Transcript of The Fate of Thomas Massie & Chinese Birth Tourism In Texas | 5.20.26

Congressman Thomas Massie loses his reelection bid after months of clashes with President Trump and Republican leadership.

Thomas Massie's a terrible congressman. He's been a terrible congressman from day one.

He votes against us all the time.

What does his defeat mean for the future of the GOP?

I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howell. It's Wednesday, May 20th. This is Morning Wire.

This is a sophisticated form of weaponized immigration as a form of subversion by the Chinese government.

As Texas cracks down on alleged Chinese birth tourism centers, The Daily Wire goes on the ground to see what's really going down.

They're being encouraged to get their tourist visas before they get pregnant.

And the legal battle comes to a head over Joe Biden tapes unearthed in a classified documents probe.

Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned, we have the news you need to know.

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Kentucky voters took to the polls yesterday in the most expensive congressional primary in history. The race was seen as a test of Trump's power with voters. Joining us now to discuss the much-watched and remarkably costly primary is Daily Wire DC Bureau Chief Tim Rice. Hey Tim, great to have you on.

Thanks for having me, John.

So after tens of millions of dollars, Kentucky voters in this 4th Congressional District have decided the political fate of one of the most watched congressional leaders here, Thomas Massie. Break it down for us. What did we see?

That's right. So, I mean, you said tens of millions of dollars. It's important to stress we're talking $33 million as of when polls closed yesterday. I actually imagine that number will go up a little bit as we get final counts in the coming days. But $33 million in a House primary, which, with all due respect to the people of Kentucky's 4th District, there is not really a single House district in the country that should garner that much money in a primary. In a primary. So why? Why did it happen? Well, it all comes down to Thomas Massie, first elected to represent that district in 2012. He rode the Tea Party wave at the beginning of the second Obama term, and he has been a pretty consistent, you know, You know, he's sort of been the House's answer to Rand Paul in the Senate, right? Very libertarian. J.D. Vance, the vice president, the other day called him Mr. No, said that he was pretty difficult to work with. He just said no to everything. And this is really what, what, what, what made him an enemy of President Trump. Thomas Massie fought the president on the Big Beautiful Bill Act, thought it was wasteful spending.

He didn't vote for it. He has fought the president on the war in Iran. He says that it's a forever war. He's anti-war. He wants the White House to release the Epstein files. He thinks President Trump is either hiding something or has been derelict in his duty. And he's gone on record to say that the war in Iran will not make people forget about the Epstein files. So you take those three things and the president wanted this guy out. So he endorsed Ed Gowdy, a Marine vet, kind of a political newbie. Not really much is known about him, but he got the full endorsement of President Trump. And then that's when the money started pouring in. That's when the national media spotlight came. And in recent days, we've seen just the oppo dumps. We've seen, I mean, pick a day and there was a new scandal for poor Congressman Massey. He recently lost his wife. People were saying that he shacked up with the new woman too soon. There were allegations of hush money payments paid to another congresswoman involving one of the girlfriends. I mean, it was just this endless sort of like churn of opposition research, to say nothing of the fact that the president was attacking him on Twitter.

The vice president was criticizing him. And so, you know, we haven't actually said it yet, but it's very clear where this was all going. Thomas Massie lost last night to Ed Galraine. At the time the polls closed, I believe, or at the time it was called, he had something like 54% of the vote. It's really hard to understate what a big deal this was. Thomas Massie, again, has been in Congress for 15 years and now it's over. And Ed Galraine, a kind of empty vessel who is allied with the president, is going to be the next congressman, likely. From Kentucky's 4th District.

Yeah, no small matter to unseat an incumbent any time. There's been a lot made of the political stakes of this race. Just how significant is this actually? Is it really a bellwether for Trump's influence on the party, or is that overblown?

