Speaker 1: And hello, how are you welcome to the Big podcast
on this Thursday. Today is the eighth day of January,
a year of our Lord, twenty twenty six. My name
is Tom Sullivan. So we've got Man the I saw
this coming, I mean yesterday, just as we finished, just
before we finished recording the podcast, it came the news
about the shooting of the woman in Minneapolis by ice,
and that's pretty much all I knew. I saw a
clip of a video, but it was awfully hard to
make any sort of study of what was going on then.
But today Man Alive, the top of the top story
is by clear that shooting of the woman by ice
in Minneapolis. So we've got that. We've got a little
bit of an update on Greenland, there's some movement on that,
a little bit of information about some actually is pretty
interesting information.
Speaker 2: About the whole.
Speaker 1: How's that going to work with Venezuelan oil and we're
going to market it and there we get the money
and then we're going to give the money to them.
So we'll we'll get into all of that as we
go along. But this whole business about the shooting, there's
a number of things to come to mind about this
first of all. In the crowds last night were big
in this morning. They were out there at seven o'clock
in the morning. It's cold in Minneapolis. I understand how,
especially George Floyd. That was late May, if I remember right,
So you had the whole summer with warm evenings, and
warm summer evenings just seem to be part of the
major ingredient when you have protests to turn into riots.
Well when it's sub zero, you would think. But the
people in Minneapolis, they are hardy people. Man, They go on.
They will protest or riot no matter what the temperature is.
So big crowds last night, big crowds again today. I
don't know what's going to happen tonight. There were there
were some small protests of various cities around the country,
but again it's wintertime and it's not as conducive frequently
go out and protest. But let me let me go
over this if I may one of this. This is
one of the tip from Tom. If you want to
go to a protest or a riot because it has
something to do, or it might be kind of fun
or I or you're really passionate about whatever the topic is.
Most of the time the crowds are just looking lose
there to see what's going on, and you've got a
small group of people that are really passionate. And my
only point to you is, if you want to go
out to a protest or a riot, you are. You
may not think it's dangerous, but I'm telling you it is.
These things can spin out of control so quickly. And
the first lesson that I got on this for those
of you that are old enough to remember Kent State University.
It was a protest against the Vietnam War and students
gathered on Kent State and Ohio and the National Guard
came and they actually armed the National Guard with real
bullets and they shot into the crowded protesters and a
handful of people died. I've seen it over and over
and over again with protests on various topics. It doesn't
matter where. Something goes sideways quickly and people get hurt
and maybe even die. And that is what happened yesterday.
So this woman who got shot, we're now learning that she, uh, well,
we've been reported that she was some sort of leader
of this protest. I don't know if you have a leader,
a formal leader, but there are people that are paid
antagonists to go out and do these sorts of things.
I don't know whether she was paid, but she was
going around to a number of places where ice was
operating yesterday and blocking the road so their vehicles could
not move. She did it at at least two or
three other locations. So by the time she did it
again at that location where the shooting went down, she
blocked the road and the police knew who she was,
had seen her at the other locations. They had no
patience with all right, we're not going to go up
and talk to her. We're going to go up and
order her out of her vehicle. Now, that's the other
tip from Tom. If the police order you out of
your vehicle, comply. Every time we have one of these
police shootings, whether it's at a protest or whether no
matter what somebody that the police want to interrogate, that
the old adage is just comply. Where you get police
shootings that people get hurt or die is because people
don't comply in it, and it goes downhill very very quick.
So the other thing we've learned about this is that
the officer who did the shooting, he was clearly in
front of the vehicle. Even though he jumped out of
the way, he still got hit by the vehicle, not seriously,
but he was still hit behind a jump. Six months ago,
he was involved in another operation where they were trying
to get unarrest going and he had to break the
window back window of the car to open the door
because the guy wind opened the door, and as he
did that, he put his arm in. The guy took
off and he was dragged for over one hundred feet
and his arm severely injured and thirty three stitches on
his leg. So this is a guy who was dragged
by a bad guy six months ago. He's back at work,
He's pretty sensitive to an automobile coming at him. It
just adds to the whole question about this so prior
incident where he was injured and that again he didn't know.
I mean, everybody's making, you know, trying to figure this out.
