Off The Cuff Declassified dissects the Supreme Court’s 5-4 travel ban ruling, upholding Trump’s immigration order over liberal objections tied to FDR’s internment camps, while linking Mueller’s investigation to potential bias. It warns of opioid weaponization threats—like fentanyl-laced flyers in Houston and Russia’s 2002 carfentanil attack killing 125 civilians—and calls for interagency collaboration. Meanwhile, AOC’s upset victory over Crowley, Romney’s Utah GOP win despite Trump tensions, and McMaster’s South Carolina runoff hint at shifting political dynamics, underscoring both legal and security challenges ahead. [Automatically generated summary]
Today on off the cuff declassified, the Supreme Court upholds Donald Trump's travel ban and liberals are hysterical.
Opioids can be weaponized.
I'm going to tell you all about it.
Dangerous, dangerous stuff.
And last night's primaries yielded some interesting results.
Most interesting, a socialist unseated a 10-term incumbent congressman in New York City.
Liberals are losing their minds as the Supreme Court upholds Trump's travel ban.
Now, I mean, they've really become unhinged.
Twitter and Facebook apparently graduated law schools yesterday, and they're all explaining why brilliant giant legal minds like John Roberts and Neil Gorsuk, Samuel Alito, are wrong.
Apparently, the Twitter law school graduates know better.
Supreme Court upheld the ban, and it was no surprise because the president's authority on immigration is, well, pretty absolute.
That's really never been in dispute.
Now, the CNN is predictably trying to do an objective analysis.
I love going to CNN for these stories.
They start it with the ruling was 5-4 along partisan lines.
Well, yeah, the liberals on the court ignored the law.
The conservatives led by John Roberts followed the law with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the conservative majority.
Now, we've long known, we've quoted the United States Code on this.
The United States Code, I'll paraphrase it, essentially gives the president the power to approve or deny anyone's admission to the United States.
But liberals don't like the black and white rule of law.
They just don't like it.
They've never liked it.
They want to rule, to govern on a motion.
They want judges to rule.
Our elected representatives don't rule.
They govern.
They represent.
Judges hand down rulings.
And they want both.
They want the elected representatives and the executive and the legislature to govern on a motion.
They want judges to rule on a motion when all three should be governing and ruling on law, which is exactly what is going on.
Now, when the Trump administration, when any administration looked at these proposals, Trump administration deployed this proposal of a travel ban from predominantly Muslim countries, but not only Muslim countries, because North Korea is one of the countries named in the travel ban.
But this is not a Muslim ban.
Okay, the countries are Venezuela.
Venezuela is one of the countries named, predominantly Christian nation.
This is not a Muslim ban.
So the nations, the seven nations of concern that were listed in the ban were Venezuela, Libya, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea.
Only five of them predominantly Muslim nations.
Libya, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia.
Venezuela and North Korea were not.
So the liberal narrative of Muslim ban was debunked at the outset.
Now, Trump was predictably very, very happy.
John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion for the conservatives, quote, the proclamation is squarely within the scope of presidential authority.
And the statutes and the case law on immigration made that clear.
President Trump tweeted immediately after the ruling came down in capital letters, Supreme Court upholds Trump travel ban.
Wow.
It seems like the president didn't expect the travel ban to be upheld.
The president thought they were going to strike it down.
President also wrote that the ruling was, quote, a tremendous victory for the American people in the Constitution.
The ruling is also a moment of profound vindication following months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country.
And the president's right.
Now, this was the third iteration of the ban, right?
This was the previous ones.
It bounced back and forth through the courts.
Now, an unintended consequence of the Supreme Court's ruling is that it further calls into question and it further questions the credibility of Mueller's investigation.
Well, how can that be?
How am I getting from the travel ban to Mueller's investigation?
Well, pretty simply and in a pretty straight line.
If you recall when Sally Yates was acting Attorney General, Big Never Trumper, the whole into the last administration, she refused to uphold the travel ban and Trump fired her.
