America On Fire

lot of us. Luckily, we will break down the whole story and what it means. This is verdict with Ted Cruz, Senator. A lot has happened since last Friday, since the last time we spoke. I can't even believe. I mean, it seems like just a completely different political situation now. And you see it everywhere, not just on the news. You see it on social media, people posting various hashtags and if you don't post a certain hashtag, you're smeared. Is a bigot and a racist. We're at each other's throats.

I mean, literal buildings are on fire. I know you spoke on the Senate floor about this this week. What's your take? Well, listen, this has been a tough week in our nation's history. What we've seen all across the country has been really, really hard. How do you think through this, Well, I mean, let's start with some first principles. Don't murder people, don't hurt people. Yeah, don't steal from people. You know, when it comes to the constitution, every one

of us has a right to free speech. Every one of us has a right to protest, to speak. But what you don't have a right to do is commit acts of violence. What you don't have a right to do is shatter store windows. What you don't have a right to do is burn police cars. What you don't have a right to do is murder police, all officers. And so we're seeing all of these come crashing in. It started with something truly horrific. What happened to George Floyd.

It was wrong, it was evil, it was grotesque. At this point, all of us have seen those eight minutes of video. What happened to George Floyd was wrong, and the criminal justice system needs to hold those who violated that, which in that instance was four Minneapolis police officers, one who put his knee on his neck and took mister Floyd's life grotesquely, and three others who stood around and didn't stop him. But then we saw the anger, the

paroxysms that came out of that initially manifesting protests. Now, look, protests are perfectly legitimate. They are are quintessentially American. We have the right under the First Amendment to speak out and to speak out for racial equality, to speak out for equal justice under law. The law should apply to everyone fairly, regardless of your skin color, and and and the protests calling for standing for racial equality. We were in the best tradition of America. But then we saw

violent criminals. Then we saw terrorists. Then we saw looters and thieves infiltrate these protests and begin rinking mayhem, begin

destroying communities, begin committing acts of violence. And I gotta say to every one of those violent criminals who slipped into the otherwise peaceful protests and began rioting and committing acts of terror, what they did was not only wrong when criminally was bigoted, because what they did is they tried to corrupt a legitimate expression of free speech and and a laudable goal, a goal this nation was built on the proposition that all of us are created equal.

They tried to corrupt it and it was wrong, and and and I got to say, watching our country burn this past week, it's been horrifying, it has been, and it's got to stop. Senator. I'm actually struck by the simplicity of your observation because it's something that we're we actually haven't gotten from the mainstream media, we haven't gotten from a lot of politicians, which is, let's go back to first principles. It's wrong to murder, it's wrong to steal.

It's wrong to commit violence against innocent people. It's good to voice your own expressions of anger and injustice, it's good for justice to be served. Still wrong to steal, still wrong to murder. I was watching CNN. That's a statement that I rarely utter, but I was watching CNN and Chris Cuomo, the brother of the Democratic governor of New York, Chris Cuomo, came out and explicitly defended violent protest which also known as riots, also known as domestic terrorism.

I mean, he said, actually, show me where it says that protests have to be polite and peaceful. Could you show him where it says that, Senator, Well, there is this little thing called the United States Constitution. Oh, Yeah, the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment protects the right of the people to peaceably assemble peaceably. To assemble peaceably

is right in there. So there's a difference. You can stand up and protests, and by the way, some of the most effective protests in the world have been peaceable, non violent protest. I want to touch on Antifa, and I think you've actually honed in here on what lies at the heart of this. It's not just Chris Cuomo going out and saying protests should be violent. It's at Keith Ellison, the Attorney General of Minnesota, held up a photo smiling with a book called the Antifa Handbook, smiling

in photos with people in Antifa. Antifa stands for anti fascist. They don't behave like anti fascists. I mean they do in the sense that they behave like radical communists and anarchists. When you march in and violently assault people, you were being FA. You're not Antifa, You're FA. You've gone full FA here, and you know, I think the President this week said that he wants to classify them as a terrorist organization and a very very basic definition of terrorism.

