Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) on Foreign Adversaries Seeing Biden’s Mental State: “There’s a Real Danger Involved”
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Vice Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, senior member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, and member of Appropriations committee, joined the Guy Benson Show today to discuss the latest coming from the Biden camp as many show concerns over the president’s age and wellness after the release of the Hur report. Guy and Sen. Rubio also discuss the border and what went wrong with the Senate border bill. Listen to the full interview below.
Full Interview:
Listen to the full podcast:
Rubio had this to say on Biden’s fading memory and competency:
“I think it’s very damning, but it’s also very dangerous because you know who else, right… they’re seeing it in Beijing. They’re seeing it in Moscow. They’re seeing it in Tehran… they’re seeing and they’re thinking to themselves, the president of our number one adversary… is in rapid decline… there’s a real danger involved.”
Full Transcript:
Guy Benson: And back with us now as U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. Senator, good to have you back.
Sen Marco Rubio: Thanks for having me back.
Guy Benson: So you saw this report that came out yesterday from the special counsel. Then I’m sure you’ve seen the president’s response to it last night in that press conference. Your thoughts?
Sen Marco Rubio: Well, I think three things. The first is that the president’s lying when he says he was cleared of wrongdoing. The special counsel found disclosure of classified information from his notebook to a ghostwriter that all those things risked serious damage to national security. You know, that he willfully retained and disclosed this information after his vice president. He was a private citizen. These are things that were in garage offices and basements, you know, marked, classified and so forth. So he’s lying when he says that. And he’s I but I think the most damning thing we need to understand is the reason why they chose not to bring charges. The reason why they chose not to bring charges. It’s right there on page 219 of the report, it says that that even though all the technical elements of a crime existed, which is what the special counsel found, he said what he did was wrong. What he did was illegal. But 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 with them 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. So I think it’s very damning, but it’s also very dangerous because you know who else, right. All this. So we’re seeing all these reports. They’re seeing it in Beijing. They’re seeing it in Moscow. They’re seeing it in Tehran. They’re seeing it where whatever cave or, you know, sewer these terrorists live in. And, and they’re, they’re seeing and they’re thinking to themselves, the president of our number one adversary, the most powerful country in the world, is a man who clearly not just has poor memory dating back to 2017, but we can see on TV every day is in rapid decline. A man who claims to talk to dead people, former, you know, dead leaders of European countries, that’s there’s a real danger involved. And I listen, there’s 100 other reasons why we should beat Joe Biden in November. I wish this wasn’t one of them because I think it’s dangerous for America.
Guy Benson: You mentioned terrorists in their sewers. One moment in the press conference last night that may have been a bit overlooked because everyone was focused on his flashes of anger, some of the lies that he told that you just mentioned, of course, is confusion of Egypt and Mexico at one point. But he came back to the podium to respond to a question about the war in Gaza, Israel fighting a terrorist organization in Hamas. And the president condemned Israel’s war as, quote, over the top as they try to defeat this Hamas enemy that slaughtered 1200 civilians not long ago. Over the top is a pretty significant thing for the American commander in chief to say, what are your thoughts there?
Sen Marco Rubio: Well, a significant thing to say while coming to Congress, who’s going to be voting this weekend on whether we should provide more money for Israel, which I think we should. So he’s asking us to fund something that he believes is over the top, which I don’t believe it is. But that’s all domestic politics. What’s happening is his campaign people are coming in and saying, sir, we have all these, you know, Arab Muslim 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 do something to continue to be supportive of Israel for one part of our base, I imagine the majority. But we also have to appease these radicals who support Hezbollah and Hamas and Israel, or they won’t vote for you because they’re important. We can’t win without their votes. Think about that. And so what has he done? Well, it started with leaks. The leak that I was on. He was on the phone with Netanyahu when he hung up on him out of frustration. Then the leaks last week that they’re working on mandating or proposing some two state solution, which is, you know, a complete fantasy, because who would run that? A terrorist organization, that’s who would run it. How can you create a country that’s going to be right? Well, they don’t want it.
Guy Benson: They said they won’t. They won’t do a two state solution. They want the Jews dead in Israel go.