And there was tremendous backlash on the left for Trump firing Sally Yates.
Well, the Supreme Court vindicated Trump.
Sally Yates was wrong.
Trump was right.
The travel ban was legal and constitutional.
Sally Yates' refusal to carry it out was a defiance of authority.
It was a failure to direct and obey order, a legal, lawful order from her boss.
She should have been fired.
More importantly, Andrew Weissman, who's Mueller's number two, his deputy, he's chief prosecutor, his chief bulldog.
Andrew Weissman's guy profiled on the show.
He has had decades of problems with exculpatory evidence, been spanked down by many judges.
It's all public record.
Andrew Weissman wrote to Sally Yates at the time and said, I'm in awe.
I'm so proud.
Things like that about her defying Trump.
This is the guy who is really Mueller's chief operations officer.
This is the guy who's really the, he's the Andrew McCabe or the Rod Rosenstein of the Mueller investigation, the very active and proactive number two prosecutor.
He was in awe and proud of Sally Yates, who defied Trump by refusing to carry out a lawful constitutional order to uphold a travel ban, something the United States Supreme Court did.
Just one more nail in the coffin of Mueller's investigation.
Now, I'm going to read a couple of details from the CNN piece.
Challengers, including the state of Hawaii, argued that the travel ban exceeded the president's authority under immigration law constitution.
They also used Trump's statements during the campaign when he called for a ban on travel from all Muslim-majority countries.
But Roberts, Chief Justice John Roberts, dismissed those.
Roberts says, quote, plaintiffs argue that this president's words strike at fundamental standards of respect and tolerance in violation of our constitutional tradition.
But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements.
It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a presidential directive neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility.
In doing so, we must consider not only the statements of a particular president, but also the authority of the presidency itself.
In other words, the legal and constitutional authority of the presidency far outweighs any statement an individual president makes.
You can't scrap the historical authority of the presidency.
It's been there since the late 1700s and it'll be there long after we're all gone.
You don't toss that out for the statements at a rally, extemporaneous, off the cuff, of one president for one brief, and I mean a few seconds, a few minutes, time in history.
And that's what I meant when I said earlier, the left wants governing and rule on a motion on changing hundreds, if not thousands of years of legal precedent.
This nation goes on for thousands of years.
The left would have wanted policy, law fundamentally changed for a split millisecond in time.
Luckily, the conservatives on the court saw how asidine that was and didn't succumb to it.
CNN Supreme Court analyst Stephen Vladek, and he's a law professor at University of Texas School of Law, called the ruling a big win for the White House.
He said, quote, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the president's sweeping statutory authority when it comes to deciding who may and who may not travel to the United States.
I mean, it's long been established and understood.
It's only because of Trump derangement syndrome that that was called into question.
Authority that both President Trump and future presidents, as a CNN analyst, and future presidents will surely rely upon to justify more aggressive immigration restrictions.
Now, CNN, of course, had a caveat by saying, well, remember, this was the third iteration of the ban, and they had to make significant changes.
But when you review the first two iterations, the changes weren't all that significant.
There were minor tweaks.
They were minor, minor tweaks.
Now, an interesting byproduct of this case was that the Kuromatsu decision was overturned.
Now, if you don't know what Kuromatsu was, Kuromatsu was a decision in 1944 in which the court upheld the constitutionality of internment camps for Japanese Americans.
Yeah.
See, the Supreme Court upheld that back then.
And who instituted that policy?
Who deployed those internment camps?
Well, none other than liberal icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In fact, there was a great irony on Twitter in that a far left writer, I forget his name now.
I'm going to dig back through a thousand tweets, who was excoriating Trump and excoriating the court.
And he was railing about the only good thing the court did was strike down Kuromatsu.
Well, at his Twitter header picture, it was FDR.
So he was excoriating the United States for Kuromatsu while he was glorifying the guy that actually put the policy into place, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And this is the first time, the first time in which the Supreme Court ever struck down a pre-existing decision like that.
