum.
Can you hear me?
I sure can.
Good morning.
Okay, thank you.
I am calling about the war.
But most of all, I'm just concerned about our soldiers, okay, because one, if they have to put their foot on the ground and dealing.
Hi, Gina, are you there?
Hi.
Yes, I'm here.
Okay, go ahead.
Okay, I can go again.
Hi.
I'm just really mostly, I'm concerned about our soldiers that are going, or if they would go into Iran and putting their foots on the ground and not knowing what's going to happen.
Okay.
I'm not trying to disrespect or anything.
Chuck from Brooksville, Florida, a Republican.
Good morning.
I just wanted to give a little background on this.
These people didn't hour death to America without some reason.
They didn't wake up 47 years ago and hate us.
We chose their leadership by putting a 22-year-old kid in the head of their nation.
That's what happens when you pick the leaders for nations and overthrow their leadership.
Now, they got back into power 20 years later and they didn't like us any.
Now, we can try it again, but this kind of choosing who leads the country for other countries means that we don't have any statesmanship and we don't have any diplomats involved with reasonable thoughts in their mind.
And I see no plan to get us out of there now.
I just don't like it.
Thank you very much.
All right, Jeff from Florida and Independent, you're next.
Good morning, Jeff.
It's open forum.
Good morning.
Kudos to you for the calls you take here.
I'm telling you what.
My call today is about disappointment with Dasha Burns, C-SPAN, and the show Ceasefire, misrepresenting clips like the BBC.
On Ceasefire this week, Dasha spoke about the state of the union showing Democrats refusing to stand when Trump called for protecting Americans first, which actually prompted him to say, isn't that a shame?
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Yet Dasha edited the clip to show him saying they're crazy.
In reality, Trump said these people are crazy.
Ten minutes later, after Democrats failed to stand for the story of a girl sent to a men's prison because the state didn't trust her family.
Is that honest?
Is that honest reporting from C-SPAN?
It seems more like news show twisting words to support a narrative.
Sorry Carolyn00:00:45
Thank you.
Carolyn from Ohio, a Democrat.
Carolyn, it's open forum.
Now I'm just going to let you know that I'm sitting here watching the House floor, so I may have to cut you off mid-sentence once they start, but go ahead.
You've got probably a couple seconds here.
Okay, I'll be really fast.
I just got back in from running errands because in Ohio, at least where I live, there's a lot of rain, and I want to.
All right, so sorry, Carolyn, but that's all for our program.
Today, here is the House floor.
The House will be in order.
The chair lays before the House a communication from the Speaker.