Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Tennessee Star National Correspondent Neil McCabe to the newsmakers line to discuss the unmasking and verification of the woman that blocked Senator Ted Cruz’s right to film migrants at the detention facilities on the southern border and a Harris presidency waiting in the wings.
Leahy: In studio with us is state Senator Mark Pody, the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael. On the newsmaker line, breaking stories left and right our Washington correspondent Neil McCabe. Good morning, Neil.
McCabe: Hey. Good morning, guys. Really good to be with you, Mark and Crom.
Leahy: So I was not in the studio on Wednesday. I just have to give a note of congratulations to you, Neil for breaking that great story about John Kerry, former Secretary of State, of whom we captured a photo of him on a plane not wearing a mask, which is, of course, something that Joe Biden says you can’t do. The regulations say you can’t do it. But we got that photo that was all over the place two weeks ago for about 48 hours. It was the only picture that apparently you could see on Fox News. And it was a Tennessee Star breaking story. Congratulations on that get.
McCabe: Wasn’t that fun, Mike? And it’s always funny when you’re working with you and Christina before a story posts, you think you have something, but you’re not really sure. And it’s like we reached out to American Airlines. They came back to us and they said, what was the flight number? I told them what flight it was, and they passed our deadline. We gave them another 15 minutes. But you just can’t hold that thing forever. And once it took off, it just took off.
Leahy: It really did. It’s been the most-watched or viewed story in the history of The Tennessee Star. It was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of page views. So good job on that. Now we have another story. We are giving the other side an opportunity to respond. They haven’t responded yet, but we’re about to break a story today. Again, you’re breaking another story. We have apparently the identity of the woman who was blocking Senator Ted Cruz from taking videos of the young kids in these, I don’t know what you call them. In very terrible circumstances on the border detention centers.
McCabe: They are detention centers and it’s a horrible situation. I read yesterday that there are now more migrant children in custody under Biden than there ever was during the peak of Trump. And they just keep coming. And this woman was going left when Cruz’s camera went left. She went right when he went right.
And she quite literally was violating the constitution. A senator has a constitutional obligation for oversight. And the idea that somebody in the executive branch would jump in front of somebody’s camera while he’s trying to narrate a video and keeps interrupting him and talking over him. If she is willing to do that to a U.S. Senator, you can imagine what they’ve been doing behind the scenes to reporters.
Leahy: Exactly. And, Neil, we’ve had this story since, I think, Sunday night. And we know the identity. We have given the Department of Homeland Security plenty of time to confirm or deny. And I think we’ve given them until nine o’clock this morning. To borrow the old Howie Carr line, when the phone didn’t ring, we knew it was the Department of Homeland Security calling back to confirm or deny the identity of this person. Crom Carmichael.
Carmichael: What you’re doing is you’re giving the Department of Homeland Security the opportunity to deny that you have correctly identified this person.
Leahy: We are doing that.
Carmichael: You’re not asking for confirmation or they could confirm it? You are at least giving them a chance to say no. I’m sorry. You got the wrong name.
Leahy: Exactly right.
Carmichael: Neil, is this person an employee of the Department of Homeland Security?
McCabe: Absolutely.
Carmichael: So it wasn’t somebody from the Biden administration sent down there to tag along with the senators and try to disrupt them?
McCabe: Yeah, she’s a political minder. She’s like a commissar who’s been sent alongside the delegation and it’s her job to sort of corral.
Carmichael: So she did travel. She wasn’t somebody who worked there with those children day in, day out. She traveled down. Interesting.
McCabe: No, no, no. If we have ID her correctly, and I believe we have, she’s someone who’s from Texas, but someone who works in a very senior position in the Obama administration in the Customs and Border Protection. And she has returned to a similar position at Customs and Border Protection. So she is working in Washington. Ted Cruz already said at his press conference that she went to another Senator and demanded that he delete the photos that he had taken and threatened that if he did not delete them, she would throw them all out of the facility.
Leahy: Under what legal authority was that, Neil?
McCabe: No idea. (Leahy chuckles) Michael, we asked them what was her role and what rules were they supposed to be following? Now I will say that it is considered a violation of people’s rights if someone is in a refugee or detention or prisoner status, you’re not supposed to exploit them, which is why Cruz made the point that he would blur their faces. But other than blurring the faces of children that are only for propriety.
My view is if I can see and I’m on the sidewalk and I see something, I can take a picture of what I see. It’s not a secret. But we’ll see what happens when this thing launches. I also want to say with Biden coming out with a new tax increase and he’s putting that in front of the infrastructure bill that he’s going to release. And then he’s got behind that a gun confiscation or a big restriction of gun rights bill coming up.
And Biden is really loading some barrels onto that wagon and he doesn’t have the horses to pull it. He’s absolutely running out of time. I’ve said this before. He hasn’t yet addressed Congress. He does not yet have a director of Office and Budget Management confirmed. They haven’t even nominated secretaries of the Army and the Air Force and a slew of other positions. And Nancy Pelosi has a five-seat margin in the House. That is very very high. And as these Democrats look at the polls, and they look at that red wave that’s coming in 2022, they’re not going to go down with the Biden ship.
Leahy: But the good news, of course, is that the legal but not legitimate occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Joe Biden has given an assignment to Vice President Kamala Harris, which is to go down to the border. What’s happened with that assignment?
McCabe: Yeah, she’s pretending she never got that assignment, and it’s a very interesting dynamic. And it happened a lot sooner than I expected is that you are now seeing the Biden and the Harris camps really develop into factions. And now you’re seeing some embarrassing leaks about Harris that she’s supposedly uncomfortable at Blair House. She’s impatient to get into her mansion. And that sort of comes from the Biden people.
And wait for the Harris people to start leaking. And remember, Harris’s sister, Maya Harris is married to Tony West, who is number three in the Obama Justice Department and who was basically in the running to replace or take the place instead of it going to Loretta Lynch. Loretta Lynch got that top job. But Tony West is very much a part of that Obama legal machine. And in Maya Harris was very much running her sister Kamala’s campaign. There is a government waiting that is centered around Kamala Harris. And the Biden people are showing that they don’t want to leave or be pushed out so quickly.
Leahy: Deliver us oh, Lord, from a Kamala Harris administration. That’s my prayer for today. Neil McCabe thank you so much for joining us. We’ll talk to you next week at the same time.
McCabe: Thanks, Michael. Be good.
Listen to the third hour here:
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