← The Kinzinger Report
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- [00:00]
Host
Foreign.
- [00:13]
Main Commentator
Good to be with you. Welcome back. Good to be home. So today we start at the White House where Donald Trump signed an order stripping job protection from 8,000 senior civil servants. These are the people who run the programs, write the rules, manage your money, and as of this week, every one of them now serves at the President's pleasure. We'll also get into a new report showing that pardoned January sixers keep getting arrested for new crimes. Who'd have guessed a flesh eating parasite has reached Texas. I hope it's not here. After the Trump administration failed to stop it. The senators all nighters that failed to kill Trump's slush fund once and for all. And an update on Trump's new spy chief who was hired to do one thing, find rigged elections. The spy chief. Quick reminder before we start, please like Share Subscribe Support this work because it's people like you that keep it going. So let's get to it. So we start at the White House where the President just made it possible to fire 8,000 senior civil servants for eight any reason at all. On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order. Remember when Republicans used to be against executive orders, by the way? Anyway, he signed an executive order moving roughly 8,000 federal workers into a new category. Meaning instead of being protected from political interference, as has been the case for decades, these experts now serve like political appointees at the pleasure of the President. Here's a clip from the Oval Office announcing the wonderful news.
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White House Official
Currently, with respect to many policymaking positions in departments and agencies across government, we lack the ability, because of existing personnel rules to effectively discipline or promote people who are in policymaking roles. This executive order follows on a number of previous executive orders. The end goal is making the federal workforce more accountable and ensuring that people, particularly in policy making roles, aren't unaccountable to the wishes of the administration.
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Main Commentator
And the reason for this was, okay, so these are not low level employees. Nearly all of them sit at the top layer of the civil service. They lead policy offices and regional offices, they manage programs, and they decide who gets federal grants. The idea was born in Trump's first term and the original target was 50,000 positions. The White House scaled it back to 8,000 for now, and it has not ruled out going bigger. The problem is we've already watched what happens to officials in this administration who tell the truth. A defense intelligence official whose assessment of the Iran strikes did not match the President's story, for instance, a labor statistics commissioner who reported bad jobs numbers. They presented facts and they were fired or shoved aside. That was before this order. Now imagine when there are no protections at all, unions are suing, and the fight is headed to the Supreme Court, which has signaled real sympathy for sweeping presidential power. So don't hold your breath on that. Look, the civil service exists, so facts do not change when presidents do. Make 8,000 experts fireable for telling the truth and you will end up with 8,000 people who stopped telling it. And by the way, it was actually Republicans that put the civil service in place. Now they're the ones destroying it. Speaking of accountability, we now have the fullest picture yet of what the January 6th pardons unleashed. A new study from Lawfare tracked down what happened to the more than 1500 people that Trump granted clemency to. At least 97 of them have since been arrested, charged or convicted of new crimes. And these are not parking tickets. 41 cases involved violent crime. 28 involved guns. 14 involved sex crimes or child abuse material. One pardoned rioter was convicted of child molestation in February and sentenced to life in prison. Another was convicted of reckless homicide. Why are we only learning about this now? Because there was no process, no pardon attorney review, no case by case vetting, no victim notification, just a blanket order signed within hours of taking the oath. And once pardoned, nobody tracks these people. The New York Times counted 39 of these cases this spring. A watchdog group counted 33. And the real number is more than double that. Really? Triple that. Lawfare even says 97 is probably an undercount. So remember, Todd Blanche would not rule out letting some of these same people collect from the weaponization fund. Trump calls them hostages and patriots. But surprise, many of them are just criminals. Now to Texas, where I'm at, where a flesh eating parasite is back in America for the first time in 60 years. On Wednesday, the USDA confirmed a case of New World screw worm in a young calf just southwest of San Antonio. It's the first confirmed case in Texas since 1966. And it exactly is. It is exactly as bad as the name sounds. The fly lays its eggs and open wounds and the larvae eat living flesh. Hope you're not having lunch. It can devastate cattle herds, kill pets and wildlife, and occasionally infect people. America wiped this pest out 50 years ago by releasing sterilized male flies. And the USDA says it will rush the same playbook to Texas. Now officials also say the food supply is safe. And that's true, I guess. But this didn't come out of nowhere. Here's the Ag Secretary in November of last year on Fox Business The Trump
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Host
administration has released a new plan. We are moving toward opening up 5 million acres of grazing land. We're obviously at some point soon going to be reopening the borders. We've got screw room under control south of the border. Still a couple more things before we get there, but we're getting close. And the president is hyper, hyper focused on this.
