The inauguration-eve panel on CNN was having none of Jeffrey Lord's worship of Donald Trump during a discussion about Mexico's decision to extradite Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman for prosecution in the United States.
According to the reporters, Mexico's decision was made in part as a snub to incoming President Donald Trump, who has used the country and its people as a punching bag during the campaign.
"You can read between the not-so-subtle message," CNN's John King said.
CNN's Dana Bash agreed, saying this is "simply a way to deprive Donald Trump of the victory of saying, 'Oh, look, Barack Obama's gone! I got him out of Mexico.'"
"On the other hand," Lord began. "This is confirmation that Donald Trump scored home with this issue because, I mean, El Chapo and drugs and all of that sort of thing, he was going around repeatedly saying the drugs are coming over the border."
"No," USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers can be heard saying. "That's not what happened. No, but good try. I mean, basically after the Mexican government, after the second time El Chapo escaped it sort of occurred to the Mexican government that they couldn't really keep him and they finally wanted to extradite him. This process has been going on, it has nothing to do with Donald Trump. It was that they couldn't keep him in prison."
Host Anderson Cooper noted that extradition has been something that was held over drug lord's heads and was something that many of them actually feared.
"What you just saw my good friend Jeffrey Lord do is exactly why the Mexican government didn't want to send him under the Trump administration," panelist Van Jones explained. "It's not just to, sort of, give a jab. It's that Donald Trump would then reinvent history and say 'No one was doing anything about this until I started talking about it and me, Donald Trump, my mouth moving, changed everything.' And nobody who's the head of state wants to deal with that."
Lord tried to equate the event to the Iranian hostage crisis, *claiming* Iranians were afraid of Ronald Reagan.
A chorus of "nos" rang from the panel.
Lord's claim conflicts with the declassified information about the secret CIA mission to use the Canadian Embassy to help smuggle some hostages out. The action was approved in early 1980. By that summer 52 hostages had been released. Just after the 1980 election and before Reagan was inaugurated, all of the hostages were released.
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