What's happening is people are coming out and saying the
cop was wrong, the ice officer should be tried for
murder or et cetera, et cetera, because they have a
confirmation bias. They don't like ice, they don't like what
they're doing, they don't like police whatever it might be,
but there's a confirmation bias. There's other people looking at
it and going and looks like he did what he
was legally entitled and morally entitled to do. Now, I
don't know if this one will never know because she's dead,
we don't know if she intended to hit him or
she was just trying to flee the officers who were
ordering her out of her vehicle. The other thing about
it is there's more video, tons more video that we
know of, but we haven't seen it. In the passenger seat.
When you see the video, all of a sudden, as
she takes off, there's a woman standing there. It's because
the woman was in the passenger seat, and apparently that
woman is the victim's wife. She was along for they
dropped off a six year old at a school, but
she was going around to all these various ice locations
and interfering with and stop trying to stop the ice
officers from doing their law enforcement work. So out of
this people are jumping to conclusions. I think it's clear
to me that he had reasonable grounds to think that
she was trying to ram him. This will be a
federal case, not a state case. Although Governor Wallace is
already crying about the fact that the state is not
going to be able to do a prosecution the federal
officer doing federal law enforcement, and that goes to a
federal court. So we'll see how that whole thing works out.
But the other part about speaking of the governor and
also the mayor of Minneapolis, you talk about the rhetoric
about how much they hate Ice. They want them out
of there, they want them effing out of there. They're
really stirring up the hatred, and wall says, we want,
we want everybody to protest peacefully, but I'll tell you what,
there's no good sobs. And then he goes on talking
about how terrible they are. So the idea of use
to force, excessive use of force by police is there's
the law books have, the court records are littered with
all kinds of cases, and each one individually has to
be examined. I'm telling you, looking at this, I thought
the officer was pretty pretty quick with his gun, but
he had every right to if he thought that she
was trying to run him down. I will criticize the
officer for two things. One was and he's apparently an
experienced officer. One was what was he doing standing in
front of the vehicle. You don't do that. You got
to be aware of your situational awareness. You just don't
put yourself in a position where that could happen. You
don't know what the driver's going to do. And secondly, uh,
there was a real close crossfire going on there. What
I mean by that is you don't shoot in the
direction of your fellow police officers. And there were two,
maybe three ICE officers right next to where he shot at.
They were right next to her door and he's shooting it.
He could have easily hit them. So I'm going I
don't know about the guy's police tactics. He might want
to be retrained, and I'm sure he will be, but
I don't think he's going to be. I'll be surprised, hey,
if there's even an indictment, and I'll be shocked if
there's any sort of conviction if there is an indictment.
So you go to a protest, a riot, be prepared
that something may happen to you, and don't cry about
it if it does. The police in this case, ice officers,
I think it's a legitimate discussion to say how are
they going about their job. I know there's part of
it where they're trying to be very public. They're trying
to send messages basically to illegals that we're coming after you,
and so they're not afraid of going out there and
getting people and making it very public. But if I know,
I suspect the reason why they have this big, large
contingent of ICE officers in Minneapolis is because I suspect
there's a large contingent of illegals in the sanctuary city
of Minneapolis. And that's the other point. This is what
really irritates me, the mayor and the governor talking about, Oh,
you guys are supposed to be in here doing things
that are for safety of the people, and you're making
it worse. Well, actually, all you have to do, governor
or mayor is just drop your sanctuary status and allow
the ICE officers to come into your jails and pick
up the illegals that have committed a crime that your
police officers have arrested, turn them over to Ice. Everything
would go very quietly and they would be deported. But
you're going to this is the sanctuary status is going
to put a fight between Ice and local authorities. And
there's part of me that thinks that Governor Waltz and
Mayor Fry actually kind of seem to be enjoying all
the chaos that they have created in Minneapolis. I think
they'll like it. I think they miss it from five
years ago with the George Floyd incident.
Speaker 2: So it's there's a lot.
Speaker 1: I don't think anything. I mean, this will die down eventually.
But if I was running ICE, I would also try
to do it more stratigue. Instead of doing a big
show and doing the big bravado thing, I would do
it very quietly. I would do it as quiet as
I possibly could. Just that way, you can, basically if
you will, sneak up on the people that you're trying
to arrest and they won't be looking for you. So
where do we start today? John Miller, former NYPD's get
his observation.
