Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My good friend Andy McCarthy, and Andy wrote a very
interesting piece about the Trump administration and MS thirteen that
I want to get to in a second. Andy, I
want to ask you one other question though, that I
didn't tell you I was going to ask you. It
just occurred to me. I wanted to ask you this,
and I don't think you've spent as much time on
(00:21):
it as let's say, your Fox colleague Paul Morrow. But
I was wondering if you had any thoughts on why
the prosecutors in Idaho decided to go with a plea
deal rather than going for the trial and the death sentence.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
I don't have a good handle ross on what the
murder evidence was. It's not unusual for the Justice Department
to take a sentence of life imprisonment without a parole,
to take the death penalty off the table, which is
(00:59):
I think my understanding of how that's going to go,
my own view of it is, for what it's worth,
the courts are hostile to the death penalty, and these
death penalty cases are they're made more difficult by virtue
of charging the death penalty, and the outcome is uncertain
(01:24):
in the sense that it often takes years to get
the appellate courts to get through the appellate litigation because
a lot of the appellate courts push against the death penalty.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
So it's a I've seen.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Well I don't Yeah, I guess I don't know enough
about how it works, and I don't know how to
give an intelligent answer to that.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
All right, Yeah, I thought it was I thought it
was an interesting and interesting decision, and I knew you
hadn't focused too much on it. So that's okay. You
wrote a fascinating piece National Review and it's entitled Trump
dog drops cases against top MS thirteen leaders. You reference
(02:09):
a New York Times report that's entitled Trump vowed to
dismantle MS thirteen has deal with Bukeley. That's the president
down there threatens that effort. So what is this about?
What do we need to know?
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Well, you know, I think given all the rhetoric the
administration's engaged in about MS thirteen and the reliance that
it's placing on the President's and Secretary of Rubio's relationship
that they have developed with the Naib Bukela, who is
the president of El Salvador, it's relevant to say the
(02:50):
least to examine what's happening here, which is that with
respect to two of the main defendants that they've managed
to get into the American criminal justice system, the administration
has now dismissed the charges against these two guys, while
at the same time, I think jacking up the rhetoric
(03:13):
with respect to this guy, Abrego Garcia. And you know,
contrary to what people say here, I'm not carrying a
brief for a Brego Garcia. I think the administration has
to follow the law and has to follow due process,
and I don't have any reason to doubt that Abrego
Garcia is somehow connected to MS thirteen, although if you
(03:39):
read the indictment the Justice Department itself filed, they seem
to go back and forth on that question about whether
he's an associate or a member or.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Somebody they respect.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
They're not exactly clear on exactly what his connection is.
But here Ross, we're dealing with two people who are
at the very zenith of MS thirteen, which is a
very regimented organization because it has a, you know, sort
of international sprawl. These are two guys that are in
(04:09):
the two organizations within MS thirteen that are at the
very highest echelon of MS thirteen. The administration has dismisscharges
against them and return them to L. Salvador under circumstances
where there's a lot of evidence developed by the.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Justice Department itself that Ukela.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Has corrupt dealings with gangs in general in L. Salvador
and MS thirteen in particular, where some of the deals
that he's made with them, a big condition of that
is to shield their top members from American prosecution. And
the only other thing I would say about it is
(04:52):
I was a prosecutor in the Justice Department for a
very long time. The Justice Department's practice, including in cases
that I portein dissipated in, was to make deals with
foreign governments to the extent that it was necessary in
order to bring big offenders into our system and prosecute them,
(05:13):
with the understanding that if we didn't do it, the
likelihood was going to be that nobody did it.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
So for example, in the piece that.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
You mentioned, I note that I was in a case
in the nineteen eighties which seems like forever ago, where
we prosecuted the head of the Sicilian mafia. We had
to agree to a thirty year ceiling on the charges
against him, even though the defendants that we had apprehended
in the United States were looking at life in prison,
(05:43):
because in Europe, which is where this guy was, that
was the ceiling that you could get for the kind
of charges that we were bringing. So we had to
agree to the thirty year cap in order to get
them to extradite him to us. But we thought it
was worth it because who else was going to prosecute
him for the crimes committed against Americans if we didn't
do it.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
And I think I could be remembering this wrong, Andy,
so you can correct me, because I'm sure you will
