NOTICIAS

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined The Guy Benson Show to discuss the special counsel’s report, America’s open border, and the crisis in the Middle East. See below for highlights and listen to the full interview here.

On President Biden’s “willful” mishandling of classified documents: 

“The president is lying when he says he was cleared of wrongdoing. The special counsel found disclosure of classified information from his notebook to a ghostwriter, which risked serious damage to national security. He willfully retained and disclosed this information after his vice presidential tenure. He was a private citizen. These are things that were in garage offices and basements marked ‘classified’ and so forth. So he’s lying when he says that. 

“But I think the most damning thing we need to understand is the reason why they chose not to bring charges. It’s right there on page 219 of the report. It says that even though all the technical elements of a crime exist, we shouldn’t charge him, because if we take this to a jury, he’s going to appear to that jury like he did in the interviews: as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with very poor memory. Basically, we can’t take this to a jury, even though he broke the law, because they’re going to see a man that is suffering from age-related dementia. 

“I think it’s very damning, but it’s also very dangerous, because you know who else reads all this? They’re seeing it in Beijing. They’re seeing it in Moscow. They’re seeing it in Tehran. They’re seeing it in whatever cave or sewer these terrorists live in. And they’re thinking to themselves, ‘The president of our number one adversary, the most powerful country in the world, is in rapid decline.’ Being led by a man who claims to talk to former, dead leaders of European countries—there’s a real danger involved in that.”  

On President Biden’s criticism of Israel’s actions against Hamas:

“He’s asking us to fund something that he believes is over the top. I don’t believe it is over the top. But that’s all domestic politics. What’s happening is, his campaign people are coming in and saying: ‘Sir, we have all these Arab activists in Michigan, a state you need to win, and they’re very upset, and they’re going to vote against you, and they’re calling you Genocide Joe, so we have to continue to be supportive of Israel for one part of our base, but we also have to appease these radicals who support Hezbollah and Hamas and Israel. We can’t win without their votes.’

“So what has he done? It started with the leak that he was on the phone with Netanyahu when he hung up on him out of frustration. Then came the leak last week that they’re working on mandating or proposing some two-state solution, which is a complete fantasy, because who would run that? A terrorist organization that wants a one-state solution: them and no Jews, from the river to the sea. Then yesterday, they deployed their key aides from the White House to Michigan, and they met with some of these activists, including people who not only openly support Hamas and Hezbollah, but are on record repeatedly saying that the U.S. government is controlled by Zionist, Jewish money.

“It’s the same as the immigration thing. I know his memory is not very good, so let me remind the president that he spent three years telling us there was no problem with the border. If you said there was, you were a xenophobe, and you were anti-immigrant, and you were a racist, and you were a hater. Then his people said, ‘Sir, the borders are becoming a problem, especially now that our liberal big city mayors are having to deal with it.’ 

“So here’s their plan. They say: ‘We’re going to come up with a bill, we’re going to call it border security. It won’t actually change anything, but we want to get some Republicans on board so we can call it bipartisan. And then when these Neanderthals in the MAGA movement oppose it because it’s a sham, we can go to the American people and say we tried, but these people blocked it, so blame them from now on.’

“He can’t fix the border, because he’s got elements of his base that believe that anyone who comes to America should be released and provided resources, provided money, provided things that Americans who work here for 40 years don’t get. That’s an element of his base. You have to figure out, how can I make it look like I’m trying to do something on the border, but not actually do something on the border, because that would upset my base? These domestic politics are infiltrating our policy decisions in ways that are damaging to the country.”

On Democrats’ reliance on antisemitic voters: 

“[Democrats] are basically admitting we have an element of our activist base that are antisemites and hate Israel, that we can’t win Michigan without their votes. It’s not just damaging for the Democratic Party. It’s damaging for the country to know that there are elements like this in our country. 

“We have people in this country on student visas, they’re guests in America, and they’re out there calling for intifada and attacking Jews, sometimes physically, or at least threatening to attack them. And we don’t revoke their visas. We can, but they won’t do it. And they won’t do it because they want their votes. That’s part of their base. 

“That’s a problem the Democratic Party is going to have to confront. There is an antisemitic element of their voting base and their activist base, without whom they can’t win. They have to figure out a way to appease them. You’re starting to see it seep into how they talk about Israel and even our policies.”

On potential executive action by the Biden Administration to reduce illegal immigration: 

“They’re playing word games, because at the end of the day, this thing started because of the decisions that he made. Immigration is not some unregulated space in American life. The law is very straightforward. It says if you are here illegally, you shall be detained through removal.

“Now, there have always existed very narrow exceptions. If the Dalai Lama shows up at the border and says, ‘The Chinese are trying to kill me,’ you grant an exception. Joe Biden, not even Obama did this, is the first president in American history to make the exception the rule. What he has determined is that even single adults that arrive at the border, we will not detain them, we will release them. 

“Over 3.1 million people have been released into the country since he’s been president. Over 600,000 of them either have criminal convictions or pending criminal cases. If you know that you have an 85 or 90% chance of being released into America, people are going to do it. They’re going to make it.

“He created this. How do you fix it? You reverse the executive orders. But he can’t do that, because it would be admitting that Trump was right. What Trump did worked. He can’t do that, because he’s got people in his party that see, in their eyes, a bunch of future citizens.”

On whether President Biden has deterred Iranian proxies from attacking Americans:  

“I think in the long term, no. I think in the short term, you’ll probably see a pause as the Iranians wait to see what else we’re going to do. But ultimately, I think those attacks will resume, because these people are terrorists, and their mission in life is to attack the United States until there’s not a single American left in Syria or Iraq or anywhere in the region. 

“They use Iranian weapons and Iranian intelligence and Iranian direction to pick their targets and conduct their attacks. That’s what they do. The reason why [the Biden Administration] telegraphed that they were going to be attacking, and they gave them three days’ heads up, is so that the Iranians and their IRGC officers would get out of Syria, get out of Iraq. They made sure none of them were killed, because they wanted to avoid escalation. I think the Iranians are probably sitting around waiting to see what else is going to happen. But eventually, these attacks are all going to restart.

“I know it may seem far away, but insurance on shipping for American and Western-flagged vessels has gone through the roof [because of the Houthis]. That price is going to be paid. It’s going to cost more money to get goods. That includes energy.

“We’re all going to start paying more because some band of pirates in Yemen is using Iranian weapons and Iranian intelligence to target our ships. They’re not hitting the Chinese. The Chinese are not paying. But we are.”