Speaker 3: The clues for this were yesterday when the Secretary of
Homeland Security was asked, are we going to maybe curtail
or draw back some of the ICE operations in Minneapolis
given the shooting and the tensions around it, and she said, no,
we have agents out there right now. We're going to
continue our operations now it's important to understand the math here.
Minneapolis the last time I checked, had about seven hundred
police officers. There's two thousand ICE agents on the ground
and the biggest operation they have ever launched according to
the federal government in that city. Tensions obviously shot up
overnight around this shooting and remain tense today. The idea
that there are literally more federal agents out in the
street continuing operations that any one of which could go
sideways in some manner that could add to these tensions,
along with the idea that those operations are being managed
partly out of this building. So what we're seeing today
is the Border Patrol, who is really the only element
among ICE and CBP that has crowd control training, usually
gets the front line on these facilities where they have
to find where their vehicles are going to be coming
in and out of some of those vehicles with prisoners,
some of those vehicles with agents, these caravans, and we
saw this a moment ago, which is what started all
of the contratempts on the ground here. When the vehicles
come in, the crowd tries to block the g the
agents move forward, they unleash their pepper bowl sprays, pepper spray,
caiene spray, and the pushing and shoving starts till they
get the vehicles in, then they draw back. In this case,
we saw those tensions spill over. We saw an individual
who was being arrested. We don't know why did he
throw a snowball? Did they want him for something else?
Then we saw the process of what we call de arresting,
people trying to pull that person away, which resulted in
it appeared one of them being arrested as well. So
we can predict if these operations are to continue on
this scale, that these vehicles will continue to come and
go from facilities like this, that these confrontations will likely
continue throughout the day and the tensions may continue to rise.
You know, their main function is to be the and
we see a car moving, here, be the force at
that gate that allows their vehicles to get in and out.
And we've seen this play out. We saw a lot
of this in Chicago. We first saw this in la
when they called in the national guard. And you know,
you have the governor who said yesterday his national guard
is on standby to come in if they're needed. But
he reminded people that's Minnesota's National Guard, Who are you know,
working for the people. We also saw in prior incidents
where in Los Angeles in particular, where the White House
and the Pentagon sent in National Guard from other states,
in one case, the Marines to guard these federal buildings
and facilitate the passage of these operations. Why are we
having a demonstration at seven o'clock in the morning that's
running through eight thirty when those things usually occur later
in the day. The protesters wanted to be at this
facility because they know the vehicles launched for their operations
in the morning and return with those arrests, and they
wanted to as a form of protest, tried to block
those or interfere with those. And now we're the class
that comes from that.
Speaker 1: I kind of smirked a little bit when he mentioned
that Governor Walls has the National Guard to be able
to call in if he needs them. Wals didn't call
in the National Guard when Minneapolis was burning. It burned
to the crown. The police. There's a precinct in Minneapolis
that still is just nothing but ash. They never rebuilt
the thing. But he didn't call the National Guard until
the riots were three days into rioting in Minneapolis back
in two thousand and what was it, twenty twenty, and
he's not going to call him now, that's just not him.
He's very I'm so glad that he's not our vice president.
He's very weak, very weak leader. Anyway, the other part
that John was talking about was the President sending the
National Guarden from other states. The Supreme Court just last
week said you can't do that, so that's kind of
off the table. But meantime, the governor and the mayor
very very tough rhetoric about they want the ice out,
they're the enemy, we don't want them. It's very inflammatory language.
Speaker 3: It certainly has the potential to accelerate this kind of
encounter and these kinds of clashes, and what you will
see is two different things. If this continues to escalate,
the federal government will send in more resources if this continues,
but also do not be surprised, as we learned from
George Floyd, as we learned from Ferguson, that protesters and
activists from other cities will flood into Minneapolis to say,
this has become the battleground of this issue. When you
think about the position it puts Minneapolis, the city in
we don't have to go over the history of George
Floyd or the loss of relations between the city and
law enforcement in the community, that the five years it
took to rebuild those to get tensions down to a
place where the police had dialogue across the community. Brian O'Hara,
the police chief, talks about all the work that's going
into that. You will note that the federal agents their
body armor says police on the back of it. I
mean technically they're not police, their law enforcement and their
federal agents, but they wear that. That is one of
the things that paints with that broad brush among protesters
who say I don't care if you're the Minneapolis police
or these Green police were against the police. So one
of the things that the city is concerned. You really
got this from the mayor yesterday in his comments, was
you know, we don't want to be dragged backwards by
these operations which are targeted politically according to him, according
to others, targeted only at democratic cities and so on.
