A report from Just the News based on newly declassified intelligence intercepts is alleging that the Zelensky government in Ukraine conspired with USAID employees in late 2022 to route approximately two hundred million dollars in American taxpayer money through a series of transactions and into Joe Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Ken Cuccinelli, former Virginia Attorney General, former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, and now national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess both that developing story and the state of play on the Save America Act and DHS funding standoff.
Cuccinelli said the Ukraine-USAID allegation, if it proves out, fits a recognizable pattern. He pointed to Biden’s own on-camera remarks from his time as vice president, in which Biden described using the threat of withholding a billion-dollar loan guarantee to force the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor whose work touched on matters damaging to Biden’s family. That the same person, once elevated to the presidency, might have engaged in a transactional relationship with the Zelensky government in the other direction struck Cuccinelli as entirely consistent with what the public record already shows about how Biden operated. He noted that the resistance to DOGE’s examination of USAID earlier this year, which was treated by much of the press as an assault on humanitarian assistance, looks considerably more interesting in light of allegations that the agency was being used to launder foreign money into domestic political campaigns.
Proft raised the companion story Solomon has been reporting involving Chinese Communist Party operatives allegedly sending tens of thousands of fraudulent driver’s licenses to the United States before the 2020 election for use in obtaining ballots. Cuccinelli said the story dovetails directly with the Save America Act debate and that Republicans have done a poor job of connecting those dots publicly in a way that would amplify the urgency of passing the legislation. He noted that even CNN polling shows the Democratic base supports the core provisions of the Save America Act, particularly voter ID requirements, which two-thirds of states already have in some form, and a fix to the federal citizenship verification gap that Washington itself created and that only Washington can repair. The problem, as he described it, is not that the public opposes what the bill does but that Senate Democrats have been willing to come to the floor with a rotating set of three or four recycled arguments, get those arguments publicly dismantled by Mike Lee, and then simply recycle them again.
The analogy Cuccinelli found most effective in cutting through the Democratic objections involves the I-9 employment verification form that every American worker fills out when starting a new job, presenting documentation to prove citizenship or the right to work that is substantially similar to what the Save America Act would require for voter registration. He noted that no Democrat has ever characterized the I-9 as racist, as Jim Crow 2.0, or as an insurmountable burden for married women who have changed their names, all arguments that have been advanced against the voter ID provisions of the SAVE Act. The open debate on the Senate floor, which Cuccinelli said Majority Leader John Thune deserves some credit for allowing despite his own reluctance, has served to expose the gap between what Democratic senators are arguing publicly and what their own voters actually believe.
On the DHS funding fight itself, Cuccinelli was critical of the process by which the Senate produced its version of a continuing resolution, which was introduced at twelve fifty-five in the morning and voted on by unanimous consent with five senators present at roughly two fifteen AM. Speaker Mike Johnson, upon reading the bill’s contents, publicly announced that no Republican senator who supposedly voted for it could have known what was in it, a characterization Cuccinelli said is almost certainly accurate and which raises serious questions about what, if anything, Majority Leader Thune agreed to with Senate Democratic leadership in producing the bill. He said the Senate will have to return from recess and take up the House version, and that while there are some operational changes to ICE that most people across the spectrum could agree on, body cameras being the most straightforward example, the Democratic position ultimately reduces to demanding amnesty and blocking immigration enforcement as the price of funding the rest of the department, including the Coast Guard, Secret Service, and FEMA, none of which are being paid during the standoff.
Proft and Cuccinelli closed on the question of Senate Republican strategy, with Mike Lee having laid out what he described as the only two viable options: enforce the talking filibuster rule as written, requiring senators to physically hold the floor and exhaust their arguments until the bill passes, or eliminate the filibuster’s sixty-vote cloture threshold entirely. Lee said the indefensible middle position is claiming to maintain the filibuster while refusing to do the work necessary to overcome it, and that failure to choose one of the two real options will have consequences at the midterms. Cuccinelli agreed, saying this is a moment that separates the wheat from the chaff in the Republican caucus, and that the base has a long memory for senators who decline to fight for the things they claim to believe. He noted, with some evident frustration, that Democrats have historically been considerably more willing than Republicans to absorb short-term political pain in pursuit of legislative goals they are committed to, citing the passage of the Affordable Care Act as the paradigmatic example of a party that knew it would lose its majority and pressed forward anyway.