Guests - Betsy Smith, Steve Mundt
The Foiled UFC Plot: Drones, Snipers, and a DACA Connection
The thwarted attack planned around last week's UFC fight at the White House held the day's first and most urgent thread. What was publicly described as a drone threat was, in Betsy Brantner Smith's telling, far more calculated and far more sinister than initial headlines suggested. Smith, spokesperson for the National Police Association, laid out the mechanics of what investigators uncovered: attackers planned to launch drones over the crowd, knowing exactly what would happen next. "People are going to panic and start to run," she said. "Law enforcement is going to direct them to certain areas. And then they were going to have snipers in place." The weapons were real. The plan was operational. "This wasn't just a bunch of emails back and forth."
The motive, according to Smith, was straightforward: "They hate Trump and they hate capitalism and they hate America." She pointed to the language used in the plotters' communications, arguing it mirrored rhetoric that has been mainstreamed by certain elected Democrats. When the identity of the apparent ringleader emerged — a DACA recipient — neither Smith nor Winn expressed surprise. Smith took the occasion to walk through what DACA actually provides and what it does not. "DACA does not give you legal status," she said flatly. "It's an immigration policy established in 2012. It allows certain undocumented, illegal aliens who were brought here as children to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for a work permit." Two years, renewable, and explicitly conditioned on not committing additional crimes. "What these people have been doing," Smith added, "is going on for years and years and sometimes decades of this two-year renewable work status."
Winn drew the line cleanly: DACA is not a citizenship dispensation. It confers no special legal immunity. Anyone operating under it who commits a crime is precisely the most deportable person in the country, regardless of how long they've been here or how sympathetically their story is framed by elected officials.
Congresswoman Grijalva and the Carla Toledo Case
The plot's DACA angle connected directly to a local case that has been consuming Tucson's political oxygen. Carla Toledo, a 31-year-old DACA recipient, was arrested after physically assaulting an ICE agent who was detaining her husband — not her. Smith was careful on that point: "She was not being arrested at that time." After a brief detention, charges against Toledo were temporarily dropped and she was released. ICE then investigated further and found that Toledo had been traveling back and forth to Mexico in 2024 with her husband under Biden-era "advanced parole" permissions — a program Smith described as the administrative equivalent of telling someone who entered illegally to just consider themselves paroled.
Smith traced the policy origins carefully. "The case of these DACA recipients, like Carla Toledo, she did not get her status because of the inhumane policies of the Biden administration," she said. "When Obama installed DACA, all these people were told, well, yeah, you're illegal, but don't worry about it. Now the chickens are coming home to roost on all this." Multiple federal district courts, she noted, have declared DACA unconstitutional. "It's not really a policy of United States immigration."
Arizona Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, representing the 7th Congressional District, has made Toledo a cause, standing alongside her attorney at the federal building while local media amplified the narrative. Smith wasn't having it. "Carla Toledo is being utilized as the face of why we need to be more compassionate in our immigration. But most people are tired of this." DHS, she noted, has been offering families in similar situations the ability to self-deport together, with each family member receiving $6,000 and the right to apply for legal re-entry. Had Toledo and her husband taken that path eight or nine months ago, she said, the entire situation would look very different. Instead, Grijalva is choosing to fight it publicly. "This is the hill she's choosing to die on," Smith said. "This is why we need to elect Daniel Buccieri to CD7."
Winn added the geographic context: CD7 is one of the largest and most gerrymandered congressional districts in the country, drawn specifically to keep the Grijalva family in office. She argued that one of the primary reasons to elect a Republican governor is to reshape those districts when the next census and redistricting cycle arrives, noting that Arizona was likely shorted congressional seats when the 2020 census was conducted during COVID.
Attorney General Kris Mayes Steps in It
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes gave the show an unexpected gift this week when she took to X to defend DACA recipients, posting that they are police officers, firefighters, nurses, and small business owners. Smith's response was unambiguous: "Directly in the Arizona Revised Statutes, it explicitly states that the minimum qualifications to become a police officer in the state of Arizona requires — how about United States citizenship." Mays, the self-described chief law enforcement officer of the state, doesn't know what it takes to become a police officer in the state she oversees. "She just got owned on a national level," Smith said.
