June 13, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:52
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
|
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. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try 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 line? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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War Room, here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I remember, and I think based on his early messages as a candidate, he won't mind if I disclose this for the first time, I remember talking to Chris Christie after Trump says, stand back and stand by to the Proud Boys. | ||
| He said, we've been all of us trying to get him to take it back. | ||
| What's wrong with him? Clearly a gaffe. | ||
| And I think in him explaining why he wouldn't do it, I understood not just Trump's enthusiasm for the support of anyone and everyone, including David Duke, but Trump's enthusiasm and appetite, insatiable appetite for violence carried out in his name. | ||
| And what it has wrought, what was that? | ||
| That was the fall of 2016. | ||
| What it has brought is it's brought the entire Republican Party to its hands and knees. | ||
| They're impotent. Can't do anything about it anymore. | ||
| If they decided today that this is not how they want the country to be, it's too late. | ||
| It's too late, because if this is something I could find before I came on the air, do you know what the radicalized extremists found? | ||
| They are awash in violent tactical instructions of exactly how to carry out, quote, retribution for their leader, Donald Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
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What do we do? Yeah, I mean, first of all, you have to recognize that all the elements of political radicalization of violence are in play here, right? | |
| He's playing on people's deep-seated grievances, particularly when it gets to the federal government, unlike the New York case. | ||
| You know, you're playing into the same forces that go all the way back to Waco. | ||
| You know, the FBI, government overreach, conspiracy theories. | ||
| Trump is tapping into that. | ||
| And that's the kind of thing that radicalize individuals. | ||
| It's so interesting. | ||
| I was just reading an op-ed by Russell Moore in Christianity Today yesterday. | ||
| And he said he talked about a documentary that he had seen. | ||
| And he said... | ||
| This generation, it seems, evangelicals have twisted things around, and they have been, like, worshipping the power, going after the power, instead of what he said, instead of focusing on the power of Jesus. | ||
| That was his view, that they got things backwards. | ||
| Here you have the Republican Party, the Law and Order Party, as you said before, that always talked about law and order and national security. | ||
| They now have also twisted and contorted to such an extent that they now want to defund the FBI. They now apologize for people who bash the brains in of cops. | ||
| They have their leading candidate actually saluting convicts. | ||
| It's really... | ||
| I say it all the time. I mean, if this guy were a double agent for the Democratic Party starting in 2015, he could not have undermined the core of this party any more than he has. | ||
|
unidentified
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Amen, Joe. And the other thing is that, you know, as you both know and everyone in this group knows, the founders, when they were designing our political system, they were trying to do something that was the mirror image of England and the autocracies of Europe. | |
| This was not going to be about power. | ||
| This was not going to be about celebrating one man, and they were usually kings, not queens. | ||
| This was going to be a system of laws and extremely carefully designed largely by James Madison to avoid just what you were saying, Joe, the fear of Alexander Hamilton that some demagogue would come along and trash it all. | ||
| It's taken two centuries, but now we've got one of our historically great parties, the Republican Party, that is coming up against all of that. | ||
| May I say a word about Judge Cannon that connects to this? | ||
| Please, please. When I was thinking when you were talking earlier, I'm not so saying when I'm a lot more nervous about Judge Cannon. | ||
| Number one, the way she behaved before, she was reprimanded by her superiors, she botched that case. | ||
| You know, if we were getting a surgery, would we want to go to a surgeon that had botched an operation the first time? | ||
| Number one. Number two, you know, we're at a time, just as you were all saying, this could be the most important criminal trial in American history. | ||
| Do we really feel sanguine about that being in the hands of a judge who is a fervent Trump supporter, member of the Federalist Society, demonstrated in that earlier case, or earlier part of this case, that she had an axe to grind? | ||
| And the third thing, and I'll close with this, is A lot of people in this country expected this trial to be in D.C. with a federal judge in D.C. It was only a few days ago that people suddenly discovered that this trial was going to be not in D.C., but in South Florida. | ||
| There are already one on Tuesday, 13 June in the year of the Lord, 2023. | ||
| We're going to focus today on the signal, not the noise, okay? | ||
| Let me go first. We've got Natalie and Captain Bannon on the scene in Miami. | ||
| Let me toss to Natalie Winters. | ||
| We've got Matt Gaetz is going to join us here in studio. | ||