Now, Sonia Sotomayor, a far lefty on the court, wrote a scathing dissent.
Let me read you a part.
Quote, the majority here, which means on the court, completely sets aside the president's charge statements about Muslims as irrelevant.
That holding erodes the foundational principles of religious tolerance that the court elsewhere has so emphatically protected.
And it tells members of minority religions in our country that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community.
That's not true, though.
That's absolutely not true.
As I said, the broader decision here was presidential authority.
What that authority was long before Donald Trump said those words for a couple of minutes, and what that authority will be long after Donald Trump is out of office, long after all of us are gone from this planet.
Court made exactly the right decision here.
They followed the rule of law.
Now, of course, there's always one.
There's always one.
So a few hours after that happened, a federal judge had to get his name in the news, a federal judge in Texas, I'm sorry, in California.
And Dana Sabra in San Diego ruled that the U.S. Border Patrol has to stop separating families at the border and has to reunite all families within 30 days.
Now, this guy's a Bush appointee.
He also ruled that the administration has to provide phone contact between parents and children if possible within 10 days.
He wrote, Judge Sabra in California, quote, the facts set forth before the court portray reactive governance responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government's own making.
Well, this isn't true.
And I do not suspect this judge's ruling, well, probably will stand up on appeal because of the liberal.
the liberal courts of appeals, but if this made it to the Supreme Court, I believe their current ruling would supersede this ruling because they've given the president very broad latitude.
I'm not a lawyer.
I'm not a constitutional lawyer.
Spoke to many about this actually this morning, the three, not many, but three of the most knowledgeable I know.
And they feel this ruling flies in the face of the Supreme Court ruling.
The Supreme Court ruling gives the president authority over immigration, over law enforcement, over those policies.
And there is case upon case, thousands upon tens of, hundreds of thousands of cases here in the U.S. of children being separated from their parents when the parent is incarcerated.
We've gone over that ad nauseum.
And so this judge, it appears, just wants to throw their hat in the ring as a voice of immigration, wanted to get their name out there in the press.
I don't see anything in this judge's ruling that could really hold water, nor did the attorneys I spoke to and one ICE agent they spoke.
But yesterday was not only a big win for Donald Trump, not only a big win for the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security, it was a massive win for the United States of America and our sovereignty when the Supreme Court upheld Trump's travel ban and the absolute, I'm going to call it absolute authority of the presidency, no matter who the president is, to decide who can and cannot enter this country.
Chemical Weapon Flyers00:04:20
Now, we hear a lot about opioids and their scary, scary substances.
You're hearing about overdoses, a nationwide epidemic.
It really is.
It really is.
People are overdosing.
First responders are overdosing via contact.
We typically think of the opioid crisis in that context, right?
People who are getting addicted to these drugs that are overdosing, getting very sick, dying, costing money with regards to detox and continuing treatment, rehab, things of that nature.
We don't think about opioids as weapons.
Yeah, weapons.
And I'm going to read you a couple of, well, bring you a couple of really scary accounts.
Now, out of Houston, Texas, Harris County, fentanyl-laced flyers were placed on Harris County Sheriff's Office patrol cars.
A sergeant who was leaving for the day had her take home police vehicle removes the flyer from the window.
We all do that.
Every single one of us has gotten a flyer or a postcard or something on our windshield or in our side window.
And we typically remove it and throw it in the garbage or crumple it up and throw it in the car until we can throw it away somewhere.
Or we let her.
I don't like to do that, though.
But we never give that a second thought, right?
We don't think we're going to put on rubber gloves, nor did this sergeant as she was getting ready to go home for the day after a long shift.
Looks like a detective.
Because where these flyers were placed on about 15 to 20 police vehicles was at the Harris County Sheriff's Office at Houston, Texas area.
Harris County Sheriff's Office, recruitment and criminal investigation building.
So they're detectives and those who recruit new deputies, civilians into the police department.