Well, yes and no, right? So it absolutely is a bellwether in that we can see that despite the fact that Donald Trump is beginning the second year of his lame duck term, right, he still has sway over the party. We saw this not just in with, with, with the Massey race. But we saw this last weekend, the Louisiana Senate primary. Senator Bill Cassidy became the first incumbent senator from either party to lose an election since 2012. Why? Because he voted to impeach and convict President Trump after the January 6th Capitol riots and has been a little bit critical of some of the president's nominees, particularly on the healthcare side. Now, I hedged a little when I started answering your question. That's because how much will any of this matter in the long term, right? I mean, The president, he's only got 2 years left. But what I think this does show is that this is Donald Trump's Republican Party now, right? People who disagree with the president are also disagreeing with what is now the mainstream of the Republican Party. And so people like Thomas Massie and Bill Cassidy are increasingly finding themselves again for very different reasons without a home in the Republican Party.

Right. There really does seem to be a lot of solidarity behind Trump. This wasn't the only significant primary yesterday. What are some other races that should be on our radar?

Yeah, so we had the Senate primary in Kentucky on the Republican side. This was the race to figure out who was going to replace Mitch McConnell. So on the Republican side, Congressman Andy Barr won very clearly. Also yesterday, President Trump finally weighed in on a very contentious Texas Senate primary, endorsing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a MAGA loyalist and firebrand attorney general, over longtime incumbent and Republican establishment figure John Cornyn. That race is next week. All signs are pointing to a Paxton victory at this point. The winner of that primary goes on to face Democrat nominee James Tallarico. So another really big race to watch, but that's next week's problem.

Meanwhile, every week the race is solidifying to some degree. We're starting to see who's going to actually face off in November. It's getting very, very interesting as this develops. Thank you so much for reporting, Tim.

Thanks for having me, John.

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A number of alleged Chinese birth tourism centers have popped up in Texas, and the state is taking action. Experts estimate that up to 1.5 million Chinese babies have gained U.S. citizenship via birth tourism.

Daily Wire immigration reporter Jenny Ter visited these covert birth centers to get answers, and she joins us now to discuss. So Jenny, where exactly is this happening, and what did you see when you went there?

Yeah, so this is happening in the area of Houston, Texas, surrounding suburbs, in these quiet neighborhoods. So there's about 4 homes that have been identified in a lawsuit by the state as operating as illegal Chinese birthing centers. So basically bringing women from China to give birth to American citizen babies that they can take back to their home country and essentially exploit birthright citizenship in the United States. So we visited these these alleged birthing centers, and they're just homes in these suburban neighborhoods, very quiet, lots of families. A lot of the neighbors I talked to really didn't know that much was going on. They did see that at times there were a lot of Asian people going in and out of the homes. There were a lot of cars parked there, but they just assumed it was like a big Asian family. So from there, we knocked on doors, and only at one of the homes did we get an answer. And this was actually someone who's named in the lawsuit. The state is saying that you're bringing Chinese women here to give birth. You can't talk about it.

I'm sorry, I cannot give you any information.

And this is a problem we've actually been tracking for years that has been going on in parts of the country. When it comes to California, for example, there's this issue of Chinese families who are using surrogates in the Golden State to give birth to US citizen babies that they can then bring back to China. Those people tend to be more wealthy Chinese. They're able to come here, and they're also kind of seeing the writing on the wall in China and saying, "Things are deteriorating here, and we want an out." And, you know, when that child turns a certain age, when they become an adult, they can then bring their family over. And so it gives more benefits and keeps giving so that people can engage in chain migration.

Now, how are these women doing this logistically? I mean, there is restrictions on flying late in pregnancy, plus it's a lot to organize. Mm-hmm.

Right, so this center in Houston is actually allegedly coaching people on TikTok, and they're telling these mothers in China, "Don't get pregnant yet. Apply for your tourist visa to come to the United States, and then we'll take care of everything from there once you get here." So they kind of have like this front of, "Okay, we're a tourist agency. We are gonna show you around. We're gonna house you in these homes in the Houston area." but also, like, as an aside, here's some information about essentially abusing the immigration system in the United States. And this center, we should note too, has boasted that they've facilitated about 1,000 births of American babies.

