Morning Wire - ICE Agents Come Under Fire & Meme-Maker Walks Free | 7.11.25

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Attacks on ICE agents increase as Democrats ratchet up their rhetoric, the man prosecuted for a “text to vote” meme fights back, and the race for AI dominance reaches a fever pitch. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.   - - -   Today's Sponsors:   NetSuite - Download the free e-book “Navigating Global Trade: 3 Insights for Leaders” at https://NetSuite.com/MORNINGWIRE   ZocDoc - Find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. Visit https://Zocdoc.com/WIRE #sponsored   - - -   Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Violent rhetoric and attacks on ICE agents are on the rise as Democrats try to paint deportation efforts as evil. But are Americans buying it? Would you support a new government program that would deport all people living in the U.S. illegally? And that finds majority favor. That finds six and ten. I'm Georgia Howe. John is off this week, but Cabot Phillips is here. It's Friday, July 11th, and this is Morning Wire. The man prosecuted by the Biden DOJ for his text to vote. for Hillary meme, just had his conviction overturned.

Now he's turning the tables on the people who targeted him. I think it's egregious. I think that it's weaponization and politicize justice, and I think it's misconduct. And from hiring wars to impersonations of top government officials, the race for AI dominance has reached a fever pitch. They started making these giant offers to, you know, a lot of people on our team.

You know, like $100,000 signing bonuses. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. It's an interesting time for business, with tariff and trade policies shifting constantly, supply chains, fuel and the squeeze, and cash flows tighter than ever.

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Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce is here to talk about threats to ICE agents as well as the latest setback to Trump's immigration agenda in the courts. Hey Tim, so first off, Where is the danger to ice agents coming from? Well, lately, it's been more random and for that, more dangerous. Here's some of the attacks in the last week alone. At an ice facility in Alvaredo, Texas, a group of people clad in black military-style clothes used fireworks to lure out ice officers while a gunman waited in the woods.

One ice agent was shot the neck. He's thankfully expected to recover. Ten of those perpetrators have been charged with attempted murder. It was a planned ambush with the intent. to kill ICE corrections officers. Make no mistake, this was not a so-called peaceful protest. In Oregon, three more people are facing charges after they allegedly assaulted officers at an ice facility in Portland. The officers were kicked, punched, and attacked with an incendiary device. In McAllen, Texas, two police officers and a Border Patrol agent were hospitalized after a gunman

fired dozens of rounds into a Border Patrol facility. And also this week in San Francisco, anti-ice protesters attacked ice agents in an apparent attempt to stop their black van from leaving an area. Now, what's the White House response to this been? Well, first, the administration has pointed out that these attacks aren't just serious, but they're becoming more common as well. Here's borders are Tom Homan on Fox News. The attack on ice officers, you've covered it many times, is up nearly 700 percent. Now, the radical against the men and women of ice is skyrocketing,

especially by members of Congress. We have senators. We have Congress people. that compare ice to the Nazis, compare ice to racist, and it just continues. And as you heard from Homan, Democrats over-the-top rhetoric has also played a part. For example, here is L.A. Mayor Karen Bass comparing deportations to kidnappings. People are walking down the street, a car will pull up, no license plate, men will jump out, completely mask, pull guns on whoever it is, and take them away.

Aside from the fact that this is unconstitutional, how do we do we? We know the difference between this and the kidnapping. Some say this radical rhetoric is actually part of a larger strategy by Democrats to provoke ICE and cut down support for Trump's most popular issue. Here's Real Clear Politics chief content officer, Andrew Woolworth. The idea of trying to provoke an overreaction on the part of ICE is part of the strategy. The attacks may be having effect because Trump's overall approval on immigration appears to be falling recently. For their part, Democrats want to ban ICE agents from where,

wearing face coverings during operations. Here's Congressman Dan Goldman pushing that bill last month on MSNBC. We don't live in a country, an authoritarian country, where we have secret police who are masked, who are intimidating, who are scaring people. That's the stuff of authoritarian states. That is not the stuff of the, that's not how the United States operates. Of course, that legislation will never get the president's signature. Here's Trump.

