You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty. Greetings, A good morning, pleasure being with you.
We will talk about the latest tariffs coming up here at seven thirty and swatting the law in about fifteen minutes. First, let's let's go back to one of the biggest stories that we've had in a while. Call it a White House scandal if you want to call it a witch hunt if you like, as the President does. And that
is the mixed signals we're getting. This is the signal group chat that was laying out plans for attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the National Security Advisor invited in a reporter from the Atlantic, which is awkward. So what happens now, Well, you better believe that Trump and many of his accolades are scrambling to figure out what's the angle that we can use on this in order to push back. Democrats are pouncing as you would expect.
Even Jesse Kelly, who's a radio host, says, we made a mistake, a bad mistake for which someone should be fired. That said, we gave them forty eight hours of the news cycle with our own stupidity. No need to give them seventy two. It's done.
Move on.
It's not a life sentence. So even people who are part of MAGA are saying.
Look, it's.
Over.
Let's just move on. Nothing to see here. Don't pay any attention to this. This is not a massive security breach. This is not a huge issue with security protocol, something that we threw a temper tantrum about when Hillary Clinton had a BlackBerry phone when she was a Secretary of State.
Just granted it's thirteen years after that, but we don't worry about it. This is no big deal.
Don't give them more of a news cycle, more of that US v Them approach to things. So, what's the latest on the fallout from the signal debacle from maybe.
As the White House and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth say no war plans were sent to a journalist on the messaging app Signal.
Nobody's texting more plans because of I know exactly what I'm doing.
The journalist satitor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg today publishing what he says Hegseth sent to President Trump's national security team and inadvertently him and a group message ahead of airstrikes in Yemen. Earlier this month, The Atlantic reports Hegseth notified the group of a planned timeline for flights of F eighteen fighter jets, MQ nine Reaper drones, and Tomahawk cruise missiles that were launched for the mission.
Now, one of the things that the administration is saying is these are not war plans. These were battle plans.
Oh well, that's it.
So it's semantics. These are battle plans, not war plans. We're not at war. We're at battle. This is akin to me getting caught cheating on my wife and saying, Honey, I didn't have an affair. I had an entanglement. So what's the big deal. It's not an affair, babe, that's an entanglement. You shouldn't be so upset with me. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Let me Dean is a News Nation reporter who's been covering the story for a while. Let'd be great to have you on here.
The President says, this is nothing more than a witch hunt. Is it something that we need to move on quickly from? And is it nothing more than a distraction for the American people from things we should really focus on, like are we getting enough vitamin A to fight off measles.
I think there's a lot of concerns for Americans right now, and this is certainly one of them, because the new U Gov. Pole actually showed that seventy five percent of Americans are very concerned about this signal group chat, so that being the latest that we're in day four here, of course, the talk is getting a little nuanced of
this group chat. But the reason it's continuing is because yesterday the Atlantic released these details the full conversation, in part the full conversation of what was discussed in the signal group chat with nineteen members of the Trump administration, while one of those, of course being Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist from the Atlantic who was included in this. So of course there's a lot of concerns on that front.
I also just spoke with the Press secretary here at the White House who said that they never denied the mistake was made when this group chat was made. Kind of a little bit of a messaging shift from the White House there rather than saying this was a witch hunt like President Trump was calling it yesterday.
All right, Livy, So how many countries do we suppose they're trying to gain access to private phones right now of some.
Of our officials, Well, I don't have a number for you on that. But of course national security is the utmost concern when it comes to this, and that's why intelligence officials were questioned in Congress. These hearings were already planned, but of course they shifted to focus all on this
group chat. And yesterday I got very fiery in the House Intelligence Committee when Director of National Intelligence TLCI Gabbard, as well as John Ratcliffe and Cash Pttel were all questioned about this group chat and they ultimately admitted that they were a part of it, some of them overseas. When they were a part of this group chat. Typically you would find these officials operating in this sense and a skiffs they do say that these weren't classified things
included in this. But if they weren't classified, why didn't they release them in the first place?
And obviously they've kind of painted themselves into a corner.
They can't be angry with UH, with Atlantic for printing this group chat if in fact it was not classified, right.
