good morning. welcome to morning joe. it is friday, december 8th. glad it s friday, but we do have a lot to get to this morning, willie. president biden is putting more pressure on israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu to allow additional aid into gaza. we ll have more details on the first conversation between the two leaders in 11 days. a lot of questions. meanwhile, the president s son is facing several new tax charges. we ll break down the allegations against hunter biden. plus, a recap of donald trump s day in court for his civil tax fraud trial. he was there as the former president is now expected to be the last person to take the stand. that should happen next week. also ahead, a rare ruling in a post roe world. a judge in texas granted an emergency request for an abortion, but the state s attorney general is threatening to prosecute any doctor who treats the woman. we ll talk about that. with us, we have the host of way too early, white house bur
department of health and human services, and as you can see that now, they are working on covid vaccinations at the dulles processing center for afghan refugees and the spokesman at fema said they are going to be pulled deeper into the afghan resettlement process and may end up building housing for afghani refugees and conducting other missions to help the country deal with that influx of people. so there is a lot on fema s plate right now. and fema with hurricane katrina was the leadership, and that has been sorted out. the woman who was the head of the new york emergency coordinating team there under hurricane sandy, and so how much now is the problem of funding and adequate staffing for fema? it is not necessarily a matter of the funding, because congress has done a good job over the years, and you know, the fema folks would say it is
mess, how do we do better going forward? i appreciate that, alex, because as americans, why don t we come together. there will be plenty of time to figure out what went wrong. that means making sure we are there even if we have to extend our time to the august 31st deadline until all americans who want to leave can leave. we have an obligation to get all of the americans out. second, we need to expedite the processing of visas. i am in a district that has 25,000 afghan americans. we ve been inundated with questions. we re sending them to the state department. we still need to cut through some of that red tape so that interpreters and our allies are able to come here and we re resettling them here. any community in my district is a huge asset and for any american to imply that we shouldn t be taking afghani refugees is just ignorant. we have a moral obligation to have them here after being there for 20 years. i m going to ask you about
interesting albania and kosovo have stepped up to the plate, taking some of those that the united states has agreed to eventually take. holding them for now saying the albanian saying that they know about dictatorship and it s their honor and duty to do so but you should be prepared to hear about an awful lot of squabbling in europe as there was when the last big refugee wave hit in 2015- 16. there will be talk about who will take them and how to vent them. 30,000 a day fleeing afghanistan. something like 2.8 million refugees in the world are afghani refugees. one in ten. during the trump years, we lower the refugee admissions to the lowest possible level than it ever had been. also many european countries have shut their door to refugees and sent them back to places like afghanistan. that was before it happened. can imagine what s going to take
refugee and how their attitude sticks with you? yeah. i mean it s also the mixed messaging, right? they re trying to find something that sticks so that they can try to, you know, put the president in that lighting and sort of come after democrats. we ve seen the former president, the man who literally banned muslims from coming to this country, say we should allow for afghan refugees to come to the united states. you have the man who led us into this war, president bush, say, we should allow for afghani refugees. and then you ve got these crazy people on the right doing, you know, what they always do with their fearmongering and their hateful rhetoric. the reality is, you know, regardless of where you come from, immigrants and refugees are highly motivated. they are people who are seeking a better life. they come to this country.