It's sort of funny when people pick it in front of Columbia in front of Harvard and they have masks on more than masks. I mean, you can't see anything. Nobody complains about that. But when a patriot who works for ICE or Border Patrol puts a mask on so that they won't recognize him and his family, so they can lead a little bit of a normal life after having worked so hard and so dangerously, there's a problem with that. Now, I want to ask you about a court ruling coming out of New Hampshire this past week relating to Trump's order on birthright citizenship. So what happened? Yeah, the judge granted class action status in a case that was brought by just one pregnant immigrant. So the order applies to all potential babies born in the United States regardless of the parents' legal status. Now, it's worth noting that this decision may run afoul of a recent Supreme Court decision blocking nationwide junctions in cases of birthright citizenship.

That's how the administration sees it anyway. Attorney General Pam Bondi has already hit this case, in particular, as an attempt to run around the Supreme Court. Well, very interesting if they're going to give unborn babies a right. Tim, thanks for reporting. Good to be on. You know that nagging feeling about the doctor's appointment you've been putting off forever? Maybe it's that dentist cleaning you're now six months overdue for. Whatever it is, today might actually be the day to stop procrastinating.

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Here with more is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestiz Yakimo. Hey Amanda, so we've been covering this case from the very start. on Morning Wire. Just to remind our listeners first of who Douglas Mackey is and then tell us about his legal win. Yeah, so Douglas Mackey had a popular pro-Trump account on Twitter, now called X, during the 2016 election. Just days after Joe Biden took office in 2021, the Biden DOJ arrested Mackie and prosecuted him over memes he posted four years prior. One of the memes in question mocked Hillary Clinton supporters and said they could text their vote and avoid the polls. similar jokes were made online about Trump supporters.

The DOJ claimed this was a mass conspiracy, voter suppression and election interference. Mackey was facing 10 years in prison. He was eventually convicted in New York City and sentenced to seven months behind bars. Now, he was able to avoid jail time as he appealed the case, and on Wednesday, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed Mackie's conviction, and they directed a lower court to enter a judgment of acquitted. I was able to speak to Mackey yesterday about this big win. I didn't expect that it would be such a resounding victory.

It's extremely rare for a case, number one, to be overturned on appeal. Number two, it's extremely rare for the circuit court, the appeals court, to actually overrule the jury and say, no, the verdict was wrong. You have to enter a judgment of acquittal. That's extremely rare. And just goes to show how weak and non-existent the government's case against me. was. All three of the judges sided with Mackie and one of the judges, by the way, was appointed by Joe Biden. And though a conviction at one time was secured, the case has largely been viewed as politically motivated. I asked Mackie why he thought the Biden DOJ went after him specifically.

Well, they targeted me, number one, because I supported Trump, but number two, because, you know, I had a lot of influence at the time. And number three, they actually, Senator Claude, which or actually blew this meme up, put it on the Senate floor and said, well, Russia must have done this. Russia, you know, Russia did this. So there was actually a Russia gate angle where they thought that if they arrested me and some other people for posting these memes, that they would somehow uncover some kind of Russian conspiracy theory, which ultimately only existed in their minds. Though Mackie was ultimately acquitted, this legal saga was more than four years of his life, and it really took a toll on him and his family and his friends, he told me.

For example, Mackie said his wife was pregnant during the trial, and she actually had an emergency C-section while he was being sentenced in New York City. Financially, Mackey said his legal fees totaled north of a million dollars. Now, moving forward, Mackie plans to file a civil lawsuit against the DOJ. He shared some details with us about that coming lawsuit. As the circuit court ruled, this case was brought without sufficient evidence. They didn't have any evidence of an actual conspiracy. And that's just the first problem with the case.

