ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos featured Missouri GOP Senator Eric Schmitt, apparently to discuss ongoing operations in the Caribbean. The interview immediately went sideways, though, when Stephanopoulos tried to gotcha Schmitt with a recent presidential pardon.
The interview followed that of a Democrat representative, which went as such things normally go- very smoothly. Watch as Schmitt takes Stephanopoulos to the woodshed over his selective pushback after a second pass at the pardon question:
“Well, I’m curious about your pushback on that particular point. With your previous guest (@RepAdamSmith) you had zero pushback because he’s giving the Democrat talking points like you spew every single week, which is probably why your ratings are so bad” – @Eric_Schmitt to… pic.twitter.com/QDO8jCn6iZ
— Brent Baker 🇺🇲🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) December 7, 2025
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: What do you mean you're not familiar with the facts and circumstances of the pardon? It's been well reported all across the country. He is the former president of Honduras. He was convicted of conspiring to bring in 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, also guns and other materials. It's been front page news across the country. Aren't you curious about that?
ERIC SCHMITT: Well, I'm curious about your pushback on that particular point. With your previous guest, you had zero pushback because he’s, giving the Democrat talking points like you spew every single week, which is probably why your ratings are so bad. But to make the point, what I'm saying is that you're trying to divert here the attention from what the American people actually support. 75 percent of Americans support us blowing narco terrorists out of the water in the Caribbean who are trying to poison Americans. There's no real legal debate about the ability to do that. Now, you could have a policy discussion about it, which now you see the Democrats pivoting from the second strike and the war crimes allegation to really what this whole thing is about. Should we do it -- be doing it in the first place? I have way more sympathy for my friends, my cousins, my neighbors, those people who've been poisoned by these narco terrorists, people who've been skinned alive by these cartels that they bring people to the United States than I do for these narco terrorists. I mean, that's just the reality of the situation. So, there's legal justification for it. He's doing it. We do have more of a focus on our interests now in the Western Hemisphere, and I'm thankful for that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you support the pardon of the convicted drug smuggler or not?
SCHMITT: George, like I said, what we're talking about here are the narco terrorist poisoning Americans. This attempt to try to focus on a pardon is classic because you've lost the debate now on the narco terrorist question.
Schmitt would go on to hammer Stephanopoulos on the media’s handling of the War Crimes Hoax as part of the “Don’t Give Up The Ship” operation to undermine the military’s confidence in their commanders, namely Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump.
After several minutes of this, Stephanopoulos would attempt to pivot to the recently-published Inspector General report on Signalgate. Schmitt schooled Steffy again by breaking down the ways in which it was a “nothingburder”. When Stephanopoulos pushed back, Schmitt reminded him of an actual scandal that threatened operational security that went completely unpunished and which the media covered in a completely deferential manner: the disappearance of Secretary Lloyd Austin due to what would later learn was cancer treatment.
Schmitt rightly concludes that this is about little more than Democrat (and media) derangement over the results of the 2024 election and the fact that the duly elected President of the United States gets to designate his Cabinet and set military policy. No matter how much the Elitist Media would like to think otherwise.
The ehole exercise proves, once again, that if it weren't for double standards, there'd be none at all.
Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned report as aired on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, December 7th, 2025:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to bring in now Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, a member of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. And Senator, let me just begin where we left off with Congressman Smith. Do you support this pardon of the former Honduran president?
ERIC SCHMITT: I'm not familiar with the facts or circumstances, but I think what's telling here is to try to imply that somehow President Trump is soft on drug smuggling is just ridiculous. It's totally ridiculous. He's the -- he has provided border security like we've never seen before. And the fact is, these cartels now, because the southern border is closed, they've gone to the high seas. So, President Trump is acting with his core Article II powers. No serious legal expert would doubt that the president has authority to blow narco terrorists out of the water, who are poisoning a hundred thousand Americans every year. If you watched the SEC Championship Game yesterday, the Big 10 Championship Game, combine those two stadiums with the number of people there, that's how many people are dying each and every year from the poison that's coming from these narco terrorists. So the fact is, George, President Trump has been delegated the authority by Congress to designate terrorist organizations. He has done that. He sent a letter to Congress saying he was going to initiate these strikes. We've had regular briefings about it, including from Secretary of State Rubio, including from other high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense. He's executing those. And so now, what we have now are Democrats who have such X-ray vision and clairvoyance that they know the intentions of narco terrorists on boats, yet were so blind to see that they had a president for four years that was operating as a vegetable in Joe Biden. So, forgive me if I'm a little skeptical that this isn't all about politics and trying to take out Secretary Hegseth. That's what this whole thing's been about, George. They didn't want him confirmed. They didn't want a realist in place. They didn't want to shift from their pet projects around the world and trying to build democracies in the sandsof the Middle East by the barrel of a gun. We have core national interests at stake, the homeland and the Western Hemisphere, and the rise of China. That's what this administration is focused on. The Democrats are just upset about that, and they try to create some controversy each and every week, and it goes nowhere.
