Transcription
The Trump administration is still holding firm to its claim that 37-year-old Alex Preddy wasn't just an innocent protester in the lead-up to his fatal shooting by federal agents. No, they're not doing that. In the words of Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, Preddy was at the scene to, quote, "do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement."
But footage of the shooting paints a very different picture. In a new Washington Post analysis, zoomed-in footage appears to show a federal agent removing the handgun Freddie was legally carrying just moments before another agent shoots him multiple times. One thing we should point out as well: at no point in this video or any video that we have watched do you see Alex Freddie holding a gun. When asked again this morning if Freddie did in fact threaten officers with his gun, but you know, FBI Director Cash Patel and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem all couldn't give a straight answer.
"Watch. Was he brandishing it? Was he a threat because he had a gun in his hand? That put law enforcement in danger? Danny, we heard the law enforcement officer say 'gun, gun, gun,' so at some point they knew there was a gun. Was the gun visible, or did Border Patrol see the gun after they shot him?"
"Again, all those pieces of the investigation are being led by DHS and HSI, and I don't want to comment on their ongoing investigation. Did he say, 'I'm going to kill you,' or did he leave a note? How do you know that was his intent?"
"You know, part of this investigation will be hearing from those agents and officers and people on the ground."
Joining us now are Jason Hauser, former Chief of Staff for ICE under President Biden, and George Conway, attorney and president of the Society for the Rule of Law. He's also running for Congress in New York's 12th congressional district. Jason, I'll start with you. Your reaction to the contrast between what we're hearing from officials and what they're saying? And the fact that you already have people in the administration coming out and describing Alex Peretti as a would-be assassin, as a domestic terrorist, and yet when they get pressed to substantiate any of their allegations, they throw their hands up in the air and say, "Oh, the investigation is going to determine that," and it's an investigation being led by an agency that is ill-equipped to do so.
"Yeah, thanks for the question. I think my thoughts come around two or three different key points. First, I ask myself, as a former Chief of Staff of ICE, is how would these investigations typically happen? You know, there would be a multiprong, multi-agency review, sort of unbiased, out of the political sphere, out of social media review, investigation that would include interviews, going through the surveillance video, et cetera. This would happen in typical ICE practice, whether there's a death in custody or whether there's a use of force. In this instance, but clearly we have a situation. On the second point is, we have a situation where this is now being adjudicated in the public sphere on social media and the media. That is not helpful to law enforcement. That is not helpful to the public. And that is not helpful for the continued trust in federal law enforcement to carry out their mission, going after national security threats. Two, we have to ask ourselves, strategically, why were these officers in this neighborhood? What was in the public safety interest that they were carrying on? We can clearly see that tensions are heightened, that it is not just tactically on the ground for officers to deescalate, but it is for senior leaders of federal law enforcement and the government to deescalate these situations and focus law enforcement on national security and public safety threats. That is not what is occurring, clearly. And we need to have a reset moment in this specific in Minnesota, and we need to ask ourselves, and the law enforcement needs to ask themselves, how are we going to be able to carry out our mission? And how are we going to keep communities safe?"
George, you have been a lifelong conservative, I guess until recently. I don't know how you identify yourself now that you're running a Democratic primary. You've been a member of the Federalist Society. I'm wondering what you make of the comments from Trump administration officials suggesting that the fact that Alex Preddy had a firearm on him meant that they were justified in shooting him. How does that sit with you?
"What does that carry a firearm? And what the point? They lie. That's what this is about. They are lying and they're creating an after-the-fact excuse for a murder. And this is what they do. They lie. We have a sociopath of our president who is a pathological liar. And unless you lie on his behalf, you lose your job. And he surrounded himself by other sociopathic liars. So all you're going to hear from this administration are lies about this. And the note. And we have to stop saying, well, this is what a normal administration would do. This is what a normal administration would do. This is what a normal DHS would do. This government is a criminal organization at this point. And what they're going to do is they're going to cover this. They're going to cover this murder up. And they're not going to investigate it. And we have to start talking about impeachment and removal of the president and senior cabinet officers."
