Suspect Arrested in Charlie Kirk’s Murder

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0:34If you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? Well, now the truth belongs to 7 billion people in an original event film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by David Koepp starring Emily Blunt, Josh O 'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Coleman Domingo. Find Disclosure Day on major digital platforms now with no subscription required. also in theaters. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber, and we have the news that has captivated the nation, the suspect in the Charlie Kirk assassination, now in custody. He is 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.

1:12You see him here, arrested 10 p.m. Utah time last night. Authorities say it was actually Robinson's father who contacted a family friend identified as a minister about what they say was effectively a confession, and that minister then contacted at the local sheriff's office. Robinson making statements to relatives that basically indicated that he had committed this heinous crime. Officials say they also have physical evidence that connects him to the shooting, including messages he sent on an app, a Discord chat app, where he allegedly said, quote, he wanted to retrieve a rifle from a drop point.

1:51So you have his alleged statements to people in his life and then corroborating evidence. It is a strong case at this point and far, far more advanced than when authorities were briefing about just talking to various persons of interest. So this case has moved in quickly. Robinson arrested on suspicion of aggravated murder, felony discharge of firearm, obstruction of justice as well, and will be formally charged on Tuesday by prosecutors. So that begins next week as the charging process. He is, as you see here, already in custody. Now, they have not determined a motive. We have now lived for several days with the country, former presidents, and the current president all weighing in on a view of what this was.

2:31But as we've told you from the start, and we'll continue to follow the evidence and the investigative process, we don't have anything approaching a specific public motive, according to authorities who are still, of course, moving through this investigation. But family members do say that he became more politicized recently, that he was criticizing Kirk's viewpoints, for example, at a dinner, and that authorities say there were engravings on the bullets which give some potential clues. One of the inscriptions basically cited a folk song that has been adapted by anti-fascists, so a kind of resistance folk song.

3:10Whether authorities view that as ultimately dispositive, that is to say that it proves the motive or not, we're not there. But we can tell you one of those casings in that realm Holmes said, hey, fascists catch a kind of a what sounds like a menacing statement towards what he believed were fascists. But again, that is one piece of evidence. It is not yet the holistic statement of a motive, nor have authorities started to issue the kind of charges, for example, political terrorism or related charges that would include a motive. So attention has turned from finding the suspect to that wider reckoning I referenced.

3:46Kirk was a prominent conservative, huge following, was considered probably one of the most famous, well-known young Republicans in this era, certainly the one with the most access to the Trump administration. He was at the White House a lot. He was on stage, on par with the president, as I mentioned to you in our early coverage. He was known to be sort of very friendly with and common political allies with J.D. Vance, with Donald Trump's son, Don Jr. So his killing here at this university has ignited a strong set of reactions. And there is also the question, as I mentioned, of even if we don't know the motive here, we can see, if we are in the factual community, we all see the mounting polarization, political rhetoric, and an increased number of politicized attacks of political violence.

4:36So this morning, Utah's governor, he's a Republican, Spencer Cox, spoke about all this. the Times covering those remarks as clearly a concerted, thought-out effort to, quote, lower the temperature while Trump vows vengeance. So we're going to play for you some of what this Republican governor had to say. To my young friends out there, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage. It feels like rage is the only option. But through those words, we have a reminder that we can choose a different path. Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.

5:29Not by pretending differences don't matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations. I think we need more moral clarity right now. I hear all the time that words are violence. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. And there is one person responsible for what happened here. And that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable. and yet all of us have an opportunity right now to do something different i absolutely believe that this is a watershed in american history yes um the question is what kind of watershed and that that chapter remains to be written is this the end of a dark chapter in our history or the beginning of a darker chapter in our history very clearly put and these are tough times for many different reasons.

6:31We have to deal in reality, in the facts. And while there are statements that can be made and everyone is following the reactions to this, there's also clear contrast. We just saw there not a partisan comparison. That's one Republican leader in the very state where this went down who's very close to all of it. And here is another Republican leader, the President of the United States, responding to this same underlying violence. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today.

7:16We have a radical left group of lunatics out there, just absolute lunatics, and we're going to get that problem solved. We have radical left lunatics out there, and we just have to feed the hell out of it. I'll tell you something that's going to get me in trouble, but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. They don't want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem, and they're vicious, and they're horrible. That is the president's claim. It does not survive a fact check, and it serves as an example, very sadly, of over time how a false equivalence or a one-sided approach can obscure what so many other responsible leaders, including the Republican governor, have said.

