John Cardillo examines claims that Robert Mueller’s Russia probe may have involved FBI/DOJ surveillance of Trump’s campaign, with Trump demanding a DOJ review after a May 2018 meeting with Rosenstein and Wray. Michael Caputo alleges entrapment via informant Stephan Halper, while Mark Penn calls it a "deep state" overreach. Meanwhile, Baltimore County police officer Dakota Kurek was killed in May amid conflicting reports—witnesses say struck by a Jeep, not gunfire—during a manhunt for four armed suspects. Schools locked down 2,000 students as officials blame Obama’s "war on police" for rising violence, contrasting with media narratives like the NYPD suspect’s sympathetic portrayal and Cherry Hill East’s prom apology over slavery references. The episode highlights tensions between historical accountability and perceived left-wing erasure of American legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Today, on Off the Cuff Declassified, the Obama administration's spying scandal on the Trump administration heats up.
I'll tell you all about it.
National Security reporter Jordan Choctelle joins me to discuss the latest on Mueller's probe.
A Baltimore area police officer was killed while the liberal media continues to vilify cops on behalf of criminals.
end.
American history continues to be called racist.
President Donald Trump has the gloves off and he's fighting back, finally, against Robert Mueller.
Now, on Sunday, President tweeted, I'm sure you've seen it by now, but we need to dig deep into this.
I hereby demand, and we'll do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI, DOJ, infiltrated or surveilled the Trump campaign for political purposes.
And if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama administration, who then went on to rail against John Brennan, the former CIA director.
Now, more on him in a moment.
I'm going to tell you what I think, where I think he stands in all this and why it's so wrong.
But the president then yesterday, Monday, called Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a guy that I'm very uncomfortable with, and FBI Director Christopher Wray, another guy I'm uncomfortable with, into the White House for a meeting.
After that meeting, the Department of Justice agreed to expand this from Newsmax.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday agreed to expand its investigation into alleged Russia collusion into the 2016 election to include any irregularities, that's a quote, in FBI tactics involving Trump's presidential campaign.
That from a White House spokesperson.
Now, the agreement, that agreement supposedly came during a meeting yesterday that Trump had with Rosenstein and Ray, Sarah Sanders.
This all came from the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
The DOJ has, quote, asked the Inspector General to expand its current investigation to include any irregularities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Department of Justice's tactics concerning the Trump campaign, end quote.
Now, I'm not.
I am not comfortable at all with Inspector General Michael Horowitz, because we're seeing some reports creep out about the OIG report.
And what it appears the OIG report is going to do is say that the FBI slow walked the Hillary investigation.
They're going to imply that it actually helped Trump, that they released their findings to clear Hillary too close to election day.
I don't like it.
Horowitz was an Obama appointee.
Nobody is truly independent in D.C. Everybody has an agenda.
Nobody is truly independent in life.
Everyone has an agenda and picks a side.
I'm not saying that I know that to be the case.
That's what's being leaked.
That could be out of context.
It might be more damning for the FBI.
We hope it is and for DOJ.
But it seems that the Clintons are impervious to any kind of criticism.
So I want to hold my breath.
It, quote, if anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action, end quote.
That's what Rod Rosenstein said.
Now, we're also learning more troubling information.
So we know now that an informant, a guy named Stephen Halper, Stephan Halper, was placed into the Trump campaign in an attempt to, what looks like, entrap Trump campaign officials, guys like Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Michael Caputo.
Well, Page and Caputo have been out there on Fox News, and they say there was even another informant, another informant before Stephan Halper.
And this is what Michael Caputo told Laura Ingram on Fox News.
He said, quote, let me tell you, this is last night.
Let me tell you something that I know for a fact, end quote.
Then he went on again, quote, this informant, the person that they tried to plan into the campaign and even into the administration, if you believe Axios, now Axios is reporting that trade advisor, senior trade advisor in the White House, Peter Navarro, a guy I actually like, that he tried to bring Stefan Halper into the White House as an advisor.
It's not known whether or not Navarro knew that Halper was a bad actor.
He may not have.
He may have.
We're going to have to look deeply into that.
But that's what Caputo is talking about.
The informant, this person that they tried to plan in the campaign and even in the administration, if you believe Axios, he's not the only person who came at the campaign and the FBI is not the only Obama agency who came at the campaign.
Paputo said, I know because it came at me and I'm looking for clearance from my attorney to reveal this to the public.
This is just the beginning.
Wow.
Puto went on to say, quote, when we finally find out the truth about this, Director Clapper and the rest of them will be wearing some orange suits, meaning prison jumpsuits.
The informant apparently approached several campaign officials, like I said, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos.
This is, this is, I mean, so disgraceful.
So disgraceful.
The president tweeted back on Friday, reports are that there was indeed, quote, reports are that there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted for political purposes into my campaign for president.