The pile-on was bipartisan in the sense that it came from across the internet. Congresswoman Yasmin Salman also jumped into the thread to amplify Mays's position, and she received the same treatment. Smith characterized the episode as emblematic of a broader problem: "She's the attorney general and she doesn't know the law in Arizona."
Winn gave the longer backstory. Mayes, she argued, didn't legitimately win her seat in 2022 — the actual attorney general, in her view, should be Abe Hamadei, who lost by under 400 votes in an environment where Secretary of State Katie Hobbs was overseeing the election she was simultaneously running in, where Cochise County was blocked from completing a ballot audit that Pinal County had already begun, and where thousands of election-day ballots favorable to Hamadei were never fully tallied. "There's so much crap baked in the cake," Winn said, "and they keep serving it up." Mayes's record in office since then, Smith argued, has been one of consistent anti-law enforcement activism — including behavior she described as attempting to make Arizona citizens feel comfortable shooting ICE agents. "She hates law enforcement. She was trying to get Arizona citizens to feel okay about shooting ICE agents." A former reporter with a law degree but no prosecutorial experience and no law enforcement background, Mayes has become, in Smith's estimation, the most consequential wrong person in the wrong job in the state.
Child Exploitation Case: A Tucson Guilty Plea
Winn flagged a Pima County case that received far less local attention than the Toledo situation despite carrying far higher stakes for the community's most vulnerable. Tucson resident Shams Can Rieman pleaded guilty on June 8th to two counts of production of child pornography as part of Project Safe Childhood, a Department of Justice initiative launched in 2006 to combat child sexual exploitation. He used Snapchat to communicate with individuals under the age of 12. He faces up to 30 years in federal prison, a fine of $250,000, and lifetime supervised release.
Smith's message to parents was direct: "There is no good that comes from a 12, 13, 14, 15-year-old child having apps like Snapchat and Instagram. These predators use social media to exploit and communicate with young children." Winn reinforced the point, noting that elected officials who claim to care about the most vulnerable in their districts rarely train that concern on the children being preyed upon in their own communities.
Voting in Uniform, Election Integrity, and the Primary Stakes
One of the week's less-covered but genuinely significant legal developments involved a case in federal court on Tuesday. Winn, alongside former Congressman Joel Strabila and represented by the Oversight Project, appeared in court over a lawsuit contesting the state's position that uniformed law enforcement officers and military members voting in their uniforms constitute a form of voter intimidation. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Senator Mark Kelly — both military veterans — have endorsed that position.
Smith, a 29-year law enforcement veteran who voted in uniform throughout her career, said the idea is absurd on its face. "I can't tell you how many times I had to vote in uniform because you're running to and from work," she said. In Illinois, she noted, police stations routinely served as precinct voting locations because they're government buildings with space and security. The lawsuit's core argument: uniformed officers and military members serving on election day shouldn't have to choose between doing their jobs and exercising their constitutional right to vote. "They want to 'ice agent' everybody that has a uniform to control us," Smith said. "It feeds back to this mindset that law enforcement people are intimidating and bad and overbearing and aggressive."
Winn's broader point on the primary: whoever wins the Republican primary for governor will determine whether Arizona gets redistricting reform, whether the voter rolls get cleaned up, and whether the state returns to precinct-based voting. She noted that thousands of Pima County Republicans with consistent voting histories have apparently been quietly removed from active voter rolls. Her recommendation: check your registration status with the county recorder now, before early ballots arrive.
For voters in Marana specifically, Smith named the candidates to watch: John Post, Terry Murphy, Herb Kai, and John Opser on the ballot, and Jackie Craig — spelled C-R-A-I-G — as a write-in. She warned that an incorrect spelling on a write-in will get the ballot thrown out, and that there is another candidate named Jackie on the ballot who is not the same person.
