With January 6 cases having evaporated, CBS’s Scott MacFarlane has been looking for a new area to channel himself and being the Justice correspondent (i.e. Deep State liaison) has suited him well. But Thursday’s CBS Evening News showed MacFarlane dismissing the Trump administration’s labeling of drug cartels as terror groups, denouncing it as a “controversial,” “provocative,” and potentially harmful.
MacFarlane was cued up by co-anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois acknowledging a Coast Guard display Thursday of “nearly 46,000 pounds of illegal drugs seized in the Eastern Pacific” that “includ[ed] more than 12,000 pounds of cocaine.”
MacFarlane actually started on a strong note: “Inside the headquarters of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the walls are covered from nearly floor to ceiling with pictures of Americans killed by fentanyl.”
After acting DEA Administrator Derek Maltz said the fight against fentanyl isn’t “a red or blue issue” and seeing these tragic cases “inspires me” to bring justice, MacFarlane brought up the terror designation.
“It seems to be equating them with ISIS, bin Laden. Is that an accurate comparison,” he asked, to which Maltz said it’s something he’s wanted “for years” because “we’re losing 100,000-plus Americans every year to these dangerous substances that are coming into this country.”
With that number established that, if it were done by an Islamist group, Americans would be enraged, Maltz explained the reasoning behind the designation: “The cartels’ motive is to make as much money as they can, but they really don’t care of the collateral damage...If they kill 100,000 Americans, but they make billions of dollars, that’s okay with them.”
MacFarlane then pivoted back to the terrorists, fretting “[a]nother potentially powerful, though controversial, tool, charging people, including Americans, who help the cartels with a felony charge of material support of terrorism, which could carry a life sentence.”
To provide a defense of illegal immigrants who belong to foreign gangs now labeled as terrorists and lament this could affect remittances to Latin America, he turned to Rachel Levinson-Waldman, Brennan Center lawyer and Kamala Harris donor (though he left the last part out). It was also here he claimed going after cartels is “provocative” (click “expand”):
MACFARLANE: Rachel Levinson-Waldman is a national security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice. [TO LEVINSON-WALDMAN] Do you think it’s realistic that somebody in Chicago or Cheyenne sends money back home to Mexico to family could get prosecuted if the family ends up handing that money over to a cartel?
LEVINSON-WALDMAN: I actually think it’s not unlikely at all and I think that’s especially seeing it through the lens of what this administration has very explicitly stated its goal to be. Its goal is mass deportations.
MACFARLANE: As you try to get after this, you need some cooperation from Mexico. Doesn’t this provocative designation make it harder for Mexico to want to help?
MALTZ: We just can’t keep relying on people that don’t want to cooperate. So we have to be more aggressive than we have been. And we have to use all the tools that are available.
Back live, MacFarlane blasted the idea of charging cartel members and going into their bank accounts by saying it “could scare off people from knowingly giving money to the cartels or risk unknowingly doing so.”
“[L]ate today, a federal lawsuit was filed by the family of a DEA agent allegedly killed by cartel leaders. They have sued the cartel leaders individually for money. John and Maurice, that’s a legal strategy only available in this case to terror victims,” he added.
Even though he already spent time opining like an ACLU lawyer why throwing the book at illegal immigrant drug cartels is somehow wrong, DuBois asked MacFarlane to explain more about the “downside to all of this.”
The CBS correspondent shamefully fretted this will “scar[e] things off”: “How about scaring off sources the DEA may have inside these cartels, helping them infiltrate it? And also, as we asked at the end there, does it damage relationships with Mexico, which has also been critical right on the border of helping infiltrate the cartels?”
To see the relevant CBS transcript from March 20, click here.