It took place very early on and long before the phony Russia hoax became a hot fake news story.
If true, all-time biggest political scandal.
President is right.
Even Vice President Mike Pence, who has been silent on this, a lot of people think he's a rhino, neocon, deep state actor.
I happen to think Pence likes the president.
I think he's loyal.
Now, some people I trust and like very much do not like the vice president.
They do not think he is an honest and good actor.
But until I see differently, I'm going to err on the side of, well, thinking the vice president is on the right team.
Vice President did say it was time for Mueller to wrap up his probe, and now he's calling reports of a politicized FBI very, very troubling.
Vice President said, quote, with the revelations that our campaign may have been the subject of surveillance by the FBI, the president, I think, is graceful.
The Department of Justice is going to have the Inspector General look into it and determine and ensure that there was no surveillance done for political purposes against our campaign.
Now, I don't like the wording of that.
To ensure there was no surveillance done.
How about saying to prosecute those in the event surveillance was done?
The vice president went on to say, I think it would be very troubling to millions of Americans if that took place.
But we are very confident that as the inspector general has been doing their work, looking at the conduct of the FBI during that period, that by adding their focus to this, that we will get to the bottom of it because the American people have a right to know.
He then went on to say he holds the FBI in high regard, which, look, many of us do.
Many of us do.
The vice president finalized his statement by saying, quote, the principle here is that the American people have a right to know what happened.
The people's Congress ought to have the ability to review materials in a timely way.
It's a principle we adhere to in this White House, end quote.
And the Department of Justice, Jeff Sessions, don't even get me started on him, is stonewalling, stonewalling Congress.
Now, House Republicans aren't having it.
So guys like Representative Lee Zeldin, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, they're calling for a second special counsel.
And today, we're supposed to see a resolution from them calling for this.
This from Fox News.
A group of congressional Republicans plans to introduce a resolution on Tuesday calling for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate alleged misconduct at the FBI and DOJ.
It's backed by Mark Meadows, co-signed and co-sponsored by Jim Jordan of Ohio, Ron DeSantis of Florida, two pretty hardcore conservatives, and guys who know what they're talking about.
Now, this is particularly troubling.
If we have the DOJ under Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein blocking information of Congress in such a stonewalling and egregious fashion, that Congress needs to call for a second special counsel to simply be able to exercise their oversight responsibilities, to be able to do the job they're elected and paid to do.
But just how bad are things?
Things are so bad.
A guy named Mark Penn, who was a Bill Clinton advisor back in the 90s and early 2000s, has called for Robert Mueller to step down, writing a piece in the Hill, an opinion piece.
Mark Penn wrote the piece entitled, Stopping Robert Mueller to Protect Us All.
He begins by saying the deep state is in a deep state of depression.
This is a former, let me read you this guy's bio.
This guy's bio is, Mark Penn is managing partner of the Stagwell Group, a private equity firm specializing in marketing services companies.
He served as pollster and advisor to Bill Clinton from 95 to 2000.
He even advised Clinton and polled for him through his impeachment process.
This guy's not a conservative.
He's calling for Mueller to be shut down.
Mark Penn writes, quote, at this point, there is little doubt that the highest echelons of the FBI and Justice Department broke their own rules to end the Hillary Clinton matter.
But we can expect the Inspector General to document what was done or more pointedly not done.
It is hard to see how a year-long investigation of this won't come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn't playing Mahjong in a secret, no aids allowed meeting with former President Bill Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac, that infamous private jet meeting.
This from a guy who worked for Bill Clinton.
This, he says that the Mueller investigation is backfiring.
It's backfiring.
He said it wasn't intelligent.
It was opposition research.
No way would a fourthhand report from a Maltese professor justify wholesale targeting of four or five members of the Trump administration.
It took Christopher Steele with his funding concealed through false campaign filing to be incredibly successful at creating a vast echo chamber around his unverified fanciful dossier, bouncing it back and forth in the press and the FBI.
So it appeared that there were multiple sources all coming to the same conclusion.
This is incredible.
He talks about Mueller's team.
He says, quote, flush with 16 prosecutors, including a former lawyer for the Clinton Foundation and an undisclosed budget, the Mueller investigation has been a scorched earth effort to investigate the entirety of the Trump campaign, Trump's business dealings, the entire administration.
And now, if it was not Russia, well, maybe it's some other country.
And that's what Trump said.
Now you're just investigating anybody.
Now it's the UAE.
Now it's the Qataris.
Now it's the Saudis.
Mueller is gone off the reservation.
He's gone off the reservation way beyond this scope.
It needs to be shut down.
Penn writes, the process must now be stopped.
It must now be stopped.
Finding the off switch is not easy.
He finalizes with this paragraph, which I think is excellent.
