Jan. 12, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:51
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
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unidentified
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Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
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unidentified
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The people have had a belly full of it. | |
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA Media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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unidentified
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Warren, here's your host, Stephen K. Babb. | |
| Selflessness. Selflessness is not selling shares of yourself to the lobby corps and then doing their bidding at the expense of the American people. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| But there certainly is intent, and it's an intent driven almost exclusively by personal ambition, and that ambition is paralyzing the House now. | ||
| Madam Clerk, at this time, there is great trust in Mr. | ||
| Jordan, and that's why I am nominating him. | ||
| Welcome back to the War Room. | ||
| Congressman Matt Gaetz here in the captain's chair while Stephen K. Bannon is out on assignment, joined by Natalie Winters. | ||
| And we are going to have a whole lot of Congress here joining us. | ||
| Got Andy Biggs in a few moments, Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, and George Santos will be joining us at the end of the show to respond. | ||
| To the growing calls from members of his delegation and folks in his state that he stepped down from Congress. | ||
| We'll see what he has to say in response. | ||
| That was the action you just saw from the floor of the House of Representatives. | ||
| And what you didn't see from the wide camera angle is that as I was talking about the lobby corps and the special interests and the extent to which they drive the action and control the elected representatives, my own colleagues in the Republican Party were walking off the floor. | ||
| Keep that in mind. When you tell the truth, when you expose the influences in this town that work against the American people, they can't even stand to hear it sometimes. | ||
| But I am optimistic, as I am here, that we are going to be able to drive the needed changes with transformational reorientation of the House of Representatives, taking that power away from leadership, away from the special interests, and returning it to the people. | ||
| One of my dearest friends, Phil Nikosis, is a member of the War Room Posse, and he says the reason he watches War Room every day, every episode, is because this is where you learn the tradecraft for politics that can alter outcomes in a place where they want everything scripted. | ||
| They want everything controlled. | ||
| And I want to thank personally the War Room Posse for being in this fight with me, with the 21 patriots who stood strong, who demanded a House of Representatives that wasn't going to advance the imperial speakership. | ||
| Nancy Pelosi is the last of the imperial speakers. | ||
| We saw Paul Ryan and John Boehner and Pelosi do everything they could to take the power of representation away from the members so that they could go in the back rooms, make all the deals with their donors and those who are paid to influence the legislative process. | ||
| That is not going to happen anymore. | ||
| Joining me for our first segment is Russ Vogt. | ||
| Russ served very, very well as the OMB director for President Trump. | ||
| Driving a lot of the strategy for the conservative movement. | ||
| Russ, you provided air cover for us here on the War Room and on other networks. | ||
| You provided strategic advice to me, to other members. | ||
| How would you assess where we are and how the 118th Congress kicked off? | ||
| Yeah, it's an enormous success, and I want to thank you for all the work that you put into it. | ||
| The 20 really became heroes in the minds of the American people as a result of what you were able to gain. | ||
| And you know that I don't like to characterize things any way that is other than the truth. | ||
| And so when I say that this is a historic transformational agreement, In how the House of Representatives operates, I mean it. I don't think you've seen something like this since 60 years ago when Sam Rayburn took power and put it into the speakership away from the Rules Committee that really used to be an independent committee like any other committee. | ||
| And so for you all to almost establish coalition government to make sure the American people are represented by the 20, Away from the special interest, away from the cartel, you dealt a body blow to it. | ||
| It still exists in the Senate, it still exists in the administrative state, but in the House of Representatives, the American people now have a fighting chance, particularly in the Rules Committee, and then all of the many spending reforms that you negotiated. | ||
| What does Steve talk about? | ||
| It's money and power. You had major agreements on those two issues in what you guys accomplished. | ||
| They robbed the banks because that's where the money is and we wanted control of the appropriations committee because that's where you see a lot of the driving financial decisions that often bankrupt the country where you get different people wanting to spend money on different things and so at the end of the day we just do all of it and that is one of the driving forces of inflation I mean if we have any mandate as a consequence of this last election it is to push back against government spending induced inflation and so People need to realize these changes we made, | ||
| this display that we put forward on the floor is not an end unto itself. | ||
| What we did was we built out a toolkit. | ||
| And what I want to talk to you is about how to use those tools so that we actually get to the results. | ||
| So don't think that the battle is won. | ||
| We are still in it. Let's start with the Hohmann rule. | ||
| Talk about what it means for any member of Congress to be able to get up and defund a particular bureaucrat. | ||
| It's huge, and so you know I come from the executive agency before this role, and we would have all of these career bureaucrats that we would be having to work with, and the American people would largely not know their names until COVID happened, and now everyone knows who Tony Fauci is. | ||
| But think about the ability to go to the House floor and have a debate about a particular That is enormous. | ||
| It changes the entire game right now. | ||
