Welcome.

In his verdict with Ted Cruz, the Week in Review, Ben Ferguson with you, and these are the stories that you may have missed that we talked about this week.

First up, deportations.

They're happening at record pace.

More than two million illegal immigrants have been deported from this country this year and it's having a major effect now on rental prices of homes and housing prices.

So what could happen going into twenty twenty six.

It could be very big news for you if you're looking to rent or buy a new home.

We'll have that for you in a moment.

Also, we found out in writing that there was no cause to raid Donald Trump's home at mar Lago, So how did the FBI get away with doing it and who actually ordered it knowing that those in the field were saying there is no probable cause.

And finally, three big wins in the last year that affect all Americans.

We go through those wins and what it means for you.

It's the weekend, Rey, and it starts right now.

Finally, I want to move to another shocking, breaking news story, and that is if you get rid of people in this country, they're here illegally, then you don't have to compete for them.

Center for Housing, we have seen the medium age of first time home buyers.

The number skyrocket to forty plus years old, depending on where you live.

It's the highest we've seen in certainly in my lifetime, and the highest we've seen since World War One.

I think if I looked at the data correctly, that was something that should be very eye opening.

Rental prices have also skyrocketed, because well, you're competing when it comes to renting a home, especially those entry level homes.

With tens of millions of illegal immigrants, we are now finally seeing Donald Trump's deportations and the shutting down the southern border completely turning into guess what, lower rent and lower home prices for Americans.

Yeah, and look, this is at the end of the day, very simple economics.

And in economics one oh one you learn that prices.

Prices are determined by two factors, supply and demand and their their graft, and where they intersect is where the price is.

So supply, it's pretty simple to understand the more of something there is, the lower the price is.

If there are a whole bunch of houses, the price of housing goes down.

If there are a whole bunch of bananas, the price of bananas go down.

But the other thing that determines price is demand.

If there are a ton of people that want to buy houses or bananas, the price goes up.

And so those two counterbalance each other.

And actually rising prices typically are a market signal that we need more supply.

And so if banana prices skyrocket because suddenly people decide they really really like bananas, you know what's gonna happen.

People are going to plant more bananas and grow more bananas to meet the demand, and the price will fall.

Well, what did Joe Biden do.

Joe Biden imported allowed more than twelve million illegal aliens to come into this country.

Now, when they came into this country, most of those illegal aliens didn't live in a tenth They didn't sleep on a park bench.

They went and rented an apartment, or they rented a house, or they bought a house.

And you bring in twelve million people, that's twelve million people that are trying to rent and when demand goes up a lot, you end up having prices go up.

Now, now here's what Scott Besson reported.

Scott Besson said that last month, apartment rents fell one point one percent compared to the same time last year, and they dropped five point two percent compared to the same time period in twenty twenty two, when rent had peaked under Joe Biden and Besson did an interview on Fox Business Channel where he said rents are down and the story the Biden administration doesn't want to talk about the mass, unfettered immigration that pushed up rents, especially for working Americans, and he continued to say, there's a recent study out from the Wharton School that shows every one percent increase in population, rents went up one percent.

So President Trump, by enforcing the border and sending home more than two million illegals, we're now seeing rents coming down substantially.

I think that will continue for the rest of the year.

We brought down interest rates and so we brought mortgage rates down, and I think everything else will follow that.

That is a major victory.

And by the way, it's exactly what President Trump said on the campaign trail, which is that if we deport the illegal aliens that Joe Biden's open borders brought into this country, the result is going to be rents are going to come down and housing is going to be more affordable.

We now have the data backing that up.

You know.

Messaging, I think center is going to be so important going into the midterms.

And one of the things I do think we have not messaged well enough on our side is what is about to happen twenty twenty six.

And there are laws that were passing twenty twenty five that are enacted in twenty twenty six.

You combine what you just said about home prices and what the Treasury Secretary was talking about there with something that's going to have a huge impact on our economy.

No tax on tips is coming in this new year.

No tax on overtime is coming this year, and no tax on Social Security for seniors is coming.

Those are three massive victories that I think many Americans have actually kind of forgotten about that are going to be implemented this year.

That's going to have a very big impact on our economy, but also affordability and living.

Now, that's exactly right, and I got to say, by the way, for people that make substantial tipped wages or overtime, millions of Americans are going to be entitled to a refund from the IRS starting in January, starting in just a couple of weeks, they'll be entitled to a refund because of those tax cuts, because of the work family tax cut.

