12-3-25 - 10am - Vetting Failure

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Michael, good morning. Really interesting you starting not the
show talking about Aften and Van Epp. And when I
checked the results this morning, most of the headlines were
about Aften cutting into Van EPP's strong lead, as opposed
to talking about the fact that she lost the race.
So you know, they were looking for that storyline, like

(00:22):
you're saying, and they're trying to run with it even
though she lost.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Interesting, it's very interesting, and quite frankly, if I can
get to it. In the third hour, we're going to
talk about the You may remember Monday morning, I started
talking about how I think, based on all of the reporting,
including Fox News, about the attack on the speedboats, the
drug boats back in September, how if all that reporting

(00:49):
is true, it could possibly be a war crime. The
New York Times yesterday came out with a news story,
and I'm going to break down that story because while
my analysis, based on the facts as they were presented,
would remain the same. Oh interestingly, now the facts seem

(01:10):
to have changed a little bit. And it's amazing the
kind of principle that The New York Times puts itself
in trying to say well without saying, so, maybe we
didn't get the story quite right, or maybe we don't
know the full story yet, or maybe you know there's
more to come, but the twisting is hilarious, and we're

(01:30):
going to walk through that. And then before I get
to and I want to talk about something else we
talked about yesterday, which was the zero three, the zero
squads in Afghanistan that were developed by the CIA to
do some kind of shall we say, off the book's
killing and then we bring those people into this country
without vetting them. And now we're going to talk and

(01:53):
so we talked about that, and I want to talk
in just a moment about how getting rid of temporary
protected status and doing what Trump wants to do is
the absolute right, legal, and I think moral thing for
the country to do. But before we do that, because
we had a lot of text messages about that little

(02:15):
game that Dragon played in the last at the end
of the last hour, I want to go to a
text message that I responded to last night. And I'm
saying this because I always tell the audience even if
the text line is three three one zero three. We've
been having some trouble with it, but we're getting the

(02:37):
text messages. But there's been some problem with the responses.
Blah blah blah. But anyway, last night I forget why
or when, but I'm as I tell you, I read
every single text message that comes in. Why you don't
believe me, I don't know. But there was a text
message that I thought deserved at least a deminimous response,

(03:00):
So I did last night, and the response was this
from This is from goober number seventy one oh five. Michael,
you obviously always do read your text messages. I have
a feeling that Tam has pissed off at you since
you just responded to mine, you must be in the doghouse. No,

(03:22):
not at all. Tarma had no clue what I was doing.
I mean, I could have been watching porn on off
my laptop.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
It's a bit of a bummer that it takes a
little bit more work for us to read these text
messages now, but it's you know, worth it.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
But yeah, and I and I always will read all
the text messages. So when I tell you I do,
I do, and Goober number seventy one oh five can
affirm that. Oh and he was surprised that I responded,
and it was, uh, maybe someday I'll talk about the
question he asked me because it was it's actually a
fascinating question. But instead, I'm going to move on to
what interests me because I don't care what interests you.

(03:59):
It's about what interests me. Otherwise, if I only did
what interests you, it'd be pretty boring radio. Let's go
back to that execution style ambush that happened in downtown DC.
We had an Afghan national gunned down that National Guard specialist,

(04:21):
Sarah Beckstrom, and then left staff Sergeant Wolf fighting for
his life. Let's remember if that was not an isolated
boat from the blue. That wasn't an isolated incident. It
was a foreseeable consequence of what I considered to be
a moral and strategic decision by the Biden administration to

(04:45):
fly tens of thousands of Afghans into the United States
with little more than a promise that they had at
one time been on our side. Huh, how fickle it
is their loyalty to the United States. Now, among the
people that Biden, you know, flooded the country with, were,

(05:10):
according to veterans and reporting in the day since the attack,
not just interpreters and maybe bureaucrats from the UH. What
was his name, CAUSEI Homi Karzai government. But the members
of the CIA's CIA's notorious zero unit death squads, like

(05:34):
as we talked about yesterday, the zero three Candahar strike
force that human rights groups have tied to summary executions,
enforced disappearances, and night rade massacres. But forced to understand
what that means, Imagine what would happened if the United
States simply took several thousand members of say a Latin

(05:55):
American death squad, men that are trained and then reward
for kicking down doors and killing enemies at close range,
like drug cartel, you know, some of the worker bees
and the drug cartels, and we brought them into this
country and then scattered them into working class neighborhoods in Denver, Minneapolis,

(06:16):
or Bellingham or Dallas. The doctrine of trauma alone would
tell you what comes next. You cannot train men for
years to hunt, interrogate, kill in the dark and then
just drop them into an alien culture and assumed that, oh,
you know what, I think I'll just drive for Uber Eats.