Washington, D.C.'s Democratic Primary and the Limits of 90% Dominance
Washington, D.C. ran its Democratic primary this week and chose Janice Lewis George, a far-left city council member, over the more centrist Kenyon McDuffie — with Lewis George winning roughly 53% in a jungle primary. She will run largely unopposed in November. Smith saw the result as predictable but worth discussing in the context of how a city that is 90% Democrat produces federal outcomes: "That's why we can't get fair juries. That's why we can't get fair prosecutors." She renewed a call for Republicans to put forward a credible challenger rather than ceding the field. "Why is it that the Republicans can't run a decent candidate against this woman? We have until November in the nation's capital to try and make a change."
Winn added what she called a pressing concern: despite the Trump administration's stated goals of decentralizing federal power, key agencies — the FBI, the Department of Agriculture, others — remain headquartered in a city where 90% of the jury pool, the prosecutorial class, and the civil service lean hard in one ideological direction. Moving agencies to cities like Kansas City, she argued, would be a structural correction, not a political stunt.
Steve Mundt: The Drone That Hit the Apache and the Iran Ceasefire
Retired Brigadier General Steven D. Mundt joined the second hour to provide the military context the first hour had been building toward. He worked in Army aviation for decades, specifically on the Apache attack helicopter platform, alongside Winn's husband — which gave the conversation a particular texture of personal investment in the outcomes being discussed.
The Apache story from the Middle East, Mundt explained, wasn't just a dramatic incident. It was the tripwire. "Trump said, my red line was met. And therefore, I am going to take action." The drone that hit the helicopter was designed not to fire munitions but to carry one — it flew directly into the cockpit with a live munition still aboard, creating sparks and the threat of detonation. The pilots could not eject. "You don't jettison yourself out of a helicopter," Mundt said. "It's not like in an airplane or a jet where they punch eject and float down in a parachute." Instead, they had to fly the aircraft down to the water, keep it level on contact so the blades wouldn't come through the cockpit, then get unstrapped underwater in the dark — not knowing whether they were right-side up or upside down — and swim to the surface. A Navy unmanned drone picked them up. Mundt described learning about it while playing golf with a Navy officer, stopping to thank him. "For what?" the officer asked. "For your unmanned drone to pick up my Apache helicopter pilots."
Mundt was unequivocal about what the survival of the crew means: "The aircraft did everything it was supposed to do. And the pilots did everything they were supposed to do, which is why they could walk away from that." He also made the broader point about investment in military technology: the communications system credited with enabling the rescue was installed around 2010-2012. Nobody who funded that system knew exactly when or how it would be needed, but it was there when it mattered.
The Iran Memorandum of Understanding: What It Actually Says
On the agreement itself, Mundt provided a framework for what the 60-day memorandum of understanding actually commits each side to and what it conspicuously does not. The immediate terms: a ceasefire, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions relief in stages tied to compliance, restrictions on nuclear activity, and a broader commitment to respect sovereignty and refrain from interfering in internal affairs. The document also covers Lebanon, committing parties to respect Lebanon's territorial integrity — a provision Winn noted keeps getting pulled into negotiations even though Israel, the most directly affected party, wasn't at the table when Lebanon was put on the agenda.
Mundt's assessment of who inside Iran is actually driving the process matters here. "The guy that's running the peace talks is their president, the civilian," he said. "The guy that is not interested is the Iranian Republican Guard." The regime's propaganda machinery has been telling its domestic audience that Iran won the war — a claim Mundt dismissed flatly as useful fiction. The reality is that Iran took catastrophic losses across roughly 25,000 sites struck jointly by American and Israeli forces over 38 days. The question is whether the faction that wants a different relationship with the world can hold ground against the faction that does not.
Mundt's bottom line: "You've got to take what Trump has done, which is the tough position that says there are things that Iran is not going to have. And if they want to become peaceful and live and work well with their neighbors and prosper, this is the road. If they don't, we'll go back to the other road." He acknowledged openly that the midterm calendar is shaping the timeline — get gas prices down, get the conflict out of the daily news cycle, hold the House and Senate — but argued that's not cynicism, it's sequencing.
