The White House Chief of Staff has traditionally been known as the gatekeeper. Well, we have gone

behind the gates with Mark Meadows, live from the White House. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.

Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz. I'm Michael Knowles. Little change of scenery today, joined as always by the senator and Mark Meadows.

Great to be with you. Mr. Meadows, I'm noticing now it is 7 o'clock here. This is probably the earliest you have gotten off work since you've taken on this job.

Well, as soon as we get off work, I'll let you know whether that's the case or not.

Fair enough. Obviously, it's a 24-7 kind of job, but, you know, our nation is in a critical time

where we've got to actually make sure that people like Ted and I work together on behalf of

all the freedom-loving, forgotten men and women in this country.

And really, the impact is well beyond this, as Ted and I have articulated a number of times.

Well, because I know, Senator, you and Mr. Meadows go back a lot farther than just you taking this job as the White House Chief of

Staff. Yeah, he actually would talk to me before I actually was the chief of staff, you know,

so I could count them on one hand, but. Well, Mark and I go back a long time. We were actually

both elected to Congress in the same day, November 2012. We showed up here January, 2013,

looked around and said,

what the hell are we doing here? And it was, Barack Obama had just been reelected. It was a messed

up time. But one of the things we found were both brand new is there were really only a handful of

people willing to stand up and fight for anything.

And so we became fast friends, we became fast friends fighting against Obamacare, where we're

standing up going, wait a second, we got elected to fight this damn thing, and too many Republicans

just wanted to give in. And it's interesting.

In Washington, like anywhere else, courage is contagious.

So before he was chief of staff, Mark led the Freedom Caucus of the House.

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