(06:37):
I think I'll just get a job driving for door Dash.
We've taught them one thing, violence, and then we leave
them one supervised. The public record on Zero Units is
not ambiguous. As I said yesterday, the Human Rights Watch
and the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan, and independent reporters

(06:59):
have documented strike forces operating under Afghan Intelligence Service designations
like NDS one to two and three, often with CIA
advisors on the ground, conducting kill capture rates that left
families shredded, villages terrorized. That's what really was going on.

(07:21):
It's not an ambiguous record. Now, I want you to
take that record that we talked about yesterday. I want
you to overlay that with the scale of Biden's evacuation
and resettlement choices through Operation Allies Refuge, and the success
from that program, Operation Allies Welcome. The Administration admitted that

(07:41):
it brought about seven thousand members of these Afghan death
squads and their families into the US, including about two
thousand fighters from Zero Units and those death squads. They
were placed into a wider cohort of almost one hundred
thousand Afghans brought onto our soil just in a matter
of months, all almost all of them brought here on

(08:04):
a humanitarian parole. That is a form of bare discretionary admission.
It doesn't have any of the durable legal protections associated
with lawful permanent residents. Now, all the reporting since then
has revealed that thousands within that broader cohort triggered, actually

(08:24):
triggered national security, public safety or fraud flags in our
DHS databases. Yet we still allowed them. And I'm saying
we because it was our government at the time. I
know it was Biden, but it was us. Will you
release them into the communities and then the files just
get pushed to shot aside. And some of those flag

(08:44):
cases involved men who had been freed from Taliban prisons
or who had served in precisely the kill teams at
issue in this current controversy of the killing of these
of the one National guardsmen, the one still laying in
critical condition, Biden didn't just rescue sympathetic families who you know,
may be worked at a desk in the embassy. He

(09:06):
airlifted substantial group of seasoned Afghan combatants, including those zero
Unit alumni, many of whom were not patriots at all.
These weren't patriots. These were men recruited directly out of
Afghan prisons. These would be like the people that Putin

(09:28):
has taken out of Russian prisons and put on the
front lines of the Ukraine War. In fact, I would
argue that the majority of these dev squad members that
had been jailed by the Taliban for serious crimes including murders,
sexual assault, violent theft. They were poor, they were uneducated.
They were military aged men that are driven by revenge,

(09:49):
not truly ideological alignment with the United States, but with
revenge against the entire world, the Taliban, the Afghan government,
the United States, the war. These are people whose brains
and their mentality, their mental fitness has absolutely been crucified

(10:10):
now either way. The attack on the guardsmen in DC
reveals the cost of this kind of just wholesale importation
of people with virtually and in most cases literally no
vetting whatsoever. Reports now indicate that local refugee workers and

(10:32):
case managers who're raising the alarms about this particular guy's
mental state. So all of that's just a factual backdrop
for a more basic legal and political point. Every one
of these Afghans, every single one, from zero unit operaties

(10:53):
to their adult family members, occupies a legal category sharply
different from the constitutional citizenship that attaches to those born
or naturalized within this country. The Fourteenth Amendment citizenship clause
creates a class of Americans whose membership cannot be stripped

(11:14):
by executive whomen and the Supreme Court has made clearing
cases like ifree Owned versus rusk in Vance Bears versus
Tazas that once somebody is a constitutional citizen, the government
can't take that status away absent fraud in the original
naturalization or voluntary or a voluntary decision to relinquish. They're

(11:35):
constitutionally granted citizenship, and parenthetically, I want to remind you,
doesn't make any difference what you and I think about
so called birthright citizenship or someone who has granted citizenship
based on a previous temporary protected status. It does not.
The shield does not extend to the men and women

(11:57):
whose presence in this country stems from statute passed by
Congress or from the president's pure discretionary powers. Statutory and
discretionary statuses, by contrasts, are inherently revocable, and humanitarian parole
is a quintessential example of one of those kinds of

