Anna Navarro (2:47)
Visit Safeway or albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save. Hi, everyone. Welcome to bleep. I'm Anna Navarro, and it's been yet another crazy news cycle since the last podcast. We are now at war with Iran. And yes, it is war with Iran, no matter how much Republicans in Congress want to call it anything other than war. We are not stupid. We have eyes. We have ears. We realize what's going on in Iran is a war that, that Donald Trump has dragged us into. Am I happy the Ayatollah Khomeini is dead? Yes. And look, today we were going to do an entire segment about Iran, but on the way over here, something funny happened. On the way to the podcast, Donald Trump fired Kristi Noem. So we've got to figure out, like the rest of the country, how to roll with these shots and how to talk about it all and break it all down. So let's start with Iran. I am very happy the Ayatollah Khomeini is dead. As far as I'm concerned, the only good Ayatollah is a dead Ayatollah. These people hate America and they are a brutal regime that has inflicted the worst of suffering, death, poverty on their own nation. Just in recent weeks, the Ayatollah's regime in Iran killed countless tens of thousands of Iranians who were protesting. And we're going to bring experts in to break this down for us and so we can understand it more as the developments continue. For me, what really struck me about what's happening in Iran is Donald Trump and how he is acting and reacting since Venezuela. I think what happened in Venezuela with Maduro, which was only two months before he struck Iran, it was January 3rd, the Maduro operation, I think that has had a deep psychological impact and effect on Donald Trump. He now thinks he is Tarzan of the jungle, can beat his chest and go around the world changing regimes willy nilly. He thinks he can replicate the model of Venezuela where he went into a country, took out the leader, there were no American casualties, and in his mind, he managed to change the regime, though in truth, it's still there. But they are working with him and they're now his new best friends forever. What's happening in Iran is entirely different than what's happening in venezuela. In Iran. First, it's a country of over 90 million people. And I say this as somebody who's from Latin America who's lived under dictatorships in Latin America. Look, our dictatorships there are horrible. Lots of people suffer. They are oppressive. But those countries, whether it's Venezuela or Nicaragua or Cuba, they don't have the ability to inflict pain on the United States. They don't have the ability to wage war and attacks against American targets. And in the entire region. Venezuela, yeah, they have oil, but that's about all they had. They don't, they don't have warships and they don't have jets and they don't have missiles and they don't have the things that Iran is not only has, but is using. So I do think that talking about what happened in Venezuela has to be part of the conversation on what's going on in Iran. But okay, now let's talk about Kristi Nom, because ding dong, the witch is gone. So Kristi Noem has been fired. Question I have is what the hell took so long? Look, she was fired last week as a direct result of testimony she gave to the Senate and the House. In the Senate hearings, she was pressed by a Republican senator from Louisiana, John Kennedy, who asked her pointed questions about this ridiculous PR campaign, this ad campaign featuring Kristi Noem that she'd paid something like $220 million of our taxpayer money on. This was happening while the shutdown was going on. So at the same time that TSA agents weren't getting paid, Kristi Noam was on a horse with a cowboy hat, posing in front of Mount Rushmore and spending $220 million on an ad campaign featuring her likeness and herself with her fake eyelashes and her hair extensions. Not that I'm one to talk, but mine aren't paying, aren't paid by US Taxpayers. So John Kennedy of Louisiana, and again, I emphasize a Republican because I give him credit and kudos for doing his job of having oversight over that department. Way too many Republicans in Congress because these are cabinet members of Donald Trump, are not asking the tough questions, are not asking the follow ups, and are afraid of revealing the ugly truth of what some of these Cabinet members are engaging in. Hello, Pam Bondi. I'm talking about you. But what we saw from John Kennedy was that he asked the question. And the question, the part that really got to Trump was when Kennedy asked Noem if Trump knew she was spending $220 million on these glamour shots. I don't know if you've seen Kristi Noem, but she likes to dress up in costume. Really? She would have made a great drag queen. It's too bad she seems to be against them. One day she's Deportation Barbie with the ice vest and the gun. Another day she is Cowboy Barbie with the hat and the horse. Another. I mean, and you get the picture. It's like she's playing dress up on a daily basis on our dime. But frankly, that testimony was, I guess, the last straw that broke the camel's back. And what pissed Trump off was that she said he knew about it, that they had talked about it, and that he had approved that $220 million ad campaign. Trump says that is not true. That's the reason he ousted her from dhs. There's been tons of scandals under Kristi Noem, so let's go through some of them because there's been plenty of reason to fire her now for months and months and months. So let's start by the fact that her department, under her leadership, killed US Citizens, murdered US Citizens, and Kristi Noem rushed to the podium to call those innocent US Citizens domestic terrorists without any facts, without any evidence. She got asked about that, too, in the congressional testimony by Amy Klobuchar, who asked her if she would apologize to the families of Renee Good and Alex Preddy. And you know what she did? She lied. Lied like a rug. She said she had never said that they were domestic terrorists. Again, we know what we see, we know what we hear. But that's not all of it. There's so much more. In addition to the $220 million on an ad campaign, she wanted to spend close to $200 million on luxury jets. Yes. These jets with bedrooms, with a bar, so that she could, I