'I don't really care, Margaret': Vance carpet-bombs Margaret Brennan interview with inconvenient facts and common sense

CBS News' Margaret Brennan took a decidedly adversarial approach to her interview with Vice President JD Vance that aired on Sunday, trying on multiple occasions and across various topics to corner the 40-year-old Republican or to extract concessions.

Not only did Brennan discover that she was outmatched, but she helped demonstrate both the toothlessness of the liberal presumptions of yesteryear and Vance's commitment to the prioritization of Americans over all other concerns.

The "Face the Nation" host appeared especially keen to needle Vance over the Trump administration's immigration policy, intimating that the removal of illegal aliens and President Donald Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship are at odds with the spirit of the nation and its Constitution, stating, "This is a country founded by immigrants."

'America should actually look out for the interests of our citizens first.'

Vance rejected the premise, saying, "This is a very unique country, and it was founded by some immigrants and some settlers. But just because we were founded by immigrants doesn't mean that 240 years later, we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world."

The vice president emphasized further that "no country says that temporary visitors [and] their children will be given complete access to the benefits and blessings of American citizenship. America should actually look out for the interests of our citizens first."

Unable to land a rhetorical punch on the issues of birthright citizenship and illegal immigration, Brennan pressed Vance on the administration's moratorium on refugee admissions, insinuating hypocrisy on the part of the vice president.

Brennan referred to her August 2024 interview with Vance, in which she asked him whether America owed anything to the "80,000 or so Afghans who were left behind [during the Biden withdrawal], many of whom worked for the United States," and whether they should be offered asylum.

"I think that we should bring people here who helped us and have been properly vetted," Vance said at the time. "And that's very, very important, because a lot of the people the Biden administration has brought in have not been properly vetted."

Years earlier, Vance was among the Republican lawmakers who warned that a failure to get the vetting process right could end in tragedy, stating on Aug. 23, 2021, that "according to Pew, 40% of the people [in Afghanistan] believe that blowing yourself up, committing a suicide bombing, is an acceptable way to solve a problem. ... Let's ensure that we're properly vetting them so that we don't get a bunch of people who believe that they should blow themselves up at a mall because somebody looked at their wife the wrong way."

After stating that refugees are "heavily vetted," Brennan asked Vance in the Sunday interview whether he stood by his August 2024 statement in the face of Trump's recent executive action canceling Afghan flights and applications.

Again, Vance rejected Brennan's premise, replying, "Margaret, I don't agree that all these immigrants, or all these refugees, have been properly vetted. In fact, we know that there are cases of people who allegedly were properly vetted and then were literally planning terrorist attacks in our country."

'I don't want that person in my country.'

Blaze News previously reported that an Afghan national who entered the U.S. on Sept. 9, 2021, on a special immigrant visa was arrested in October and charged with allegedly plotting an Election Day terror attack for ISIS in Oklahoma. Following his capture, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi allegedly admitted to purchasing weapons for the purpose of targeting large gatherings of people near voting stations and dying in the process of doing so.

Last week, the Oakland County Sheriff's Office apprehended another Afghan refugee in Michigan after he allegedly stabbed his caseworker multiple times.

Brennan, confronted with the Oklahoma case and caught on the back foot, conceded that not all of the Afghans were properly vetted; however, she desperately clung to her question, asking once more whether Vance stood by his previous statement.

Vance simply hammered home the point: "My primary concern as the vice president, Margaret, is to look after the American people. ... And now that we know that we have vetting problems with a lot of these refugee programs, we absolutely cannot unleash thousands of unvetted people into our country."

Vance stressed that he wouldn't subject other American citizens' children to the threat of improperly vetted foreign nationals, just as he wouldn't tolerate such a risk to his own children.

When Brennan tried splitting hairs, suggesting that one of the imported threats at issue may have been radicalized in the U.S., Vance cut her off, saying, "I don't really care, Margaret. I don't want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me."

Having failed to dunk on Vance when discussing immigration, Brennan hurriedly pivoted to the topic of Trump's pardons for thousands of Jan. 6 defendants, suggesting again that the vice president's support for the president's decision reeked of hypocrisy.

After noting context missing from a quote Brennan shared, Vance proposed an alternative framing to the issue than that provided by the CBS News interviewer.

Brennan, adopting the go-to Democratic talking point, insinuated that by issuing a blanket pardon to supposedly violent and nonviolent Jan. 6 protesters alike, Trump downplayed violence against law enforcement. Vance countered by suggesting that the pardon power, which is "not just for people who are angels or people who are perfect," was properly utilized to rectify a wrong, namely the Biden Department of Justice's subjection of American citizens to an "incredibly unfair process, to denial of constitutional rights, and, frankly, to a double standard that was not applied to many people, including, of course, the Black Lives Matter rioters who killed over two dozen people and never had the weight of a weaponized Department of Justice come against them."

"There's what the people actually did on January the sixth, and we're not saying that everybody did everything perfectly," said Vance. "And then what did Merrick Garland's Department of Justice do in unjustly prosecuting well over a thousand Americans in a way that was politically motivated?"

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