To me, that seems like a very symbolic placement of those, a more high-profile unit.
So like the rest of us do, she's going home from work.
She removes this flyer.
She soon starts to feel lightheaded and starts showing effects of some kind of exposure.
Later determined to be fentanyl when the flyer was tested.
She was lightheaded.
Now, she was rushed to the hospital.
They caught it early enough.
She was treated.
She was released.
He's okay.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says that one flyer that was tested, the one she touched, did test positive for fentanyl.
15 to 20 others were sent off to the Harris County Crime Lab, their forensic center, for testing.
The group that did this, it promoted an organization.
Flyers were promoting an organization called Targeted Individuals.
And this organization believes that the deep state targets certain people that the FBI and the CIA get together in darkly lit rooms and targets certain individuals who criticize the deep state via microwave beams to the head and all these other crazy things that cause brain damage.
Now, if that were the case, I'd be long gone.
I'd criticize the deep state every day, but I tell you what the deep state really is.
It's not this conspiratorial, dimly lit room.
It's the annoying people at the Department of Motor Vehicles who have you wait for three.
It's the incompetent staff at the VA that has our veterans waiting in line.
It's those institutional bureaucrats, those politicians in office for too many years, John McCain and Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, all of these people who want big government to continue, who want debate, who want controversy.
And when I say debate, I don't mean in a healthy way.
I mean debate as a stall tactic so they don't have to govern.
These people who want government to grind to a halt so that lobbyists can keep donating to their campaign, donating to their PACs.
They don't ever want to really get anything done because when you get things done, you're not needed in government.
That's what deep state really is.
They hate Donald Trump because he cuts through the red tape and he says, well, let's do this.
Let's fire that guy.
Let's merge the departments of education and labor.
Let's take SNAP and EBT cards and food stamps out from under housing and urban development and stick it under Health and Human Services that has the infrastructure to service it.
But Trump, if you saw the press conference, Lloyd did a roundtable last week and Mick Mulvaney, head of the Office of Management and Budget, gave an amazing presentation about making government more efficient.
And Mulvaney's presentation went on, I don't know, about 12 minutes or so and 15 minutes.
And just in that brief time, you realized how inefficient government was.
Terrible, terrible, terribly inefficient.
But so these people are protesting the deep state, okay?
So that's all the deep state.
Back to the issue at hand.
Opioids As Weapons00:04:42
The fentanyl-laced flyers show us that opioids can now be weaponized.
Because make no mistake, this is a chemical weapons attack.
The delivery method of the chemical weapon being a flyer.
Fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine.
100 times more potent than morphine.
And I'm going to tell you about carfentanyl and how it can be used.
And that's 10,000 times more potent than morphine.
Fentanyl is a chemical, comes in predominantly from China, 100 times more potent than morphine.
You've heard about it.
They lace heroin with it now.
That's why people are dropping dead of overdoses.
Chemical weapon being placed onto the medium, a flyer, placed on the windows of police cars.
That is a chemical weapons attack.
That is a chemical weapons attack.
A very short hop from that to ISIS.
Well, they're being designed.
Al-Qaeda, some random one-off terrorist trying to get a job as a janitor at a school and lacing the kids' books.
Yes.
This is how bad it is.
Okay.
It's even scarier.
So there's a report in the Oxford Academic from 2012, the Journal of Analytical Toxicology.
This is going back to a 2002 terror attack where Russian special forces raided the Dubrovka Theater when Chechny terrorists took it over.
We're finding out that they used an aerosol, an aerosol containing carfentanil, to knock the terrorists out.
Then they went in, shot the terrorists as they were unconscious, removed their suicide vest.
Problem was that 125 victims also died.
And what the journal says, through a combination of the carfentanol aerosol and inadequate medical treatment following the rescue.
But wow.
The Russian explanation that an aerosolized form of fentanyl had been used.
Various hypotheses are proposed to account for the Russian explanation that an aerosolized form of fentanyl had been used.
It was a mixture of fentanyl and the anesthetic gas halothane or fentanyl alone.