He writes, stopping Mueller isn't about one president or one party.
It's about all presidents and all parties.
It's about cleaning out and reforming the deep state so that our intelligence operations are never used against opposing campaigns without the firmest of evidence.
It is about letting people work for campaigns and administrations without needing legal defense funds.
It is about relying on our elections to decide our differences.
I couldn't have phrased that any better.
This is an outstanding piece from a Bill Clinton advisor.
What Mueller is doing in light of everything else we now know, spying on the Trump campaign, Mueller's 16 Democrats, Hillary donors.
I mean, the impropriety, the impropriety is staggering.
I have an hour to bring you this show.
I don't have enough time every day.
I don't have enough time in a week to really detail the impropriety, the conflicts of interest surrounding the Mueller investigation.
But one thing is for sure.
Mark Penn, Vice President Pence, even Paul Ryan, and senators like John Thune, who have never been big fans of Trump, especially Paul Ryan, they all want to see the Mueller probe concluded because now it's a stain on history.
It's a travesty.
It's tragic.
And it's not what our criminal justice system is meant to be.
Feels like we're getting new information on Mueller's investigation spying on the Trump campaign every five minutes.
And the news cycle isn't now every week or every day.
It's literally every five minutes.
Here to help us make sense of it all is my good friend Jordan Choctell, National Security Reporter at Conservative Review.
Jordan, thanks for being here.
Yeah, good to be with you, John.
Always a pleasure.
So meeting at the White House yesterday, we have a lot to go over.
We know there was now spying in the Trump campaign.
We've got Carter Page and Michael Caputo on Laura Ingram's Fox Show last night saying it wasn't only Stefan Halper who infiltrated the campaign.
Caputo made some pretty bombshell claims that there was another spy who approached the campaign from a different agency.
He won't say who it is or which agency.
He needs to get clearance from his lawyer.
But I suspect that John Brennan might have run an illegal CIA operation against American nationals on American soil.
What do you think about that theory?
Am I being a nutty conspiracy theorist or might that hold water based on Brennan's recent rantings?
You have to absolutely believe the possibility that it's true.
I mean, if you look at the timeline that's been presented to us about when this so-called counterintelligence operation began, the facts keep changing week after week.
Political Interference Suspected00:04:54
We were told at first it started with Carter Page, you know, making mysterious trips and under FBI surveillance for dealings with the Russians, but then they came up with no evidence.
Then they told us that George Papadopoulos was drunk at a bar and just happened to be sitting next to a mega donor from the Clinton Foundation, right?
That was just not believable.
I mean, listen, I ran investigations.
I've never, this was a series of coincidences that was akin to hitting Powerball for investigators.
Yeah, it's just shocking.
And it does so much damage to the public trust and the trust that we need to have in the intelligence community to conduct these investigations without political interference.
And all you see when you're investigating these reports is political interference and collusion with the mainstream media.
Well, that's just it, right?
I mean, we've got the mainstream media losing their minds because Hamas terrorists were killed in Gaza, losing their minds because raping, murdering MS-13 gangbangers were called animals.
And now they're working overtime to justify what went on here.
What concerns me, though, Jordan, is we're starting to see preliminary excerpts leak the OIG report on the FBI.
Preliminary excerpts are leaking, and I'm very uncomfortable because what I'm hearing, and we might be seeing it out of context, is that the IJ, Michael Horowitz, is going to claim that, well, the FBI slow walked the Clinton email investigation not to help Hillary simply because they were incompetent.
In fact, it helped Trump because it cleared Hillary too late.
And I really, that makes me very, very uncomfortable that criminal referrals won't be handed to DOJ for people who should be criminally referred.
Yeah, and you saw that in the Senate committee reports and emails released yesterday that there was so much political interference in the FBI's conduct, even into the Trump administration.
I mean, these people were such political hacks.
And you forget that even Sally Gates, who continued to serve into the Trump administration, she was running ridiculous Logan Act investigations into Michael Flynn, and no one's ever been prosecuted since like the 1700s or whatnot.
I think 1799 was the last Logan Act prosecution.
And it goes to show that these people are political animals.
And it has nothing to do with the rank and file agents of the FBI because I think both of us have tremendous respect for them.
But it's very clear that Andrew McCabe, James Comey, and several other high-ranking officials in the FBI dislike this president to the point where they were working with the mainstream media to leak damaging information to this president during his tenure.
So you can only imagine what they were doing beforehand and trying to exonerate Hillary because these people, of course, they're political animals.
They don't want to get caught on the bad side of President Hillary Clinton, and they all expected it to be President Hillary Clinton.
So, of course, they didn't do the investigation correctly.
Look, most of the agents I know, the rank-and-file FBI agents, even those up to supervisor, they're disgusted by what Comey did, McCabe did.
It's made their jobs infinitely harder.
