Interview with Duncan Hunter
JULY 18, 2007

GLENN BECK PROGRAM
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

GLENN: From Radio City in Midtown Manhattan, hello you sick twisted freak. Welcome to the program, the third most listened to show in all of America. Glad you’re here. Congressman Duncan Hunter is with us. He was on Capitol Hill last night. It’s kind of a sleepy place today, isn’t it?

HUNTER: You know, the Senate’s always a little bit sleepy there, Glenn Beck. How are you doing?

GLENN: Very good, sir. Congressman, yesterday I didn’t even know — I didn’t even know how to watch the testimony coming out of the hearing that you were in with Johnny Sutton on the Compean and Ramos story. I didn’t know how to even process it, and I told Lou Dobbs this last night on TV. I found myself asking what everyone’s motivation was in the hearing. I really, I’m to a point — this is sad. I’m to a point to where I really didn’t trust that very many people in that room had the people’s best interests at heart.

HUNTER: Well, let me tell you, I know what I’m doing, Glenn, and that’s this. Is when the President didn’t issue a pardon to these two agents, I pulled our lawyers in on the House side and I said, can congress issue a pardon? And they went back and looked at it and they came back. They said, some law indicates you can and some indicates you can’t and it may end up going to the Supreme Court. I said, let’s try it, and we drafted up a congressional pardon. I introduced that bill a couple of months ago. In fact, the day they went into prison, I introduced the — I wrote that pardon bill up, and right now we have 100 cosponsors. That is 100 members of congress on the house side that have sponsored a congressional pardon for Compean and Ramos, and I thought the interesting thing about that hearing was even if you believed the drug dealer side of this story, these two border patrol agents wounded a drug dealer as he was bringing in 750 pounds of narcotics and they were given basically murder sentences. That is, they were given 11 and 12 years in the federal penitentiary, which is more than the average convicted murderer in America. So the point is even if you believe the drug dealer side of the story, this is an extreme injustice to have these guys in jail. Ramos has been beaten up and so here’s what we’re doing, Glenn. I’ve got 100 cosponsors on my bill to pardon them. We’re going to fight to get 50 more cosponsors over the next 30 days. We think we can get a hearing, maybe get this thing marked up and get a vote on it in the house of representatives and hopefully the Senate in the next couple of months.

GLENN: What happened? I watched Dianne Feinstein and she seemed genuinely sincere and really hacked off at Johnny Sutton the way this whole thing has been handled, the way the drug dealer was given a humanitarian pass where he could come back and forth across the border. The guy is involved with a drug cartel, and we knew it. And we give him a pass.

HUNTER: Yeah, back after he became a State’s witness, he was involved with another load of drugs coming into the country and that’s one place where I think, you know, what’s happened with Johnny Sutton and happens with prosecutors a lot is in the end they just want to win. They just want to get that ball across the goal line, but they had more of an obligation than that. And, you know, these two guys went to jail based on the drug dealer’s testimony that he had no weapon on him, and they took — he was never searched, he was never frisked and so Johnny Sutton’s saying that this guy was disarmed or was unarmed is only based on the drug dealer’s testimony. When they caught this guy the second time bringing drugs across the border, I think Johnny Sutton had an obligation to go to the court and say this guy’s blown all the credibility he might ever have and we can’t use him as the key witness in prosecuting these two border patrolmen. I think that was an obligation he had.

GLENN: Johnny Sutton said to me — and he’s going to be on the program tomorrow — he said to me face to face, eyeball to eyeball, we don’t have any evidence that he was bringing drugs over the second time.

HUNTER: Okay, I tell you what, I’m going to give you — I’m going to send you the police reports that I have on the second load of drugs. I’ll send that to you so you’ve got that when you talk to him.

One other thing you should ask him, Glenn, is this: The senators didn’t ask him after I left the hearing yesterday. You know, I let off the hearing, then I had to take off to the Pentagon, but he said seven times in his statement that this guy was unarm. Ask him how he knows that because nobody frisked that drug dealer. Nobody searched him. He’s in the — he’s coming across the Rio Grande in a part of Texas which is almost a free fire zone. The small town across from Laredo, Texas, Nuevo Laredo has had something like 600 unsolved murders, most of them drug-related. A lot of those guys carry automatic weapons with them and so for Johnny Sutton to say that a drug dealer driving 750 pounds of narcotics was unarmed is just his guess.

GLENN: Well, it is his guess.

HUNTER: He’s taking the word dealers’ word for it.

GLENN: I will tell you this, congressman, that I have asked him that question and his response is that drug dealers just don’t carry guns anymore because they know that our laws are so tough and they are minimum sentences required that if they carry a gun or they pull a gun, they will go to jail for a very long time. So there are no drug smugglers that now carry guns. That’s his response.

HUNTER: You know, that’s about the weakest statement I have ever heard and about the weakest justification for saying that a guy is unarmed. So ask him. Pin him down on this thing. Say, did you search him, did anybody search him and so if you didn’t search him, how do you know he’s unarmed. And hit him with that. And, you know, the other question I’d ask him, if that’s true, how did those 600 people die in Nuevo Laredo, most of them in drug-related murders if guns weren’t used? Do these guys choke to death on their Wheaties in the morning?