And look, the latest mantra of both Democrats in the media, because in many instances they're one and the same, is affordability.

Now affordability, I am certain that that came from a focus group the Democrats put on that that was a word they could blame and blame on Trump.

Affordability about twelve minutes ago, used to be called two things.

Jobs and inflation.

That's how we used to talk about it.

Jobs were seeing economic growth and that is coming from the historic tax cut we pass and it's coming from President Trump's incredible leadership cutting job killing regulation.

And then inflation.

We are seeing inflation coming down, and this is interesting.

The HUD Department Housing and Urban Development Department published this month a report an investigation that concluded Biden's importing of millions of migrants drove up prices for America who are low income but who do not receive public assistance.

And here's what the report concluded.

Quote one key cause of elevated worst case needs is immigration between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty four, the foreign born population of the United States increased more than six million, the largest such increase over such a short period in American history.

This immigration driven increase in households has contributed to a significant increase in housing demand, thus driving up housing prices.

In fact, in some markets, immigration is accounted for nearly all of the increase in housing demand in recent years.

That is hurting affordability.

All, nearly all.

What else do you need to know?

Yeah, that's Democrat policies killed jobs and drove up inflation.

And right now, under common sense conservative policies, we're seeing jobs come back and we're making progress turn around and driving down the Biden inflation that hurt so many Americans.

Now, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation, you can go back and listen to the full podcast from earlier this week.

Now onto story number two.

New files are revealing that the Department of Justice and the FBI quote did not have cause to raid mar Lago.

Hold on a second, you're telling me the people in charge of Government Center under the Biden regime knew that they were going after Donald Trump for political reasons.

And not because they thought he broke a law.

Can't I could not imagine this.

You know, it really is astonishing.

So the Department of Justice and FBI handed documents over to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And here's what Fox News has reported about those documents.

FBI doubted probable cause for mar A Lago raid, but pushed forward amid pressure from Biden doj emails reveal quote very little has been developed related to who might be culpable for mishandling the documents.

An FBI official wrote, the FBI did not believe it had probable cause to raid President Donald Trump's mar A Laga home in twenty twenty two, but move forward amid pressure from the Biden Justice Department, with an official saying he didn't quote give a damn about the optics of the search.

Newly declassified documents reveal and you have emails between the FBI and the Justice Department in the months leading up to the August twenty twenty two rate of mar A Lago, and FBI officials explicitly expressed concern about a lack of probable cause to execute the search warrant on the president's residents.

Quote very little has been developed related to who might be culpable for mishandling the documents.

This is written by an FBI agent serving as the assistant Special Agent in charge to another FBI official quote from the interviews.

The Washington Field Office has gathered information suggesting that there may be additional boxes, presumably of the same type as we're sent back to Nara in January at mar a Lago.

The Washington Field Office has been drafted a search warrant AFFIDAVID related to those potential boxes, but has some concerns that the information is single source, has not been corroborated, and.

May be dated.

Dojcs opines, however, that the search warrant meets the probable cause standard quote.

Even as we continue down a path towards a search warrant, the Washington Field Office believes that a reasonable conversation with the former President's attorney stating that the FBI and DOJ are reading a search warrant and developed information there may be more documents at mar Lago ought not to be discounted.

At a minimum, Even if the former president's attorney is correct and the documents were all declassified or believed to be disc classified, it can be reasonably argued that the documents remain sensitive and should be properly secured until the matter of classification is sorted out.

This conversation could easily be accomplished at the same time that the Washington Field Office presses forward with the investigation and continues building out the search warrant.

Weeks later, an FBIA agent rights in a new email, quote, this is stunning.

We haven't generated any new facts, but keep being given draft after draft after draft.

Absent a witness coming forward with recent information about classified on site.

At what point is it fair to table this?

The agent rights it is time consuming for the team and not productive if there are no new facts supporting probable cause.

Another email revealed that the Washing Washington the FBI's Washington Field Office quote did not believe and has articulated a DOJCS that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at mar A Lago.

Let me read that again.

The FBI Washington Field off is this is in writing quote, did not believe and has articulated to the DOJCS that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified weapons of classified records at Mara a Lago and the response quote do joz opine that they do have probable cause requesting a wide scope including residents, office storage space, and the FBI also said a raid would be quote counterproductive and suggested quote alternative, less intrusive, and likely quicker options for resolution to reclaim any potential classified records.

This is stunning it because I can't.

I don't think you can.

You can overstate how stunning this is that the Field Office they're saying this is stupid.

