Video available HERE.

Today, on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) slammed President Obama’s rush to empty out the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay before leaving office.  A few key excerpts are below.

Hardened terrorists are being released from Gitmo: “One-third of these individuals who were released are now either expected to have or have been proven to have rejoined the jihadist cause. So this is our worry. It has cost American lives. We know that.”

Dangerous detainees have been transferred to countries ill-equipped to handle them: “[T]he administration made a political promise in 2007: It was going to close down Guantanamo. Now they’re rushing to try to do that. There are another 20 that they’ve just cleared for transfer. And the problem is, the countries they’re sending them to, like Uruguay or like UAE, which has a very porous border, are not able to properly hold them or monitor them.”

The Obama administration needs to get its priorities straight: “[T]he focus here has been to close down Guantanamo. The focus should have been on an early defeat of ISIS. It should have been on using our air power early in that effort to hit ISIS as their fighters were coming out of Raqqa… I only wish the same obsession that they show towards trying to close down Guantanamo was visited instead on a policy of taking down ISIS. But this seems to be their political obsession – closing Guantanamo.”