Right, That's a big question in the big back and forth that's been going on all week. If it was classified or not. But you can look at the messages for yourself and determine your thoughts on them. But of course that one message from Pete heegsas the Secretary of Defense really stands up to me where he gives timing of when bombs are going to be dropped. He said at one point, this is definitely when the bomb is
going to be dropped. They detailed who was being hit when they were hit, not something that you would typically expect in a signal group chat. Look, I've talked to Trump officials on signal before. I think this is a very common app that is used within the Trump world, but I don't think it has been used in this sense with a journalist privy. Who knows how many times it might have happened without a journalist privy.
So that was going to be my next question. Then, is there any word on whether or not signal will be used in the future. Are we clamping down and using skiffs moving forward, or is anybody.
That really interesting development?
Yeah?
Yeah, that was an interesting development here at the White House yesterday when the White House Press Secretary did a briefing, she said that signal is approved on government device It's something that I didn't even realize was the case. And of course they said actually that they aren't backing away
from signal and they plan on still using it. The President Trump yesterday when he was speaking to the press, actually said that there might have been some kind of glitch with signal, trying to blame signal for this journalist being added, when Mike Waltz clearly took the blame for adding Jeffrey Goldberg to this chat. So signal moving forward definitely a question on if the Trump administration plans on using it. It sounds like they do at this point.
But of course national security officials are going to have to be more tight lipped and not go adding journalists to One of the things.
That we've heard Libby Diner, a News Nation reporter, is that this editor for The Atlantic was a disgraced journalist from a two bit magazine, that he's no good. And if that's the case, why why would Mike Walls, the National Security Advisor, have his info in his phone in.
The first place.
Yeah, And Mike Waltz was asked about that during an interview and he basically said that this was in put it into his phone or sucked into his phone or something, is how he described it. He didn't give a very clear description on his relationship with Jeffrey Goldberg. I saw that Goldberg did an interview where he also wouldn't detail his relationship, but he basically said, look, my phone number is in Mike Walltz's phone for a reason, and if he wants to discredit me, he can. And that is
what the Trump administration has spent all week doing. It seems like they're kind of taking a shift with their messaging here saying that they're admitting it was a mistake, but also yesterday we heard them rail, and the day before and the day before that, we heard them rail against Jeffrey Goldberg. That was their main line of attack. We'll see if that continues throughout the day today.
And is there any word on whether or not that messaging is hitting home with the with the the.
Mag of faithful Look.
I think that attacking the media is certainly something that lands with the Trump base. I think that they're very familiar with that kind of attack, and people can make up their mind on if that's credible or not. And Jeffrey Goldberg has criticized President Trump in the past as a journalist, so I think there are things to look into in this fact, but he was involuntarily added to this chat and now he's just reporting the facts and part of us with the chat.
So indeed, Levy Dan, here's nation reported Lebby, thanks for the great reporting, Well done.
Yeah, thank yous appreciate that. Yeah, very good. All right.
We know that we've had a couple of high profile swatting incidents in southern California here and the last few weeks we're actually seeing a number of swatting incidences, incidents incidents.
Growing nationwide.
In fact, one happened to a radio host, syndicated host out of Texas, and the FCC.
Chair Brendan Carr, actually got in on this.
He was mentioning that it was politically motivated, but he says he called it political violence, saying that he had been in touch with law enforcement to ensure that they have access to trace back resources that locate the calls originating point. Bad actors will face accountability that according to the FCC, when it comes to some of these others incidences incident SI. But what about closer to home, Well, believe it or not, you can't do a whole lot.
If somebody swats, and by swatting, I mean they call in law enforcement and they file a false claim saying oh, there's a bomb or something, you can't really do a whole lot about it if it's if it's done against an institution. Now, if Amy were to say that that Chris Merrill has a bomb, then she would be committing
a crime. If in fact, she were to say that something's happening at the radio station right now in the state, you can't do a lot as far as prosecution goes, Which brings us to what we saw in Clarmont where uh, I mean, if you're saying it's happening at a hospital or a college or something of that sort, what can be done well? Legislators aren't tackling the matter. Cakew was reporting.
That Claremont Peedee says the intent to prosecute the people who recently pulled a swatting incident here, but they're often hard to track down and to prosecute. They're hoping some new laws will change that. Massive law enforcement responses at both Claremont McKenna College and Lowilinda University Medical Center last week after two separate swatting calls or hoax at nine to one one reports in two days required both campuses to be evacuated.