8:03That it is a time to stop and reiterate and double down on opposing all political violence. And to do that, seems commonplace and quite clear that you can also acknowledge, to do that is not to try to randomly pick sides or say only one side does it, or, heaven forbid, politicize this. Now, Republican Congressman Thomas Massey is talking about toning down the rhetoric, and to do that, he mentions a president who, as you just saw, says things about only one side doing bad things, which just isn't what law enforcement or data shows. It doesn't offend me, he says, quote, that he's over the top with his rhetoric, but some people take it literally.

8:45And he should probably tone that down himself. And that is not, of course, a claim of causality or, as I've said every night we've covered this story, anything about motive that we don't know yet. But what you're seeing here across these three Republicans I just showed you is differences within the party about how to sound, especially at times like this. On the Democratic side, here is a governor who faced an attack, a fire set in his home that could endanger him and his family, Pennsylvania Governor Democrat Josh Shapiro. I think it is dangerous when the president cherry picks which political violence he's going to condemn and which he's going to allow to just simply pass.

9:28I think we need to be universal in condemning all political violence. The president missed the mark last night in his Oval Office address. He should be condemning all political violence. That is where we are in America now that the shooter has been caught legally. A individual who's going to be a defendant when he's, of course, formally booked and charged by the prosecutors next week. Defendants have rights. Legally, he'll be presumed innocent, something we say about all trials. But he is the main suspect in custody. And so you have a different chapter, as we heard from the Utah governor. And what will the response to this be?

10:07That involves, of course, leadership, what the politicians and elected officials are saying, and what the country, the nation, does about it. I'm joined by Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, longtime journalist, and Margaret Carlson from the Washington Monthly. Eugene, your thoughts both on dealing with this as we go, because law enforcement and journalists are much more careful about what we don't know yet than politicians who start operating as if this is a fully baked case. It's not. But what we know, what those limitations are, and the fissures that we see clearly within the Republican Party in the response.

10:46Well, look, number one, we have to do what we do, and that is, yes, we have to be cautious. We can't get out ahead of ourselves and ahead of the story. And so the situation is just, as you said, a suspect is in custody and authorities are trying to ascertain motive. They're probably still trying to ascertain whether there was anyone else potentially involved in the crime. There's a lot that has to be found out, and there is vastly more unknown than is known. that said, yes, the president did jump out. I am not surprised that he did, but he did. And it encouraged me to hear those words from Governor Cox, which I thought were eminently sensible.

11:45I think he's been sensible all along. He says, we have to tone it down. And, you know, I hope people listen to him. The president has a louder megaphone, of course. But we will see. You know, you have to always root and hope for the better angels to win out in the end. Sometimes that takes a while. Yeah, and you have to do the facts. And, Margaret, there are times that ebb and flow. the governor if you don't think he was being hyperbolic and given the rate of this violence he may not be then then he's referring to and believing that it could go either way that things could get a lot worse that he is concerned about that and he's a republican or that it could be a breaking point on the facts i want to put up what dhs says the department of homeland security has the annual assessment threats the u.s this was as of last year their politically motivated violence among its top concerns.

12:49And then if you look at federal officials, threats against federal officials also surging in that same calendar year, that's according to Capitol Police estimates, three times higher than, say, the period dating back to 2017. And so both things can be true, as we say around here, Margaret. That's the threat profile, and that's the problem. And yet everyone trying to, people were talking about what this crime, this horrific shooting meant before they had a suspect, which is a self-canceling sort of impossible claim, right? You can't say this means that, but we don't know who did this and why they did it.

13:30I mean, you can't balance it, right, Margaret? No, and what people did was go to their sides. They didn't have to have the facts. It became an occasion to root for your team your team and condemn the other. And the president led in that regard, you know, saying, it's all the radical left and we want to beat the hell out of them and on and on. The person playing the president today was Governor Cox, who I'd never seen before. I knew who he was and I knew that he's a governor who does know how to govern with both Republicans and Democrats, but almost every word he said was the opposite of what the president was saying and others on that side, which is, he said, as you do, Ari, well, let's wait.

14:26But he also said, if we continue in this direction, there lies horribleness, that there's no knowing where it would end, and that it's metastasizing if we don't do something. And I felt this one thing. I could see the sorrow of Governor Cox having to be there, and it felt so genuine. And the father, who had to find out and confirm for himself what his son had done. Just put yourself and his place. And, you know, he must have thought his son was normal. And then this happens, and he has to step up. And it shows you something about where we are when this middle-class kid goes out and does something like this, and he does it in such a clumsy way that, you know, all great gratitude to the police and the FBI, but it wasn't that hard in how he did it, and the clues he left behind.