This is abuse of power in essence, and they're to the point where they're putting it in writing.

And by the way, what it means if you don't have probable cause for a search warrant, but you nonetheless engage in the search, the search is illegal without probable cause.

You don't have a basis for the search that is justified.

And if the FBI is saying it would be illegal to search President Trump's home, apparently the Biden Department of Justice, they were so partisan.

Their objective was not to actually prosecute a crime.

Their objective was.

To stop the American people from voting for Donald Trump.

They were acting as political operatives, and so their view as one of the officials said, they don't give a damn about the optics.

The optics they wanted was President Trump in a mug shot.

They got that optic, but it backfired on them, backfired bigly.

As President Trump might have said in the first term.

But this was a political persecution.

And what's stunning is they knew it.

At the time.

Well, let's go to accountability.

And this is where some of people listening and watching this on Facebook or on YouTube are gonna want to ask the question that I'm going to ask you now it's qlear abuse of power.

Where's the accountability?

Because at this point, it's like, we know they did it, We've got the information, we know that they were breaking the law or the rules, and no one seems to be held accountable for this.

So in the rest of my lifetime, I have a feeling there's going to be a Democrat that's going to get back in the White House.

What then, why would there be an incentive for them not to abuse their power and go after any other conservatives in the same way.

So there wouldn't be an incentive.

And look, who knows, it may not be a Democrat in the White House.

It may the Democrat Party may have radicalized so much that maybe the next nominee will be a member of the Turtle Turtle Island Liberation Front.

I mean, that's that's how extreme these guys are getting.

Look, there has to be accountability, there has to be people who engage in the abuse of power need to be fired.

Now the Trump Department of Justice and FBI have fired a number of people.

That's that's moving in the right direction.

But anyone who knew they were participating in an abuse of justice and abuse of power, and anyone who knew that it was illegal, let me ask, why was there not anyone who stood up and said this is not right at the Department of Justice to abuse our power.

Why were there no whistleblowers?

Why was there.

No no pushback from within d OJ?

You know if she ask you that question.

There's a lot of appointees, so that and I want to get in the weeds here on this because I do think it's important to paint the picture.

When I was in the Bush administration, there are political appointees and there's non political.

There's lifers, there's people that stay in certain positions at the DOJ, for example, at the FBI, they don't change based on the election or who is in the White House or who's in charge of the House or the Senator of Congress in general, that those individuals are the ones that you would hope would stand up here.

The problem seems to be that there's either massive fear when the Democrats were in charge that their careers would be over a or B that they just put in so many of their liberal friends that the entire DOJ leadership and those below them that were the me the non political appointees were actually incredibly partisan.

I go back to you know, Peter Struck and Lisa Page or whatever the hell their names were.

That's I mean, there's two examples of quote non political people that were absolutely political.

There are far too many extreme partisans who burrowed into both agencies, the FBI and the Department of Justice.

As you know, a book I wrote a few years ago was called Justice Corrupted, How the Left has weaponized our legal system, and I detailed This was written at the beginning of the Biden administration, so I did not cover the prosecutions of Trump or the Marlago ray because it hadn't happened.

By the way, how right were you on writing that book, I mean knowing what happened afterwards.

Good Grief, And the book starts chapter one is actually about Watergate.

It's about Nixon.

And I am not a Richard Nixon fan.

I think he was.

He was corrupt and dishonest, and he abused power.

But if you look at one of the things Nixon tried to do is get the Department of Justice and the FBI to go after his political enemies.

But at the time DOJ and the FBI and the I R S.

They all resisted.

They pushed back and said, no, that's an abuse of our power.

We're not going to do that.

And what Richard Nixon tried to do, Joe Biden succeeded in doing why because nobody, not a political not not not careers, nobody pushed back effectively and stopped it.

And and and.

We saw that started with Barack Obama.

Barack Obama weaponized.

The Department of Justice, the FBI, the I R S.

And then when Trump became president and those partisans.

Flicker about it.

I do want people to understand that he was he was very smart about it.

Compared to this, the blaze and abuse of power by the Biden administration but there were and I want to remind just a couple a couple examples of the abuse of power under Barack Obama.

Give us a couple of those highlights if you will remember what they did do and how this already a long time ago, and and the reason why is center there were a lot of people that got into the dj yeah, and the FBI then that were lower in rank, who are now running the damn place.

When if you fast forward to the Biden years.

Yeah, you look at I mean, one of one of the classic examples of lowest learner at the i R S and and and the i R S deliberately targeted conservative groups.