Then here there's like a potential shooter, Like yeah, yeah, that's It's also quite disruptive too.
I mean, you're not just disrupting one person. You're talking about disrupting the operations of a hospital.
Send students in Claremont into a panic.
Everyone else was kind of running around and leaving campus.
So it's definitely scary, very freaky.
I was on the phone calling all of my friends.
At a time when swatting calls are on the rise across the country.
I just said that.
Why are police departments here in California struggling to hold the suspects account of the.
Why you can hide your regular phone number, your IP address. You can basically use a voiceover for you your own voice, so it disguises your voice. So any that type of evidence we're looking for is very hard to track down.
But it's also because of California laws that require.
At some point, speaking of disguising your voice, at some point, one of us is gonna get wrapped up in a in a legal matter. You know that, right at some point they're gonna they're gonna take samples of Bill's voice or Amy's voice, or Neil Savadra's voice, and they're gonna use AI to process it, and then they're gonna have what sounds like Neil or Amy or Bill may could dastardly call and.
Then there's gonna be a knock on the door.
Ah, yes, mister handle, we'd like to talk to you about a recent phone call you made. And Bill's gonna go, I don't even know how my cell phone works. I have and make the calls for me. But this is gonna happen. You're gonna you're gonna start getting You're gonna start getting uh, crank calls from Keanu Reeves, from Taylor Swift, You're gonna start getting crank calls from all kinds of celebrities whose voices have simply been emulated by AI.
Mark my words.
But it's also because of California laws that require perpetrators here to threaten specific people instead of just an entity like a school or a hospital in order to prosecute.
So what do we do, Tom, Especially since ore now reaching across the us A, people are realizing this is a bigger issue than what we're actually thinking about.
This Bill really is going to tackle that loopo where you don't need to mention a person and it's still against the law.
Senator Susan Rubio, who represents Baldwin Park, authored a new built SB nineteen which allows prosecutors to charge people who make any credible threats of mass violence at schools, houses of warship.
I mean, this one seems like a no brainer. Why did it take so long?
Children deserve better, our students, our communities deserve better. So hopefully you know this will set a strong message.
Students we spoke with think threats of violence should not be tolerated.
If it negatively impacts the community that it affects. It negatively impacts the police because they could be doing a myriad of other things.
And yeah, this is not a free speech issue because this is intended to incite immediate reaction.
For those of you that say, well, I was my speech not protecting.
No, no, this is the definition of an exception to free speech. It is intended to incite immediate reaction here and in this case violence or at the very least, disruption by the authorities.
So no false threats, not okay.
And Senator Rubio says these swatting calls often cost one hundred thousand dollars in police response when you factor in things like helicopters and getting responding agencies out to help clear campuses. She says it's important for parents to talk to their kids about how serious it is to make a threat. But you know, sometimes the people who do these swatting calls are adults reporting in claremont nicolecom Stock Kkel News.
Yeah, I think oftentimes we and I'm glad you made that point because oftentimes I think we say, oh.
The kids these days, here's what they're doing. I don't think so.
I think sometimes you've just got some disgruntled or off kilter people that they're bored. They like the challenge or the adventure. They like to make people jump. Maybe they are sitting alone in their home and they feel powerless and this gives them some element of control. I'm sure there's a psychological factor to this, but either way, we've got to tighten the laws up so that we can track these people down and stop the sort of nonsense
in the future. So if you missed it, the President introduced tariffs on all vehicles that are produced outside of the United States and tariffs on all car parts that are produced outside of the United States. This is going to have an impact. It's going to have an impact on the new car market, and I'm going to tell you in a minute that it's going to have an impact on the.
Used car market as well.
NBCLA was doing a breakdown on what this means to you inside.
The Oval Office. President Trump explains what he just signed, so.
Will effectively be charging a twenty five percent tariff. But if you build your car in the United States, seris no tariff.
The tariff's go into effect permanently on April second, when it comes to trade. That's the day the President has referred to as Liberation Day in America.
This is the beginning of Liberation Day in America.
Oh wait a minute, hold on, So March twenty sixth, and will you just mark down March twenty six for our Liberation Day celebrations moving forward, Thank you, we'll just call it l Day.
We're going to take back just some of the money that has been taken from us.
And this is a direct attack, to be clear, a direct attack.