They're using violence against civilians to achieve political ends. It's as simple as it gets. It seems pretty clear. What is the role of Antifa here and what does it say about the state of our country that you've got elected officials voicing support for them. Well, listen. For two years, I've been calling on the Trump administration to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. I introduced a resolution last year in the Senate calling on Antifa to be designated

because they go in and they commit violent assaults. They commit violent attacks, and these typically are our young anarchists. They're often rich white college kids who wear masks. And look, you know that they're sitting there with their thousand dollars iPhones saying capitalism is evil, let's burn it all to the ground. And interestingly enough, they're not burning their dorm room to the ground. No, no, no, no no, no, that

that would be too much. They're going into the inner city and they're burning to the ground the communities that that people have to live in it and it is it's grotesque, it's wrong. And look, Keith Ellison's son is a city council member in Minneapolis. He tweeted out that he stands with Atifa. There Antifa, they're literally burning his city to the ground, and these Democratic politicians. And I'll tell you if anyone behave worse than that, it's Hollywood celebrities.

So Hollywood celebrities are all engaged in this virtue signaling where they're giving money to bail the rioters out of jail. And this is literally so, you know, I engage with some of these celebrities and asked, hey, hey, wait a second. You know, justin Timberlake was like, oh, give money to

this fund to bail the writers out of jail. How about you give money to a fund to rebuild the African American and Hispanic owned small businesses that have been burned to the ground by these violent criminals, instead of bailing the criminal out of jail. Right, help the innocent victims. And let's take another component of it, the words black lives matter. Ye, this has been at inchous point. Yeah it shouldn't be. Do black lives matter, absolutely, yes, unequivocally period,

Black lives matters. But here's the part that's deemed, Oh, you can't say that. You can't say black lives matter, Hispanic lives matter, Asian lives matter, White lives matter, human life matters. Right, and and Okay, so why is that a political statement? This is so. I actually had this conversation with with my daughters today where they were talking about some YouTuber that raised a bunch of money for BLM. Of course, my daughters already know the acronym BLM. I like,

so tell me what what does BLM stand for? And you know, my daughter said, what you know? Equality? Equality is good and I was like, yeah, that's that's certainly true. But if you look at the radicals who are co opting the message black lives matter, what they're advocating is number one, an absolute assault on police. I'll tell you

who it hurts. It hurts African Americans, It hurts Hispanics because you know why, because when this happens, if you look at what happened in Ferguson, you look at what happened in Baltimore, there's something called the Ferguson effect, which is essentially that when cops feel like, okay, if I get it in an interaction, maybe with a criminal, and somehow it gets violent, my whole life can be destroyed by career, can be destroyed by family can be destroyed,

And the perfectly rational thing to do is, hey, I'm going to step back. I'm not going to engage, of course, And what you see happen over and over again as the murder rate skyrocket. Right. We saw that happened in Ferguson, we saw that happen in Baltimore, and you end up

with a laite. If you are committed to the proposition black lives matter, demonizing the cops will end up with more Black lives being lost more because, by the way, the people being murdered most frequently right by violent criminals, by gangs are people in low income neighborhoods, and often they're African Americans or Hispanic Well, this is I think the key point here, because you know, people see that phrase black lives matter, and they say, if you don't

support this organization and the most radical leaders of this organization, then somehow you don't care about black lives. And the fact is virtually statistically nobody in this country thinks black lives don't matter. Anybody with any political influence it believes black lives matter. Anybody with any media influence believes black lives matter. Anybody with any business influence, right, major corporations don't any millions and millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter.

Anybody with an Instagram account or a Twitter account or Facebook believes black lives matter. Everybody agrees on this point. But some radicals, some people pushing things that are not so great, that are not so popular, are co opting that very basic message that everybody agrees with and using it to put push radical leftist ideas that the vast,

vast majority of Americans don't want. And it's so cynical, and it's so bullying, and it's so intimidating that I think a lot of people are just lost on what to do. So, Michael, I'll give an example. One of the agenda items of the radicals that are leading this movement is to use their phrase defund the police. This past week that was tweeted by Hillary Clinton's former press secretary, defund the police. Let me ask you for a second, how good do you think it would be for African