remember it correctly. But I think that in order to
get El Choppo extradited to the United States from Mexico,
we had to promise we wouldn't seek the death penalty.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yeah, that's pretty common because there's no death penalty in Europe,
and there are a lot of countries where there's no
death penalty, and we often have to make that deal
in order to get a European country or a country
that doesn't have the death penalty to send somebody here.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Let me just share a few just short sentences from
the New York Times piece that Andy references in his
great piece for National Review, and again if you go
to National Review dot com you'll find it. And by
the way, I didn't properly introduce Andy. So he's a
former federal prosecutor. As he mentioned, he's a contributing editor
at National Review. Andy is a Fox News contributor. So
(06:59):
whenever they're you know, serious legal stuff, especially on the
federal side going on, you will see Andy show up
on Fox. So let me just share this with you.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Just but but Ross, we've established he doesn't known nothing
about IDAHM.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
That's right, that's right, exactly all right. This is from
the New York Times. Even among the brutal ranks of
the transnational gang called MS thirteen, Vladimir Arevalo Chavez stands
out as a highly effective manager of murder, prosecutors say,
known as Vampiro like vampire, He's been accused of overseeing
killings in at least three countries. His arrest in February
(07:37):
of twenty twenty three was a major triumph for American investigators,
who only months earlier had accused him and twelve other
gang leaders of terrorism, bloodshed, and corruption in a wide
ranging federal indictment on long Island. But this April, prosecutors
who brought those charges suddenly and quietly asked a federal
judge to drop them, citing national security concerns. They said
(08:00):
they needed to return him to El Salvador. So continue Andy, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Well, I have national security concerns about them sending him
back to L. Salvador if he's running an enterprise from
there that's involved in murder, including murders in the United States,
according to these indictments. And I would point out Ross
that one of the main things that's charged in the
two indictments that the Justice Department has brought since twenty
(08:30):
twenty is that we had an FBI agent who was
working on the case in L. Salvador, and that agent
had to be pulled out with his family because there
was a conspiracy by MS thirteen to murder him. So,
in my experience in the Justice Department, when they conspire
to murder one of ours, we prosecuted that guy. If
(08:53):
we can get any if we can get our hands
on and bring into our system anybody who was complicit
in something that the last thing that we would ever
do is take someone who might have been involved in
something like that, much less what we're talking about here,
which is, you know, people who are at the very
highest echelon of this enterprise. Sending them back to the
(09:17):
place where they committed the crime in the first place.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
It doesn't seem very sensible.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Now, to be fair, I assume what the administration would
say is that they're going to face justice in L.
Salvador and that they're incarcerated there.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
And the only thing I.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Can say about that is the Justice Department's own case,
particularly the second indictment that was brought in twenty twenty three.
A big part of the proof in that case is
that officials in Bucele's government cut a deal with MS
thirteen that they would reduce violence in L. Salvador in
(09:56):
exchange for various corrupt accommodations that were made for the
leadership there, including you know, getting prostitutes into the prison,
making it easier for them to run mSv or thirteen
in prison, various payments.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
And stuff that.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
You know, the indictments are available publicly, people can read them.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
That's that's our evidence.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
That's not like stuff we read in the New York
The New York Times report that you just read from
is basically reading from Justice Department indictments when it comes
to this. So we're sending these guys back to a
place where the Justice Department itself says ukel has a
corrupt deal with MS thirteen, and we're taking people who
we had in our system and sending them back there
(10:43):
without prosecuting.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
So obviously we're speculating more than a little, but there
does appear to be, as you say, evidence put together
by the Justice Department, including in Trump's first term. If
I got that right, that's suggests that the president of
L Salvador has a corrupt relationship with MS thirteen, as
you just described. So these two MS thirteen kingpins, who
(11:08):
we probably had dead to rights and were probably going
to be convicted in federal court and go to prison
in the United States for a long time, are going
to get sent back to L Salvador. Are they there already?
Are they already in El Salvador? Do you know?
Speaker 3 (11:21):
Yes, they're already there? Oh one is and is what
no one is? And I believe I believe Aravello. The
judge has not granted the government's dismissal of the indictment.