STEPHANOPOULOS: What do you mean you're not familiar with the facts and circumstances of the pardon? It's been well reported all across the country. He is the former president of Honduras. He was convicted of conspiring to bring in 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, also guns and other materials. It's been front page news across the country. Aren't you curious about that?
SCHMITT: Well, I'm curious about your pushback on that particular point. With your previous guest, you had zero pushback because he’s, giving the Democrat talking points like you spew every single week, which is probably why your ratings are so bad. But to make the point, what I'm saying is that you're trying to divert here the attention from what the American people actually support. 75 percent of Americans support us blowing narco terrorists out of the water in the Caribbean who are trying to poison Americans. There's no real legal debate about the ability to do that. Now, you could have a policy discussion about it, which now you see the Democrats pivoting from the second strike and the war crimes allegation to really what this whole thing is about. Should we do it -- be doing it in the first place? I have way more sympathy for my friends, my cousins, my neighbors, those people who've been poisoned by these narco terrorists, people who've been skinned alive by these cartels that they bring people to the United States than I do for these narco terrorists. I mean, that's just the reality of the situation. So, there's legal justification for it. He's doing it. We do have more of a focus on our interests now in the Western Hemisphere, and I'm thankful for that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you support the pardon of the convicted drug smuggler or not?
SCHMITT: George, like I said, what we're talking about here are the narco terrorist poisoning Americans. This attempt to try to focus on a pardon is classic because you've lost the debate now on the narco terrorist question. Because at the beginning of the week, you had Democrats actually on camera saying you should disobey orders. That's what Senator Kelly and Slotkin were saying, you should disobey orders. And then they went so far as to say that if you do -- if you don't do that, you might get prosecuted down the road. It's hard to sort of overstate how problematic that is for the chain of command and what it is for a military. The Democrats had their shot at all this and it was rejected. They wanted to have DEI struggle sessions in our military, transgender surgeries, recruitment was way down. The fact is under President Trump and now Secretary Hegseth, recruitment is sky high. Morale is sky high. They're upset about that, because they had an agenda that said that America could be everywhere all at once all the time. Now, we have a president that's a realist, focusing on core national interests, including protecting Americans from being poisoned by the narco terrorists.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Just to clarify, the Democrats you talked about were talking about illegal orders, they were specific about saying it was illegal orders --
SCHMITT: Yeah.
STEPHANOPOULOS: -- that they were talking about.
SCHMITT: Sure. But when you press them on -- but when you press them on what orders are they talking about, they had no answer except to say that, somehow they should be guessing along the way. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's really ridiculous. And this is kind of the rabbit hole of Trump Derangement Syndrome, is that they can't let this thing go. They can't believe that he won. They didn't want Hegseth to be the Secretary of War. They fought it. He was their number one target. They failed at that. And so now you just have a series and series of issues that come up every week to try to undermine the president and the Secretary of War.. And it's not working. They're going to carry out their mission. They executed another strike of a narco-terrorist just this past week. Those will continue and they're completely authorized. I reviewed the 40-plus page memo by the Office of Legal Counsel. There's JAG officers in these rooms, George, every time there's a strike. So, again, the narrative at the beginning of the week that these are war crimes, that's clearly fallen away and now the Democrats are peddling another lie.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You mentioned Secretary Hegseth. Here's a quote from the Department of Defense inspector general report on that release of sensitive information over the Signal app. According to the inspector general, "The secretary sent information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately two to four hours before the execution of those strikes. The secretary's actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots." Isn't that a concern?
SCHMITT: I reviewed the I.G. report and it's a nothingburger. The fact is there were allegations this was confidential or classified information, I should say. It wasn't. There was no operational integrity problems that that Operation Roughrider was executed flawlessly. So was by the way Midnight Hammer. So you can't really call that into question. There's no confidential or classified information that was disclosed. And, again, I think the bigger concern that you didn't have a hue and cry about from the Democrats was when Secretary Lloyd Austin went in for a medical procedure, was incapacitated and didn't tell the president. Literally, we had a Secretary of Defense that wasn't on duty and nobody knew about it. Like that's a real problem. This was a nothingburger and that's what the I.G. report that I read last week in the SCIF indicated.
STEPHANOPOULOS: It said it was a risk to operational security.
SCHMITT: But it wasn't. It wasn't. There was no -- listen, remember, when the scandal -- so-called scandal started, it was about classified information being disclosed. It wasn't classified information. So, again, you pivot to this sort of sensitive information, but there was no risk. There was no risk. And by the way, I'll point out, Signal is approved by the U.S. government for communications. And so if you want to have a broader discussion about that, we probably can. But I think the bigger issue was, you know, in the previous administration you had real operational risk. You had a department, you had a Secretary of Defense that was incapacitated in a surgery and nobody knew about it for days. That's a problem.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, thanks for your time this morning.
SCHMITT: Thanks, George.