So this is a thing where what do you not
say here you don't see Minneapolis police. They are trying
to keep their distance from these ice operations. To show
we don't do immigration enforcement, we don't do purely civil
immigration matters. But you're going to likely see them at
some point, as we did yesterday, because after things get
out of control, who is the neutral party? Who are
who is going to separate you know, the ICE officers
from the crowds and so on. Difficult call for them.
We saw this happen in Los Angeles, and you know,
we saw them become really immeshed with the with the
operations against the protesters.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we'll see how this, how this if it
boils up, or whether it starts to tame down. But
again ICE is there in big numbers and they are
absolutely sure that they're going to continue their efforts. Todd Lyons,
who's the acting director of ICE, says we're not going anywhere.
Speaker 2: Heyl Grissina. Yeah, no, ICE is doing our law enforced submission.
We took a pause yesterday afternoon after that deadly shooting,
an incident, to check on our staff and our officers
in the scene, make sure everything was secure. But we were
back in the fight that's lost more than an hour later,
so we continued operations in Minnesota. We're there today. We're
still conducting operations, our daily law enforced submission, and all
fifty states and territories right now, so we're going to
keep doing the work. So we've put more resources there,
not only to address the ongoing fraud investigation, which is
extremely important. I think Americans people want to know exactly
what happened with that money, but also for the large
amount of criminally legal aliens that are in Minnesota. We
have the most largest contingent we ever had in an
ICE operation out there right now, and I think the
numbers speak for themselves. You know, you can see just yesterday,
even though we had that incident, we're still arresting more
and more people. Because sanctuary jurisdictions are like a magnet.
It brings these illegal aliens to an area that they
know they can hide in plain sight. And that's why
we have to be up there. If central jurisdictions worked
with US and turned over criminal legal aliens and a
timely fashion or when they know that they're a public
safety threat, we wouldn't have to be out of the street.
I would much rather have my men and women of
ICE and are the federal partners take custody these individuals
inside a controlled safe environment not have to go out
there and deal with the people like you're seeing right now.
Speaker 1: Now this makes no sense. I mean, I know it's
a political ideology, but it just seems somewhat safer for everybody.
They If the Minneapolis police have arrested various people for crimes,
then people seem to agree on let's get rid of
illegals that are in this country committing crimes, and they're
in the Minneapolis jail. Why can't the Minneapolis police call
up Ice and have them come over and meet them
in the jail, take custody of the people and deport them.
This none of this would go on, and that lady
would still be alive. However, there are people with different
thoughts on this. One of them who I think is
just a certifiable goofball is Eric Swalwell, congressman from the
San Francisco Bay area, and well this is how he
reacted to the story of this Ice shooting.
Speaker 2: We have to stop this.
Speaker 4: No one asked for this, and of course this is
where it was always going to end up. When you
put masked thugs, unidentified into our communities, of course, horrible
things are going to happen. And now people feel like
you're probably lucky if all that happens as you're thrown
into a van that's unidentified, or you're grabbed by your
hair and dragged through the streets. But this started with
Ice chasing people through the fields where they worked, and
then they deported a US citizen four year old and
battling stage four cancer. And then they started pulling people
out of their homes. And today we have found ICE
to have shot a mom in the face three times.
Here's that's what we can do. Because we're not helpless,
and people may feel helpless, we're not helpless, and tell
your leaders they're not helpless. We can strip them of
their immunity and I'm working on doing that in Congress.
We can make sure that when we seek to fund them,
we don't fund mass and we don't fund them being unidentified.
We also can make sure that local prosecutors and attorneys
general across the country, particularly in blue states, use your
law enforcement authorities. If they're going to falsely imprison people,
kidnap people, assault people, commit battery, and now murder, prosecute them.
They only understand one language. It's either us and the
most vulnerable in our communities on our heels or them
on their heels. That's the only way to approach this
is to be on offense.