Autos are Canada's second largest export, and tonight Prime Minister Carney says he will assess the details of the Trump decision before taking retaliatory measures.
Oh, they're coming. There will be retaliatory measures.
But vowing to protect hundreds of thousands of Canadian auto workers, we are going to.
Stand up for Canada. We're going to be united.
In Japan, autos make up twenty eight percent of the country's total exports to the US.
Wow, I realized it was that much.
Ichibun, Japan's Prime Minister Isshub telling lawmakers he is strongly requesting the US not apply these tariffs to Japan and is quote considering all options in response to them. President trum said he expects auto firms to relocate to the United States and build new side or expand existing ones.
And of course there are some here.
We know that Honda's open site, Hyundai's open the site, Toyota's got a plant here.
But still parts.
Aren't necessarily being manufactured here. In fact, many parts for domestic automakers are manufactured elsewhere.
These twenty five percent terrace will almost certainly increase the cost consumers will pay to buy new vehicles affected by the duties. We wait to see how the stark market will react when it opens, but shares of the top us automakers did fall sharply in after hours trading. So just how will these tariffs impact you? Well, according to autoweek, prices will go.
Up and be passed on to buyers.
Autoweek says, depending on the model you purchase, expect to pay between four and twelve thousand dollars more.
I'm Robert Cavosik, all right, so four and twelve thousand dollars more. By the way, I'm looking at the market right now, and the Dow is pretty flat four it is down four percent, so we are seeing that there are some some of these movers that are moving.
In the wrong direction.
But overall, let me see, S and P is up, no, slightly up, it's about flat and NASDAK is just up thirty five points. So what does this mean to your pocketbook? It means that if you want to buy a car, it's gonna cost you more. And that doesn't just go for new cars. That's gonna go for used cars too. And here's the logic, it's pretty basic economics. The price of the new cars goes up four to twelve thousand dollars, So you say, well, I'm not gonna give four to
twelve thousand dollars more for that new car. I'm gonna buy a gently owned, a gently loved used car.
Maybe it's a.
Certified pre owned, doesn't matter. You're not the only one doing that, which means that demand for used cars goes up. If new cars are up four to twelve thousand dollars, you're gonna start looking at a gently pre owned vehicle, and so everybody else. If demand goes up and supply remains the same, then you're gonna see.
The prices go up.
Expect supply, however, in the used car market to decline, and the reason is if you are considering a new vehicle, but all of a sudden, that new vehicle price goes up four to twelve thousand dollars, you might say, let's see how say much longer I can push this one? Because there is no cost in new car payments if you're still driving the old car now. The old car costs might go up because of maintenance, but your other
costs they don't increase. So the best way to save money is to not buy a new vehicle.
The longer you.
Make your car last, the more value you get out of it, and as a result, fewer cars will be entering into the used car market, which means supply drops at the same time that demand is up. Expect to see US cars increase in price in the same way that we're about to see these vehicles go up in price. Now, one interesting little tidbit too on the side here is that Tesla is the ones least likely impacted by the US tariffs on vehicles because Tesla does their manufacturing here
in the United States. So some are gonna You're gonna hear people screaming about how this is an unfair trade advantage being granted to Tesla, and this is all elon musk and YadA, YadA, YadA. I don't I don't buy that this falls under the president's tariff philosophy. It just happens that his top advisor is a South African born in Canada and doing business in the United States, and he will benefit from this to a degree because as soon as there are retaliatory tariffs, that's when Tesla's gonna
get stung. And where do you know that he's been trying to crack into the Chinese market that hasn't gone very well. Chinese byd auto manufacturer actually just introduced some new charging technology, new battery technology that is superior to anything that we have stateside. If Japan all of a sudden says, oh, you're gonna tear if our cars, We're definitely.
Going to hit any vehicles that are coming out of the United States.
That's gonna have an impact on US automakers, including Tesla, and Tesla of course wants to see growth in Europe, and Europe's going to say, uh.
New the take a long wump of a shoot bridge and then it's gonna hit.
It's gonna hit him, but not until there are retaliatory tariffs, and when there are expect to hear more bad French accents from yours. Truly, there is an issue with some of the DNA samples that the La County Sheriff's Department had tested in the past. Now they have to retest them all because somebody didn't get an email.
Oops.