(12:18):
discretionary statuses that is inherently revocable. It is not an
admission in a technical sense. This humanitarian parole under which
they were brought here, confers no permanent right to stay here.
It exists solely because Congress has allowed the President to

(12:40):
temporary allowed otherwise inadmissible aliens into this country because of urgent,
humanitarian or for significant public benefit reasons. Asylum and refugee
status are also statutory creations. They're granted by executive officers

(13:00):
officers under conditions that Congress has specified and explicitly subject
to termination when those conditions are no longer met, or
when fraud, criminality, or most importantly, national security grounds are present.
Lawful permanent residents the green card status that many of

(13:22):
these Afghans hope to someday reach, hope to someday reach,
they've not yet reached. It. It may be a little
more durable, but yet it too can be rescinded within
five years if obtained by fraud, and can also be

(13:47):
the basis for removal if the holder commits certain crimes,
aligns with terrorist activity, or violates the terms of admission.
This hierarchy matters because it shows where President then Trump
and I think Secretary of State Rubio can act unilaterally unilaterally,

(14:09):
and where they must, in my opinion, they must proceed
through slower judicial channels. I think the latter, slower judicial
channels is going to be a very narrow subset of
these people that Biden brought in. The most potent tool
in Rubio's arsenal is the doctrine of consular non reviewability.

(14:34):
That is a principle that is centuries old, under which
federal courts decline to second guess the decision of a
consular officer that denies, revokes, or withholds visas and other
entry documents for any aliens abroad. Now, Congress codified the
secretary's discretion in statutes that allow him to revoke any

(14:59):
of the or any other documentation at any time in
his discretion, and courts have read certain cases and decisions
to mean that exclusion decisions for non citizens outside our
borders are a political is a political question, is not
a judicial question. And the Supreme Court's handling the President

(15:21):
Trump's travel prompt proclamation back in Trump versus Hawaii actually
harden my view, emphasizing that where the executive articulates a
facially legitimate and bona fide reason grunted in foreign affairs
and national security, the courts must step aside. Now, let's

(15:41):
get to the nitty gritty for the Afghan militants and
many of their family members. That means that Trump and
Rubio are not trapped by the choices that Biden made
in twenty twenty one. I think just the opposite. A
second Trump term has already used emergency authority to pass

(16:02):
new asylum grounds and Afghan visa issuance, So the next
step would be to reverse the pipeline itself. So Rubio can,
as a matter of law, instruct the consular officers and
the State Department bureaus to revoke every entry document, every
parole authorization, every transportation letter, and refugee or thighly travel

(16:28):
document that was issued to Afghan nationals under Biden Arab programs,
subject only to any narrow exceptions that he alone decides
that he wants to carve out, and he can do
so on the ground that ongoing intelligence reports and of
course the killing in DC shows a systemic failure of

(16:50):
vetting that renders all the prior approvals unreliable. So therefore,
under existing law and doctrine, no federal judge can order
him to reissue those documents. So, of course that raises
a question, what do you think the question is, well,

(17:12):
what does that mean in practice for the zero unit
cohorts or any other non vetted Afghans. I think it's
a great question, and I'll tell you exactly what it means.

Speaker 4 (17:29):
Again, I have to wonder, how is it that KALE
can spend so much time in all of its newscasts
talking about snow. It's weather, it snows.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
Next, says the Belief of Alaska. I don't think I
don't think that's him. Oh, you don't think that was him.
Sammy kind of liked him. Maybe it's maybe it wasn't.
But but whoever it is, they'd make a great point.
Oh it wasn't. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's weather. Let

(18:05):
me check calendar. Oh, Wednesday, December third, as we're broadcasting
live at ten thirty four in the morning and it's snowing.
Holy cow. But I do have to admit I honestly
thought this morning I left thirty minutes earlier than I
normally do, because you know, it's a requirement. I've got
to have the diet coke. If I came in here

(18:26):
without a diet coke, the show would just be crappier
than it already is. And we can't have that. I mean,
we've got a certain standard. We have to make sure
we stay below, right. Can't exte the standard, of course, right.
And I was truly amazed at how well people were driving.