It targeted tea party groups, It went after them and persecuted them, and and and the search words they were among among things they were looking for as any group dedicated to the Constitution of the Bill of Rights.

Yeah, and mind you, they didn't mean the ACLU, they didn't mean leftist groups that they meant anyone that was conservative, any pro Israel groups they targeted.

I mean, it was an.

Ideological purge, and it was an ideological purge that the political officials did everything they could to cover up.

And and ultimately, you know, you look at Eric Holder, who was Attorney General, described himself as Barack Obama's wingman, and he ended up being held in contempt of Congress, which was stunning.

But it began during the Obama administration.

When Trump became president, many of those partisans they burrowed into senior career positions at the agency, and for four years the first Trump term, they waged war on Donald Trump from within the agency, trying to overturn the duly elected president, trying to overturn an election.

And then when Biden got into power, they came out in the open, and they were brazen.

And part of the reason Biden was so much worse than Obama is they saw there were no consequences when it happened under Obama, that it worked, that they were able to weaponize the system, and I suspect many good people just left the agencies and those many of those who remained were either they were afraid or they were.

Willing to go along with it.

But it's why one of the most important obligations responsibilities that the Trump dj and the Trump FBI have is to restore integrity to those agencies, to go after criminals and bad guys like terrorists planning to set off bombs in Los Angeles rather than using it to target political opponents.

What will accountability look like specifically on these emails and the people there?

And will Congress get involved in this now seeing this letter Grassly, etc.

Yeah, Look, I would certainly expect we'll see hearings in Congress.

I'd like to see the Senate Judiciary Committee hold hearings on this and engage in oversight.

This was released by Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, so that's beneficial.

And you know, look, I want to commend the Trump Justice Department for handing these emails over.

Part of the reason that the Biden DOJ wrote these is because they thought no one would ever know that.

They thought Biden was going to be re elected or Kamala Harris was going to be elected, and so this would remain hidden forever.

What change the rules is you have an Attorney General and a new FBI director who decided we're gonna give this to We're going to show the American people exactly what was going on.

That was the right thing to do.

As before.

If you want to hear the rest of this conversation on this topic, You can go back and dow the podcast from earlier this week to hear the entire thing.

I want to get back to the big story, number three of the week.

You may have missed.

Center as we're doing our year review.

I love getting to say this one.

We had a big win on the issue of space.

We're not talking about you finding aliens or anything, but we do have an update on space that's near and dear to your heart with NASA and Houston of course talk about the big victory there.

Well.

In the Working Families tax cut, we invested ten billion dollars in NASA and commercial space, and in particular in going back to the Moon.

And again because that falls within the jurisdiction of the Commerce Committee, I wrote this provision.

And we are in a race to go back to the Moon.

We're in a race with China.

China has said publicly they are going to go to the Moon by twenty thirty and they're trying to get back there.

And it's also a race not just to get there, but to also to build sustained human habitation on the surface of the Moon, to begin mining on the surface of the Moon.

That's the next challenge that we're moving towards China is moving full speed ahead.

And we did major investments to say America is going to beat China back to the Moon.

We are going to have sustained human habitation on the lunar surface or insist lunar orbit.

And that investment, it is in the bill.

It is critically important.

And the objective is for us to land on the Moon by twenty twenty eight, two years before China, with President Trump still in the Oval office.

And that investment will make it.

And I'll tell you this is a point I made.

If we lose.

If we were to lose the race to the Moon, I think the impact of seeing the Chinese on the Moon before we could get there, I think it would be a bigger blow to the country than Sputnik was Sputnik when the Russians launched the first satellite, Sputnik around the Earth, it was a massive blow.

It started the space race, and I think losing the Moon to China would be orders of magnitude worse.

That investment is in there.

It matters, and it matters also enormously.

They're over fifty thousand high paying jobs in Texas that are directly connected to space, so it's big for jobs, jobs in the economy as well.

Selfishly, I just think it would be so cool for kids' minds to be blown to see NHD people walking on the moon.

Just the wonder and the inspiration that would come from that for an entire generation, you know, with everything that's yeseah and technology driven, Like just to have a moment of pause where we're like, we went to the moon and you can see an HD.

I can't imagine what that does for kids that are dreamers for their futures and their education as well.

Look, I spend a lot of time at Johnson's Space Center.

I spend a lot of time with NASA, and like the inspiration that astronauts provide.

Uh.

Now do you know the connection that Rice University has to us going to the moon.

The first time?

No?

I do not.