Although as we saw with Mayor Adams, there's not much
a judge could do if the Justice Department decides not
(11:41):
to prosecute the first guy, Osiris Luna, not Osirius Luna.
I'm sorry, Caesar Lopez has already gone back. Osiris Luna
I mentioned because he was one of the Bukla regime
officials who, apparently, according to the Justice Department, was key
to these nicolotiations with MS thirteen.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Right. So, I think that if the intent of the
l Salvador government was really going to be to put
these guys in prison, in a real prison in a
way that keeps them from operating their gangs, they would
have just left them here to serve their time in
an American prison. So if they insist on bringing them there,
(12:23):
I think it's it's not crazy to conclude that they
will either not put them in prison or do the
other thing that you said, create for them. The El
salvadoran equivalent of club fed, but even better with conjugal
visits and hookers and blow And it sounds like so
(12:47):
if that's true, it must be that Pam Bondy knows
and the order is probably coming from Donald Trump after
getting a request from the President of El Salvador. I'm
guessing how else would that happen.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yeah, I think the Justice Department here is just taking
its marching orders. I doubt that Bondi is that deeply involved.
What we've seen so far with Bukele is it seems
to be that the administration's agent for dealing with Bukele
as Secretary of State Rubio.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
In fact, it was Rubio who was in.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
L Salvador when they announced this agreement between Salvador and
US that El Salvador, for payment of what I think
was about six million dollars, agreed to give US three
hundred detention spaces for people that the Trump administration wants
to deport. And obviously the current Trump administration, unlike the
(13:40):
first Trump administration, is prioritizing the deportations over the prosecution
of MS thirteen and Ross.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
I would just.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Point out you mentioned before that the first case was
brought under the Trump Justice Department.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
It was the Trump.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Justice Department that set up the task force against MS
thirteen that the Biden administration actually continued. So that task force,
which I think is called Vulcan, is responsible for both
the cases that were.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Brought against these MS thirteen members.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
All Right, so last night for you on this Andy.
So if this is some kind of corrupt bargain, and
if the President of L. Salvador has some kind of
corrupt deal with MS thirteen, from the perspective of the
federal government, like who cares? And I mean that literally
in our federal government, who cares? Right? Donald Trump doesn't care.
(14:37):
Donald Trump supporters don't care if Trump breaks the law,
So they're definitely not going to care if the President
of L. Salvador breaks the law. It's all kind of
like utilitarian ends justifies the means lawlessness all the way down.
So even if this is what it looks like, is
there anything ever going to happen?
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Well, no, I would be surprised.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
You know. Look there, as we saw again with the
Mayor Adams case. Constitutionally speaking, ross it's up to the
executive branch who gets prosecuted. And if the executive branch
doesn't want to bring a case, Congress can't make them,
the courts can't make them. If they want to no
longer pursue a case that they've indicted, no one can
(15:22):
make them. My point is, why are we sending these
guys back, particularly before trying them. You know, there's nothing
in life that says that you know you have to
if you're going to send somebody back who's in the
American justice system, you have to you have to do
it right away. We could try them first, we could
(15:43):
have a public airing of what the evidence is against them.
We could do all those things and then send them
back to serve their time in L. Salvador if that's
if we're satisfied that that L. Salvador will keep them
in custody. But it's always been the US this Department's
approach that when kingpin types orchestrate major crimes against the
(16:06):
United States, we want to prosecute those people ourselves to
make sure that they get the justice they deserve.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, I think you don't really come out and aggressively
say this really stinks. But I get the implication from
the piece that you think there might be something really
wrong going on here. And I don't know that we'll
ever find out because I think the people who are
in a position to find out have been told to
turn to turn away. Andy McCarthy's great piece for National
(16:36):
Reviews entitled Trump DOJ drops cases against top MS thirteen leaders.
I'll also tell listeners, normally you'd have to pay to
read this article, but I'm a subscriber and I used
one of my small number of gift links to post
this on my blog in a way that you can
read it without a subscription, but I recommend you subscribe
after that so you can get to all of Andy's
(16:57):
writing at National Review. Andy, thanks so much for your
time today as always, and thanks for bringing that important
story to my attention.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Thank you, Ross, all right, good seeing you