Sen Marco Rubio: To the sea. They want a one state solution, which is them and no Jews. And from the river to the sea. Right. But then yesterday they deploy their key aides from the white House, go to Michigan, and they meet with some of these activists, including people, by the way, who not only openly support Hamas and Hezbollah, but some of the activists who are on record repeatedly saying that the US government is controlled by Zionist Jewish money. And things of this nature. Look, it’s the same as the immigration thing, right? 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. And if you said there was, you were a xenophobe and you were anti-immigrant and you were a racist and you were a hater, and then his people one time and said, sir, the borders are becoming a problem, especially now that our liberal big city mayors are having to deal with it. It says, all right, great. So here’s their plan. They came up with we’re going to. Come up with a bill, we’re going to call it border security. It won’t actually change anything but the Republican. And we want to get some Republicans on board so we can call a bipartisan. And then when these Neanderthals in the MAGA movement oppose it because it’s a sham, then we can go to the American people and say, look, we tried, I really did. But, you know, these people blocked it, so blame them from now on. I guess a brilliant move. But again, all of it. 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 not just released, but provided resources, provided money, provided things that Americans who work here for 40 years don’t get. That’s an element of his base. So 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. So it’s the same thing. It’s how these domestic politics are all infiltrating our policy decisions in ways that are damaging to the country. Yeah.
Guy Benson: And one of the people that you just referenced in that Michigan meeting there were top Obama, Biden officials from both eras who are now working for the president, who went to Michigan as emissaries, basically to this outraged community of basically Hamas sympathizers and supporters, one of whom is named Osama Siblani, who’s a journalist and an activist. And he said in the past that, quote, if the FBI wants to come after those who support the resistance done by Hezbollah, they better bring a fleet of busses. I, for one, would be willing to go to jail. He also said that Hezbollah and Hamas and other Palestinian factions are not terrorists. We believe they are freedom fighters. And after October 7th, he said, Hamas is not a terrorist organization. He said Hamas is radically approaching this situation, but it’s a result of oppression for a long period of time. So victim blaming, supporting terrorist groups, that man made it to the list of a meeting with top Biden officials. Senator, is there anything someone could say that would disqualify one from making the guest list for that type of pow wow?
Sen Marco Rubio: No, because they need their votes, because there are basically admitting we have an element of our activist base in the Democratic Party that are anti-Semites and hate Israel and, you know, so we need their votes. We can’t win Michigan without their votes. I mean, it’s frankly, it’s, 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. I mean, you know, we got people in this country on student visas, student visas, they’re guests in America, and they’re out there calling for intifada and, you know, anti and, attacking Jews, sometimes physically or at least threatening to. And we want we don’t revoke their visas. We can but they won’t. They have made a point of doing that. And they won’t do it because they want their votes. That’s part of their base. And that’s a problem the Democratic Party is going to have to confront is that there is an anti-Semitic element of their voting base and their activist base, without whom they can’t win. So they have to figure out a way to appease them. And, and you’re starting to see it seep into how they talk about Israel and even on our policies.
Guy Benson: On the border, since you brought that up as well. That bill went down very hard in the Senate, didn’t come close to the 60 vote threshold that it needed, didn’t even get to 50. Actually, at one point, hard opposition among Republicans in the House as well. One thing that I noticed is President Biden, to your point, has been saying, along with his administration for the last couple of years, that the borders secure, there is no crisis. Now all of a sudden, well, there is one. And the only way to secure it is through this specific bill. And if not any of that chaos down there is the fault of Donald Trump or Republicans or what have you, something else that they have asserted over and over again, including from the president himself, is there’s nothing more he can do, right? He’s tried everything. He has no more authority. It has to be Congress. We know that’s not true. We know that he could undo all sorts of decisions that he made unilaterally after Trump left office when he assumed office, he just refuses to do those things. And now I see NBC has a report saying, well, now the white House is mulling some executive action at the border. I thought they literally told us like four days ago, he was totally out of options. It just seems kind of incoherent here.
Sen Marco Rubio: No, I mean, they’re playing word games because at the end of the day, this thing started because of the decisions that he made. Look, the immigration is not some unregulated space in American life. We had law. The law is very straightforward. It says here are the people that are allowed into America. And if you were here illegally, the law says you shall detain them through removal. Now, there have always existed very narrow exceptions. You know, the Dalai Lama shows up at the border and says, hey, the Chinese are trying to kill me. Will you let me in? An exception, right? Joe Biden, not even Obama did this. Joe Biden is the first president in American history to basically make the exceptions, the rule. And what he basically has determined is that even single adults that arrive at the border, we will not detain them, we will release them. So three point over 3.1 million people have been released into the country since he’s been president. 600,000, over 600,000 of them either have have criminal convictions or pending criminal cases. They have been released into the country. All of it, because has he basically ordered by executive order that we will no longer detain basically anyone? And what happens is, if you know, you have an 85 or 90% chance of being released into America, all you got to do is get to the border and cross it. Turn yourself in, they will release you. Those are pretty good odds. People are going to do it. They’re going to make it. We’re going to get back and more people are going to come. He created this. How do you fix it? You reverse the executive orders that created that that made that decision. Yeah, but he can’t do that because it would be admitting that Trump was right. And what Trump did worked. And he can’t do that because he’s got people in his party that see in their eyes a bunch of future citizens.