So it was at Rice University at the at the Rice Stadium.

You've been to that that football stadium?

Uh, that that JFK gave the speech where he committed we will go to the moon within a decade and and and in fact what he said he said, Uh why does Rice play the University of Texas?

They do so not because it is easy, but because it is hard, and that was that was his explanation for why.

Are we going to the moon.

We're going to the Moon for.

The same reason Rice plays ut not because it easy, because it's it's hard, and it inspired millions of kids.

We're going to do that again.

But it's also critical listen there there there are major economic benefits.

I've predicted for a long time.

The first trillionaire is going to be made in Spain.

That may well be elon Musk He's already halfway there.

I think the.

Mining that we're going to see on the Moon and ultimately on Mars is going to generate enormous economic activity.

And it also matters from national security and from a military perspective.

Controlling what is quite literally the high ground is really important for keeping America safe.

Cafe standards.

I want to make sure we get this in there before the end of the show.

Let's talk about that victory as well.

Another provision I wrote in the bill, we zeroed out cafe standards.

Now, what are the cafe standards?

There?

The rules the Biden administration put in.

Place to drive up the cost of your car and drive up the cost of your truck, and what they did is they jacked up the mileage it had to get to what were unsustainable levels.

And they were doing that because they wanted to ban the internal combustion engine.

They wanted to make it impossible for you to buy a gasoline car.

They wanted to force you to buy an electric vehicle.

Now, Alouise, let's be clear.

It also put you and your family at risk.

Yeah, because of having to be forced to make the cars lighter.

They had to get rid of the steel in cars that made them so safe, like tanks.

And that's the reason why everything's now in plastic and the bumpers and you've had a small wreck.

You see how things just shatter.

It's because they're trying to meet those standards.

Yeah.

Look, my first car was a nineteen seventy eight Ford Fairmont.

It was my grandfather's car that.

He gave it to me.

It was we called it the green Bomb.

When you were younger, I knew it.

That was confirmation, right.

Right, are you kidding?

That was the coolest car.

We called it the green Bomb, and it was a tank.

And if you got a sixteen year old boy, all sixteen year old boys are idiots.

And for the teenagers, listening.

I apologize, but I was there.

I was an idiot, and I promise you when you get older you understand it's just part of life growing up.

And like putting your kids in a car that is big enough that if they hit something like an idiot, that they're not going to be badly hurt or killed.

That matters.

We zeroed it out.

The effect of that is going to be the lower the cost of you getting a car or a truck lowered by thousands of dollars.

That's another victory that is in the bill.

And it also is going to save life, just as you said, because you'll be able to make cars that are safer with more steel and less plastic.

Yeah, it really is incredible.

Finally, one last thing I do want to hit, and it's important one to end the show.

Take it down act something that you worked so hard on and became reality as well this year, and it keeps kids safe.

Yeah, it's a great victory.

Look that there is a growing problem with what's called non consensual intimate imagery, and we're talking both real world so called revenge porn, where you have boyfriend or girlfriend, they have an intimate relationship, they take explicit pictures or videos of each other and then they have a breakup and they get one of them is ticked off and decides, all right, I'm going to stick it to you and I'm going to release this to the world.

And it is a grotesque violation of privacy.

Nobody has a right to do that to somebody else.

There is, secondly, a more recent aspect of that, which is deep fakes, and people are using AI to create deep fakes where they take pictures of real people and they use AI to make it appear that they're naked or in explicit and sexual situations.

More than ninety five percent of the victims of this are women or teenage girls.

And so I drafted a bill that's called to Take It Down Act.

That number one makes it a crime, makes it a felony to post non consensual intimate imagery, either real pictures or fake pictures.

And secondly, it gives you the right, if God forbid, you're the victim of this, any tech platform that is displaying that content, you have a federal statutory right to demand they take it down and they have to take it down immediately.

And we pass that through the Senate, We pass that through the House.

The First Lady Milania Trump was a big champion.

She joined with me and I was in the Rose Garden right next to the President and right next to the First Lady when he's sign that legislation protecting kids, protecting teenage girls, teenage boys, women, protecting everyone, and also standing up to the abuse of AI, creating deep fakes and victimizing people.

As always, thank you for listening to Verdict with senter Ted Cruz Ben Ferguson with you don't forget to deal with my podcast and you can listen to my podcasts every other day you're not listening to Verdict or each day when you listen to Verdict.

Afterwards, I'd love to have you as a listener to again the Ben Ferguson podcasts, and we will see you back here on Monday morning.