15:33Well, and that speaks to the amplification and the clear problem in America, Gene, that also is not one side or the other, but is a broader problem of violence and gun violence. And, you know, I'll let, you could take it any number of directions, but I'm reminded of how, with the terrible attempt on the former president's life last year, this is a country where someone can get that gun and get pretty close to a president who has the best protection available and that also doesn't have to be a partisan thing about oh well this means you get your preferred thing or beat up another political side of it we understand it's political discourse that we're admired in here but in these cases several of them you have that aspect as well, which is what is already a problem of people getting radicalized or getting to the point they want to take this criminal action, and then that they can walk around with guns.

16:35And as Margot referred to, this is a 22-year-old who, according to his family, and we're gathering the information, in a relatively short amount of time, went from walking around however disturbed he may have been to deciding to do this to operationalizing it. And that puts all of us at risk, Gene? Well, it does. Just two things to say. Number one, it is a simple fact that the one common element in all these horrific shootings is the gun. There's a gun present. And, you know, now, once you say that, people, you know, as you said, people run to their corners on the issue of gun safety, on the issue of background checks, on the issue on all these issues.

17:22But that is just a fact. And, you know, it's simply true. It's always a guide. The second thing is we are, I'm speaking collectively of many people, very quick to ascribe responsibility to one of myriad elements that go into anything anybody does, right? So it's all political rhetoric, or it's all mental illness, or it's all the gun, or it's all this or that. And of course, that's not the way human behavior works. and we tend to ignore it. We tend to oversimplify it for our own political, perhaps our own political sense of security and the sense that we're right on this issue or that issue. But, you know, objectively, that's wrong.

18:26That's not how people are. Yeah. Yeah. And Nancy Pelosi, who, of course, had her home invaded as they went in for her and they attacked her husband. She's made some new remarks. I want to share those. And we'll hear from both Eugene and Margaret further when we come back after this.

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20:11Visit IXL.com slash 20 to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. We're back with Eugene and Margaret, and here's what former Speaker Pelosi said today on this national reckoning and discussion about political violence. This is a subject near and dear to my heart because our home was invaded by someone who was out to get me, got my husband, and it's a tragedy for our family and traumatic for our children. But we just have to change the rhetorical nature of our debate. We cannot have a situation where what we're saying, even though we have our differences of opinion, and they are vast as we express our views on it, to have our rhetoric not be contributing to this.

21:05Margaret? she's so right and remember the response to that was to come up the the republicans or those on the other side of nancy pelosi to come up with all kinds of reasons that it happened uh that that paul pelosi was having an affair that that it was all these reasons that were his fault and it had nothing to do with that. And there was no sympathy for Nancy Pelosi or her husband from some on the right. I just want to go back to something Jean said about the guns and raise something about the roofs. In Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump was attacked, there was a shooter on the roof, and this time there was a shooter on the roof.

21:57It seems like it wouldn't be that hard for all of the law enforcement that's at these events to somehow be looking at the roofs. You know, a lot of the scary movies I watch have somebody on the roof. So it's not too outlandish. Well, maybe it is outlandish because it's in movies, but actually it's in real life now. You know, to go back to the governor for a minute, you know, he said we can get off this path that's causing us so much suffering now. uh first of all social media it's a cancer on us and the the don't just point the finger to the other side but look inward at what what you're doing and pull back from it because if you don't i mean he did have this pessimism if we don't um we're headed in a in to even more horrible things yeah no i think we're all raising that and the governor is kind of pleading with people and it It is important at a time where you have different leaders doing different things to also spotlight that and not only be mired in what is unavoidably sometimes what we hear from some politicians.

23:06On a tough story here, on a tough week for the country, Eugene and Margaret, thanks to both of you. I'll tell folks what's coming up. We do have some other important stories. The Epstein scandal continues and there's pressure on Trump. And I want to explain why this story won't go away, although it may recede for good reason when other things are happening. But what we've learned from the emails, from the birthday book, it shines a wide light on a problem in America. As we look at the talk about how we're doing as a government and the autocratic crackdown, Democrats protesting what they say is a rank misuse and abuse of federal power.

23:41Trump announces another city where he's going to test where he can go and threatening to investigate people who criticize or protest him in any way. We have all that and more from Bob Woodward tonight.