Their credentials don't carry the same weight.
They don't get the respect they used to get.
If anything, the rank-and-file agents are on the side of the American people here.
They're saying, Hey, I think it looks bad to you.
We've got to walk into these buildings and go to work every day and pull out those FBI creds.
You have no idea how bad it is for us.
And they call the seventh floor at FBI headquarters, the supervisory floor, the management floor.
It was a small cabal.
I was talking to somebody inside the bureau.
They said, Look, at that level, we did some math.
We think it was about 13 people out of the 20 some odd thousand that worked for the FBI.
And when you understand the hierarchy of law enforcement and how much power is actually centralized with the director and the deputy director, that's very plausible, George.
I don't disbelieve that for one second.
Yeah, and it's so unfortunate because these people don't have a voice.
So I think, like you and I and some others, we feel the need to kind of speak for them because, you know, if they were to even mess around with politics even a little bit, they could be thrown in prison for a decade, right?
So there's so much hypocrisy.
These people cannot speak for themselves.
And I think it's right of them just to keep their head down and try to do their job.
But when their superiors are leaking all this nonsense to the media and they're still doing it too, you see the leaks are coming from DOJ and FBI to the New York Times and Washington Post.
And it's just disgraceful that the morale must be so low when you have these political hacks.
There's people in there that have been there for two decades, three decades, working serious counterterrorism investigations.
And you have these people plotting with these CNN and New York Times reporters.
Like, are you kidding me?
No, it's really tragic.
Political Hacks Plotting?00:09:34
So today, we're supposed to see a resolution from a dozen plus, I think it's 16 or 17, more conservative members of Congress.
It's initiated by Mark Meadows, co-sponsored by Ron DeSantis and Jim Jordan.
Representative Lee Zeldin from New York is signing on to call for a second special counsel.
You think it'll get any traction?
You know, I hope so.
The issue is that we have Republican senators that are, of course, ultra-political characters, and they're so concerned with their next election, you know, the poll testing of should Mueller stay or Mueller go.
The facts don't really matter.
You know, the president should have more allies.
And unfortunately, you know, you have senators like Lindsey Graham, even Marco Rubio.
You know, Jeff Flakes retiring, but there's so many hurdles to initiating a second special counsel that I think the president is right to kind of launch the investigation from within the departments that he has under his power because it doesn't look like we're going to get the traction necessary.
Of course, the Democrats would vote against something like that.
So you'd hope for a second special counsel and that the president can take it upon himself to ask wherever Attorney General Jeff Sessions is to yeah, he's hiding somewhere.
But let me ask you about this.
With Rosenstein in the mix, how could anything get done?
Right now, Sessions has relinquished all control of DOJ.
He pops up every three weeks.
He says MS-13, weed, and civil asset seizure.
And then, like the groundhog, he goes back into the borough.
He disappears.
He does nothing.
He doesn't have to be recused from any of this anymore.
He was cleared by the ethics panel.
He can absolutely take the reins of DOJ.
You know, I made an argument on Twitter yesterday.
Good luck.
All of these nonsensical theories for D. Chess, this, that, and the other thing are just silly and stupid.
And they're for people that don't understand how this stuff works.
But Jeff Sessions, even if that were true, his job is not to work in the shadows.
There are national security prosecutors.
There are public corruption prosecutors and bureau chiefs.
That's their job.
His job is to stand in front of a microphone, in front of a microphone, and to reassure the American people: I'm in command of DOJ.
Justice will be done, and there's equal justice under the law, not two sets of justice, one for us, one for the Clintons.
He's failing miserably on all fronts.
Rosenstein is effectively running DOJ.
How can anything get done when Rosenstein is the operational guy at the Department of Justice?
Yeah, and Rosenstein has a lot of access to information that we aren't privy to.
And he should be able to recognize right now that the Mueller investigation is a political witch hunt.
It's been over a year.
I don't know where Jeff Sessions is.
I understand that he does not prioritize things like this, but this is threatening the integrity of the presidency.
How much bigger can it get from that?
What bigger priority is there?
I know that he has his little pet projects, but it's getting a little ridiculous.
And he needs to emerge from the shadows.
If he doesn't want to do the job anymore, it's okay.
You can just resign.
But he has to make a decision.
He can't just be prosecuting the war on drugs that he enjoys and ignore the other obligations of the attorney general.
It's a big job, and it requires someone who can handle it.
You know, it's funny you say that because I was speaking to somebody within DEA who told me that Sessions and the new acting administrator of DEA are incredibly close.
They speak every day for long periods of time.
And I think you were honest, Sessions enjoys those kinds of prosecutions.
It's like he's purposefully avoiding what's going on with the White House, which is tragic.
It is absolutely tragic.
Maybe he should step down and ask Trump to appoint him U.S. attorney somewhere again.
