'Your World' on Rittenhouse trial, Gosar censure

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What Gosar's censure by the House means

Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pergram paints a picture of how the House vote to censure Rep. Paul Gosar went down on 'Your World.'

This is a rush transcript of "Your World" on November 17, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

NEIL CAVUTO, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: All right, just to bring you up to speed here.

And welcome, everybody. I'm Neil Cavuto. And this is "Your World."

You have been seeing the questioning back and forth of Travis McMichael, I should say, the one of three defendants accused right now in the death of Georgia jogger Ahmaud Arbery back in February 2020.

Defense attorneys in the murder trial are trying to get an idea of the timeline here and whether this represented self-defense here, in that they were protecting themselves amid suspicious activity or behavior on the part of Arbery here.

They're taking a 10 minute recess to continue this line of questioning right now.

Let's go to Ted Williams, who has been following this very, very closely that D.C. detective, lawyer, with a very good read of maybe what's what's happening at a trial like this, when we're still awaiting word on a jury that is separately dealing with the Kyle Rittenhouse matter. That is -- those jury deliberations are continuing.

But, Ted, in this particular case, in the case of Travis McMichael, who sees and is responding to suspicious activity on the part of Arbery at the time, that this was sort of justified actions taken to respond to a guy he said appeared to have a weapon, I'm just wondering how this is coming together and the defense line of questioning here, in your eyes.

TED WILLIAMS, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well, it's very interesting at this stage, because all we have at this stage is -- are Travis McMichael, the actual shooter, giving his rendition of what took place.

I can tell you, our viewers must be shocked by what we heard, because what we heard was a young man was shot just for running. A young man was shot because he refused to answer any questions of Travis McMichael's. This was a young man running through a neighborhood, had looked into a vacant house on several occasions.

At no time had they been able to show that this young man stole or took anything. He's running through the neighborhood. All of a sudden, there's a truck with two men in it chasing after him. They catch up with him. They start questioning him. He moves away. He doesn't even talk to them. He runs away from them.

They go after him. They chase after him. He gets into a confrontation with Travis McMichael over the gun. Travis McMichael now wants to holler self- defense. Well, let me just say this to you. If you are the aggressor, or if you are found to be an aggressor, you cannot then hide behind self-defense.

And in this case, everything, everything that I have heard tells me that the McMichaels and Roddie Bryan, who was also involved in this, were the aggressors.

This man, Neil, this is such a tragedy. He was just running down the street, didn't have any stolen goods in his hand, didn't have anything he was doing that they could show that he had committed any kind of a crime.

This man was killed.

CAVUTO: So, let me ask you, Ted.

McMichael is saying at the time that -- and, by the way, he's in a pickup truck. It's not a police vehicle. So the question is, how was he to think that this guy would think any differently, Arbery would think any differently that this was some -- an attempt to try to -- some locals in the area to do something to him?

But McMichael said -- I'm quoting here -- "It freaked me out." He then went on, called 911 when he was seeing this suspicious activity, apparently, this guy going in and out of homes under construction.

"Once I realized what's going on, that he's doing this, I'm under the assumption he's armed. I jumped back into the vehicle." He runs into the house.

But there was no proof for no indication he was armed. He lifted his shirt, I think he made a point at one point, referring to Arbery. But there was no way to know for sure. So he seems to have acted based on Arbery's behavior, the best I can place this.

So what do you make of what case the defense is trying to build here?

WILLIAMS: What they're trying to build is a case of self-defense. What they're saying here is that they had what they defined as reasonable suspicion to believe that this guy -- quote, unquote -- "possibly" was armed or that he had possibly broken into that one single home there, that he, this guy, meaning Ahmaud Arbery, was, in fact, a pest, some crook in the neighborhood, and that he had done something illegally in that neighborhood.

And there is no evidence of any of that. And I think it's going to come back and haunt them. I think we need to wait until we see the cross- examination here, which I believe will be very zealous.