| I would have situations where our staff would do anything they possibly could not to necessarily give me what I needed because they were worried about their own ability to stay anonymous. | ||
| The Holman rule makes sure that those career bureaucrats are no longer anonymous and that they are put in the crosshairs to the same extent in the arena that you are, that I am. And so that is a game changer in having the appropriations debate. | ||
| Also, not just what the message it sends, but the extent to which it itself focuses the appropriations process on the deep state, on the administrative state that exists that is now woke and it's weaponized. | ||
| And that has to be the biggest What is the fiscal priority that we have to go after the woke and weaponized bureaucracy? | ||
| Russ, if we'd have had this tool, we would have obviously directed it at Anthony Fauci, right? So if you're comparing and contrasting, we would have had the ability, if we had the rules that we now have in place, if we'd have had those in place in the last Congress, you could actually force a vote on funding Fauci or not funding Fauci. | ||
| As we look at a weaponized system across the apparatus of government, Give us some examples or advice for who are some of the bureaucrats that enjoy their anonymity now? | ||
| What are some of the agencies we should look at to target and take this tool out of the toolkit and actually put it to use? | ||
| Well, there's all sorts of We're going to want to use this in Department of Justice. | ||
| We're going to want to find those people that participated in the Russia hoax, that participated in going to FISA and lying to get warrants that are cooked up against the American people. | ||
| Bring that aspect of what you negotiate along with the church-style committee that will sit within judiciary. | ||
| Those are the kinds of things that you can say in real time that makes this enforcing. | ||
| The battle is certainly not over. | ||
| We've got to show up at every stage. | ||
| But it is self-enforcing. | ||
| You enforce it. | ||
| The 20 enforce it. | ||
| And that was what makes this different than anything else that we've seen in recent memory. | ||
| Because not only is your vote of no confidence in real speak, your motion to vacate present, But you also have the Rules Committee that is enforcing this on a bill-by-bill basis. | ||
| So it's enormously successful and you've got a lot of potential to use it against that bureaucrat that you'd identify that's standing in your way at NASA. Or the EPA? Who's the EPA bureaucrat that put Joe Robertson, 77-year-old Navy veteran, in jail for building four ponds on his ranch to be able to fight wildfires? | ||
| That's the person we want to use the Holman rule on. | ||
| It will have a deterrent effect against some of these overreaches in bureaucracy. | ||
| See, these bureaucrats knew that they never had to stand before the voters. | ||
| They never had to have their individual budgets, their individual salaries up for a vote. | ||
| But now we can take that out and use it. | ||
| We're also going to get individual assessment of appropriations bills. | ||
| You know, for all of the mainstream media talk about how we've weakened McCarthy, we've weakened the speakership, he was the one Republican leader and we weakened him. | ||
| That is nonsense. We have made McCarthy stronger in being able to negotiate against Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden because if they want to send some omnibus spending bill, our rules will not permit us to take that up. | ||
| And so that gives us strength to be able to say, no, we have to individually look at the HHS budget, the Department of Education budget, the Department of Justice budget. | ||
| What does that mean as a guy who understands the federal budget as good as anyone? | ||
| Yeah, it gives the House the ability to figure out how much something costs, what is in it. | ||
| The cartel often doesn't even know themselves what is in the bills that they're jamming through because they only represent pieces of it. | ||
| So this spreads it out. | ||
| It slows it down. When you're up against a big enemy, a big adversary, what do you want to do? | ||
| You want to slow it down. What do you want to do when you're up against Duke basketball? | ||
| You want to slow the court down. | ||
| Doing that on the appropriations process will allow you to figure out how bad this is. | ||
| And then you've given us a fighting chance on the outside to give you the air cover to be able to make sure that we're not spending on ridiculous earmarks across the country. | ||
| It's a key point that the way the worst things happen in this town is by using the calendar to jam people. | ||
| And to not get a review of where they're spending this money. | ||
| I mean, look at this last $1.7 trillion omnibus bill. | ||
| They're funding every LGBTQ concept they could think of. | ||
| They're actually funding their own political apparatus, if you think about it, because a lot of these different entities are not engaged in public do-gooding. | ||
| They're engaged in political work. | ||
| And now taxpayer money is going to be used to that end. | ||
| And so this gives us the tool to be able to fight back against it. | ||
| It's also not an end unto itself, the sense of teamwork we've created among committed conservatives. | ||
| And you spoke a lot about how a slim majority actually empowers conservatives to band together and force change. | ||
| We're excited about that. | ||
| Not everyone is. | ||
| Take a listen to Maggie Haberman on ABC lamenting the great horrors of the new Gates Group. | ||
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unidentified
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Play the clip. Maggie, and we heard Speaker McCarthy right there say that Donald Trump deserves a lot of credit. | |
| Does he? I don't know about a lot. | ||
| Considering that he had endorsed McCarthy and early in the week made a public push for him that he hadn't wanted to make. | ||
| He had to do it because he gave some mealy-mouthed comment to an NBC reporter. | ||
| And that didn't do anything. | ||
| But he did matter at the end, in that very final motion to adjourn right before they voted in McCarthy. | ||
| He did make calls to people like Matt Gaetz, and he did have some influence there. | ||
| That's a problem for Kevin McCarthy, is that it's not just Scott Perry and the House Freedom Caucus. | ||
| It's this Matt Gaetz group, and Matt Gaetz kept his folks together, and he is now in a pretty strong position with McCarthy. | ||
| Keeping our folks together, having a singular point of focus, what are the fights you see coming forward, whether it's the debt limit or other matters where the assembly of this team is going to need to be put out on the battlefield? | ||