But those were soon discredited.
And later on, blood, clothing, and urine analyses told us that carfentanyl and remifentanyl were used.
Far, far more powerful opioids.
Now, this was 2002, 16 years ago, October 26, 2002.
How have the terrorists, how have the bad guys, how have rogue nation states figured out how to weaponize these opioids?
This really is a national security crisis.
This is far beyond just a public health emergency, a law enforcement emergency.
Opioids and synthetic opioids can now be weaponized.
Can you imagine carfentanil being pumped into a shopping mall through the duck system or into a school into police stations?
Knocking out the cops, going in and slaughtering them.
God forbid the kids in schools.
This is a terrifying prospect.
And we need to devote far more resources.
This libertarian nonsense of, oh, leave drugs alone if people want overdose on fentanyl.
Not when it can be weaponized.
You can't weaponize cocaine.
You can't really weaponize heroin.
You can't weaponize crack.
You can't weaponize weed or alcohol to this degree.
But this stuff, the fentanyl, the carfentanyl, is so potent that it simply becomes an ingredient in deadly chemical weapons.
And for that reason, we really do need to treat this much differently.
We need to treat this as a national security emergency.
And I mean not just DEA, but FBI, CIA, the Department of Defense need to all be collaborating.
Department of Justice, if they can get their act together, need to all be collaborating on how to stop this threat.
Because as I research this, I have to tell you, I often tell you the things that keep me awake at night are these low-tech, asymmetrical attacks.
Doesn't seem like aerosolizing carfentanol is all that difficult to do.
You have a basic understanding of chemistry.
And if that's the case, this could be one of the most terrifying low-tech asymmetrical attack scenarios I've ever analyzed.
Romney's Senate Plans00:07:40
Few primaries last night around the country.
I want to tell you about the ones that were most interesting to me.
Well, one of them that's most interesting is probably the least interesting.
Mitt Romney won the GOP Senate nomination in Utah.
Mitt Romney to me has become John McCain.
He even said he wants to be like John Senate.
Mitt Romney earned 73% of the vote against State Representative Mike Kennedy.
He only drew, Kennedy only drew about one in four votes.
Romney won big, but that was expected.
He raised an absolute fortune.
And Trump tweeted, big and conclusive win by Mitt Romney.
Congratulations.
I look forward to working together.
There is so much good to do.
A great and loving family will be coming to D.C.
Now, Trump had to do that.
He's trying to extend an olive branch, but Romney is going to be the thorn in Trump's side, the big thorn in Trump.
I mean, Romney called Trump a fraud and a con man.
Trump passed him over for Secretary of State and other positions, and they don't like each other.
All right, they don't, no matter what Trump says, he's doing the right thing for Republican unity.
They don't like each other.
And Romney, I believe, is going to go into the Senate with the intention of removing Trump or lobbying for the removal of Trump if Dems should win the House.
I think the Dems are done in the midterm, but anything can happen in the next five, six months.
If the Dems were to take the House, which I think is highly unlikely, in fact, I think the Republicans are going to pick seats up.
Romney, I think, would be a voice to remove Trump in the Senate where he impeached the House.
But Romney won.
Not unexpected, not unexpected.
If it was, of course, Orin Hatch's seat, Hatch is retiring.
Romney was also, conventional wisdom would tell us, behind the Evan McMullen debacle to thwart Trump's electoral path in the states of Idaho, Utah, and Arizona, states with large Mormon populations.
That failed as well.
When they saw Trump was winning, they threw McMullen in as a ringer, hoping to block Trump's electoral path and throw it to Hillary.
That failed miserably.
A really interesting race in New York City's, well, New York's 14th congressional district, which is in New York City, covers parts of Queens, parts of the Bronx.
Now, these are predominantly English as a second language areas.
And the incumbent was a guy named Joe Crowley, a far-left Democrat.
He was like a 10-term incumbent or seven-term incumbent.
