It's a presidential cracktown looking for a pretext.

And Donald Trump has been in search of that pretext for seven or eight years.

If J.D. Vance wanted to be honest with the American people, and he knows this, he's a smart guy.

I know he knows this.

He could just say, you know what, guys, the real truth is my boss, who I'm a heartbeat away from, really just wants to go

deploy the military in places to create violence to justify a wire crackdown. Because I can tell

you firsthand, Nicole, just before the state of the union in 2019, we stood in the map room

of the White House, and Donald Trump almost spontaneously brought up the idea of weaving

a couple of sentences into the speech, announcing he was invoking the Insurrection Act.

You can't imagine the panic on the faces in that room.

And Donald Trump was just a few moments away from just telling the guy who sits at the

teleprompter to write it into the speech.

And we had to go spend the rest of the day convincing White House counsel's office to stand up to the president to get him not to do it. But that's how long this has been going on. And Trump wanted to go deploy it and use the border as his pretext. It doesn't matter what they say. This is not about street crime. And by the way, if it was about street crime, you don't need to use the

United States military to crack down on street crime. You can increase the number of police on

the streets. You can do any number of things. These excuses are exactly that they are excuses.

The vice president knows it. And it's why Nicole, by the way, I think you watch them in those

video clips, and he has a really tough time defending this because the defenses

are so completely threadbare. Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton reportedly could

be next. And investigations have been opened into other targets, including California Senator

Adam Schiff, Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis and former CIA Director John Brennan.

A current administration that is attacking heretofore innocent people,

people who have committed no crimes, people whose only crime exists in the mind of the President of the United States

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