| Yeah, all of these budget fights are going to be very, very early on in the new year. | ||
| And so it's going to be the budget. | ||
| It's going to be the debt limit. | ||
| But the Appropriations Committee is going to make moves very, very soon in their attempt to unravel this. | ||
| And it's going to be incumbent on the 20th. | ||
| Who now have new power, coalition-style government, to be able to step into that new day and realize that anything that happened before this power-share agreement is old history. | ||
| New history is such that we make determinations based on the decisions of the American people. | ||
| It is not, hey, you're going to vote for a bill just because it's in your committee. | ||
| No. Is it good for the 20? | ||
| And is it good for the American people? | ||
| And if you guys have that approach to everything that you do, it will be a new day in the Congress. | ||
| But it's one of those things where you just negotiated and secured this historic thing, and now everyone needs to kind of manifest it by how they act in decisions that they make. | ||
| It says, oh, I'm not going along with that. | ||
| That's the old day of thinking. | ||
| We're going to think about how it looks like today. | ||
| All right, Natalie Winters, are you ready to keep the investigative reporting going so we know exactly who to defund and exactly where all the swamp monsters are buried? | ||
| Having some audio difficulties, but of course, as always, that's my forte. | ||
| I love digging into all the ways that the Chinese Communist Party has gotten its scary, scary claws and greedy talons into the city that is Washington, D.C. Well, we absolutely have to use these tools. | ||
| I think it's going to be critically important. | ||
| And the Rules Committee used to always be like the inner sanctum. | ||
| Now it is going to be an asset of the conservatives to enforce all of this. | ||
| Russ Vogt was given the air cover. | ||
| He was given the strategic advice. | ||
| The man knows the budget. | ||
| We know the rules. And now we're going to use the leverage and power we have to change this place and send a shockwave to the D.C. cartel. | ||
| Thanks for joining us, Russ. We'll be right back on The War Room. | ||
|
unidentified
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We rejoice with a low war. | |
| Let's take down the CCP! Here's your host, Stephen K. Beck. Stephen K. Bannon is on assignment. | ||
| I'm Congressman Matt Gaetz here with Natalie Winders and joining us now, Congressman Andy Biggs. | ||
| There's over 10,000 people who've served in the United States Congress during our nation's history, but far fewer who have ever received a vote for Speaker of the House. | ||
| I was proud to vote for Andy Biggs on the first ballot, as were many of our colleagues. | ||
| Now we're in a position with real leverage, real authority, and we've done something for the institution. | ||
| Undeniably, that will outlive our time, outlive Kevin McCarthy's speakership, and I was so honored to be in that fight with you. | ||
| We know the fight coming is on the border, and few in Congress have worked as hard to try to educate members about the dynamic there, the morale that has been zapped of the Border Patrol, the A cartel network that has become fused with the Mexican government. | ||
| And we finally saw Joe Biden take his first trip to the border. | ||
| I think it is an entire time in public life. | ||
| Your reaction to the president's trip? | ||
| What a farce. | ||
| I mean, he managed to squeeze in three or four hours on the border after they cleaned it up. | ||
| He has no knowledge of what goes on because he didn't get any knowledge. | ||
| I lay this at Mayorka's feet, Homeland Security Secretary Mayorka's feet, because he got it all cleaned up. | ||
| He didn't see the hole in the fence in El Paso where you got Venezuelans pouring through living on the streets of El Paso because they moved him out. | ||
| He didn't see Yuma. | ||
| You've been with me to Yuma. | ||
| You've been on the border. I mean, you have people now. | ||
| Yuma has so many people that CBP is having to release them. | ||
| They can't even get them to the NGOs and move them into our country. | ||
| They're releasing them into the city of Yuma, which is about 80,000, 90,000 people. | ||
| Tens of thousands coming over in massive waves right now. | ||
| There's hope among people in the country that with Republican control of the House of Representatives, we will be able to utilize some of these tools. | ||
| But make a prediction for me, Congressman Biggs. | ||
| Two years from now, will we see that from this point, the illegal immigration trajectory going up or going down? | ||
| I'm going to give you two factors that weigh into my prediction. | ||
| Number one is that Mayorkas and Biden now recognize they have a problem on their hands politically. | ||
| And so they're going to try to reimplement the safe first country. | ||
| That will be helpful for us in reducing it. | ||
| But at the same time, you've got the Republicans in the Senate talking about amnesty. | ||
| And that will instead incentivize. | ||
| So I think you're going to have a net positive amnesty. | ||
| So where you're sitting at 12,000, 13,000 people a day being encountered and coming across and another 5,000 at least gotaways, you're going to see that increase by 2,000 to 3,000 people. | ||
| So don't believe that just because Republicans got control of the House of Representatives, we have some magic elixir that is going to turn the tide on this. | ||
| You've just heard Congressman Bigg say, we're actually going to see more illegal immigration going forward, likely not less. | ||
| This will upset the war room posse, what we're about to tell you. | ||
| But if you take a universe of all Republicans in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, A majority of those people believe that the right immigration policy is to trade some feature of amnesty for some feature of border security. | ||
| And their definition of a good deal is to trade as little amnesty as we have to for as much border security as we can get. | ||
| Why is that the wrong approach? | ||
| Well, because historical data tells us that anytime that Congress even mentions the word amnesty, you have an immediate surge at the borders. | ||
| That's number one. Historically, we've always done that, and we've never gotten the border security. | ||
| It's like betting on the come again. | ||
| Okay, yeah, we're going to go ahead and give you amnesty, and we're going to trust that you're going to give us border security, and it's never happened. | ||
| Third thing is the cartel controls the border now. | ||
