Vance visits National Guard troops in D.C.

A round of heckling and boos followed Vice President Vance as he arrived to see National Guard troops at Washington's Union Station. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah, thank you, guys. Appreciate you. You can actually bring law and order to communities. You've just got to have the political willpower to do it.

Nearly 2,000 Guard members will be on the streets, many from six Republican-led states. The troops are still not carrying firearms or making arrests but today were manning posts near monuments and along the DC subway system, which Leroy Thorpe, who leads a community neighborhood watch group, says will help. You think it's effective to have National Guard on the subway? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean because the subway presents a public safety issue for law-abiding citizens that are coming to or going from work.

But DC's mayor continues to argue the deployment is unnecessary. We know that crime has gone down in our city, and it has gone down precipitously over the last two years.

The Department of Justice has launched an investigation into DC's crime data, which the administration has called fake. You've just got to look around. Obviously, DC has a terrible crime problem. The Department of Justice statistics back it up. The FBI statistics back it up.

Tom Dupree is a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration. Might there be a political motivation for that? I think there could be. In other words, right now there is a very public debate about the need for enhanced federal patrolling in the streets of DC and the use of federal law-enforcement resources to stop local crime. And I think the factual backdrop this is all playing out against is, is crime in DC getting better or worse? And that's where the battle of the statistics comes in. Even as the White House champions the number of people arrested for having illegal guns, the Department of Justice says it's easing its prosecutions of people for possessing long guns or rifles here, which gun-rights groups who've long championed President Trump are heralding as a victory, John.