I mean, even if you suspected him of doing something, how dare you? Who in the hell are you to go and try to make a citizen's arrest of a young black kid just running down the street?

CAVUTO: Now, the impetus for this, even -- and it dated back a few days earlier, I believe it was 10 days earlier, when, while he would be jogging, he would visit the homes. I think there were two at least under construction, and he would wander through them, and then that was deemed to be suspicious activity, but enough for him to return, that is, Travis McMichael here, to come back and try to talk to Arbery.

But what was interesting, on this issue of a gun, he said -- I'm again quoting from Travis McMichael here -- "He comes out," referring to Arbery, "and pulls up his shirt, goes to reach in his pocket or waistband area."

In other words, he builds the case that he didn't know. Maybe the kid had a gun. What did you make of that?

WILLIAMS: You know, I think what Travis McMichael is doing, and his attorney, is that is that their plan to this jury.

They started off by talking about him being in the Coast Guard, and how -- the training that he had in the Coast Guard with weapons. They started out talking about the fact that there had been break-ins in that community.

But one of the things that they did not talk about is that there were a lot of white people walking through those same identical home -- that same identical home. There were white kids, there were white men and women walking through there, and they never chased after them. They only went after this black man.

CAVUTO: So, when he and his father jump into a pickup truck to pursue Arbery, they did so after seeing him in the neighborhood a number of times going in and out of these homes or this one particular unfinished house.

But that was the catalyst for tracking him down. So there were no signs he had a weapon him at that time. There was nothing to indicate he was a danger or a threat to the area, or whether he was even familiar in the area.

And it was the next leap, when they joined in a chase on the truck itself, that ratcheted this up, and others participating in the same chase. Now, the prosecution has argued that was -- that was a targeted attack for no reason. That's where they're coming from.

What do you think of their argument?

WILLIAMS: And I think -- and I think the prosecution is on target here.

If they had what we would define, and I can tell you, as a lawyer, I have defined as reasonable suspicion to believe that this man had done something, there are times under Georgia law where you can make a citizen's arrest.

But under the circumstances here of getting your gun, your father getting a gun, you're running and chasing after this man down the street, he's running away from you all. You're telling him -- and you try to make this - - the jury understand this. And that is where I said to him, hey, look, the police is coming, and he took off running.

So what you're trying to convey there to the jury is that this guy had done something wrong. And he -- and, again, that, in and of itself, was not enough. That was not even reasonable suspicion. That wasn't reasonable justification for these men to take the law in their own hand, to act as though they were vigilantes, to act as though that they had the right to arrest this man, because they couldn't arrest him for anything.

Even if law enforcement would have come on that scene, there would have been no reason to arrest this man. This man was -- all they saw and all that he had on him was his clothes. He had no or property belonging to anybody. There was no crime that had happened that they were cognizant of.

All they knew is that there were people breaking into homes, and that he fit the description in one of those occasions on February the 11th of someone who had been into one of those homes. But that was all.

That, in and of itself, is not enough to murder somebody. And this is what we have seen here and heard this afternoon. We have heard a murder, Neil, a murder of a young black kid jogging through a neighborhood.

CAVUTO: All right, Ted, if you can just stay there, and I do want to pick up more legal analysis of what's going on at this particular trial.

I do want to alert you right now that it appears the House has enough votes to go ahead and censure Representative Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who you might recall had offered a tweet, an anime, really, depicting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting killed and swinging two swords at a cartoon version of President Biden.

In the censure that will happen here, and that looks likely now, it removes, it removes Gosar from any committee assignments. They could take still steeper actions against him. Gosar himself at said that this is the same house, the same censure action that, if it were to be the done, would be akin to what Alexander Hamilton experienced back in the early 1800s.

I think there are significant differences there. But that notwithstanding, he is going to be formally censured here. Then the issue becomes, what will become of him, if he's off all committee assignments and other duties? How far does this go? If he's an anathema to Republicans, we have not really seen that across the board, although what we have seen is the only Republican vote for censure appears to be that of Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican, who has had troubles of her own within the Wyoming Republican Party now saying that she's effectively not part of that party.