| We've got Caroline Wren. | ||
| We have a ton of people today. | ||
| Natalie, set the stage for us down there. | ||
| It's early yet. I know the president's not going to get involved here into the afternoon. | ||
|
unidentified
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What's going on? Thank you so much for having us. | |
| Captain Bannon will be here basically all day outside of the courthouse. | ||
| I have to say, I've never seen more media in my entire life for any event I've ever been to. | ||
| It is packed not just wall to wall, but inch to inch, millimeter to millimeter, with basically every single media outlet. | ||
| Of course, the mainstream ones, but a bunch of citizen journalists, and it's really heating up, not just temperature-wise, of course, but we also see A lot more protesters starting to sort of trickle in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like you said, Trump will be appearing later today. | |
| But in the meantime, there already is a pretty healthy presence of protesters, healthy presence of security. | ||
| We've got some music going off right now. | ||
| But all in all, I would say the Trump base is turning up and showing out. | ||
| Natalie, you're going to do double duty today because you're lead investigative reporter and one of the best in D.C. We're going to talk a lot about the offense here in Grassley. | ||
| We've got Matt Gaetz, et cetera. | ||
| Just hang tough. Mo, what's your sense of things down there? | ||
| This is not New York City. | ||
| I told people it was not going to be New York City. | ||
| What's your sense of the pro-Trump forces down there, ma'am? | ||
|
unidentified
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There's going to be a lot of pro-Trump protesters to counter. | |
| Okay, honey, we've got an audio problem. | ||
| Let's fix her audio so I don't lose all that brilliance. | ||
| Let's fix her audio and we'll come back to her in a second. | ||
| Can we get that fixed? | ||
| We're on scene in Miami. | ||
| Let's go to Matt Gaetz. Thank you for joining us, particularly everything you've got going on. | ||
| A lot of people don't know you're actually a brilliant lawyer. | ||
| Walk me through. | ||
| Give me your assessment of what we're seeing today. | ||
| I wanted to play for you. | ||
| It's the most important trial in history. | ||
| This is an inflection point of America, etc. | ||
| What are your thoughts? The original sin was the Russia hoax. | ||
| The original sin was the effort by the national security apparatus to control the election process by utilizing the Steele dossier. | ||
| And this is just the outgrowth of that. | ||
| You see a direct link all the way back to the beginning. | ||
| Look at how the national security apparatus has tried to influence all these elections. | ||
| In 2016, you had the Steele dossier. | ||
| In 2018, they were pursuing the Russia hoax, and Adam Schiff was out there making stuff up. | ||
| In 2020, then you have the Ukraine hoax. | ||
| But he was lying to the American people. | ||
| Absolutely. Then you have them try to suppress the 100-line laptop. | ||
| This is why Luna's trying to get the expulsion of him because he went to the skiff and then came out and lied to us. | ||
| I am Congressman Luna's co-author of that. | ||
| But that brings us to this moment where you've got yet another very biased prosecutor in Jack Smith hired for the explicit purpose of destabilizing Donald Trump's path to the presidency. | ||
| Pattern recognition, we see it here. | ||
| But there is a feature of this indictment that I am obsessed with. | ||
| I cannot believe that Jack Smith made reference in the indictment to Hillary Clinton. | ||
| That is a massive error. | ||
| And if I were on President Trump's legal team, I would have an entire vector of discovery about absolutely every piece of paper that the federal government ever touched regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton, the legal analysis of whether or not to bring charges. | ||
| And that, I think, would serve us as an interesting factual display for any jury. | ||
| And it's going to be very hard for Jack Smith To now try to keep any evidence out about the misapplication of the Espionage Act and the like, what he himself brought Hillary Clinton into this case. | ||
| Walk our audience through what do you mean by that. | ||
| Talk about this reference in there, why you've been so excited about it since you first saw it. | ||
| Yeah, I read it and I can't believe that what Jack Smith is using as a factual or legal basis to bring this charge is what Donald Trump said about Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign of 2016. | ||
| It is a signal that this is about politics and campaigns and it is an incredible lack of prosecutorial discipline. | ||
| When you are laying out an indictment, you want to make sure everything you lay out, you can Totally prove and that it is relevant to the legal obligations that you've got to have to maintain a charge of this kind. | ||
| And so to have something so superfluous as what Donald Trump said about Hillary Clinton, it's a mistake and it's one I think Trump's legal team can leverage. | ||
| And how so? Why does that open up to bring all Hillary Clinton? | ||
| I don't believe this case ever gets to a jury, but in the event that it ever did... | ||
| Hang on, don't go so fast for this audience. | ||
| That's pretty big. What do you mean you don't think it'll ever... | ||
| Today they're dancing around and they're crying crocodile tears because it's in Miami instead of D.C. What do you mean it never goes to trial? | ||