| And it won't matter if you say, okay, we're going to add some footage to the fence because we're still going to be so overwhelmed that our poor agents, they're just going to be used as the logistics arm of the cartel. | ||
| They're just going to be transporting them to a center and let them go. | ||
| The other thing, too, is this administration has now proposed, believe it or not, an app where these people can come and they don't even have to be processed anymore. | ||
| They don't have to get a return to appear. | ||
| They're going to be able to put it into an app. | ||
| And by the way, everybody coming across our border has a smartphone. | ||
| They do. You've been with me. | ||
| They're FaceTiming back home. | ||
| Hey, I made it across. They're going to have an app so they can just put in and say I'm here. | ||
| And so you start trading amnesty, the incentives will still be there for people. | ||
| Any amnesty. Any amnesty. | ||
| So you wouldn't trade the most Thorough, exquisite border security, internal enforcement regime for DACA, would you? | ||
| No, I wouldn't. All right. | ||
| Well, we've said this is a show about tradecraft, about how we have to manage the power we have, how to marshal it effectively. | ||
| Let me throw out a scenario for you. | ||
| The discharge petition. | ||
| This gets a little wonky, but I think the War Room audience can hang with me. | ||
| The rules of the House say that if 218 people sign a petition to discharge a piece of legislation from the committee process, it does not pass go. | ||
| It does not collect $200. | ||
| It goes straight to the floor of the House of Representatives. | ||
| I predict that 212, 213 Democrats will sign a discharge petition for a clean DACA bill with no border security and that five or six or ten liberal Republicans might join with them so that the work we do in the Judiciary Committee is diminished. | ||
| How would we stop that? | ||
| Well, the first thing is, you would count on Kevin McCarthy. | ||
| But he's not going to. | ||
| Why do I know he's not going to? | ||
| Because we already have a member of our leadership team that supports not just DACA amnesty, but the deal with the devil that you're talking about. | ||
| So that's number one. | ||
| Wait, who is that member of leadership who supports a clean DACA? I won't say Klindaki. | ||
| He wants to trade amnesty. | ||
| He wants to trade amnesty for border security. | ||
| They don't even know what they want for border security. | ||
| So I've got my two bills that actually are pretty comprehensive border security. | ||
| The only way you're going to be able to stop them, I'm kind of surprised they didn't do it this week, if you want the truth, Matt. | ||
| Wow, week one? I thought they would do a week one. | ||
| I thought they'd do a week one. Natalie Winters, how will the war room posse feel if six Republicans team up with all the Democrats to do an end run around where most Republicans out in the country are on DACA? Deja vu. | ||
| It's, you know, swamp gonna swamp, to say the least. | ||
| I'm not surprised. I think immigration is one of the, I would say, most salient issues with the war room posse because it affects everyone. | ||
| And I think it's the issue that the ruling class loves to gaslight Americans on the most. | ||
| They love to tell us that immigration, illegal immigration, is actually great for the country, right? Shut up, sit down, and enjoy multiculturalism, right? | ||
| Forget e pluribus unum. | ||
| Diversity is our strength. | ||
| And of course DACA, right? | ||
| The poor dreamers, right? | ||
| They love to really tug on those heartstrings. | ||
| But Americans, the Warren Posse, know that illegal immigration is tanking this country, all the way from depleting social services to depressing wages. | ||
| And it shouldn't be lost on anyone, I think just a month ago. | ||
| The World Economic Forum put up an article that actually said that illegal immigration was the way that we could solve inflation. | ||
| Immigration, illegal immigration seems to be the catch-all that's always pushed by American elites, by the American ruling class to fix any problem that we have, when in reality the reverse is true. | ||
| Our open border is the cause of so many of the economic woes that we're facing right now, the national security threats that we're facing right now, the fentanyl pouring over here that's of course tied to the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| So the war room posse will know all too well that it's just gaslighting. | ||
| Like I said in the last block, the reason that the Biden regime wants to ban gas stoves is so they can have a monopoly on gaslighting. | ||
| But the war room posse, as well informed as they are, won't let it happen on the issue of immigration. | ||
| Well, and know that you have a say in this and do not allow a mystified process in Washington to let some of these liberal Republicans off the hook. | ||
| You need to be communicating with members of Congress saying if you sign up to join the Democrats on this We know you are selling out. | ||
| We know you are doing an end run around the legislative process. | ||
| Andy, do you have other border trips planned where you're inviting members of Congress down to observe these circumstances? | ||
| And how are the circumstances on the border changing? | ||
| What are the trend lines you're seeing? | ||
| So yeah, we're going to take some more people down. | ||
| You know Kate, my chief. | ||
| She's actually already in the process of planning. | ||
| We'll see if anybody will come with us after last week. | ||
| You never know, Matt. The situation is like this. | ||
| First of all, El Paso is an interesting choice for Biden because a year ago they were getting about 300 to 350 apprehensions a day. | ||
| Those are encounters. People just coming and surrendering. | ||
| And now it's well over 1,000 a day. | ||
| But I don't believe he toured the soft side outside of El Paso. | ||
| Now, you have to see the soft sides, and you've seen them with me when they've just been so packed. | ||
| They're worse than when you and I were there. | ||
| They are far worse. | ||
| And in Yuma, they just don't have enough room at all. | ||
| The other thing, too, is they're moving people. | ||
| They're letting agents go where they need to go for their home choice so they can say, well, I want to go down to La Jolla or whatever because I have family down by La Jolla, Texas. | ||
| Well, La Jolla, Texas is being overrun. | ||
| And there's signs literally at the border. | ||
| When they cross the river, they come across. | ||
| There's a sign that says, go this way to see the Border Patrol. | ||