But he's not, he doesn't seem to have the chops to be U.S. Attorney General.
Yeah, and I think it's definitely time for him to step down.
I think he's lost the confidence of the president.
The president has made that pretty obvious.
There is no, as you said before, there is no grand secretive conspiracy that he's working behind the scenes with the president quietly passing papers amongst themselves to take down Mueller.
People should forget about that.
It's not happening.
There's a clear constitutional crisis going on, and the Attorney General is MIA.
And that's the best way to summarize it.
It's very sad.
Did you read this editorial in The Hill by Mark Penn?
The guy was a Clinton pollster and advisor.
Even he's calling.
He advised and polled for Bill Clinton throughout the impeachment process.
It was with him for 95 to 2000.
And even this guy is saying Mueller needs to be shut down.
I loved his piece.
At the end of his piece, he wrote, Dopping Mueller isn't about one president or one party.
It's about all presidents and all parties.
It's about cleaning out and reforming the deep state so that our intelligence operations are never used again against opposing campaigns without the firmest of evidence.
It's about letting people work for campaigns and administrations without needing legal defense funds.
It's about relying on our election to decide our differences.
Spot on, but the number two at DOJ, Rod Rosenstein, takes that, crumples it up, and throws it in the trash.
I can only speculate about what's going on with Rod Rosenstein.
But again, he's close to all the wrong actors.
I think the president probably appointed or elevated his position by mistake, didn't really know who he was.
It's very clear that Rosenstein has a hostile agenda.
He's extremely hostile to Congress.
He somehow believes that the DOJ has oversight over Congress, specifically the Mueller people and the FBI.
It's a very dangerous precedent that he's trying to set.
He's been totally obstructive to all the requests coming from our buddies at the House Freedom Caucus, the House Intelligence Committee.
He hasn't given them anything.
The way that these people find out information is either through top secret briefings where they can't disclose anything or also through the mainstream media.
And then they have to play catch up.
And Rosenstein's putting them in a very difficult position.
And when he should be kind of a neutral arbiter in this situation, he's very clearly played defense for the Mueller probe and very publicly, too.
You know, I think you make a great point.
One of the reasons Trump was elected is he was an outsider.
We all know that.
And I'm beating a dead horse.
And America likes that, and it was exciting and it was fun.
But one of the problems with that is you didn't exist in Washington.
You don't have a bench, excuse me, a deep bench of allies from which to tap your people.
Your AG, your deputy AG, your FBI director.
Trump never had that.
So I think you're spot on when he got there.
People said, okay, Rod Rosenstein is a career guy.
He's been in the DOJ a long time.
And Trump just assumed that's the guy.
You have to make the number two.
He's been there a long time.
People seem to like him.
He's competent.
Never thought, I don't think he ever thought they were going to weaponize him against him like they did.
I also think Jeff Sessions, to a large degree, trusted Rosenstein.
And when Rosenstein said, Sessions, you have to accuse yourself, Sessions did it without even thinking twice because Rosenstein was a career guy.
And Sessions, albeit was a U.S. attorney a while back, was the new kid on the block at Maine DOJ in D.C.
And I think Rosenstein took a lot of advantage and was able to manipulate a lot of power to his own agenda.
And is it too late is my question.
Is it too late?
The course correct.
I don't think it's too late.
I mean, you see that the president's really gaining momentum.
His poll numbers continue to increase.
And I think the American people are seeing that this is indeed a witch hunt with no end.
If you look at what Mueller's been doing, he's been prosecuting people on ridiculous charges.
And they are all starting to contest it, whether it's Manafort or Flynn.
The momentum is going in the direction of the people who used to be associated with the Trump campaign or former Trump officials.
So I think it's definitely now is the time to put your foot on the gas and continue to reorient his administration.
You saw he made a couple bad appointments.
You know, I think Tillerson was a bad call.
He didn't really, he didn't really realize the power of the swamp.
And I think all of us underestimated the national security intelligence bureaucracy, how they would viciously turn against him, the officials at DOJ and the intelligence community.
And I think he's starting to recognize who his allies are.
He's moving in lockstep now with conservatives and Freedom Caucus members and not necessarily like hardcore conservatives, but people that recognize the importance of the separation of powers and the president's role in commanding his office as the commander in chief.
Yeah, and I think they're America first people as well.
All right, Jordan, so last question for you.
What do you think?
Is Juliani right?
Does this thing wrap up by September 1 or does it continue through the midterm?
Mueller's probe.
Yeah, unfortunately, I've become convinced that Mueller is out to, I don't think he's going to indict the president because he can't constitutionally do that, but he is out to delegitimize the president.
And with his team of Democrat, Clinton-connected, Obama-connected lawyers, they will find something to embarrass the president with.
And I think that is when they will conclude their investigation.