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Main Commentator
But it was not under control. Since then, the screwworm has spent months marching more than 1100 miles north through Mexico while the government dropped billions of sterile flies. That did not stop it. Don't take my word for it. Take it from Sid Miller, the Texas Agricultural Commissioner. A Republican, of course, and about as MAGA as they come. He called the federal response slow, bureaucratic and incompetent. He says he personally handed Secretary Brooke Rollins research on the USDA built suppression system three separate times. And this week, he publicly begged the President to cut through the bureaucracy and take charge himself. The good news is we've killed this thing before and we can kill it again. But when's the last time this administration saw a problem coming and actually got ahead of it? Texas is about to live with that answer. Back in Washington, the Senate pulled an all nighter and still could not bring itself to kill the slush fund. We've talked about how the so called weaponization fund, reparations really for insurrectionists. We told you about how it collapsed with the DOJ and the White House both backing off. Still true. But the Authority behind that $1.8 billion stays on the books until Congress repeals it. And overnight, the Senate had three chances to do exactly that. First, a Democratic measure to bar the fund outright. It would have sunk the whole bill and it failed by a single vote, 49 to 50. Second, Thom Tillis tried to redirect the money to fraud enforcement. Voted down. Third, in the early hours this morning, Bill Cassidy's plan to give every penny to the police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6th. And won a majority, 52 votes, six Republicans included. But it needed 60. Which brings me to Cassidy. Yesterday, he and Cory Booker filed a court brief calling this fund a dire threat to our constitutional democracy. Strong words. So when the one vote arrived where his voice alone would have killed it, what did he do? He held the floor for a few hours, huddled with leadership, and voted no. Cassidy's own amendment needed 60 votes. Everyone knew it would never get there. But so six Republicans got to vote yes and go home and tell voters they stood up to the slush fund. A free vote. It cost nothing and it changed nothing. But on the motion that needed a simple majority, where Bill Cassidy was the deciding vote, he voted no and gave other vulnerable Republicans a free yes vote to help them in their campaigns. Cassidy already lost his primary. He's gone in January. The one Republican in that chamber with nothing left to lose, saved the thing. Save the thing he calls a threat to constitutional democracy. He saved it and didn't turn against it. This was his moment. No primary to lose, no career to protect. One last chance to back up his own words. But he passed up on the opportunity. And let me tell you something from personal experience. You may only ever get one chance to make a difference. And if you can't bring yourself to take the tough vote, you will probably spend the rest of your career and the rest of your life rationalizing why it wasn't the perfect moment to actually stand for something that matters. Cowards, every single one of them. Cassidy is on the top of that list. And finally, an update on the president's new spy chief. On Tuesday, we told you who Bill Pulte is. A housing official with no national security experience who was handed the keys to the nation's intelligence agencies while keeping his day jobs at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yesterday, Trump told us what the appointment is actually for. But he's a very smart guy, and he may find out some things about the rigged elections, et cetera, et cetera. I think he'd like to do it. I'd like to. I think he wants to do it very much. Got a lot of energy. Think about what that means. This is the president telling you the nation's spy agencies now have a new mission, rewriting the last election he lost and laying the groundwork to contest the next one he loses. And if you're wondering what finding things about rigged elections looks like in practice, we've already seen the beginning of it. In January, Pulte's predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, personally showed up at an FBI raid in the Fulton county election office in Georgia, where agents seized record from the 20 records from the 2020 election. The director of National Intelligence has no role in domestic law enforcement, but she was there anyway. And when the backlash came, her defense was that the president asked her to be there.
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Host
I did not participate in a law enforcement activity, nor would I, because that does not exist within my authorities. You were present on the scene. Are the photos of you on the scene? I was at Fulton county, sir, at the request of the president and to work with the FBI to observe this action that had long been awaited. I was not aware of what was in the warrant or was not. What was the president's specific request for you to go? What was the specific request that was made by the president for you to show up in Fulton county to go and observe the FBI's activities on this issue? So.
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Main Commentator
So this is not a hypothetical. The man who spent his housing tenure targeting a Federal Reserve governor, the New York Attorney General, and Senator Adam Schiff for president now has the intelligence community at his disposal and standing orders to chase 2020. And it doesn't stop there. This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is urging Palti to start firing intelligence community employees because, in his view, Palti is less shackled than the people who came before him. The shackles were the rules. So that's the mission. Chase the election. Clear out anyone who gets in the way. Our intelligence agencies exist to protect this country from enemies. Turning them on our own elections and our own people is what failing states do. If this hit home, hit the like button, Share it, subscribe, send it to somebody who needs to see it. You never want to miss what's coming. Hope you have a great weekend. We'll see you on Monday.