On what happens if the ceasefire collapses, Mundt said the mechanism is already built in: "We can go back to the blockade again, cutting off their finances. We'd go back to the military, if that's what's called for." JD Vance put it plainly to critics who called the deal naive: are you saying we shouldn't even try peace?
Regional Enforcement, the European Problem, and the Middle East Freeloaders
Mundt expanded on the broader geopolitical frustration that the Iran deal has brought into focus. Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE, and other Gulf states have expressed enthusiastic support for American-led stability — as long as America is doing the actual work. "They're very happy to have the United States do all this," Mundt said. "But where are they going to do to police their own backyard?" He drew the parallel explicitly to Europe and the Ukraine-Russia conflict: "When are they going to police their own backyard where they have an interest? You hear them — oh yeah, we're all ready to come in with the Strait of Hormuz, we'll help with the demining as soon as we're sure you've got this thing in place." The ceasefire is now in place. The test, Mundt said, is whether those commitments materialize.
The Syria-as-peacekeeper idea — floated by someone, somewhere, as a way to police Hezbollah in Lebanon — got a sharp reaction from Mundt. "If anybody hates Hezbollah more than the Israelis, it literally is the Syrians. If they went in, it would be a bloodbath. Everybody would be begging for the Israelis to come back." He wasn't sure where the idea originated, but found it alarming as a serious policy proposal.
Radicalization, Precious Metals, and the Long Game
On the domestic terror threat raised by the UFC plot and by the pattern of young, American-born men being radicalized into violence, Mundt identified what he sees as the primary vector: "They're being radicalized by the education system. They're being radicalized by people pouring money into demonstrations and things." He pointed to polling data that he said genuinely frightens him — the finding that only about one in four self-identified Democrats believe America is a good place to live, compared to more than 50% of independents and high eighties to low nineties among Republicans. "That scares me," he said. "Everything else we're talking about — but that stuff scares me. When people are trying everything to get into this country because they see it as a land of opportunity, and we have people who were born here by God's grace who don't love it here."
He also moved the conversation toward supply chain and materials security, a thread that connected directly to the Chinese military company blacklist discussed on the previous day's program. The rare earth metals required for military systems, GPS components, and advanced electronics remain approximately 90% controlled by China. "We have the technology," Mundt said, "but we have to have the resources as well." He praised the administration's moves to open domestic mines and secure access to African deposits, framing it the same way he framed military readiness: "It's like a fire hydrant in your home. You may never use it, but if you need it, you want it there and you want it functional." China knows this, he said, and is playing the long game while American political culture defaults to short-term thinking. "They're asymmetric and they're playing the long game. Americans want to play the short game. The problem is, guess what? We don't have the precious metals."
Ballot Harvesting, Washington DC's Cleanup, and the Standard That Should Apply
The conversation closed with a pair of contrasting images: California's elections still counting ballots weeks after election day, and Washington, D.C.'s physical transformation under a mayor who chose to work with rather than against the current federal administration. On California, Mundt's frustration was direct. "How can you look at countries around the world that have more people than we have in California, have less technology, and they can literally hold their elections, find the results, and finish it the end of the day?" He called ballot harvesting on Skid Row — where people are reportedly paid in drugs to fill out ballots — a moral obscenity regardless of its technical legality. "You're hurting the person you're getting the ballot from. You're hurting the election process because it's not a fair open election."
On D.C., Mundt and Winn both described a city that looked and felt genuinely different during their recent visits — the Reflecting Pool being cleaned after years of neglect, the Tidal Basin undergoing restoration near the Jefferson Memorial, families in public spaces, a sense of order and care being restored to the nation's front yard. "Nobody wants to hear that," Mundt acknowledged. But he pushed back against the reflexive opposition that frames every improvement as a political act: "These are people who are trying to do a good thing. If you think there's a better way to do it, by all means have the discussion. But quit being against things without any solution. You're not adding value. You're just sucking oxygen out of a room that is oxygen deprived already."