But we are watching this very, very closely.

I do want to go back right now to Andy McCarthy on this ongoing situation here in the Arbery case, and the role of some people who are sitting in, in that room, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson and others. We understand that the defense was already saying their presence was pressuring and giving the appearance of a lopsided, unfair courtroom, and that they wanted a mistrial declared because of that.

I'm oversimplifying it here, but the judge quickly dismissed that. So what do you make of where this stands right now, Andy?

ANDY MCCARTHY, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Neil, I think that these defendants are very likely to be convicted. So they're trying to make a record of things that they will be able to raise on appeal.

And one of the things they will want to say is that there was an atmosphere of intimidation in the courtroom. Frankly, in this country, you're allowed to attend to trial. And if Jesse Jackson wants to go to the trial, he can go to the trial. If he's going to the trial to make a statement, I would respectfully suggest to him that the outcome that he wants would be easier to get and more secure if maybe he wasn't such a presence in the courtroom.

But he's got every right to be there. And I really wouldn't put much stock in it. The jury is going to decide the case, not on the basis of who's in the courtroom, but on the evidence. And the evidence, as Ted was just laying it out for you, is pretty strong here.

CAVUTO: Now, the prosecution rested, I believe yesterday. I think they talked to two dozen witnesses, who all seemed to a man or woman to say there was nothing suspicious or toward about anything Arbery was doing at the time.

The only reason I mention that in the context of this week, where we're waiting on the Kyle Rittenhouse's decision there, there the issue, in the case of Rittenhouse, is that the prosecution was saying he asked for this, his behavior was provocative enough and intrusive enough to say that he was looking for trouble, and he found it. Two people are dead, one injured as a result of his actions.

The defense countered by saying, no, no, this was self-defense. He did nothing, nothing that an average person would not do facing those threats, now, of course, the issue of the AR-15 rifle notwithstanding all that. The judge removed that even as a misdemeanor charge.

But I'm just wondering the difference in the cases there, where the prosecution here seems to be focusing on an unfair activity vs., in the Rittenhouse case, one that was justified. What do you think?

MCCARTHY: Yes.

Neil, the difference really comes down to, who's the aggressor, who's the assailant? In the Rittenhouse case, the prosecutors tried to use lawful behavior and spin it as if it were provocative and criminal almost, because they don't have good evidence that he actually did anything in the way of being the aggressor or the assailant in any of the confrontations that he had with people who were -- who were shot, ultimately.

So they talk about showing up in a neighborhood that they say he didn't belong in and carrying a long weapon and contending that he wanted to be a medic, when he didn't have medical training. And they try to lay this out as if it shows that he was looking for trouble, because they can't prove that he was looking for trouble when it gets down to who was the aggressor in these exchanges.

Whereas, in the Arbery trial, in the trial that we're looking at now, you have a situation where the people who shot this man clearly were the assailants in the situation. And their conduct in basically arresting someone under circumstances where they didn't have grounds to make an arrest, a citizen's arrest, and then being the ones who introduced not only an assault and a holding of somebody, but introduced lethal force into the equation, it's almost a diametrically opposed situation.

CAVUTO: All right, if you could just hold that thought.

And, Ted Williams, I do want to go back to you.

But I do want to go back to the well of the House of Representatives right now, where Represented Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican, has been censured by the House right now. That will remove him from some key committee assignments.

You might recall this after his tweet, anime, if you will, that seemed to show him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and swinging to swords at Joe Biden.

Nancy Pelosi is weighing in on this. So let's go to Washington.

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): That Paul Gosar of Arizona be censured, that Representative Paul Gosar forthwith present himself in the well of the House for the pronouncement of censure, that Representative Paul Gosar be censured with the public reading of this resolution by the speaker, and that Representative Paul Gosar be and is hereby removed from the Committee on Natural Resources and the Committee on Oversight and Reform.