GLENN: Let me — before I switch topics, let me ask you, do you believe that this hearing, anything will change for Compean and Ramos and, two, that we will stop giving people passes when they are linked to the drug cartel and we stop allowing them into our country unsupervised because they will testify against one of our border guards? Do you think either one of those things will change?

HUNTER: Yeah, I think there will be some nips and tucks on the law with respect to letting these people come in, but with respect to Compean and Ramos, what we’ve got to do is get those guys out of prison, and the only way that’s going to get done is to get more people to cosponsor the congressional pardon. And if we can get that number up to 150, I think we can get the legislation marked up and have a chance of getting it passed in the house of representatives. So that hearing in the Senate is not going to result in these guys getting out. It may change — it may result in some reforms on how we treat these drug dealers and these guys that come across, get immunity in exchange for their testimony.

GLENN: You know, congressman, I will tell you this. There are a lot of people in my own audience. I mean, I started selling — in fact, if I may, I would like to offer you a T-shirt. It’s a $20 donation goes directly to their legal defense fund. It’s a T-shirt with a U.S. border patrol symbol on it and it says To Protect and Serve Time, and every dollar goes to their legal defense fund. I’d like to send you one, sir, if I may.

HUNTER: Glenn, please do. And, you know, Glenn, I called up the bureau of prison the night they went in and I said, you have to separate those guys immediately from the general population or they’re going to be beaten up. The bureau of prisons sent me a letter the next day, and the staff director talked to Mr. Lapin, who is a director of the United States bureau of prisons, and they said we assure you they will be protected. We’ve got a special program. And they didn’t tell me they were putting Ramos back in with the general population and as you know, he was beaten up by five guys. And so those guys, they’ve now served six months in the federal penitentiary. It’s time to get them out. And if we can get an additional 50 cosponsors, that means if people will call their congressmen, ask them if they’ve gotten on the bill to give a congressional pardon to Compean and Ramos, that helps those two gentlemen enormously. So help us sponsor that bill. Let’s get that one across the finish line.

GLENN: I will tell you this, Congressman. What I was going to say to you is I put these T-shirts up for sale and you are asking people to call in to your — you know, call your congressman to cosponsor this bill.

HUNTER: Yes.

GLENN: There are a lot of people in my audience — and I have a very conservative audience — that say these guys are criminals, that these guys broke the law and they should do time. That, you know, we don’t want out-of-control border guards. Make the case that what they know is false because honestly that’s where I was. When this story first broke, we got on it for about a day or two and then I got off it real quick because I started hearing things about this case that we got off and I said, you know, something’s not right. We got back into it because I still had that feeling something’s not right and I said, drop in and really look at this story and find out what’s wrong. There are too many things, too many loose ends, but the general public really is confused between Johnny Sutton and their story.

HUNTER: Yeah. Okay, let me make the case, Glenn, and let me frame this thing. This was two U.S. border patrolmen on our side of the border. They saw a van come across. It turned out the van had 750 pounds of narcotics. The agent Compean had a scuffle, arrested the — or stopped the driver, the drug dealer, had a scuffle. The drug dealer took off running. Ramos came running up. He saw that his partner was on the ground. He pulled his gun. Compean and Ramos, from there you have two divergent stories. One is from the drug dealer who claims he was just running and he was unarmed. That’s the guy whose word Johnny Sutton takes. Compean and Ramos claimed he whirled around and had a gun in his hand and they fired at him. He was wounded in the rear end, continued on to Mexico, ran off into Mexico, was contacted several months later by the U.S. attorney’s office, was given immunity and came back in and testified against Compean and Ramos and the police report that I saw reflected another drug vote brought in by this guy in which he was identified by one of the witnesses as being the guy who broughts second drug load in after the first incident.

Now, here’s — let me tell you I’ve got a background in these cases because I’ve been on the armed services committee of the United States House of Representatives for 26 years. The last four years as chairman. So I’ve seen a lot of cases involving our Marines and soldiers where they are brought to trial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for discharging their weapons, for shooting at civilians and whether or not they had the right to discharge a weapon, whether they were in danger, whether they had reasonable fear.

Here’s the problem. When you have a law enforcement officer making a split-second decision as to whether a person has a gun in his hand or not, you have to give the doubt, the presumption in favor of the law enforcement officer. This guy’s not sitting back in an easy chair reflecting on facts three weeks after it happens or two months after it happens. He’s in the field. The adrenaline is flowing, he’s in a free fire zone there in the Rio Grande where lots of people have been killed in this multibillion dollar drug trade. Most of these guys, most of the drug traders carry automatic weapons or carry at least side arms and so you’re in a free fire zone. You think that guy’s shooting at you and as a result of that, you shoot at him and you wound him.

GLENN: Okay.

HUNTER: Now, if we put this decision, this split second decision, make that the difference between a law enforcement officer getting a medal for valor or giving to prison for 11 or 12 years, you are not going to get anybody to join the border patrol and I’ve never seen a case involving Marines or soldiers where the service person was treated as unfairly, in my judgment, as Compean and Ramos

GLENN: You have left out a part of the story and this is the part that bothers people, and my response to Sutton was because it’s afraid of Sutton and they are afraid of the system and there were supervisor on site while they did this but Sutton dismisses both of those things. The thing that bothers people is they went and they picked up the bullets. They picked up all of the shell casings and that leads to the “Cover-upâ€