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President Trump was quick to defend the ICE officer involved in the shooting. He called the victim a, quote, "professional agitator." We're going to turn now to our Ed O'Keefe, who is at the White House. Ed, good to see you there on the North Lawn. The White House really leaned in today to this argument that the woman in the car was to blame, not ICE agents. What can you tell us about the message and the strategy here? Yeah, well, and it was especially Vice President Vance who came to the White House briefing room to denounce coverage of the aftermath of this, especially the focus and the scrutiny on the ICE officer involved, and then, yes, as you suggested-- the president first did-- picked up on that by arguing that she was part of this organized left-wing or left-leaning movement to discredit or to impede the ongoing work of ICE and other federal agencies to enforce immigration law. Normally, the goal, the hope, is that administration officials come to the briefing room to convey information. Occasionally-- and this happens in all presidencies-- they come to lecture us. And that's what the vice president did today. Take a listen. She was trying to ram this guy with her car. He shot back. He defended himself. He's already been seriously wounded in law enforcement operations before. And everybody who has been repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Part of what the vice president also did today is announce that the Justice Department is set to hire, essentially, a special counsel or an Inspector General, someone he kept referring to as an AAG, or Assistant Attorney General, to investigate all those allegations of fraud across the state of Minnesota, a position, a mandate, that's likely to expand to other states, as the White House intends to spend much of this campaign here, focusing on alleged fraud, especially in Democratic-controlled states, to try to raise questions about their leadership and about the use of federal dollars to fund social programs across the country. This was the most high-profile and certainly pretty vociferous appearance of the vice president in recent days, amid, of course, all the focus on what's going on in Venezuela and what could happen one day soon in Greenland. Ed, I want to shift to Venezuela. The president told The New York Times that the US oversight of that country could last for years. That was an eye-opening comment. Did he say why it would last so long and what that would look like? Well, he suggested, certainly, that there aren't going to be elections anytime soon and, once again, didn't firmly commit to supporting the opposition party that had won elections in 2024, suggesting that so far, at least, the interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, is doing what the US wants. We're going to get some sense of what the US engagement in extracting Venezuela's oil is going to look like, most likely, after a meeting tomorrow here at the White House that the president, the Treasury Secretary, the Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, and the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, are set to have with executives from Halliburton, Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Valero, Marathon, and Continental. Those are all either companies that are extracting oil from Venezuela right now, companies that could, or the oil infrastructure companies that could conceivably one day help them do that work.