American communities if there were no police officers? Yeah, not quit. Just the drug dealers could run free, if the street gangs could run free. It's already the murder rates are are are horrific. How good would it be for your family or mind? How many Americans this week, as you watch the rioting, thought about the right to keep in bear arms. I'm sure the lines are around how many? How many? How many? Thought about what happens if that mob comes to my house? Right, and that that is

an extreme agenda and it's not right. You know what, here's the name. The media doesn't want to talk about it. David Dorn. David Dorne was a retired police officer in Saint Louis, Missouri. David Dorne was shot by rioters. He was protecting the pawn shop. He's a small businessman. He was shot and murdered. David Dorn spent four decades serving honorably as a police officer. And David Dorn was murdered by this rioting, and yet the media didn't want to

talk about him. Yeah, if you believe in black lives matters, David Dorn's life matters, give you another name. David Underwood, who was another law enforcement officer, was murdered Las Vegas. You had another law who was also David under was African American as well. We had two African American police officers murdered by this rioting, and yet the woke virtue signal allerts in Hollywood on CNN, on Twitter, those lives

don't matter to them at all, right, and it's wrong. Look, we should protect everybody's life, and we should have a passion in this whole racial issue and this whole issue of the protests and the riots. I mean, in the fact of the riots and the protests. Probably the most outrageous cynicism is that just a week ago, we were told if you go outside to do anything, you're killing grandma,

You're endangering people because of the coronavirus. If you go God forbid to protest any of the lockdown orders, you are a terrible, no good, awful person. And then this week we're told by the very same public health experts, by the very same politicians, everybody should go out by the hundred thousand to protest in this left wing narrative. I mean, people look at that, and I think our

capacity for outrage just goes out the window. Right. Well, Look, one of the more ridiculous hypocrites on this has been Billed de Blasio in New York who de Blasio was asked this list last week, So if you can come and protest and get much much closer than six feet apart. Can we go to church, can we go to synagogue? And de Blasio said no, no no, no, no, no, because because there's a history of racial discrimination in America, but

there's no history of religious discrimination. What utter crap. By the way, not mean you want to talk about millennia of racial of racial discrimination, yes, but but a religious persecution. I mean, we are in a country that was literally founded by people fleeing religious persecution. You look at the pilgrims who arrived here. They arrived to come to a

land where they could practice their faith. And by the way, you want to talk about people persecuted for faith, you look at the Jewish community in New York City, who do Blasio has singled out for persecution over and over and over again. You know, Jews in World War two, six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. To say there's no history of religious discrimination, it's absurd. Is a

political leftist, anti American narrative. That is nonsense, and the hypocrisy of it is really coming out amid all this chaos. Two point five million jobs added in May. The economy is now, I mean the stock market surged when we got this news. Is there a chance that we could see something like a V shaped recovery. Is there a chance that we could come out of this thing pretty strong? Look, I hope. So the job numbers are fantastic. We're seeing

states all across the country reopening. Texas is reopening. And let me say that this is a powerful sign. Open up the economy. Now, yeah, let people go back to work. Now, that doesn't mean ignore all of the efforts we're doing. You look, we can engage in social distancing, we can continue to be prudent, but open it up. Let people go back to work. Two and a half million new jobs. Now, we've had forty million people lose their jobs, so two

and a half million. But you know what, it's the first time in a long time we haven't seen job numbers that were several million going down, right, So instead of going down, they're going back up sharply. And I hope we keep seeing it go back up. The forty million jobs that went away were self inflicted. We did this to stop the pandemic. Now let's let people open up.

Let's let them get back to work and and and get the economy movie again that these job numbers are really encouraging and we need to keep keep moving in that direction. That's great news. And before we get to mailbag, because I do want to hit the mailbag, there is there is one more story on the subject of destruction

that I've got to get back to. Obviously, destruction has been in the news a lot, but it's important, I think, to talk about your absolute destruction of Rod Rosenstein's testimony before the Senate when when you were discussing the gross mishandling of things over the past several years at the DOJ, Could you just tell us a little bit about this because I think for those of us who have been gasolit for years and years on this subject of how the DOJ was going after Trump, I think it was

just so refreshing to see you shed light on what was really happening. What we now know, as more and more information has got in public, is that the Obama Biden administration politicized the FBI, politicized the Department of Justice, politicized the intelligence community, and targeted at the Trump campaign. Targeted them at Donald Trump directly. They targeted them with wire taps, directed at a Carter Page, a senior adviser

to the Trump campaign. They targeted it with spy sent in wearing wires confidential import formance to the Trump campaign. They're opposing campaign, and they went after in particular, General Michael Flynn, a three star general who'd spent his entire life fighting for this country, and they directly targeted. We now know that the decision to target them went all the way to the top. On January fifth, twenty seventeen, there's a meeting in the White House in the Oval Office.