| And they'll go to the Border Patrol and they just walk right in and get processed. | ||
| And they're getting released. And so it's 12,000 people or so a day. | ||
| And in Tucson sector, Well over a thousand gotaways every day. | ||
| These are the people who don't want to be talked. | ||
| These are the folks that are probably terrorists. | ||
| They're dealing drugs. They're criminal gang members. | ||
| They're from countries of high interest. | ||
| So we don't know what they're doing. | ||
| And we don't know where they're going. | ||
| And it's pretty bad. | ||
| It's number one. | ||
| So you and I are America first foreign policy. | ||
| We do not believe that our country should be trying to build Jeffersonian democracies out of sand and blood and Arab militias in the Middle East. | ||
| And so we've sought reforms to prior authorizations to use military force. | ||
| But what we see in the fusion of purpose between these cartels and the Mexican government, should the United States of America authorize the use of military force against these Mexican cartels that are stronger than many countries in our hemisphere? | ||
| We're getting pretty close to that point. | ||
| Think of what AMLO just said when Biden's down there. | ||
| He said, you know, don't... | ||
| He said grant amnesty to the 40 million Mexicans that are in America. | ||
| This is from AMLO, the president of Mexico. | ||
| He thanked him. Don't put up a fence. | ||
| Let us keep coming. | ||
| And they use this as an integral part of their governments and their financing. | ||
| Mexico is not blameless in this. | ||
| They are joining in the problem, and I think there needs to be accountability there. | ||
| Andy Biggs, congressman, guy I voted for for speaker, thanks for joining us on The War Room. | ||
| We'll be right back with Ana Paulina Luna and George Santos. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Babb. | |
| But I want to clarify something real quick to my colleagues across the aisle. | ||
| What you're seeing with this discussion does not mean that we are dysfunctional. | ||
| And in no way, shape, or form will a Democrat ever hold the gavel to a Republican-controlled House. | ||
| These discussions and dialogues have actually been good for the American people, and although the media tries to pit us against each other, I can tell you that it's been something that we need as a country. | ||
| There are people that are frustrated with this process. | ||
| Byron, through this entire time, has done something that I think most leaders should do more of, and that is listen. | ||
| Respect people when they're talking. | ||
| Understand the needs of the American people. | ||
| Be willing to take negotiations, but also to realize when is a proper time to stand your ground on certain things. | ||
| She is not a rising star. | ||
| She has arrived. | ||
| Ana Paulina Luna, my favorite member of Congress from the Sunshine State, joins us by phone. | ||
| Ana, that was a rousing speech that you gave on the floor. | ||
| And I want to start with this question because there's been a lot of folks in the mainstream media saying, oh, we've weakened the institution. | ||
| We've weakened Speaker McCarthy. | ||
| As you assess it, is the Republican majority stronger today than we were a week ago? | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. In fact, you know, for those who are tuning in, there's this room right off the floor. | |
| It's called the cloakroom. And it's where sometimes members will go either before votes or in between. | ||
| And, you know, they have a little snack room. | ||
| But the point is, is that, you know, when I was back there, even right after our negotiations had leaked and what was actually being talked about and what really has now become adopted by the Republican Party, many of our colleagues actually said, you know, I just want to let you know I really applaud you for what you guys are doing. | ||
| And we actually really like where this is at and we appreciate it and good on you. | ||
| So I think the media initially was trying to paint us as, you know, quote unquote terrorists and extortionists. | ||
| But we're clearly not. | ||
| Clearly, our hearts are in it for the American people. | ||
| And ultimately, what you'll find is that when you come up here, there is a certain type of way and system of how things are run. | ||
| And people like myself and Representative Gates, we don't agree with that system that it's correct. | ||
| And so we have to bring change. | ||
| And I think we brought change this past week. | ||
| One of the key demands that was not met prior to our efforts to really go through a deliberative process was a demand for a vote on term limits. | ||
| We hear all over the country the American people want term limits, but we never seem to take a vote on it. | ||
| So establishment members can say one thing and then they're never really held to account. | ||
| What do you think is the impact of forcing a vote on term limits in the House of Representatives? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's really going to show the American people, constituents of some of these representatives that say, you know, they're going to Washington to bring change. | |
| It's going to show them where their heart's really at. | ||
| You know, I took a term on that pledge early on, and I am a firm believer in part of the reason why we see such a broken system. | ||
| And if you even just want to take a look at the deficit currently, you know, people that have been up there sometimes for 10, 20 years, Say that they're up there to serve the American people, and yet we have this ballooning debt and nothing changes. | ||
| And so I'm a firm believer in that. | ||
| As you know, Matt, serving in the Florida House, we have turbulence there, and we have a good turnover, and I think that that's in part why we have such a good Republican representation in the House of Florida. | ||
| But I'm supportive of it, and I can tell you that people back home When they saw that that was actually something that now Speaker McCarthy actually agreed to with some of these concessions, they actually applauded it, and they want to see that. | ||
| So I'm excited to vote for it. | ||
| I'm definitely someone that signed on to Representative Norman's bill, and I hope that the American people can see exactly what we're fighting for. | ||
| You heard it right there from a great Florida woman, Anna Paulina Luna. | ||
| If we want to Florida-fy the country, one great way to do that is to embrace term limits. | ||
| Now, what I noticed in the state of Florida, when we got term limits, our state legislature got a lot younger. | ||
| Natalie Winters, right now we have the third oldest Congress in American history. | ||