CAVUTO: All right, most of the votes are in right now. Liz Cheney and Kinzinger voted -- the two Republicans who voted to censure Gosar. They need him there to formally make the censure charge.

Let's go back.

I do want to go to Chad Pergram right now, what we're seeing play out here and how this process goes.

Chad, he's been censured, lose key committee assignments. What else happens.

CHAD PERGRAM, FOX NEWS CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Right, well, this is pretty much it.

Paul Gosar now becomes the 24th member in the history of the House of Representatives to be censured. The last was Charlie Rangel, the Democrat from New York who was censured over a panoply of ethics violations.

Censure is one of the three formal modes of discipline in the House. It lies between reprimand and expulsion. The variety of things that people have been censured for in the House of Representatives ranges from cursing out the speaker of the House back in the 19th century, to also selling appointments to military academies.

So this is pretty rare. What just happened on the House floor here is that Pelosi read the pronouncement. Gosar presented himself in the well of the House chamber here. And I'm looking here just to see if there's anything -- anything else going on the floor. This doesn't happen very often, so there's not really a book here.

He presents himself in the well of the House chamber, and then the speaker reads the censure resolution, and he is formally rebuked. Now, I should note that this did not go through the ethics process. If you followed the Charlie Rangel situation 11 years ago, that went through a lengthy ethics investigation before the Ethics Committee.

It does not have to go like that. If the House votes, which is how the House voted today, to censure you, you are thereby censured. The vote was 223-207. All Democrats voted in favor of this. There were two Republicans, both members of the 1/6 Committee, who voted against the Republican colleague. It was Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, and also Adam Kinzinger. And there was one present on the board. That was David Joyce, a Republican from Northeast Ohio.

And I want to contrast this vote to what happened earlier this year when the House of Representatives voted to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican from Georgia, from her committees. There were 11 Republicans who voted in favor of that. So this is much different at this point in time.

But, again, so he has been censured. They didn't go through the Ethics Committee. If the House votes to rebuke you in this fashion, it happened. And it played out this afternoon. It was very interesting to watch the tenor of debate on the House floor.

It was pretty intense an exchange between both sides. You had Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, basically trying to pivot and saying -- talking about inflation and gas prices, saying the Democrats were trying to distract from those issues.

You had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat from the Bronx, who obviously was the target of this video, speaking out against this. She was given a big, long chunk of time, five minutes, saying this is kind of code when they go after women. That was something that Jackie Speier, a Democratic congresswoman from California, what -- that's what she alluded to here.

And the other thing that I thought was interesting, and I was surprised that the Democrats didn't do this, you have to keep your language during floor debate within the decorum and parliamentary language within the House. That did not happen at certain times.

And you didn't have either Democrats nor Republicans flagging the other side. One thing that caught my attention that went by the wayside, which Democrats did not flag, you could have your language stricken from the record here, was Lauren Boebert, the Republican from Colorado, came up and talked about Ilhan Omar, the Democrat from Minnesota, and called her a -- quote -- "member of the jihad squad."

And that was something that a lot of Republicans said that the Democrats had not been sanctioning some of their own. Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, talked about back in earlier this year, when you had the Derek Chauvin verdict, that Maxine Waters, the chair of the Financial Services Committee, went to Minnesota and made some pretty stark comments about, depending on how the verdict goes, you should go out into the streets.

He said that the Democratic leadership did not flag Maxine Waters. And then, of course, Democrats are saying, where is Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the Republican leaders, not taking on their own members, in particular here, Paul Gosar from Arizona or back earlier this year maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene -- Neil.

CAVUTO: So those were Republican leaders, and with the exception of Kinzinger and obviously Cheney, they didn't think that this rose, this action, this drawing, this anime, whatever you want to call it, on the part of Gosar, was elevated to the necessarily censuring him.

They condemned his remarks and said he apologized, that he should have apologized. But they left it at that.

PERGRAM: Right.

CAVUTO: And that became the tussle and the debate as to, if this isn't the kind of thing that gets you censured, nothing should, and back and forth, back and forth.