There are multiple. Based on that, we have to assume that they brought this case for political reasons, because why else would you bring this case? I think that it's weaponization and politicized justice, and I think it's misconduct. So, look, the damages are a lot. I mean, if we're talking about just purely legal fees, we're talking $1 million to $1.5 million dollars that I had to

raise and a lot of, you know, I spent a lot of my own money. I'll note that President Trump has personally talked about this case as an example of political persecution. And a White House policy advisor also cited Mackie's case when he was discussing Trump's executive order to end the weaponization of the federal governments. Mackey's team is confident that they'll be able to obtain a favorable outcome with this coming lawsuit. Yeah, and a lot of First Amendment activists viewing this ruling as a victory for free speech. Amanda, thanks so much for reporting. You're welcome.

The race to develop advanced artificial intelligence is heating up, and some tech giants are sparing no expense. Earlier this week, Meta paid $200 million to poach one of Apple's leading AI developers for its new superintelligence lab. Daily Wire researcher Michael Whitaker is here with the latest on the race for AI dominance. So Michael, who are the leaders in the AI space right now? Well, right now, despite some effort from foreign companies and foreign governments, U.S. companies definitely lead the field. There are some prominent newcomers like OpenAI and Anthropic, but many of the established firms also have a very strong presence in this field.

Everybody who is anybody wants to have a piece of the AI pie. We're talking Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, meta, the list goes on. Apple generally has underperformed many of its peer competitors in this sector. That being said, they do have a lot of expertise building smartphones and personal computers. They've spent much of their research efforts attempting to develop smaller AI models that can be integrated into their own hardware. so an AI tool could be on the phone or on the computer as opposed to being reliant upon an outside server connection.

That little widget appears to have caught Mark Zuckerberg's attention. The meta CEO reached out to some of Apple's top talent in an attempt to poach them for his own AI research lab. Rooming Pong, the head of Apple's AI model research, has been poached for a cool $200 million to go work at meta. Sam Altman of OpenAI says his employees have received similar offers. They started making these giant offers to, you know, a lot of people on our team.

You know, like $100 million signing bonuses. more than that comp per year. It's crazy. And actually, it is crazy. I'm really happy that at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that. So 200 million for one employee is pretty astounding. Now, another headline relating to AI just from this past week

relates to deep fakes and vishing. So what is vishing? It's very similar to phishing, except with more virtual components, more AI. And it is a growing concern. We've all gotten robocalls or text messages asking for, or our driver's license or our social security number. Hopefully we have the sense not to answer those.

No judgment. But a growing number of these efforts are using deep fake voices to not only get personal information from individuals, but to compromise security at the highest levels of government. Earlier this year in May, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had her contact list compromised. Somebody had the bright idea to use a deep fake AI to impersonate her and reach out to congressmen, senators,

senior business figures, in an attempt to glean whatever information they could from those channels. The FBI put out a warning that month, letting people know that if you are contacted by a senior official, you should not automatically assume that is an authentic message. There was a similar case in the State Department where Secretary of Everything, officially Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was impersonated in a similar manner. The fakers were able to reach out to at least five people through signal and other channels using text messages and voice messages that remarkably resembled what Rubio may have said based on his speech patterns, his voice, his cadence, even the word choice he might use. This is pretty sophisticated. The trouble is voice cloning isn't difficult, so there are no obvious suspects.

At this point, almost anyone can do it. Roll the tape. Several companies offer free or cheap software that can convincingly replicate a person's voice in cadence with as little as 30 seconds of sample audio. Anyone who has ever spoken in public or answered the wrong phone call could easily be spoofed. Most of this answer was delivered by an AI,

although, to be fair, Michael already talks like a large language model, so he's pretty easy to copy. That was hurtful and unnecessary. Leah Siskin, an AI research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, has a more comprehensive and less hurtful explanation. You don't need much technical knowledge to learn how to produce these audio fakes. And what they'll do is they use AI to look for patterns in your accent, your tone, your pitch, your breathing patterns, all within that 30-second audio clip. And from that, they'll be able to produce a very realistic mimic of your voice.

Well, very unnerving, especially for people who speak on podcasts for a living. Michael, thanks for reporting. Thanks for having me and not replacing me for my AI double, who's cheaper. Thanks for waking up with us. And if you're watching on YouTube, please like and subscribe. We'll be back later this evening with more news you need to know.