Speaker 1: You could hear the hatred he has. He really hates
ICE and everything about them. They are a law enforcement agency,
Swalwell says, he's pro police. No, these are police officers
and they're enforcing the law. And if the reason why
prosecutors aren't excusing them is because they're doing it legally.
Have there been a smattering of cases where they've gone
to court and the court has ruled against him, Yes,
that's the way it should be. But the heavy, heavy
majority of this is all going according to the law.
But Swalwell has such hatred for law enforcement and for
ICE he wants to go after them using the big
foot of Congress. Here's another guy that was out this
morning in the snow, standing there protesting across the street
from the Federal building then Minneapolis. He's just crazy.
Speaker 5: Listen, I mean, how do you feel about what's going
on here in Minnesota.
Speaker 6: I'm very sad, But I'll tell you what I think
that President Trump and I saw I think this is
President Trump is a Russian. I think he's a Russian
asset and he's ripping our country apart. He's tearing us apart.
And these people in Minnesota, people with brown skin and
brown eyes, they're doing our work. They're hardworking people, they're
making trying to make a living for their families.
Speaker 5: They're doing the work that nobody else will do.
Speaker 7: Thank you.
Speaker 1: So you hear some of the achieser, Yeah, we got
to move on. So it's Trump's fault. Of course, it's
Trump's fault. The thing about though, I wish they would
do a better job of publicizing the people that they
are arresting. They arrested a guy in Minneapolis yesterday that
is a child molester, multiple child molestations, and so I
guess this guy wants child molesters to stay in Minneapolis.
The governor there, Walls, is now claiming that he's issued
a warning order to the Minnesota National Guard. He got
so much grief over not calling the National Guard when
the city was burning in twenty twenty that, well, I'm
not actually calling him. I've issued a warning order to them.
I don't have the kahunas to actually order them into
controlling the riot or the protest or whatever they want
to call it. He's such a weak guy, such a
weak guy, but he keeps and he says he's also
not using any sort of adversarial language. He's full of it. Absolutely,
he's not as bad as s wallwell, but he's in
that same paragraph, no question about it. So back to
the shooting itself. Like I said when we started the
podcast today, everybody has an opinion. Everybody has seen the tape.
You've seen one tape. Apparently there's many more to come.
But this is fascinating to see how both sides. By
the way, I think I'm not a big fan of
Christinome and she's out there declaring that this woman was
a what was a domestic terrorist? And National Review wrote
a piece today. Andy McCarthy wrote a piece saying, don't
throw around the term terrorist so loosely. There's a definition
for it. So she is getting that's her. She likes
to do the bravado dress up and have a dress
up event every single day. She's very performative. But she's
not as bad as again the people like the mayor
and the governor. But Elliott Williams, who is a lawyer,
former federal prosecutor, that haven't we learned anything about rushing
to judgment?
Speaker 5: You absolutely cannot We not learned anything in the last
decade of trying to unpack whether police involves shootings or
even individual ones between people. There are a host of
complicated questions over the reasonableness of the fear of the
person shooting in an action that certainly can't be unpacked
from looking at a video. I will say, setting aside
sort of a nonsense that came from the Secretary of
Homeland Security today or yesterday, the smartest comments I think
came from Tom Homan. The borders are for the White House,
who is known as a you know, somewhat of a
hardliner on immigration, and somebody I worked with four years
at ICE. Tom was clear that we can't rush to
judgment when looking at a video. Why because he's actually
a law enforcement officer and did this for decades and
years and knows that it is incredibly risky on either
side to look at a video and try to unpack
it as if we really really just.
Speaker 1: Have people making all kinds of claims about what that
they know exactly what happened by one video. And Elliott's right.
I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's Governor Waltz or
Christy Nome. Stop with it, and two a couple of
law enforcement officers, chiefs of police. They're saying this, this
is going to take an investigation, then we'll have answers.
Speaker 7: I do that, Well, I think that is a question
that ultimately must be answered through a third and complete investigation.