They'll find something very small, but the media will elevate it to the extent where it could potentially threaten his presidency.
Major Manhunt: Burglary Suspect?00:11:43
I don't know if they're going to find some kind of bank records where he forgot to pay taxes on something.
It's going to be something minimal.
And that's the problem is that Mueller is hell-bent on finding something in the U.S. criminal code to embarrass the president and delegitimize him.
Make a case for impeachment.
And I think that the president doesn't really have anything to worry about in terms of collusion because we all know that's total nonsense.
So that's why it's time to shut it down.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Jordan Choctelle, Conservative Review, National Security Reporter, as always, my friend, a pleasure.
Thanks very much.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Another police officer killed.
Man, it feels like there's one a week because I believe it has been for at least every 10 days.
This time, a female police officer in Baltimore County, Maryland.
Now, there are conflicting reports, which I'll get to in a moment.
But the story is basically that the officer was responding to a burglary, and they have not said police have not released her name.
All we know is that she's a four-year veteran of the Baltimore County Police Department.
They've not released her name, but witnesses are saying it wasn't gunfire.
The officer was struck by a vehicle.
She was hit by a car.
Now, the department has two conflicting bits of information.
The chief, Terrence Sheridan, said that the officer was responding to a burglary call.
However, the spokesman said the call was for a suspicious vehicle.
Now, before you vilify the police and say they're incompetent, they're inept, they can't get their stories straight.
That's not the case.
This is actually pretty common.
What probably happened here is that the chief is reading the initial 911 call, a call for a burglary.
Now, as oftentimes as the case, when officers respond, when they get to that area, the calls change.
Another neighbor calls and says, well, there's a car.
Okay, ma'am, is this for the burglary call we just received?
Well, I don't think it's a burglary.
The car is really suspicious.
I've got a better point of view than my neighbor.
They're not in the house, but they're looking at the house, and it looks like they could be plotting a burglary.
And so the dispatcher will go over the radio to the police officer responding and say, okay, you know, second neighbor called.
They say it's not a burglary, but there is a suspicious vehicle in front of the home.
And all of that is going to be transcribed.
When they download those 911 tapes and take the transcripts, you're going to see a burglary.
You're going to see a suspicious vehicle.
In all this chaos of a police officer being murdered, it is pretty common.
It's not inconceivable that different officials in the department might have just been reading a different piece of that transcript.
Maybe contradictory, but both are giving the public accurate information.
I suspect, I don't know, but I suspect that's the case because a suspicious vehicle would typically go hand in hand with a burglary call.
It makes sense to me.
Okay, onto the manhunt now.
Now, they have not found the perpetrators.
This happened yesterday afternoon.
They've been looking all through the night using dogs and helicopters and thermal imaging.
Other departments from the area, there, federal agencies are going to lend resources when a cop is killed.
They are going to literally, literally turn over every stone.
And I mean, literally, if they're walking through the woods, they're going to turn rocks over to see if there's a speck of blood, if suspect dropped something, left something, just anything, anything, a DNA sample.
And I suspect with the resources being thrown at this, this will resolve with the suspects either dead or in custody.
I'd be fine either way.
Now, the chief Sheridan said, quote, this is a bad time in the United States for law enforcement.
And Chief Sheridan is right.
It's a terrible time for law enforcement.
Obama's war on police, Obama's campaign of vilification and disrespect for police really does continue two years, nearly two years, a year and a half after he left office.
It's so sad.
It really is so sad.
And the officer was taken again.
Like I said, the witnesses are saying the officer was hit by a vehicle.
She was taken to MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center outside Baltimore where she passed away.
Police are now doing to find these guys.
It was four male suspects at the end of the report.
They're working grids.
They're putting up a grid pattern and teams are searching that grid.
Thermal imaging, dogs, aviation units.
And I'm sure many agencies have lent helicopters, more dogs, more bodies to search the grids, sophisticated equipment, night vision, things of that nature.
Like I said, thermal imaging.
This is a major manhunt, a major manhunt.
2,000 students were stuck in their schools until late last night because the suspects are considered armed and dangerous.
Now, we don't know if the officer was also shot.
We're only going off of one witness.
And this is just so unfortunate.
It really is such an unfortunate thing to see.
And a young, I'm assuming a young officer, four years on the job, goes out there, goes through the police academy, loving their job.
I did it.
I know the feeling.
You're young.
You're out there on patrol.
It's an exciting job.
It's a dynamic job.
You're having a great time.
And then your life is cut short.
Your life is cut short.
Kids, almost 2,000 students, they see 1,900 students at this Perry Hall neighborhood, this Perry Hall area, were held until 7.30 p.m. in their schools, locked down for safety.
Smart move.
Smart move on the part.
I mean, it wouldn't be inconceivable for armed suspects that killed a cop to go into a school and take hostages.
