department s july 2017 country reports on terrorism. and i m quoting now. there are no known international terrorist organizations operating in mexico. no evidence that any terrorist group has targeted u.s. citizens in mexican territory, and no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through mexico to gain access to the united states. now, you might be saying okay, that s a report from july of last year about conditions back in 2016. what about now? maybe it s changed. well, here s what a senior administration counterterrorism official told cnn yesterday about current conditions, and i m quoting, while we acknowledge there are vulnerabilities at both our northern and southern border, we do not see any evidence that isis or any sunni terrorist groups are trying to infiltrate the southern border. those are the facts not just as we know them but as knowledgeable people in the president s own administration do. this isn t about the merits of this or that immi
americans just 14 days before elections. he trotted out vice president pence to back up some of those claims which the vice president, as you ll see, wasn t really able to do. then after doubling and tripling down on his still unsupported claims, he said this there s no proof of anything. there s no proof of anything. he was talking there about his claims that the caravan of central american migrants walking north through mexico is infiltrated by middle easterners suggesting even at times isis terrorists. finally admitting however there s no proof of anything. ask yourself, did the president in those few words also reveal something beyond that specific question? about how he views proof and facts and everything else central to public debate in a functioning democracy. we ll ask that question tonight because we re at a time wherever you stand on the partisan spectrum where these things matter most. keeping them honest, at just this critical moment president trump appears to be amp
president, who s never been shy about backing up the boss, says it s leftist groups. then the president said this. let me just tell you something. i spoke with border patrol this morning. and i spoke to them last evening. and i spoke to them the day before. speak to them all the time. and they say and you know this as well as anybody over the course of the year, over the course of a number of years, they ve intercepted many people from the middle east. they have intercepted isis. they have intercepted all sorts of people. all right. so keeping them honest again, nothing in what the president said there actually supports his own repeated claims that there unknown middle easterners, perhaps isis terrorists in that caravan heading for this country. he only says he s been told over the years authorities have stopped people somewhere from the middle east and isis from entering the country. and today, perhaps under pressure from all the
he told me the caravan is now making its way through mexico, headed for the southern border, was organized by leftist organizations and financed by venezuela. and we as we have said and the democrats maybe? and the democrats. so that s the vice president of the united states there not saying a single word about middle eastern terrorists in the caravan, which apparently left the president wanting more, as the follow-up question came. where is the proof that democrats are paying for this caravan? why would they pay for a caravan? you know what? you re going to find out and we re going to see. well, maybe they made a bad mistake too. we re going to find out about that. what else did they say, mike, about isis? did they say something? just that it s been organized by leftist groups. all right, so on the democrats, we ll find out. we re going to see. that s something the president tends to say a lot when he doesn t actually have an answer, and then he asks the vice president
which is also why again tonight we re not showing wall-to-wall video of that caravan itself, because whatever you think about the people in it, there s no evidence they are as the administration is suggesting some kind of invading army infiltrated potentially by terrorists looming on the u.s. border. they re 1,100 miles away from the nearest border crossing. they come mainly from honduras where they re fleeing a variety of problems including, according to multiple reporters who have interviewed them, gang violence, repressive government and poverty. and there are very real disagreements about how to deal with them, legitimate disagreements, but again, that s not the argument the president is making or the one at least parts of his administration have been scrambling to defend with very little success, just a whole lot of misleading language. just to recap, here s what the president tweeted yesterday. quote, sadly, it looks like mexico s police are unable to stop the caravan heading to