| How do you assess a Congress that is going to be voting on decisions where a lot of the members won't even be around for the consequences of those votes? | ||
| ...politician serves or spends time in Washington, D.C., the more likely they are to have been compromised by all of these foreign elements and, of course, domestic elements, too, who certainly don't have the future of Americans my age, even your age. I know we're sort of close in age, but at the top of their minds. | ||
| And frankly, when you're talking about Chinese Communist Party compromise, I think they have the antithesis of the issues that are important and Really, really, really, I mean, existentially important to young Americans, whether it's finances, issues like COVID vaccine mandates. | ||
| So term limits are so important to prevent this. | ||
| I also think the world that we've inherited, whether it's social media, the issues facing young people, there's just a generational gap. | ||
| And when you see people, I like to call them ossified swamp creatures, who look so old they should be nowhere near Congress. | ||
| They've been there for so long. | ||
| And the really scary ones are the ones who you don't know their names, because that means that they're just part of the D.C. permanent political class. | ||
| They just sort of are a rubber stamp on all the policies that really are detrimental to the success of this country. | ||
| It really is, I think, a glaring case for why we need term limits. | ||
| But I will say the important thing to emphasize, When you have this mass exodus of, I would say, sort of the grifter lobby in Congress, right, the people who've sold out, who really are America last at their core, it's important that we have regulations in place to make sure that these people don't leave Congress and then End up as foreign lobbyists for countries like Ukraine, like China, or as more domestic lobbyists for big pharmaceutical companies, say Pfizer, | ||
| Moderna, because that is really a tale as old as time, right? | ||
| People who leave Congress, they join Congress with bad intentions in the first place just to get kind of connected into that revolving door pipeline. | ||
| So we definitely need term limits, but concurrently I think we need to be pursuing regulations and restrictions on former members of Congress who go and lobby on behalf of both private enterprises but also foreign countries. | ||
| It's a great point. | ||
| Term limits would make Congress younger, it would make Congress more dynamic, and it would make Congress less corrupt. | ||
| And if you have someone able to be here for decades and decades and then those people get bought off, well, buying people off becomes More amateurized over that extended period of time. | ||
| So if the Chinese Communist Party, foreign interests abroad, special interests at home, want to actually bribe people and buy them off, at least if we have term limits, they'll have to buy off a new crop every six or eight years and it'll make it far more difficult and it'll make it more enticing for patriots to want to run for Congress. | ||
| Anna Paulina Luna from the state of Florida New member of Congress, but actually had to run for Congress two times to get here. | ||
| When you have run, you have faced opposition from not only Democrats, but from the Republican establishment. | ||
| Establishment Republican super PACs came after Ana Paulina Luna because they know she's a veteran, they know she's a fighter, and they know she is entirely loyal to her constituents, not the swamp of Ana, what does it mean that as part of this deal for Speaker McCarthy, we got some of these establishment Republican PACs to disarm themselves in these primaries where we want to get great patriots like you into the United States Congress? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's a game changer. | |
| You know, to your credit, Matt, early on, I think that you were actually one of the first member of Congress to actually met with me. | ||
| And then in my first race, you were the only one that had endorsed me. | ||
| And, you know, in that race, I was outspent. | ||
| And then in this race, I mean, I was outspent $12 million to $1 million. | ||
| But the point is, is that when you are in some of these contested primaries, and a lot of times the primary is the most important time in the race, right? Especially for some of these red seats. | ||
| At that point, you're determining who the likely representative will be on the Republican ticket. | ||
| For myself, and I'm sure for many candidates across the country, when you are a grassroots populist candidate, you know, there's just certain money that I won't take. | ||
| I won't take money from pharmaceutical. | ||
| I'm very, very, very cautious about taking certain special interest money. | ||
| And I think, to your credit, I know you don't take any lobbying money, but, you know, that's a separate conversation and topic. | ||
| But, you know, these super PACs will come in and people just completely just try to destroy you. | ||
| And in my case, they did exactly that. | ||
| But, you know, we had a really strong grassroots game. | ||
| But I will say to, you know, candidates like Joe Ken and hopefully Carolyn Levitt, I would love to see. | ||
| I know Joe Ken, I think, announced that he's running again yesterday. | ||
| I'm very excited about that because I know he faced some fierce opposition from the party in his primary. | ||
| But, you know, the fact that they're staying out, I think, makes it more of a level playing field for the voters to truly decide who the best candidate is. | ||
| And one of the bigger issues that we have right now in our elections is it becomes so expensive that it makes it nearly impossible for quote-unquote normal candidates and normal people to actually run for office. | ||
| And that's not the way or system that our Founding Fathers engineered this country to be. | ||
| And so I do believe that because of that, It keeps some of the best candidates away from politics. | ||
| And so I'm very excited that that happened. | ||
| I think it was way beyond due. | ||
| And I think that both you and I, Matt, will probably be on the campaign trail for some of these America First candidates this next election cycle. | ||
| Undeniably, if the paradigm we have now negotiated going forward were governing in the last election cycle, Joe Kent would be a member of Congress, Caroline Levitt would be a member of Congress, and the Republican majority, the size of the Of the delta between us and the Democrats would be 50 % larger. | ||
| So it's very significant and it's very significant that Congress will be more attractive as a career opportunity for people like Ana Paulina Luna, like Joe Kent, like Caroline Levitt. | ||