| One of the basis for a motion to dismiss an indictment is where there's been extreme misconduct on the part of the government. | ||
| And in this case, we already know as an undisputed factual matter that there were government prosecutors trying It's telling lawyers that they had to flip their clients against Donald Trump if they wanted a chance to go be a federal judge. | ||
| That is the most extreme example of prosecutorial misconduct that I have ever seen. | ||
| I've never seen an abusive... | ||
| I really have never seen anything like that in my entire legal career or as an attorney who serves on the House Judiciary Committee. | ||
| To literally tell someone that they have to go flip their client in order to secure a federal judgeship... | ||
| I mean, that alone is considerably more criminal than a dispute with the archivist over records. | ||
| And so I think that this indictment will be subject to a motion to dismiss because of that abusive prosecutorial misconduct. | ||
| But in the event that this got to a jury, How do you think a jury is going to react when now because of Jack Smith, you can put evidence before them regarding Hillary Clinton's conduct, Donald Trump's conduct, and juries don't like when the laws are misapplied. | ||
| And it's not technically a legal element of the case, but juries really, really don't like that in my experience. | ||
| Could you actually see people like McCabe and Comey actually being called as witnesses to that level? | ||
| Look, Jack Smith brought Hillary Clinton into this matter. | ||
| That means anyone who touched anything regarding Hillary Clinton potentially could be deposed, they could be subject to the obligation to produce records, and they could even be forced to give testimony. | ||
| So it was, I think, a blunder, but it's one that showcases the signal, and that is that this is election interference. | ||
| Zoom out just a moment here. | ||
| We showed in this Congress how the CIA was literally using their power over their former agents and employees to try to get them to sign the letter. | ||
| The 51. Exactly. To say that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. | ||
| And so if you've got people in the CIA right now engaged in that degree of election interference, is it hard to believe that the Department of Justice had an axe to grind as well? | ||
| Now you've got, and we're jammed, the next section I've got to spend about the fight on Capitol Hill that you're leading. | ||
| I've also got to get to Senator Grassley's amazing speech lesson. | ||
| I've got to have you break it down for us. | ||
| We're going to go back real quickly. | ||
| On Fox News, you have something coming up on the website. | ||
| Can you tell us about that? Well, we're going to be asking some important questions to Jack Smith. | ||
| It's my belief as I'm chatting with you, Steve, that We got to understand how we pierced the attorney-client privilege in this case. | ||
| I think there is a federal equity there for rigorous oversight. | ||
| I mean, every single client in almost any matter, criminal or civil, has discussions with their lawyers about what documents have to be produced, what documents might be subject to some privilege, what documents you want to litigate over or separate out from the production. | ||
| Oftentimes when there's a subpoena, there's a negotiation among the lawyers to in some way constrain the scope. | ||
| And so these questions President Trump's asking are part and parcel with the normal course of business, which you talk to your attorney about. | ||
| Right. And then to use that as the basis to claim the crime fraud exception. | ||
| The crime fraud exception is when you have your attorney like doing money laundering. | ||
| It's like the old mob stuff where the mob lawyer was kind of in on a lot of the criminal activity. | ||
| And in these cases, the lawyer's answering questions about what's responsive to a subpoena, which happens every single day in America. | ||
| You're not impressed with what Jack Smith put before the American people, I take it. | ||
| Well, I am concerned a lot more than I'm impressed because I'm concerned about what this means for the country that we've now got the DOJ as the left's hitman. | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. | ||
| Natalie and Mo are down in Miami with Caroline Wren. | ||
| Congressman Gates is with us for one and a half more blocks. | ||
| We've got to get a lot out of him. | ||
| Short break. Back in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
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I need to say it again. | |
| I love my former colleague, Charlie Dent. | ||
| I'm the crazy Tea Party guy. | ||
| He was the responsible Republican congressman. | ||
| I miss those days when we argued about issues. | ||
| Look, here's the deal. | ||
| No serious challenger to Donald Trump is going to criticize him or attack him. | ||
| They're not even trying to beat him, Ali. | ||
| All they're hoping for is that the justice system or a heart attack takes him out. | ||
| But the party is gone. | ||
| Our former party is an authoritarian embracing cult. | ||
| If not Trump, Ali, who do they want? | ||
| Who's the only other person even registering in the polls? | ||
| It's Ron DeSantis. | ||
| He's a Trump mini-me. | ||
| There's no following for Mike Pence or Nikki Haley or Tim Scott or Chris Christie. | ||
| It's hard to wrap your arms around the fact that one of our two major political parties is gone. | ||
| Charlie? Yeah, Joe, what I would say is this. | ||