Jason, I have to ask you about Attorney General Pam Bondi. She sent a letter to Governor Walz basically saying, you know, I'd be willing to call off ICE, get them out of your your city, your state, but hand me over a couple things. The most, I guess, eye-popping of them being your voter rolls. What exactly do voter rolls have to do with immigration enforcement in the interior and public safety?
"Migrants can't vote, so they don't have anything to do with immigration enforcement. Immigration enforcement, immigration enforcement. From my understanding of my time at DHS, CBP, and ICE, the Minnesota Department of Corrections has always had a relationship with immigration enforcement officials, turning over those that are convicted criminals and those that are national security and public safety threats. And in these instances, in this instance, let's just look at this specifically what happened on the ground here. Border Patrol officers responding in an instance, and these sort of heightened, you know, circumstances where there's a lot of tension and fear on all sides, where officers potentially are not, we're not trained even to sort of carry out. This Border Patrol has a national security mission on the border, not in these communities. But we have a situation now where dozens of thousands of officers across the state of Minnesota are off their normal mission set. That's going after human smuggling, counterterrorism, human trafficking, drugs, drug smuggling. No one in the country has said that drug prices have been been skyrocketing because there's so little on the market. But to the to the question of the attorney, you know, with or the questions that the attorney general raises to your to your question is clearly this is not with the sort of typical operations of immigration enforcement. There's 1.5 million people that have final orders of removal that have exhausted their pathways to be in the country. And there is a small subset of individuals that have taken advantage of a broken immigration system that no one is now talking about fixing. Enforcement is just one piece of an immigration continuum. No one's talking about that. But this idea that we shouldn't have Border Patrol, FBI, ICE focused on actual convicted criminals and humanely removing, it sort of takes it away from what the public believes is ongoing. And it breaks down the public trust. And one final point, is this erodes the relationship between federal law enforcement agencies and federal law enforcement in state and local law enforcement. This could take decades to rebuild."
"No, I mean, and you look at, I'm going to go to George now, but you look at, there's a lawsuit from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Hennepin Attorney's Office suing the administration, saying, don't destroy evidence. We need to have a pause. We need—you know, this is the concern is so great that this administration is just blatantly lying and destroying evidence. How can the American public trust anything that's coming out of this administration when they see with their own eyes in video footage that completely contradicts their narrative? And they are reminded yet again that at the end of the day, people can see and process information. Again, this is a criminal precedent and a criminal administration, and they are engaging in crimes, and they are covering up these crimes. And this isn't about immigration enforcement. The letter from Pam Bondi talking about voter rolls demonstrates that it's not about immigration enforcement. This is totally and completely. Any scholar, any serious scholar of international relations and history will tell you this is straight-up fascism. They're using ICE and the Border Patrol not as immigration enforcement tools. They are using them as brown shirts. And there actually, there's been talk about, oh, these people aren't trained, and a lot of them aren't trained, but the people who pull the triggers on Renee Goode and on Alex Pretty, they were experienced, okay? What's happened here is you have a police force that's beholden to a president that's being told, we have your backs no matter what. Do what you will to these people, do what you will to the public because they want to intimidate and scare people. They want to control people. And the voter rolls? This is about the election. This is about this is about ending democracy. We have to stop pretending that there is some argument that there are some legitimate law enforcement concern here, because there isn't. These people are destroying the Constitution. They're trying to destroy democracy, and they are using the mechanism of armed officers with masks who are just beating up citizens and killing citizens. They are using that tool to create disruption so they can use more force to eliminate the possibility that they could be removed from office and suffer criminal sanctions for the crimes that they are now committing. That is what is happening in the United States today, and if we say it in any words that are less blunt, we're not telling the truth to the people."