Really nothing else you can do.
Now, the spokesperson for the department, Vincent, is saying that the incident began to unfold just before 2 p.m. when police received a call for a suspicious vehicle.
That's the suspicious vehicle aspect of this.
The chief, of course, said it was a burglary.
The officer was pronounced dead at 2.50 p.m.
And a witness, a guy by the name of Tony Kurek, that he had just walked in the door of his home.
This is from the Baltimore Sun.
Walked in the door of his home when his son shouted for him, dad, dad, a cop just got run over out front.
The officer was lying on the ground in front of his house, and the son named Dakota told his dad he had seen the officer draw her gun on a black Jeep Wrangler and order the people inside to get out.
Instead, the driver sped forward, ramming the officer with the vehicle.
She landed about 20 feet away.
This family said she basically landed almost in front of my mailbox.
They then called 911.
They were nerve-wrecked, screaming curses in the phone.
You've got a cop lying in the road dying.
He said he wouldn't soon forget the look on the cop's eyes as his son tried to revive her.
He had a very, very bad feeling that she was going out of the picture on it.
He was young.
He said, it just breaks my heart.
Now, they said glass and one shell casing were found.
They heard shots fired.
They don't know if it was the officer or someone in the vehicle who pulled the trigger.
This is a very, very volatile time still for police officers.
Volatile time for police officers.
Yet the left, the left, especially the mainstream media, would still rather vilify cops.
They'd still rather vilify the good guys.
They're supporting Hamas terrorists in Gaza and here at home.
They were hysterical.
They were beside themselves that Donald Trump had the audacity to call MS-13 animals because MS-13, well, they are animals.
And the New York Daily News took this to a new level.
A photo has been circling on the web.
I don't know if you saw this, but of a thug, this 21-year-old little punk, standing next to an NYPD patrol car from the 45th precinct in the Bronx.
While his friend engages the two police officers in the vehicle in conversation, this lowlife, this derelict named Kelvin Rodriguez, is holding a handgun.
He's holding a pistol with this thuggy look on his face right next to the vehicle.
Now, if he were some kind of murdering psychopath, he could have easily turned around and murdered those two police officers.
Well, you would think that's enough, right?
Police eventually caught him.
They arrested him.
He was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, drug possession, and menacing or harassment, one of those two.
No, the New York Daily News, the New York Daily News wrote a story that seems to make this derelict the victim.
He got a profile piece in the far left New York Daily News.
Let me read it.
Bronx man who posed next to cop car with a gun blows chance to work with kids.
This is amazing.
Career tip.
Photographing yourself with a gun next to a cop car could wreck your chances for a job working with kids.
They keep using this idiot's quotes.
Quote, I was about to become a teacher's assistant, but this has messed me up, Kevin Rodriguez told the Daily News.
Rodriguez says he fears his arrest cost him a shot at a job at Brightside Academy Child Care Center on White Plains Road.
Quote, I have all my certificates, Rodriguez said, displaying papers that said he was trained to cope with children suffering from shaken baby syndrome and a lookout for child abuse.
Quote, they're making me out to be a terrorist.
I'm not a monster, end quote.
The Daily News should be ashamed of itself that they're giving this thug his chance to tell his story.
No one at the preschool has returned calls, rightfully so.
Posted by Reels D.A. Blicksky, the image showed Rodriguez with a gun in his right hand, the image is here on the screen, with a gun in his right hand in front of the cop car while a pal spoke to an officer through the car's passenger window.
The picture had a comment.
Quote, you see De Blickski?
Stupid, dumb, as F the 45th.
So, stupid, dumb, N word, N-word, F, you know what they're saying there, the 4-5th, meaning calling the police dumb and saying, F the police in that precinct.
Putting up a picture of himself like a street thug with a gun, and now he's the victim.
Now, this is my favorite part.
Police busted Rodriguez early Sunday near his Frisbee Avenue home.
They stopped him as he was bicycling the wrong way down the street.
Yeah, Daily News.
That's why the police stopped him for going the wrong way on a bicycle, you morons.
Quote, I was just riding my bike on the street and they tackled me.
There were five cops on top of me.
You moron.
You.
I don't even.
A criminal complaint.
Charged Rodriguez with drug possession, harassment, and criminal possession of a weapon.
But he was released on his own recognizance.
No bail.
He got to go home.
No bail.
He posed next to a police car with a firearm that F the police intimated he was going to kill them.
Carried an illegal gun in New York City.
No bail.
No bail released on his own recognizance.
Unbelievable.
And of course, now he's playing the mental illness card.
Quote, they charged me because I had a prescription for Xanax and Valium.
I take medication for anxiety and depression.
I am diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Well, then you shouldn't be working around kids, right?
You shouldn't be carrying around an illegal gun.