24:01Donald Trump's push to expand federal power and troops in the streets continues to draw protests over a creeping autocratic bent. Today, he is saying protesters may be targeting him because they're somehow on the take. And he's threatening to go after people he says would be funding protests. they are professional agitators they're professional you i had one the other night i went into a restaurant and this woman stood up i looked at her immediately she had money she wasn't she wasn't so shoot they get paid for it they're professional from soros and other people and we're going to look into soros because i think it's a rico case against him and other people because this is more than like protest this is real agitation you can see what used to be sort of broadly mused about or hinted on social media by Trump is now just day-to-day statements.

24:57He's admitting they're something that could get a case thrown out if he really is ordering up a RICO case against a prominent Democratic donor. I mean, you heard the way he said that. There hasn't been any public reporting that Mr. Soros is funding the people that Trump ran into at the D.C. restaurant and protesting peacefully is an American principle and certainly protected by the First Amendment. And yet Trump is not shy about a desire to punish free speech and to test how far he can get with his power. So he's saying they're going to send troops next to Memphis, part of the ongoing effort to put troops in the streets to affect things.

25:41He's done it in the Capitol. And this is not what the National Guard has been typically used for. Indeed, in L.A., we saw a judge say he went too far, although the exact line here is being worked out. And you might say, gosh, why hasn't the line been worked out before? Here's the answer. No other president in either party has sought to habitually deploy National Guard troops to this many cities without any ongoing reason or cooperation from those state's governors, who, of course, run the spectrum. and are from both parties. So no one's ever actually tested this. We've had some problems and debates over the National Guard being deployed, but they were usually deployed because there was mass riot protests, nothing like what Trump is seizing as kind of his pretext, and almost always with the governor's cooperation.

26:30How does the Guard feel about this? Well, internal documents from this Guard under the Trump administration show some troops and veterans think this is a bad idea. They have shame around this type of mission. They're concerned that they are being used as pawns leveraging fear that ultimately drives a wedge between the citizens and the military. The most important thing that we've seen in Washington, D.C., Matt, is the evidence that the American people don't have to live like this. Chicago should be begging Donald Trump for help to keep Chicago safe. Yet they aren't. So we're going to go into a city who wants us there.

27:08They are a progressive city and they don't want the president's help. That's on them. It's horrific that they don't want President Trump's help. I would love if we did this in every big American city. Is it horrific that people aren't calling in the feds? Remember, traditional conservatism is you don't bring out soldiers or the federal government to deal with every problem. Since the founding of this country, the conservative party, and its name has changed over time, but the conservative party and its principles has always been the feds are a last resort. Now, if you have a sprawling multi-day riot, sometimes you've seen it.

27:46You bring in the feds, but you don't bring them into police every street corner. They're not of the community. They don't have the relationships there. They're not answerable to the local community. That's why conservatives have always been skeptical of too much use of federal power. And now that this is moving from what you might call the blue cities, as Trump puts it, to elsewhere, we are hearing some voices. Republican Senator Tillis says it's a problem to send troops to his state. We're also seeing other scenes in Trump's America, a video that has caused a lot of concern as masked federal agents went in surrounding this car, smashed the window, and detained people at gunpoint.

28:28With guns drawn, masked federal agents shatter the driver's side window of a car, grab two men inside, and push them to the pavement. A third person in the orange Chevy Camaro, a woman, can be heard shouting at one of the agents not to touch her and to identify himself. Other witnesses say the two men are lawful permanent residents or green card holders and were hauled away from the scene in handcuffs by agents. When someone runs up on you like that in the middle of the day for no apparent reason, it actually makes sense that you would ask who they are. Do you even know if you're experiencing a law enforcement operation or a potential kidnapping?

29:07And if they are mass and aggressive and won't identify themselves, they're contributing to the problem, even if ultimately we learn that they are acting under the color of federal law. Local reports say the woman was pregnant and an American citizen. So these are big problems for how we live now. I wanted to give you that update, even with everything else going on, and tell you when we come back, rising inequality and billionaires taking over the media. We have the ultimate authority on journalism, Bob Woodward, on that and more.

29:42A finance milestone, Larry Ellison, seen here with President Trump, the tech billionaire, surpassed Elon Musk at one point this week to become the richest person in the world and in world politics. history. He also made other unrelated but big news this week with this headline about his planned bid to buy up CNN, HBO, and the rest of the entire Warner Brothers empire, an expansion that comes after his Paramount company was criticized for undercutting CBS's journalism after acquiring that storied institution. Now, the new Ellison offer is in early stages, but it follows a wider push towards media consolidation as a small number of billionaires are increasingly in charge of what you hear and see.