(18:47):
I was like, am I in a different state? Am
I outside the Denver metropolitan area? People are driving rationally
and carefully. I didn't find the person, you know, driving
in the left lane with their blinkers on. I didn't
see that. Wow.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
It kind of quickly reminds me the girl dad there
had interned for koa way back in the day, in
the you know, the nineteen hundreds. There there was a
host here that did a Diary of a Mad snow shoveler,
and he actually had requested that we could play that
in years past as we were doing you know, the

(19:23):
show's over here and over and I couldn't find it.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
I found it, Oh did you really? Yeah? So what
is it?

Speaker 3 (19:32):
It's it's exactly as it says, Diary of a Mad Snowshoveler.
So it's December first, it snowed. Oh I love shoveling.
It's great, it's fantastic.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
And he has heard yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
So just tossing it out before we you know everybody.
You know, it's we're going on a Christmas vacation. There's
no real secret here that the shows take some time off.
But before we go, we should save some time.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah, we should do that. Play that, Yeah, we'll do that.
Doesn't fit in right now talking about zero three murders
schoo but yeah, although he kind of turns in, he
probably could at the end of that whole vent could
have been recruited by the CIA to be one of
those killers.

Speaker 3 (20:09):
But since that was girl dad, and girl Dad had
requested it and he was actually shoveling as he left
the talk back.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
Oh, he actually requested it years ago. No, we're not
gonna do anything to make him happy.

Speaker 3 (20:21):
Okay, Yeah, we're gonna kill seven or eight minutes for us.
We don't have to do anything during that time.

Speaker 2 (20:25):
Fine, well we'll do the other day when I'm like,
I'd run out of steam. David ends and why yeah,
but that's a personal matter at home that has nothing
to do with the radio. That's why I endorsed Rocky
Mountain Men's clinning. What do you think me? Good grief?
Anyway back, So what does this mean in practice for

(20:47):
the the zero unit cohorts and all of the other
thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of non vetted Afghans.
It means that every Afghan who are right on that
humanitarian parole can have that parle terminated. They can do
it either by an explicit ravocation or they can refuse

(21:09):
to extend it. Temporary protected status, which is a form
of parole is begins with the word what come on kids,
temporary meaning it's not permanent. Once the parole lapses, the
person is removable. Now, Trump and Rubio could build a

(21:30):
triage of a triage system in which zero unit membership
Combat Service and CIA back kill teams, serious derogatory flags
that might pop up in a DHS database or any
unexplained gaps in a file that could trigger immediate placement
into the removal proceedings. Or let's say the person is

(21:52):
currently abroad, you get to go ahead and impose a
permanent ban on re entry. And for the those who
have already received their asylum, then Trump and Rubio could
use statutory termination provisions that permit revocation when the person
committed fraud or poses a danger to the security of

(22:14):
the United States, or no longer qualifies as a refugee
in light of change country conditions. That's the first thing,
but there's a second. It means that even Afghans who
have progressed to lawful permanent status, lawful permanent residents, doesn't
mean that they're untouchable. Now, Rubio cannot use consular non

(22:39):
reviewability to sign a magic order to somehow just magically
vacates a green card. But he can do two things
that are almost as consequential. He could direct the Department
of Homeland Security to conduct fraud and security audits of
every Green card obtained by these Biden era Afghaan paroles,

(23:01):
and then rescind any status that was granted on the
basis of false statements within a five year statutory window.
I would just add a quick footnote here to the
person that sent me the text message about Congressman elon Omar.
That might be the most prohibitive way on prohibit that.

(23:23):
That might be the most strident prohibition on revoking her
permanent resident status. Plus she's also become a citizen. But
you could also argue fraud, but I think the statute
of limitations has probably expired and you can't do anything
about her. And the other thing Rubio could actually weaponize

(23:45):
the boundary between inside and outside the United States, so
that when a Green card holder is abroad you're trying
to get back in, they get treated under current immigration
law as an applicant for admission if certain triggers are present,
including extended time outside the country, or engaging in suspected

(24:05):
criminal activity, or just the broad general national security concerns.
So Rubio could then instruct the consular posts and all
the carriers at those posts to deny boarding, refuse returning
resident visas, treat these individuals as intending immigrants without valid documentation. Interestingly,

(24:31):
not only did a cursory sarch, but the court seem
to have been clear that non resident aliens that are
stuck outside the borderlines have almost zero constitutional claim to
demand re entry into the United States. So we ought
to just forth just being a smartass here, but maybe