Barack Obama was there, Joe Biden was there, James Comey was there, the head of the FBI, and he reported to the President and to the Vice President about their targeting of Michael Flynn, the incoming National Security Advisor. Sally Yates, who was the acting Attorney General, said she didn't know anything about it. So she learned that the FBI was targeting the incoming national security advisor from Barack Obama. Because the FBI was briefing the president directly. That is such

an abuse of power. And if you look at everything that has come out, the Inspector General report at the Department of Justice showed that the FBI was totally politicized. It showed seventeen material misstatements that were made to the FISA court. It also showed that that a senior FBI lawyer fraudulently altered evidence and so, and here's what he did, because it's worth her memory. I mean, it really is.

It's like out of a bad spy movie. So they're trying to get a warrant to wire tap Carter Page, and they're trying to renew the warrant, and Carter Page is talking to a bunch of Russians. And so, look, if you're talking to a bunch of Russians, that's ordinarily kind of suspicious. Why are you talking to a bunch of Russians? Now he is a Russia expert, so but even so there's a little bit of suspicion there. So the FBI sent an email to the CIA, said, hey,

is this guy working for you? Because if you're working for the CIA on going after the Russians, then you probably ought to be talking to the Russians if you're working for the CIA. CIA sends an email back, Yep, he's working for US. So CIA says in writing, Carter Page is working for the United States government when he's talking to the Russians. The FBI lawyer takes that email and alters it and literally changes that one hundred and

eighty degrees the opposite. Instead of yes, he's working for us, he alters it and creates a fraudulent document, No, he's not working for us, and that gets submitted to the court. If you or I did that in any court in a traffic ticket, right, if you created a fraudulent document and submitted it, you would go to jail. I would

go to jail. And so Rod Rosenstein was testifying. And by the way, Rosenstein signed one of those applications, and I laid out that history that I just walked through, and I said, listen, you were coming into a deeply politicized, corrupted law enforcement environment. There are two and only two possibilities. One you were complicit in the weaponization of law enforcement against one political party, or you were grossly neglighent. Those

are the only two choice. And when we walked through, I said, look, did you did you know about the Steel dossier that was the basis of this whole application. The principal witnessed behind it and said, oh, it's not reliable. It was all just a bunch of guys talking at a bar. It's not reliable. Did you know that. No, did you know that there was a bunch of exculpatory information. No, did you know that this lawyer had fraudulently created this document? No?

Did you know that the guy was working for the CIA at the time. No, did you know that the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, had paid for this oppo research pile of lies? No? And Rosenstein just didn't ask any of it. He was just a rubber stamp. He just said, well, the FBI told me that, so I just listened to them. And what it raised Now, it's interesting, Rosenstein testified. He said, if he knew what he knew now, he never would have signed it. He would not have approved the wire tap.

That now means the next step is to go ask people like James Comby, go ask people like Andrew McCabe, the happy at the FBI, because there were people lying and complicit and the responsibility I believe goes all the way to the top. And I got to say in this hearing, one of the most interesting things Michael Senate Democrats so desperately wanted to change the topic that they I mean, you could see the panic. No, no, no, no, don't ask they and they just didn't care about law

enforcement being abused. And look, I understand why Joe Biden is their nominee. They don't want anything that touches Joe Biden. They want zero fall. And they've elevated Obama the sainthood so so so in their narrative, Obama could never do anything wrong and and and Biden is their only hope. And but I gotta say so, I asked this week yesterday, actually it is a Senate here, and I said, look, what would you guys think if Donald Trump did exactly

what Obama and Biden did? What would you think if Donald Trump today sent the FBI to wire tap the Joe Biden presidential campaign? Right? What would you think today if Donald Trump sent in FBI spies wearing wires to the Joe Biden presidential campaign? What would you think today if Donald Trump's directed the FBI to submit fraudulent evidence

to a federal court to target the Biden campaign. And by the way, we also know that General Michael Flynn, that his identity was unmasked, was revealed by Joe Biden himself personally and directly. Joe Biden did that. That's stunning. And I got to say also, so one of the things that became public in recent weeks. There's an email from Susan Rice. It stated January twentieth, twenty seventeen. Now, Michael, you and I both know what that date is. That is the date Donald Trump was being sworn in. So

Susan Ry, this is a national security advisor. She's on her way out. Now. Think about it. Usually your last day in the office. What are you doing. You're packing up your desk, picking up the plants, take the photos down. She sends an email to herself. Just pause to think for a second. Your last day in the office. What do you want to do? You send an email to yourself. It's one of the funniest CYA emails you've ever read.