So very bizarre situation about how all of this went down. So here's the thing. The Sheriff's partment over at their science lab has a series of DNA tests that they use for various crimes like sex crimes, DNA and murders, all kinds of different things. So here's the deal. The company that provides those tests for them notified the sheriff's partment that the tests that they had were bad. The problem is is the company sent a letter to a person who no longer works at the sheriff's department.
Oops, yeah, that's a problem.
So that happened more than a year ago, and so for the last amount of time since that letter was sent out, the Sheriff's Department continued to use those tests, not knowing that they were actually bad.
Here's the thing.
The company that runs the testing program says it doesn't provide false positives, but it's just not as reliable as they should be. So what happens now Now the department is trying to retest four thousand DNA samples to figure out if everything is still okay with the way it was tested the first time. The problem is, as we've reported before, in certain crimes, in certain situations, there's not a lot of DNA evidence to test, So in some cases there may be none left to retest.
With these cases. Uh oh, that's a problem. Now.
Isn't it interesting that this email got sent to somebody that's no longer with the sheriff's department, which means either they left the sheriff's department and the email was taken away, which means that the email was sent to a box it no longer exists and it's up in the ether. And I don't know if they got a return message at the manufacturer, but they didn't do any other follow They certainly didn't send a second notice, third notice, another
way of contacting. Or it's somebody that was terminated from the sheriff's department, in which case maybe they're even getting the notification and they're going, well, shouldn't.
Have fired me, and then they delete the email.
To be honest, I would have done that unless I thought that it was putting somebody in jail, you know, wrongly, then I would probably follow up.
But if I thought that.
You know what this is on you guys, yeah, I probably would have just deleted the email, been like, shouldn't have fired me?
Now, what does this mean for all of the cases that have already gone through judicial system using these now hampered essentially DNA tests. Well, the District Attorney's office is working with the sheriff to try to sort all of that out. Defense attorneys could certainly get a hold of this and demand that certain things be retested or retried, and they could have a very big implication for the criminal justice system.
We'll have to wait and play that out.
By the way, the Sheriff's department is the only one that's come forward and told us about this issue, but we are told that other law enforcement agencies in the county also use that company. So we're reaching out to the different agencies throughout LA County to figure out if anybody else has been in this test. But we are talking thousands of bad DNA tests at least what the Sheriff's department gest.
And that's just Sheriff's department. As he said, this could be. This could have a wider fallout. And if I'm a if I am a defense attorney, I'm salivating right now. I mean salivating, not like into a sample tube that they can future test, but I'm salivating like figuratively speaking, that would be They've got to be very excited about that. Hey, before we move to the news here, I want to
take just to tell a personal story. If I can't has nothing to do with this, amy, can would you mind if you have a second I know you're trying to put your newscast together. So my my wife and daughter, just I mean twenty minutes ago left on a very long road trip. They're going to be on the road for the next thirty hours. And so I had to send a message to my daughter and told her to use ways, And I said, you're going to need to use ways.
And choose the voice Amy on that.
And so she's all excited now that she has a celebrity who's giving.
Her directions to wherever she's going. And I think that's pretty cool. She says, it's pretty cool.
Anyway, Well, I hope I don't steer her wrong.
We would blame the app, We wouldn't blame the voice.
Oh no, you should see Shannon Farren. She comes in and yells at me.
She dies, yeah, how dare she?
Yeah? Amy, you kicked me off the other day. You sent me the wrong direction.
How long did you have to record stuff for that? Did that take forever to get?
No? No, no, really no, it didn't take very long.
And I did it when the app was first unveiled, so in its crowdsource, so it was brand new when it came out.
But no, it didn't take that long.
It's only about one hundred prompts because they mix and match them.
Oh okay, so you have to so you would do like one word like turn. You wouldn't say turn left in half a mile mile, turn say in one mile, and then you say turn left.
Oh that's fascinating.
Yeah, that's great. I love it when you take me behind the scenes on that stuff.
Thank you for sharing that anytime. Appreciate that.
Yeah, I will let you know if you do indeed, steer them wrong?
Makes it? Why does that say boise ten miles? We weren't even we weren't even north of Colorado.
That's yeah.
Yeah, we're gonna learn how to money with Joel Larsgard. He joins us next Chris merrill In for Bill Handle Today kf I Am six forty were lab everywhere in the iHeartRadio app.
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