After offering explanations for why TikTok presents a danger to US security, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted Friday that his college-aged daughter uses the controversial app.
At a “signature event” held by the Economic Club at the capital’s Marriott Marquis Hotel, the club’s president, David Rubenstein, sat for a lengthy conversation with the secretary. On immigration, Rubenstein pressed him, asking about asylum policy, increasing encounters and whether having a physical barrier would have helped curb illegal crossings. This reporter asked Mayorkas if the administration was preparing for any policy changes given they recently hired two new senior-level officials. “No, I think that personnel changes are something of regular order in any organization,” Mayorkas replied.
The answers weren’t anything we haven’t heard before, but when the conversation moved to TikTok, things got interesting. Rubenstein disclosed that his firm, the Carlyle Group, had invested in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. He also noted that although “a number of people from Homeland Security, CIA and/or NSA, as well as Capitol Hill, have said that TikTok is a danger to our national security, the public hasn’t been given much detailed information.”
“How much of a threat to our national security is TikTok?” Rubenstein asked.
Mayorkas responded, “The People’s Republic of China acts adversely to the interests of the United States in different ways. One of those ways is through the dissemination of disinformation — the intentional dissemination of false statements. TikTok is of extraordinary value through which to disseminate disinformation to millions and millions of people.”
Rubenstein pressed. “But newspapers can disseminate misinformation, why is it that if it is over social media, it had to be banned, but when newspapers say the same things that are over TikTok, it wouldn’t be banned because of the First Amendment? Why isn’t the First Amendment protecting the TikTok social media?”
“Well, it’s not to me an issue of the First Amendment. It’s an issue of security,” Mayorkas said (perhaps ironic given his lack of action on the security issue at the southern border). “We are talking about a company and an algorithm that is controlled by a foreign state that acts adversely to the interests of the United States, and we have an obligation to protect Americans.”
Rubenstein continued to push back, arguing that it sounds to him like Mayorkas is claiming that “people aren’t smart enough to know [when something] is disinformation.”
“We are talking about young people that have access to TikTok,” Mayorkas replied. “I will probably posit that in this country we don’t have the level of digital literacy that we all want. We are all vulnerable to disinformation.”
Mayorkas was finally asked if any of his children use TikTok despite the clear threat he believes it poses to young Americans. “I don’t think our older daughter goes on TikTok. Our younger daughter does,” Mayorkas admitted, before referencing an old law school maxim: “the law purports a useless act… if I admonish our nineteen-year-old daughter to not access TikTok, I’m not sure I will succeed.”
-Juan P. Villasmil
On our radar
ALITO FLAGGED Democrats are calling on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to recuse himself from a January 6 case over a recent incident in which an American flag was seen flying upside down at his home. Alito told Fox News that the flag was temporarily flown that way in response to neighbors who harassed his wife, including calling her the “C-word.”
CONGRATS, GRAD! Barron Trump, the youngest son of former president Donald Trump, graduated high school Friday. President Trump was able to attend his son’s graduation ceremony after Judge Juan Merchan relented to his request to be out of court for the day.
PELOSI ATTACKER SENTENCED David DePape, the man who broke into the Pelosis’ home in San Francisco and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, was sentenced to thirty years in prison. DePape was convicted of assault and attempted kidnapping of a federal official.
Cat fight in Congress
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claws were out in full girl-fight force once again, but this time, her opponent was not fellow Republican representative Lauren Boebert (at least not directly). During what the Hill has described as “an hour of disorder,” “chaos” and “madness,” MTG and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly hurled the “baby girl” condescension at one another.
The uproar happened during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing concerning holding attorney general Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress. Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas criticized MTG for asking a question regarding Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter.
In response, MTG told Crockett, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”
Then, all the cats were out of the bag. Per the Hill:
“How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person,” [said AOC].
“Are your feelings hurt?” Greene responded.
“Oh girl, oh baby girl, don’t even play,” Ocasio-Cortez shot back, leading Greene to say “oh really, baby girl?”
Other highlights from the hearing include Crockett referring to “somebody’s bleach-blonde bad-built butch body,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna yelling at Crockett to “calm down” and telling Crockett her behavior was “not cute,” and Crockett declaring, “If I come and talk shit about her y’all gonna have a problem.”
The panel ultimately voted to allow MTG to continue speaking, but Bobert “crossed party lines to vote against allowing the Georgia lawmaker to proceed during the hearing. Boebert was sitting two seats away from Greene during the vote.” Me-ow.
–Teresa Mull
White House blocks Hur recording
Special counsel Robert Hur’s February 2024 report on President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents — which memorialized the line “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — was a disaster for the Biden campaign. Naturally, they are doing everything possible to keep that story out of the news cycle.
The White House has asserted its executive privilege to block congressional committees from accessing audio recordings in which Hur interviewed the president. House Republicans said they needed the recordings to prove Hur’s assertion in his report that Biden was essentially not mentally fit enough to be held accountable for his mishandling of classified documents.
The executive privilege claim came after House Republicans were looking forward to holding attorney general Merrick Garland in contempt for withholding the recordings.The privilege assertion sparked outrage from the right, especially considering that many Democrats have opposed Donald Trump’s claim of executive privilege when blocking access to a request of more than 770 pages of presidential documents.
“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal — to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,” White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote in a letter to Republican House leaders Thursday morning. “Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally-protected law enforcement materials from the executive branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate.”
Here’s a translation: “We don’t want to give the recordings because they make our guy look bad.”
–Cockburn
GOP tackles crime
As we finish another week of Trump trial drama, Republicans in Congress decided to go squarely on offense on a panoply of other crime-related issues. This shift coincided with National Police Week, where thousands of cops from across the country descended on DC.
At the core of their focus, particularly from the House’s Homeland Security Committee, was the surge of tens of thousands of military-aged males entering the country from China. The roughly 27,000 who have crossed the border recently represents a staggering 8,000 percent increase since early 2021, and a former State Department official said in response to questioning from Congressman Mike Ezell, a former sheriff, that it is “statistically undeniable” that this surge is “putting America at a greater risk.”
Some Republicans seized on a report that the Department of Homeland Security directed Border Patrol agents to reduce the forty questions they used to ask to border crossers to five “basic questions.” Their Democratic counterparts, however, claimed that this focus was a racist exercise in xenophobic “invasion rhetoric and fearmongering.”
While it’s easy for some, like the Democrats on various committees, to dismiss the border crisis as a far away problem, Republicans also brought in the sheriff of Loudoun County, Virginia, Michael Chapman, who represents a jurisdiction that has seen a surge in high-profile illegal immigrant crime. But the problems run even deeper than that, Chapman testified.
In one three-week period, one high school in his county had nine fentanyl poisonings, he said. Loudoun County is almost 2,000 miles from the southern border.
–Matthew Foldi