So, in the meantime, I'm just curious, Chad, how long is someone censured it for, in the event of that? And how -- obviously, you're put on what the -- I guess would be legislative equivalent of a time-out chair. But how long are you there? And what can't you do?

PERGRAM: Well, a censure is permanent. That's pretty much it.

I mean, Charlie Rangel, the way the resolution was written, he was allowed to keep his committee assignments. That wasn't a problem for him. He used to be the chair of the tax writing committee, the Ways and Means Committee. But this one formally removes Paul Gosar from the Oversight Committee and the Natural Resources Committee.

So, the censure -- let's say Republicans win control of the House in 2022 and take charge and 2023. Republicans could decide, because that's a new Congress, could decide to put him back on committees. But the censure remains on his record.

And something else I want to address here. At the end of Paul Gosar's remarks -- he spoke in his own defense on the floor here. And he said, if I am censured, like Alexander Hamilton was, he said, so be it.

I should note that Alexander Hamilton, who was Treasury secretary, was not censured by the House of Representatives. There was an attempt to do that over a banking issue when he was the Treasury secretary, but they could never garner the votes.

And Alexander Hamilton also did not serve in the House of Representatives. You had instances sometimes, especially in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, where they went after Cabinet officials and even private citizens.

And that was the censure then. The Constitution is pretty clear that the Congress can sanction its own members in the House and Senate and mete out discipline. And that's what happened today. So this goes on Paul Gosar's permanent record. It's probably something that will be in his obituary, same with Charlie Rangel 10 years ago, 11 years ago, December 2 of 2010. That's when he was censured.

And, again, this doesn't happen very often. Prior to that, you have to go back to the early 1980s to find a member who was censured, so just three in really about the last 40 years, Neil.

CAVUTO: If he is reelected to his seat, does the censure then carry on into another term?

PERGRAM: Yes. I mean, it's on your record.

CAVUTO: It's with you forever.

PERGRAM: Right. You have been censured.

But the key thing there is, if -- even if Democrats, let's say Democrats hold on to the House, they could make a decision to allow him to serve on committees. This is the bridge too far that a lot of members on the Republican side of the aisle thought was different about this central resolution with Paul Gosar.

They didn't like the idea that they were precluded him from committees. That's the -- that's the key part here. If you go back to the Rangel resolution, it didn't say anything about that. It talked about some restitution and some other types of sanctions that they had for Charlie Rangel.

But this was very specific. And you saw just how quickly it happens.

CAVUTO: Right.

PERGRAM: I remember, with the Rangel censure because, again, I -- I have been around here a long time, but I had never seen one. He walked very dolefully down the center aisle. His head was kind of hanging down.

Nancy Pelosi -- there was rapt attention in the House chamber. Nancy Pelosi read the citation, and very gently tapped the gavel. And that was it. And everybody has kind of left. I mean, you could have heard a pin drop in the House chamber. This went very fast, but it was a little more animated this time around, where you have a Republican speaker admonishing -- a Democratic speaker admonishing a Republican member, especially someone like Paul Gosar, who, obviously, the Democrats are very displeased with about the sending out this anime video, which they believe depicted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

CAVUTO: Indeed.

All right, thank you very much for that, Chad Pergram, here.

Just to wrap up, we're waiting to hear from Congressman Paul Gosar on this. He will appear, we're told, or at least the procedure is that he appears before the House to hear his fate that he has been formerly censured. And that is something that will stick with him forever.

I guess Congress under either party can let some of those committee crackdowns where he can't serve on any participating committee. He's on two as we speak, but whether in the future they allow him to join committees or to join in the normal operations of the House, that's something that has to be decided down the road.

I do want to take you back right now, though, to the trial involving Travis McMichael. He is one of the defendants we were talking about accused in the death of Georgia jogger Ahmaud Arbery. Now the prosecution is getting a crack at him right now and holes that they say are obvious for everyone to see in his story.

That's going to be their line of questioning. Let's go to see if they succeed.



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