But he also possessed a small amount of weed.
Here's my favorite.
Here's my favorite.
Quote, there was no threat, end quote.
I'm a good kid, quote unquote.
Prom Ticket Controversy00:07:03
I don't even really know what to say to this.
The Daily News gave a thug who said F the 4-5th, F the cops, while holding a gun next to their patrol car, basically saying cops should be shot and killed.
He got the last word, and the Daily News is trying to promote him as a good kid.
This is disgraceful beyond words.
Disgraceful beyond words.
And this is why nobody takes the left-wing, mainstream, fake news media seriously.
American history is racist.
Well, that according to a high school principal in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, who apologized because he was going to host a 1776, the year of our nation's birth, themed prom at the, this is great, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
That is all deemed racist.
Carry Hill High School East principal Dennis Perry sent a letter to students, parents, and other community members on Friday.
This is all from Far Left Newsweek, apologizing for the, quote, insensitive wording that led to complaints from African-American and minority students.
Perry said it was irresponsible for he and other prom organizers to overlook the historical fact that not all communities can celebrate what life was like in 1776, a time of slavery in America.
So let's just eradicate American history.
Here's the letter.
Let's read the letter from Dr. Dennis Perry.
So Dr. Dennis Perry writes, he's from the Cherry Hill East High School, and he principal of Cherry Hill East High School in New Jersey, Cherry Hill High School East, I'm sorry, in New Jersey.
Dated May 18th, last Friday.
Dear East community, today I learned that members of our school community were offended by a statement written on our senior prom ticket.
Specifically, the statement on the prom ticket called for students to, quote, party like it's 1776.
And I am writing to apologize for the hurt feelings this reference caused from members of our school family.
It was insensitive and irresponsible not to appreciate that not all communities can celebrate what life was like in 1776.
I especially apologize to our African-American students whom I have let down by not initially recognizing the inappropriateness of this wording.
You can expect that we will do better as a school community and to produce well-thought-out, appropriate communications.
In an effort to right this wrong and do better for the students, we are going to take the following actions.
There are three bullet points.
Students will not be required to bring their prom tickets to gain entrance to the prom.
We have a record of who purchased tickets.
A name will be sufficient upon arrival.
All students will receive a commemorative ticket at the prom prom ticket.
These will feature a new design and will be distributed to all attendees.
Moving forward, in an effort to learn from this experience, safeguards will be added to ensure that a diverse group of people view all information before it is distributed from the school.
I would like to thank members of our school community for their caring and thoughtful conversation while discussing this sensitive issue.
Sincerely, Dennis Perry, E.D., Doctor of Education.
Now, give me a break.
Give me a break.
The Cherry Hill School, okay?
The student body of the Cherry Hill School is 6.2% black, 62.2% white, 22.4% as Asian.
School had 2,177 students, and the Hispanic population is just shy of 6%.
The NAACP is, of course, in this.
And he said, and Camden County, NAACP East Chapter President Lloyd Henderson, told the Courier Post, a local newspaper, the school's oversight was, quote, another example that the culture at Cherry Hill East is one where the African-American students' needs are not considered along with the rest of the school.
However, I do take some solace in the fact that Mr. Perry immediately recognized and acknowledged the insensitivity of the comment.
Give me a break.
1776 is a significant date in America.
History is good and history is bad.
And there could have been a moment of silence incorporated at the prom for those who were victims of slavery.
Could have done that.
Could also celebrate the birth of the greatest nation in the history of mankind, but no, no.
The left will not be happy until it absolutely eradicates, until it destroys, until it sanitizes and makes disappear American history because we were then, and to a 77% degree, are now a white Judeo-Christian nation.
That's not racist.
That's data.
We are not a black nation.
I wouldn't expect to go to Africa, to go to Cameroon, to go to Niger, to go to Somalia, to go to Ghana.
I would not expect those nations to sanitize their history to accommodate the relatively small white population.
South Africa is engaging in white genocide, the blacks in South Africa.
No one is talking about that.
Is the NAACP condemning that?
We at the Rebel feature it.
We talk about it.
Our good friend Katie Hopkins here at the Rebel has been working on that for a long time, exposing white genocide in South Africa.
But nobody talks about that on the American left.
But you have a prom ticket celebrating the birth of our nation in the year of our nation's birth at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, a city of extreme historic importance.
It's racist.
It's insensitive to African American students.
What about the 66.2% of white students who want to know about this, who want this event?
That's not racist.
Why does the majority always have to capitulate to a small, it's not even the whole minority?
I'm sure there are African-American students.
I thought it was a fun event, but it's always a vocal, radical, fringe minority that ruins it for everybody else.
And we're going to keep letting this happen.
We're going to keep letting this happen until we erode and sanitize history until it's no more.
And far-left, radicalized, revisionist history is in its place.