1/3/25: They've decided immigrants did it, Trump explodes

**David Pakman** (0:07)
Welcome to the show, everybody. Incredibly, we are seeing the primary lens through which the New Orleans New Year's Eve attack is being viewed is through the lens of immigration and the border. Now, I'll explain why to you in a moment, but we're going to look at a couple of clips, a couple of examples of right wing elected officials and politicians continuing to insist that the prism through which we should think about, interpret and understand the New Orleans attack that left many dead on New Year's Eve. It's really a story about immigration and the border and undocumented migrants. Even though the attacker we now know with certainty is a born in Texas, a military veteran, which by the way is also the case with the Tesla Trump Hotel bomber guy, I guess is what we're calling him. There is nothing related to foreign countries here. There is nothing related to the border. But Republicans are, I would argue, cynically seizing on a detail about the vehicle in question to try to make this a Trump was right. Those dangerous criminal illegals are the problem. The border is the source of all of our domestic issues. Let's start with one clip, House Republican on Fox Business saying the open borders are the problem.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:40)
Look, I'm on the Border Security Caucus and we've had former border patrol people come in and talk to us. Fifty five now under under O'Biden. I call him O'Biden because I think he's Obama's third term. Fifty five thousand special interests aliens have come across our border. That's from countries who hate us. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen. You can go right down the list.
And yet they're coming into this country free. They've been handled to border now, Cheryl. If only 10% got through that we didn't know about a fifty five thousand, that's fifty five hundred special terror.

**David Pakman** (2:15)
You guys following this math now, if you're waiting for how this explains the New Orleans attack, just keep waiting.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:20)
It's potential terrorists that are in this country in my orcas and the company. As you know, they said we've got operational control of the border. He's been saying that forever. They're not doing their job and Americans are paying the price for that.

**David Pakman** (2:34)
Why are they talking about the border when a Texas born military veteran took a truck to New Orleans and massacred a bunch of people? I'll give you the answer. I'll give you the answer. But first, I want to play for you another one of these examples. Here is Maga Mike Johnson, for now the Speaker of the House, saying that Joe Biden's wide-open border played a role in this attack.

**Mike Johnson** (3:02)
Let me say something else that's obvious. I don't know if enough attention...

**David Pakman** (3:06)
When Maga Mike says something is obvious, it's almost certainly untrue. That you can almost count on...

**Mike Johnson** (3:12)
.is being paid to this. But we all know that for the last four years, the Biden administration has been completely derelict in its duty. The congressional Republicans, we here in the House and the Senate, have repeatedly asked the DHS, under the Biden administration, about the correlation, the obvious concern about terrorism and the wide open border. The idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potentially terrorist cells around the country. We have been ringing the alarms. We impeached DHS Secretary Mayorkas in the House over that very issue and others related to it. So this is a big concern. They told us, Lawrence, for four years, that the number one threat was so-called racially motivated extremism. It was nonsense.
This is the thing that we were all concerned about. This is why we raise the alarms. This is why we passed HR to the strongest border security act ever passed by Congress and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats in the Senate.

**David Pakman** (4:05)
All right. I think you get the picture. Biden, wide open border, Schumer, Democrats, dangerous, this, that, the other thing. Here is the current link that they are seizing on to pretend, to pretend that this is related to immigration or the border or whatever. They are fixating on reports that the truck used in the New Orleans massacre at some point recently came through the U S Mexico border. Now why is this generically speaking completely irrelevant to the story? I'll give you all the information I have right now. Now if the information changes or we get more information or conflicting information, I will tell you what, what I, what is reported right now is that the truck that was used in this massacre was not owned by the perpetrator but was rented by the perpetrator on an app called Turo, T-U-R-O. It's sort of like instead of renting from enterprise, you can rent cars. Typically it's from individuals, although, you know, it's sort of like with Airbnb companies are starting to be on there too. And what it appears to be the case is that plate readers have determined that at some point this truck did cross over the US. Mexico border. Now of course, if that's all we know, which is all we know right now, if it changes, I'll revise the story.