And that's why I think we owe it not just
to the deceased and her family, but also to the
larger community to ensure that number one, we maintained that
scene yesterday so that it could be processed and that
we can allow a full investigation to follow the evidence
to all of its logical conclusion. That being said, in
law enforcement professionally, it is very concerning when we have
officers that are placed into situations which may result in
the use of deadly force, and we must ensure that
our officers are doing everything possible to avoid placing officers'
lives in jeopardy unnecessarily and trying to de escalate whenever possible.
Speaker 1: Well, the officer that did the shooting had a millisecond
to make a decision is this part trying to run
me over? And if so, I've got to fire at him.
It was literally a millisecond. As far as the investigation,
I think I know where it's going to go. I'm
not trying to make a conclusion out at Hal's. I'll
let them do their investigation, but that a lot of
that is for public pr if you will, to make
the public happy. But again, I'll be surprised if this
guy is indicted for anything carry or bond Washington lawyer,
this is her assessment that of whether or not he's
going to face criminal indictments.
Speaker 8: Well, I think what's particularly important about the facts, and
with respect to what Christino I'm saying, is this woman
appears to have been in the process of committing crimes.
Right She's impeding law enforcement, she's stopping traffic. These are
all criminal offenses. So why does that matter? Because if
you're a law enforcement officer and you're approaching someone or
dealing with someone who is already in the process of
committing crimes, what's going to happen. Your suspicion is going
to go up, and you're going to become extra concerned
that this person is capable of something else. Why does
that matter? Because of perspective and when this is being
investigated and ultimately going to the courts, they're going to
look at if an officer on the scene, on the scene,
not the armchair quarterbacks, not hindsight, but on the scene,
had reasonable belief that he or she or others were
in harm or in threat of serious harm or possible death.
And so this all comes into play when the court
examines all of the circumstances that led to the use
of deadly force. Right, Well, again it comes down to
the perspective of the officer on the scene. Right you
have to look at it through the lens of the
person who's stopping, and of course the person who's in
front of the car, who sees the car coming towards
them and is maybe not aware of what's going on
on the other side of the car. And we've all
watched the videos and we can see that part of it.
And so again it really matters what has happened. Then,
certainly in the hours proceeding at Bill it does matter.
Speaker 2: And you know, the.
Speaker 8: Courts have upheld that even an in perfect decision, if
made in extreme danger, can be lawful.
Speaker 1: So hopefully things settle down quickly in Minneapolis and Ice
can do their job and leave and go someplace else.
They'll always be there. Like todd Lyon says They've been
there for decades, so it's not like this is something new.
They have an office there. We've got Greenland again. Question
of we already have this is where I scratch my head.
We already have the authority from an agreement from nineteen
fifty one to do as much military work in Greenland
as we want to do. Build bases, build military establishments,
build air fields, whatever we want to do. It's already
been agreed to. So I don't know what all the
fuss is about. As far as Venezuela goes and controlling
the oil, we're getting more information about that as well
that we will do the marketing, they will do the
work on getting the oil out of the ground. Whether
oil companies from the US are going to invest a
dime will wait and see. I'm sure they're interested, But
what the terms are is going to determine all of
all of that, and then we will take the money
and supposedly put in US banks and then send money
to Venezuela. We don't know how much. I don't know
how the Venezuelans are going to think about that. You
can see that they're probably pretty happy that Maduro's gone
and if money's invested back into the communities. I would
think the Venezuelan people would be very supportive all of that.
What else do we owe? The President wants to ban
large investors from buying single family homes. He's trying to
make it so that they don't ace out the couple
that wants to buy a home here in the US
and all of a sudden, some big corporation comes in
and buys up the home and they're not able to
afford it. I don't know if that's legally possible, because
investors have freedom of speech just like individuals do. So
we'll see what comes out of all of that. As
far as Wall Street goes, looks like we are starting
the year off with a little bit of a roller coaster,
way up, then way down, then back up higher again.
Today Dow Jones Industrial is up two hundred and seventy
or forty nine thousand and two sixty six. The S
and P up just part of a point. Nasdaq fell
one hundred and four, so a mixed market. The price
of gold up twenty dollars to four thousand and four
to eighty three, and a big jump for oil today
up to almost three dollars to fifty just under fifty
nine dollars now for one barrel of oil. That's it
for today. Thank you for coming by. We'll be back
again tomorrow. Tomorrow's Friday. We've got the big jobs report
in the morning, so we will talk about that and
hope to see you them