Guy Benson: Precisely.
Sen Marco Rubio: And they want orders as a good thing.
Guy Benson: Yeah. They would have, basically an uproar. There would be a huge problem for him politically on his left. He’s trying to shore up this left wing base. He’s got bigger problems that obviously politically. But if you look at the actual immigration issue itself that we’re discussing, I’ve made the point ad nauseum. I’ll make it again. You can’t pretend that some piece of paper from Congress, even if it has some good provisions in it, that’s going to make the complete difference here. And without it, you can do nothing. When the situation has spiraled so historically, so disastrously over the last three years, the border was relatively secure when Trump left. It is anything but right now, to the tune of millions of people crossing every year. The American people know it, and there were no law changes in immigration in the interim. What changed was him and their executive policy. So trying to blame you guys in Congress or Trump making demands out on the campaign trail? I just don’t think it washes with most voters because it doesn’t pass the smell test. I do wonder, would you be open, Senator? Let’s say Biden had a had an hallelujah road to Damascus moment. He sees the light. He re-implement some of those successful Trump policies and really steadies the problem, brings down the flow. Would you be open to some sort of bipartisan border security deal down the line if that were to happen?
Sen Marco Rubio: Sure. As long as it doesn’t have any traps built into it like this one did. You know this one created an asylum corps. They were basically going to create three, 4000 people, bureaucrats hired by my workers who would now have the authority. You couldn’t. You can’t even overturn it. They would have the authority at the border to say, okay, we think you might qualify for asylum. Here’s an immediate work permit, not a six month wait like now. Immediate work permit. Or they could even grant you asylum right there and then at the border. Basically, you are now on a path to citizenship. No one spots that, but it’s in the bill. It’s there. They created an asylum court and their argument is, oh, that’s the trap. Oh, the problem is asylum takes too long. Let’s speed it up. Let’s take it out of the hands of judges whose decisions can be overturned by the attorney general and put it in the hands of bureaucrats and asylum corps whose decisions cannot be overturned. And we will give them the ability to hand out either an instant work permit, which is a migration magnet if you did that, or asylum, because once you get asylum, you are on your way to a green card and you were on your way to citizenship, and then obviously you’re on your way to the voter rolls. So a lot of people didn’t spot that, but that was there in the bill.
Guy Benson: Back to overseas policy. Just for a moment, Senator, the reprisals from the United States against the killing of three of our soldiers over in Jordan. We witnessed what well over 150 attacks against our men and women in that region from Iranian proxies. This one was fatal. We saw the administration telegraphed, well, we’re going to do something, but it’s not going to be too much. And it might be these targets. Then a lot of these people sort of scuttled into their, you know, wherever the cockroaches go. There were some bombings. There was one militia leader taken out in your mind, have we collectively, as a country, responded effectively and sufficiently to these attacks and these and these killings?
Sen Marco Rubio: I think in the long term, no, I think in the short term, you’re 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 are not stock brokers. These people are not they don’t own, you know, carwashes or whatever. These people are terrorists, and their mission in life is to attack the United States until there’s not a single American left anywhere in Syria or Iraq or anywhere in the region that they they’re they call them parties, but they basically use Iranian weapons and Iranian intelligence and Iranian direction to pick their targets and conduct their attacks. That’s what they do. And so, and when you say to them and this just to give me some clue as to why this happened, the reason why they 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 to make sure none of them were killed because they wanted to avoid escalation. So they said, let’s get let’s give these people warning to get them out of here. And that way none of them will be killed. You know, we’ll blow up some stuff. And I think the Iranians are probably sitting around waiting to see, okay, let’s see what else is going to happen. But eventually these are all going to restart. They’re all going to restart, and they’re already still going on when it comes to the. You know, that that, you know, we’re going to start to feel it. I know it may seem far away, but insurance on shipping and American and Western flagged vessels has gone through the roof. So that price is going to be paid. It’s going to cost more money to get goods out of market and into our markets. That includes energy because these insurance, we’re all going to start paying for it because some band of pirates in Yemen, are using Iranian weapons and Iranian intelligence to target our ships. They’re not hitting the Chinese. The Chinese are not paying the highest interest at higher insurance rates. But we are.
Guy Benson: Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, our guest on the Guy Benson show on this Friday. Senator, thank you for your time. Have a good weekend.
Sen Marco Rubio: Thank you. Have a good weekend.
Guy Benson: We’ll be right back.