He'd been there 14 to 20 years, at exactly, 10-term.
They'd been around 20 years.
And a girl named a woman, girl, she's 28 years old, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won.
She's a Democratic socialist who ran on abolishing ICE.
She's been down at the border ranting and raving.
Now, the district is far left.
The district is predominantly immigrant, a lot of illegals.
English is, like I said, the second language in these areas.
Hard left, hard blue area.
But this was also Crowley's race to lose, and he really gave up.
The guy didn't show up for a debate, instead sending a surrogate who looked like Ocasio-Cortez.
That really offended people from the area.
You're running in an area.
You're running in an area in Queens and the Bronx, just predominantly minority.
And you then decide to show up as the white guy and send a Hispanic female as your surrogate, a Latina.
That's a slap in the face.
Now, this area, again, would never be a Republican seat.
I don't think the Republicans should even waste money on this area.
I don't think the Republicans should even run a candidate here.
It's a waste of money.
It'll never be an RC.
But I hope the Democrats keep doing this.
I hope Democratic voters in the farthest left districts continue to put forward these candidates who are this far left, who are admitted Democratic socialists.
It shows us the true face of the Democratic Party, just how far left the party has gone.
Now, she wants to abolish ICE.
She went to the border.
She was yelling at ICE agents through the fence.
She said, we have families and communities here in the 14th district from Ecuador and Colombia, Bangladesh, Korea, Pakistan.
And I see them every day.
And many of them are scared about what's going on with my campaign.
In terms of immigration, we're trying to say, hey, we got your back.
Well, if these people are illegal and you're a U.S. Congresswoman or you're elected, which you will be, take an oath to protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America.
No, you should have the back of the Department of Homeland Security and the rule of law, not the backs of illegal aliens.
And then lastly, we had the South Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary runoff between Henry McMaster and John Warren.
Now, McMaster, there had to be a runoff because he didn't get over 50% of the vote in the original primary.
He won last night.
He won by about six points, seven points.
7.2 points.
In fact, he won by just over 30, just under 30,000 votes, about 26,000 votes.
Trump rallied for him.
What was interesting is he didn't win in the areas surrounding Greenville, South Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina.
Why was that?
Is it that he was rejected by Republicans and was Trump?
Well, I don't think so.
Because he won in the rest of the state.
Big, big, big swatches of red over there.
This is an open primary state, South Carolina.
And I think in these areas, Greenville and Charleston, Democrats and independents voted in the Republican primary against Trump and anyone he supports rather than vote in the Dem primary for the Dem challenge.
Well, actually, don't even know.
I guess whoever the Dem was won in the primary.
I haven't followed the South Carolina race.
Quite honestly, there was no runoff.
But what it tells me is that Dems didn't vote, didn't vote in, or Dems that did vote in their primary.
Well, it looks like independents, those who didn't vote in that first primary might have waited till the Republican runoff to vote against McMaster and against Trump.
Now, Trump did a rally there.
And the question is, did the rally help McMaster?
Was it the rally that both pushed McMaster over the edge with those who weren't going to vote against, those who were solid R's, or did the rally energize the Democrats and the independents in an open primary state to vote against anyone aligned with Trump?
That's really going to be the question going into the midterms.
How energized is the left?
Now, I think McMaster handily wins reelection in South Carolina.
He became governor after Nikki Haley went over to be U.N. ambassador.
But I'm always really interested in watching these open primary states and how things shake out in these cities.
Because there's no reason Charleston and Greenville, the Republicans there wouldn't have also gone with McMaster.
This tells me that in those cities that have large concentrations of Dems and Independents in an open primary state, those Dems and Independents voted against Trump.
And that's why the opponent, John Warren, picked up as many votes as he did in those areas.
So it's going to be very, very interesting to watch going into November.
But I have to tell you, McMaster still won, still won comfortably.
Essentially, the entire middle, from north to south, center of the state of South Carolina went with McMaster.
By proxy, went with Trump after that rock concert of a rally.