Here & Now

On national security, how does the U.S. stay safe in the face of ISIS? We gotta get it right. We gotta first of all understand there can be no toleration of groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and let's not be fooled that it's just ISIS. It's other affiliated groups such as Al Qaeda and others that are still operating. I have offered a very specific plan to do something about these monsters who have to be stopped. I have advocated that we knock off the leaders of these organizations which there are some aspects of it in place but it has to be intensified. We're able to apparently get the number two guy over there recently. And one of the ways it can be intensified is by using more human intelligence. That means more spies. We need more people through our intelligence agencies able to infiltrate those areas to find these people and destroy them. We also have to make it so they can't function. You know they're really trying to have a caliphate there. They're trying to have a state. They're trying to have a country. And they've lost a lot of ground. But some of the ways that they are able to proceed we can stop. Oil production and oil transport. We are able with more aggressive activity to destroy their ability to transport and produce oil. We can do something to make sure they don't get financial transactions. You know our Department of Treasury has a fairly sophisticated ability to go after some of this. When I was on the Intelligence Committee for five years, I worked with them closely on this kind of thing. Heightening our ability to cut off their financial transfers would make a difference. And making sure they can't get arms. You know that Turkish border is where they get a lot of it from. And recently with U.S.-assisted help for some of the Syrian forces, some of this ground's been retaken. And the Turks now claim that they control the border there. So we now have the opportunity of possibly cutting off their arms supplies. So what I see here and what I proposed is a specific plan. Senator Johnson has no plan except for to send 100,000 troops into the region and what do you do the next day? That's the same mistake we made before. And he hasn't lifted a finger to create an authorization for military force for President Obama. He and others in Congress and he's the Chairman of a Homeland Security Committee has done nothing to try give the president greater authority to go after these things and that's really very unfortunate. Now even as we speak, the FBI and Homeland Security's investigating bombing and a knife attack at a mall in Minnesota as potential terrorism. Your opponent calls you weak on national security. What's your response, not just to these recent crimes, but to his description of you that way? I'm not interested in his characterizations. That's petty politics. What matters here is the safety of the American people. Both overseas and within this country. And nobody cares about that more than I do. Look, look at the situation. Senator Johnson I don't think has lifted a finger to give the FBI more resources. It's clear that they have many investigations they have to do. Remember San Bernardino? When they went after trying to figure out what had happened there which apparently was Al Qaeda-inspired, I remember seeing on the news that they had to drop various other investigations in order to do that investigation. What does that tell you? They need more resources. You can't do it through thin air. We're gonna need the CIA to have more agents. And we're gonna to need the FBI to have more resources. So we can go after those who may try to harm us. So the issue here isn't, "Are they connected with ISIS? Are they connected with Al Qaeda?" Of course, that's relevant. But anybody that's trying to kill Americans within this country has to be pursued and we have to give people the resources and have the people on the ground able to do that.