Now, how does this tie in with the Trump administration's push to end birthright citizenship?

So there's an estimate of about 1.5 million of these babies that have been born in the United States and have US citizenship. It's a really concerning number. As we know, this has been happening for years, but the extent is just beyond, I think, what we can all comprehend. And I think that's why the president is trying to crack down on this issue. We know that he signed an order to end birthright citizenship altogether. Now, there's been some legal challenges to that. So the fate of it sits in the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in April, which were actually attended by the president himself. And based on the justices' questions, it's not yet clear how they're going to rule.

Right, a really hard problem to address. Jenny, thanks for reporting.

Thanks.

A legal fight is escalating over whether the public will hear more than 70 hours of recorded conversations between former President Biden and the ghostwriter of his memoir, tapes recovered during Special Counsel Robert Herr's classified documents investigation. The Trump DOJ plans to release redacted audio and transcripts to Congress and the Heritage Foundation in mid-June, but Biden's legal team is trying to block their release, calling the effort political and an invasion of privacy.

Joining us now is Jeff Clark, VP of litigation at the Oversight Project and former assistant attorney general under Trump. 45. Jeff, great to have you on.

Good to be here.

So first, for our listeners, uh, just catching up with this story, what exactly are these tapes and why is Heritage working hard to get them released?

These tapes are very important. Joe Biden put together a biography in an objective view was designed to tell something of his personal story and sad story of the death of his son at a young age who was clearly being groomed for higher political office to lead that into a potential future presidential campaign for, for Joe Biden. And so that is in itself very newsworthy, very interesting, very important to the government. And, you know, he opened his kimono and he made various disclosures to this ghostwriter, uh, Swanitzer. And we want to know what he told him. This is particularly important because this has a close nexus to the documents case that was being looked at by DOJ and the Biden administration for President Biden when he was both a senator in the United States Senate and vice president, but not president, taking classified documents home with him. And we know from what's already come out that he talked to Zwanitzer about those classified documents, may have showed some of those documents to him. And the other thing this goes to is that there was this special counsel investigation by Robert Herr about the Biden documents case, and there was no case, no prosecution brought on the theory that, you know, Joe Biden was basically a kindly old man who would play well in front of a jury and had some memory issues.

And from that perspective, right, It relates to one of the things that Heritage and the Oversight Project are very interested in, namely the fact that Joe Biden's presidency appears to largely run on the basis of an auto pen. There was a council or some group of people who were deciding when to make use of that auto pen. And the evidence for that conclusion grows even stronger if we can hear the audio tapes that Biden did even years before becoming president. Where he was struggling to, uh, remember things and was stumbling along with his ghostwriter.

Right.

And the stakes there are really high. The auto pen controversy, of course, is not just about how he signed things. It's actually about who was making the decisions during his administration. Seems like crucial information for the public.

Precisely.

What do you think Biden's lawyers are most worried about? Is it the, the privacy? Is it the classified information? Or is it ultimately public perception?

I have to think that there's something in there that they do not want to have come out before the midterms, and that's why they're trying to throw a monkey wrench into this. Otherwise, the United States government, Freedom Justice Department, and Heritage were on the verge of a settlement where DOJ had gone through and redacted out classified information and was then just going to turn the documents over to us. Then, you know, Joe Biden's lawyers come screaming in and say, oh no, no, no, you got to stop all this. I think that they're hoping to delay it for long enough that this information doesn't come out until after the midterms. It's a blatantly political purpose. And you say, well, what are they mostly concerned about? I mean, part of the answer is it's a black box to us until we see the documents. We don't know what's in there. Clearly Joe Biden's lawyers do because they were allowed to go to DOJ and look at the documents and then make arguments about what to redact.

All right, so the plan for now is you should be getting access to these recordings in mid-June unless the Biden team slows it down further, correct?

That's correct.

We'll be watching that closely for sure. Jeff, thank you so much for talking with us.

Sure, I'm glad to be here.

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