| Ana, what do you think the principal critique is of your constituents when they... | ||
| are concerned about Congress. | ||
| I mean, right now Congress has like a 9 % approval rating. | ||
| Muammar Qaddafi had a 13 % approval rating and his own people dragged him in the streets and killed him. | ||
| So what is it that the folks in Florida you serve want to see change about this place? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, the biggest critique they have and really I think had until the 20 of us kind of stood up there and did our thing is that they don't trust elected representatives. | |
| They don't trust Congress. And I think that they saw that really play out on the national scene because initially even some people that we thought were on our side, of course not the war room posse, but some of the mainstream other outlets that were quote-unquote conservative, were hitting us saying that we were causing all this chaos. | ||
| They had no idea what we were doing. | ||
| And I think that what we did It showed the country that change can happen, that there are still people that are fighting for the interests of the American people, for the Constitution, and to really stop some of the corruption that we're seeing out of Washington. | ||
| But I think that this is just one of many things that has to continue to happen. | ||
| And I want to be really clear about something. | ||
| For what we've done, I really do believe that it's going to help set the stage for 2024. | ||
| And I do believe that some of what we're seeing now will be around far after both you and I leave office, Matt. And so for me, especially when it came time for that vote, I mean, I think we both realized what was on the table. | ||
| And, you know, it's going to take a lot more, but I don't want to tell everyone that this country is not beyond saving because I think there's some really great patriots up here. | ||
| But, yeah, I think people just have lost trust in the process, and we hope to bring some of that back. | ||
| And I can tell you that many people, now that they know what we did, especially back home in Pinellas County, I've gotten thank yous. | ||
| I mean, when I was traveling home and traveling here to Washington from home, people were stopping me in the airport and saying thank you. | ||
| So that goes a long way. So, Natalie, we heard Ana talk about the influence of big pharma, how that has become supercharged. | ||
| And you've done a lot of reporting on how compromised elements of big pharma are. | ||
| And you look at that compromise and then how it manifests in our congressional activity. | ||
| They want to be in charge. And one of the things that we did not have a concession on at the beginning of last week, but we now have a guarantee from McCarthy on, is a vote to get rid of the national emergency. | ||
| And I think that will, in a lot of ways, just peel back the layers of the onion on what all Big Pharma has done to scare us. | ||
| What's your assessment of a vote upcoming, getting rid of the national emergency, and taking the power away from Big Pharma? | ||
| We've got about a minute. You're making big pharma lobbyists very mad, and they've increased their lobbying representation recently post-COVID by hundreds of percents. | ||
| You're talking dozens of people. | ||
| Millions of dollars have been spent. | ||
| So I hope we can repeal it. | ||
| I hope we can make these lobbyists mad. | ||
| I don't know if Kevin McCarthy is the person to do it, but with fighters like you, I think we can get it done. | ||
| And fighters like Ana Paulina Luna. | ||
| Ana, how can folks follow you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Real quick. Yeah, head over to my personal social media at RealAnaPaulina if you want to see what I'm doing in Congress at RepLuna. | |
| All right. Thanks so much for joining us, Ana. | ||
| We'll be back with George Santos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You'll want to miss it. So I join with you and I join with my colleagues in saying that George Santos does not have the ability to serve here in the House of Representatives and should resign. | |
| We're back in the war room. | ||
| I'm Congressman Matt Gaetz. Stephen K. Bannon is on assignment. | ||
| One thing I know about this town, they come for the fighters. | ||
| And they are coming for George Santos like nothing I've seen in quite some time. | ||
| I could ask you what it's like to be an embattled congressman, but I kind of know a little bit about that scene. | ||
| George, you've heard just there, Congressman D'Esposito, your Republican colleague, calling for you to resign. | ||
| Nick Langworthy also has your reaction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, Matt, it's their prerogative. | |
| I came here to serve the people, not politicians and party leaders, and I'm going to do just that. | ||
| And I've been doing just that throughout this entire first two weeks, whether it was voting for the speaker or whether it's been the last week where we've been working on legislation in my office. | ||
| So, you know, I wish well all of their opinions, but I was elected by 142,000 people. | ||
| Until those same 142,000 people tell me they don't want me, we'll find out in two years. | ||
| What do those 142,000 people deserve in a representative? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They deserve somebody who's gonna come here and fight and not get involved with the media nonsense that we're seeing take place, right? | |
| Look, a lot of people are saying that I am unable to govern, I'm unable to deliver. | ||
| But in the meantime, my office and my staff, we've been able to jump on co-sponsoring legislation such as term limits, which you spoke about earlier. | ||
| You know, there's not a lot of people running to jump on this, specifically the ones criticizing me. | ||
| They want to stay here forever. I don't want to stay here forever. | ||
| I want to come here, do the best I can with the time I have and deliver for the American people. | ||
| And that's going to be through fighting crime, inflation and whatnot. | ||
| That's what they elected me to do. | ||
| And that's what I'm going to give them. | ||
| You have admitted embellishing your resume. | ||
| You've acknowledged it. You've apologized for it. | ||
| Some have said that you shouldn't be seated on committees for it. | ||
| I would offer that if we didn't seat people on committees who embellish their resume running for Congress, we probably wouldn't be able to make a quorum in any of those committees. | ||