She says three times that President Obama has directed this investigation into Flynn, and she says three times it's by the book, by the book, by the book, by the book. The only reason you send that is you're sitting there going, oh crap, the new guys are gonna come in and they're gonna find out about all this. Let me write an email to say we're doing everything by the book. It The only reason you write that email is indicative of a deeply guilty conscious. I think I think we

need to know who abuse the political process. There needs to be accountability, and those who broke the law need to be prosecuted. That's right. It's evidence of a guilty conscience and the cleverness to realize this isn't going to be looking very good when the new guys get into power. Before we go, I've just got to get to a few maale back questions here. First one from Margo, why are you two still socially distancing? Go get a cigar together,

Senator your thoughts damn straight? Come to DC next week? Will film that works for me? All right? John asks? What are the effects this will have on the twenty twenty election? Do you think this hurts Trump, Moore or Biden? I don't know. I think twenty twenty is incredibly volatile. Yeah, I think it depends Number one, on what happens with coronavirus. If the numbers suddenly starts skyrocketing, that is really bad for America, but that's also probably bad for Trump as well.

Number two, what happens with the account me If if we see massive job losses between now and election days, that's really bad for Trump. If we see with the sort of thing we just saw in these job numbers, the economy coming back, that's really good. And and this this racial divisioning and division and rioting. Um look, rioting, I think scares people. I think it as it also shows just radical, how radical and extreme the Democrats are. It's really unmasked them that that that I don't think

has helped Joe Biden. If a Democratic presidency means the radicals who want to burn our cities to the ground or put in charge, that ain't good. So how all of this plays out. I look at this election and I think there's a huge delta. What I hope we will see is I hope we will see the economy coming back, optimism coming back, hope, and the promise of America. And if that's the case, we could see a really good election. We could see the president reelected by a

big margin. We could see the Republican majority in the in the Senate grow, and we could see Republicans taking the House. That's what I hope will happen. That people will look at this craziness of Nancy Pelosi and the extreme, radicalized left and say, we don't want any of that. But this is uncharted territory, and so if if things go really badly, we could end up with a terrible

election right uncharted territory in many ways. Darrell asks, what's your take on the use of military personnel to help quell the riots. I know your senate colleague Tom Cotton got the New York Times and a lot of trouble because he weighed in on this, and some of the younger Time staffers were very upset by it. Well, okay, so so let me take two different issues there, because they're both worth addressing. The New York Times you literally

can't write satire about them anymore. They're so ridiculous an extreme. So Tom Cotton wrote an op ed in The Times that said, send the troops in, advocated for sending in the military to bring peace to the cities, and the New York Times began to have an epileptic fit. Like like like, their reporters began began trembling, and one after the other, they were triggered and they were mad. How dare you publish this view? This view is violence to me.

And you've got reporters. You know, you remember that the old archetype of the tough grizzled reporter Shane Smoking was going to speak truth to power, was gonna uncover whatever's going on. You've now got these pansies who are reporters that are just like Mommy. Scary words. Scary words hied me from the scary words like Okay, if you disagree with Tom Cotton, all right, buckaroo, here's a crazy idea. Man up and argue why you think he's wrong. That's okay,

that's called free speech. And by the way, listen, I actually think Tom, I don't. I don't agree with everything Tom said, and you actually look at the substance of it. How do you keep cities safe in terms of how it operates under the law. The first line of defense are our police officers. It's why I'm so vigorous and saying, don't undermine our cops. Let let law enforcement do its job.

We've seen a lot of democratic politicians basically tying police officers hands behind their back, preventing them from keeping cities safe. And so the first line of a line of defense are the police. The second line of defense is the national guard. And so if the police are overwhelmed, you can call up the national guard that provides an additional

wave of strength, and the military is available. Look, there is a long tradition of the military in a case of violent insurrection, in case of rioting, coming in, but the military is the third and final step. And so I think there's some Republican politicians that are showing how

tough they are by saying sending the Marines on day one. Well, look, if we need to, yes, we need to do whatever is needed to keep people safe, but let's start with not handcuffing the police officers and let them actually protect our communities. And the military should only be a last resort, I believe right, fair point much more. We'll have to leave it there. We'll have to wait until the next episode. But Senator, if that Stogy invitation is real, I will

call the airline right now. I will book a ticket and I will see you in DC. Together. You and I are gonna light some fires. That works for me. See on the East coast. Senator, I'm Michael Knowles. This

is Verdict with Ted Cruz. This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations and candidates across the country in twenty twenty two, Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.