(24:52):
ought to form like a little travel group and just say, hey,
we've got really cheap flights when I go home to
visit the relative that you're left behind. You know, for
nineteen dollars and ninety five cents, we can fly you
from Lax or Kennedy or DA and you will fly
you back into cobble. We'll fly you back into Islamabad

(25:16):
wherever and you can visit your relatives and then oh, well,
sucks to be you. You're out of the country. You
have no constitutional right to demand re entry. Oh I
do it. I do it in a heartbeat. So I'll
never be president because that's kind of crap that I'd pull. Now,
the effects of doing any of these things is pretty straightforward,
because a zero unit veteran who parlayed a parole entry

(25:40):
into a green card but then travels back to the
region could find himself in stranded, unable to board a flight,
and his green card suddenly reduced just to a piece
of plastic that has no associated right to re enter
attached to it. Now he could sue, but without a
foot on us soil, that's going to be pretty damn

(26:03):
hard to do, and the litigation that's going to take
years anyway, And in the meantime, the practical question that
matters for public safety, whether he is present in the neighborhoods, say,
where the bexter's family lives, or on the far side
of the world. Well, that's been answered. You're out of
the country and you can't come back, so that neighborhood
that you were in no longer has to worry about

(26:24):
are you one of the crazies or not? Now, I
know that even in this audience, you might say that
that's collective punishment. Well, like, wel come on, most Afghans
resettled under Operation Operation Allies welcome. They haven't committed any crimes,
and many did indeed risk their lives against the Taliban.
I understand that, But do you really want to blur

(26:47):
the hard moral difference between an Afghan translator who just
quietly processed payroll and a man who led door kicking
raids in Kandahar. I think there's a difference. I think
there's a huge difference. And even if there's a huge difference,
I still want both of them feted. I know they're

(27:10):
interpreters that just shuffled paper. All they wanted to do
was make a living and hope the Americans could help
establish the stable government. And when it all went to
crap and they somehow made it aboard, you know, a
C five A or whatever, they were able to get
on and get into this country. I know all they

(27:31):
want to do is get a job at mcnowledge or
whatever and live out their lives here and not go
back to that craphole country. I understand that. But we
ought to do is at least met them. Michael, was
that the collar from Alaska girl? Dad?

Speaker 5 (27:45):
Anyway, He's right, it's just snow. When I was a kid,
we had whether, we had meteorologists, we didn't have bomb
cyclones and all this crazy talk about the weather read
snow days, and I grew up in a place way
snowier than here. I mean, we're just scared of everything.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
I think these days.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
I do like the text messages also came in and said, Mike,
when did it when it didn't snow? They also talked
about the snow, how it didn't snow yet? Oh weather,
I mean global warming or cooling or change.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
Yeah, I mean it was. It's the point that I'm
probably going to get to in the next hour about
how they distorted the news through both comission and omission,
and no matter what, no matter what's happening, it's the
end of civilization. Oh my gosh, this is interesting news.

(28:44):
Congresswoman Elise Stefoni, the Republican from New York, has been
in a battle with Speaker Mike Johnson. She has now
secured the inclusion. Just this happened this morning. The key
provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, the NDAA, which

(29:04):
this provision is an attempt to prevent the illegal weaponization
of federal agencies. Now, the two have been arguing about
this for some time. Well, yesterday the spat between the
two became public and Stefanic, a New York Republican and
obviously an ally of Donald Trump, and Congresswoman and A

(29:27):
Paulina Luna from Florida both threatened to vote against the
NDAA unless her provision was included. So Johnson really didn't
have much of a choice. Now it's expected to reach
the House floor sometime later this week with Stephanic's provision
on weaponization included. Now, if adopted, here's what, well, why

(29:48):
this is so important. If it gets adopted, this provision
would require mandate that the FBI notified Congress win their
investigations into pre residential or other federal candidates get launched.
What's what's wrong with that? I know all the law

(30:11):
enforcement people are saying, well, sometimes investigations need to be
kept quiet. Yeah, but if you're investigating the president of
the United States of America, if your own Department of
Justice is investigating you, or you're on the on the
Senate Oversight Committee that oversees the FBI and they're investigating
somebody on the oversight committee. Yeah, I think they have
a right to know that, So take the little victories

(30:33):
where you can.