| Do you now have a sense of the committees you want to serve on, the type of work you want to do? I came to D.C. without really any preconceived notions of what committees to serve, but whether what I can give to the American people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whatever committee I'm given, whether it's, I don't know, science and technology or education and labor or whatever committee is thrown my way, I will deliver 110 % because that's what I know how to do. | |
| I'm going to outwork any of the pundits and talking heads that are out there saying that I should resign, that I'm unfit for office. | ||
| The reality is, and the case and point here being is, I'm a workhorse. I've worked my whole life. | ||
| I'm the kid who came from a basement department. | ||
| You weren't supposed to win this seat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was not supposed to win this seat. | |
| I mean, this was a seat that a lot of folks looked at and said, definitely going Democrat. | ||
| You know, Republicans, gosh, Santos ran last time. | ||
| We'll send him to run this time. | ||
| And you surprised a lot of people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All the people calling me to resign, I beat them by double their margins in the victory because I outworked every single one of them. | |
| Embellishing one's resume isn't a crime. | ||
| It's frankly how a lot of people get to Congress. | ||
| And we want everyone to be honest. | ||
| And again, you've acknowledged that and you're working for it going forward. | ||
| One of the principal critiques I've heard is that a lot of money was donated to your campaign by you. | ||
| 700,000, I believe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where did it come from? Well, I'll tell you where it didn't come from. | |
| It didn't come from China, Ukraine or Burisma. | ||
| How about that? Well, that is an answer. | ||
| I also put money into my campaign when I ran. | ||
| I had to sell some of the property that I had acquired in my life in order to fund something that I really believed in. | ||
| When I was raising money for different charities, I always tried to put my own money in first. | ||
| When you donated that money to your campaign, is there anything else you can say about the work you did that was the origin of those resources? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, I've worked my entire life. | |
| I've lived an honest life. | ||
| I've never been accused of any bad doing. | ||
| So, you know, it's the equity of my hard-working self that I've invested inside of me. | ||
| Like I said, it didn't come from Burisma. | ||
| It didn't come from Ukraine, Russia, China, unlike some folks that we all know that get money from those sources. | ||
| Inside the Beltway of Washington, there's such a media tornado. | ||
| And there are moments where you think all people are worried about is like, what's the new big thing in Washington? | ||
| But I'm wondering, like, when you hear from constituents back home, what are the what are their challenges? | ||
| What are the things that are concerning the people who need a strong representative for them in Congress? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, we're fielding calls in the office already. | |
| People are asking for as simple as White House tour tickets, which we've already engaged with the White House liaison. | ||
| We are requesting passport issues. | ||
| And then all the way to an issue that's very near and dear in my community, which is we have an organized crime that's taking car tickets It's an interstate faction of folks who, they steal the cars from my district, take them all the way to New Jersey and Elizabeth to the ports, put them on ships and send them overseas, | ||
| right? It's MS-13 principally doing this, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's actually not. In this case, it's not MSN13. It's been identified that they're a Chilean gang. | |
| The police commissioner is rendered useless the moment they cross into New York City. | ||
| The police commissioner of New York City is rendered useless the moment they cross over to the George Washington Bridge into Jersey. | ||
| It's really an FBI requirement to get involved in this because of the multi-jurisdictions that it covers. | ||
| But nobody's doing anything about it, and I'm here trying to figure out a way to get this solved. | ||
| The amount of constituents of mine that are plagued by this issue, whether they're coming home from a restaurant and being followed at gunpoint at their driveway, this is a real issue in the 3rd Congressional District and nobody wants to talk about it. | ||
| Local leadership is too worried about getting reelected so that they can keep the power grab on the taxpayer dollar jobs. | ||
| And I'm here actually trying to fight for the local people. | ||
| The absurdity of saying that George Santos isn't we're going to redirect the constituents requests to another members of Congress's office instead of mine. | ||
| That's absurd and it's illegal. | ||
| I'm here to serve. Any member of local government that wants to say they're not going to work with my office, you're doing a disservice to the American people, to the taxpayer. | ||
| I'm here willing, ready, and able to work, and I will work for the American people in the district. | ||
| Well, if people don't have physical security, it's hard to get almost anything else done. | ||
| And it's one of the reasons why a lot of New Yorkers are coming to the Sunshine State. | ||
| Are you concerned about New York depopulating because people don't feel safe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I lost a lot of constituents in my district during the 2020 coronavirus shutdowns and then during this plague of people just running away from the hokul situation over there. | |
| So it's just been absolutely crazy. | ||
| The Democrats cannot stand that Republicans did so well in New York. | ||
| They really can't. | ||
| As we evaluate this, you know, you have to wonder whether or not these other Republicans are just the next ones. | ||
| You know, they come for you and then they're going to come. | ||
| Isn't The New York Times going to come for every one of these Republicans before it's over? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every last one of them. | |
| I just pray for all of you when they come for you that you have the same strength I have. | ||
| George Santos responding exclusively on The War Room. | ||
| Thanks for being here. Thanks for answering the tough questions. | ||
| And we wish you well fighting against those Chilean gangs terrorizing your constituents. | ||
| Thanks for joining us. | ||
| This is The War Room. I'm Congressman Matt Gaetz. |
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