guess, get her drink of choice. So these high, very expensive luxury jets, which she lied about, she said that she was going to buy those luxury jets and retrofit them and turn them into deportation flights. As Congressman Raskin said, that be akin to buying a Rolls Royce and retrofitting it to become a Metro bus. Makes absolutely no sense. We all know she was buying them for her use. She likes to fly around in planes with Corey Lewandowski. There's another scandal there. It's been widely reported and widely speculated that there is a romantic relationship that's going on between those two. I guess now that she's out of dhs, he's going to be out, too. He's been in some sort of weird special employee status. And he's. It's past his time. Those special employees have a limited amount of time for which, under which they can work. And, yeah, I guess now we're rid of her at dhs. And since they're attached at the hip, actually at the groin, I suspect he's going to be going as well. And we remember the reports that Corey Lewandowski had fired a Coast Guard pilot that was flying them around because Kristi Noem's blankie had been misplaced. Then they had to rehire the Coast Guard pilot because, turns out they had nobody to fly the plane. And then, of course, there's Minneapolis. There is Minneapolis, which was a disaster. We saw the cruelty. We saw the ineptness. We saw the lack of leadership, the lack of training by these federal officers under her leadership, or lack thereof. Donald Trump's numbers on immigration and in general are down in the dumps. And I think that's part of the reason that he got rid of Greg Bovino in Minneapolis, and it's part of the reason why he's getting rid of Kristi Noem. There's elections coming in just a few months. This guy can't afford to be where he is in the polls and changing. Some of these folks, like Kristi Noem and Bovino, who have brought him nothing but shame and embarrassment and awkward moments that are hard to defend or justify, is part of why he is so low in the polls. And one of the things that's the most egregious and hypocritical about Kristi Noem is that at the same time that she was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on an ad campaign at the same time that she was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on luxury jets, she instituted this rule at DHS that any expenditure over $100,000 had to be signed off by her and go through her desk. Which in turn meant that the requests by fema, that requests by contractors, emergency management contractors, were held up. Because when you are the head of DHS, a lot of things are over $100,000. But she wasn't giving the same level of scrutiny to the hundreds of millions that she was misspending, giving these ad contracts to a company linked to a Republican, a company that was founded like five or six days before this contract was issued to them with zero experience in government PR campaigns. She just gave it to somebody she knew. Cronyism at its best. And now what's going to happen to Kristi Nol? Well, first, DHS apparently is going to be now in the under the leadership of this senator from Oklahoma. Current senator from Oklahoma. He'd been in Congress before. His name is Mark Wayne Mullen. He is a former MMA fighter. He is staunchly maga. He has no national security or military experience. He is very experienced, though, in defending Donald Trump on tv. It seems to me every time I turn on cnn, there is Mark Wayne Mullen blindly defending Donald Trump and his policies. No matter what Trump does, this guy will go out there and defend him. And as we know, that is Donald Trump's priority and how he measures being qualified or not for a cabinet position. So, okay, Noem is out. Mullen is going to be in. He still has to go through Senate confirmation. I hope it's thorough. I hope he gets asked tough question questions. And what's going to happen to Kristi Nome? Where is that going? Well, we're not quite rid of her, even though, listen, what she's being given is an elegant exit. She is being made the special envoy to the Shield of the Americas. So basically a special envoy to the Western Hemisphere. This Shield of the Americas is an effort, is an initiative of Trump's. He's got a meeting in, in Miami with about 10 or 12 of the leaders of some of the allied countries, people who like him, like the president of, the president of Argentina, the president of Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic. So he's meeting basically with his friends from the hemisphere, even though folks like the big guys like Brazil and Mexico were either not invited or are not attending. Anyways, off goes Christine Ohm to be head of that. I guess it's a brand new opportunity for her for photographs. She can now wear a Charo hat in Mexico. She can go to carnival. Maybe she can put on one of those carnival costumes in Rio. She's going to look great with a headpiece, dancing the samba. Or you know what, she could go surfing in Costa Rica. I mean, her Instagram pictures are going to be fire. So yeah, so that's what she's gonna go do. Obviously this lady knows shit from Shinola when it comes to Latin America. She doesn't know the difference between the country of Venezuela and Fernando Valenzuela, who used to be a pitcher for the LA Dodgers. She's from North Dakota or South Dakota, one of the Dakotas. And she, you know, she doesn't know much. I'll tell you what I'm happy about. Finally there was justice for Cricket. Yes, Chacha, this is the bitch who killed her puppy. So finally we're getting justice for Cricket. She was asked about that by another Republican senator in the hearings, and it looked terrible. So what we're going to do now, though, is we're going to talk to people who actually do know about Latin America. We're going to talk to people who have spent years of their lives covering the region, interviewing the actors there, and who know it intimately and are going to talk to us about it. So coming up, we're going to be talking to Jorge and Paola Ramos. Jorge Ramos is one of the most respected journalists Latin American journalists. I've grown up my entire life watching him and his daughter Paola. She didn't fall far from the tree. She felt right next to the tree. She, in her own right, is an extraordinary journalist.