| Here we are in June. | ||
| We're so far out from the presidential election. | ||
| A lot can happen between now and then. | ||
| Trump has been indicted two times. | ||
| He may be indicted a few more times. | ||
| He's going to delay this thing as long as he can. | ||
| But I do still think there are a lot of Republican voters out there Who want to move on, who want something different. | ||
| They want to move forward. | ||
| One of these candidates is going to break through. | ||
| I agree with you that Ron DeSantis, you know, talking, basically trying to be the new coke. | ||
| Why be the new coke when you can get the original? | ||
| I mean, defending Donald Trump at a time like this, if you're opposing him, I think is bad politics. | ||
| Bad politics. Don't take a cheap imitation. | ||
| Get the original. I think it's a mistake. | ||
| They did the same thing after the stormy gang of payments. | ||
| I don't think it's good politics at all, because how is this going to help them in a general election by embracing Trump so closely? | ||
| They want the nomination, my friend. | ||
| They want the nomination, and it's smart politics to defend Donald Trump right now, because that's what the base wants. | ||
| Well, the base needs to be led. | ||
| And when more voices speak up, I've always said the problem is if it's just a handful of people speaking, you're right. | ||
| They're just yelling into the wind. | ||
| But if we have more people speaking up in elected positions, they can help change a narrative. | ||
| They can absolutely change a narrative. | ||
| That's the story of the past seven years. | ||
| If only we had more Republicans speaking up. | ||
| That's the story. Allie, Charlie, think about this. | ||
| We are two and a half years removed from Donald Trump leading a violent attempt to overthrow an American election. | ||
| He's still the party leader. | ||
| It ain't happening. | ||
| It ain't happening. You want me to say on television that I support three and four year olds with firearms? | ||
| Is that what you're asking me to do? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Typically members of Congress don't just hear a story about a program and then indicate whether they support it or not. | ||
| The intensive three-week kindergarten course introduces specially selected children from 12 to 4 years old to pistols, rifles, semi-automatics, and a rudimentary knowledge of mortars. | ||
| In less than a month, less than a month, a first grader can become a first Grenader. | ||
| Okay. We had to do Joe Walsh and Charlie Dent losing it. | ||
| By the way, we've got audio problems in Miami. | ||
| We're going to fix it and get back to Natalie and Captain Ben and Caroline Wren. | ||
| The Borat. | ||
| Oh, Borat! Yes! | ||
| Borat, you know, tried to get me. | ||
| Couldn't. I couldn't imagine that his foolishness would work on anyone. | ||
| And it definitely worked on Joe Walsh. | ||
| He was talking about how four-year-olds should be running mortars. | ||
| You dared Borat in that thing. | ||
| Yes. The longer clip. When you call him, I said, never get another congressman to do this. | ||
| Yes. And in fact, he did. | ||
| Hard cut to the Joe Walsh. To Joe Walsh. | ||
| But here's the thing about Joe Walsh. | ||
| He's actually right about some of his political analysis, that there isn't a constituency for Mike Pence or Nikki Haley or Tim Scott. | ||
| We see President Trump continuing to grow that base in the Republican Party. | ||
| And what I think the mainstream media misses is why. | ||
| And it's not even sometimes the substance of policy disagreements. | ||
| It's that the American people right now are on edge. | ||
| They feel like this government is in existence to hurt them in a lot of ways. | ||
| That this government is trying to tell their third grader to mutilate themselves, trying to tell their children that they're somehow intractably oppressed or oppressors because of their skin color. | ||
| That this government is cratering the dollar by printing all this money, spending so much, inducing inflation, And senior citizens are now more worried about outliving their money than they are. | ||
| Death is the good option in Joe Biden. | ||
| I see why John Fetterman is so depressed sometimes. | ||
| But what President Trump understands and what I think the people who support him understand is that we've got to break through the wall here. | ||
| We've got to have that energy in the executive that Alexander Hamilton talked about as central to the country. | ||
| Okay, I've got to pivot now. | ||
| Report out this morning, the trailing 12 months, the deficit's actually $2.1 trillion. | ||
| People's heads are blown up because tax revenues are declining rapidly. | ||
| Interest rates have kicked up, and so you're paying more. | ||
| Where do we stand right now with holding the floor? | ||
| A lot of news articles out about you guys have cut a deal temporarily. | ||
| Walk our audience through it. | ||
| Well, last week, the pistol brace legislation had been held hostage, had been taken off the floor. | ||
| That was going to hurt possibly tens of millions of gun owners. | ||
| We have now liberated the Pistol Brace Bill that is coming to the floor this week, and we've allowed the floor to be open. | ||
| Yes, and you've opened it to allow that, and we've sort of put everyone in a situation, I think, to be able to get that bill passed. | ||
| But next week is a new story, Steve, and next week we are not going to continue to engage in failure theater absent real change to put downward pressure on spending. | ||
| And I can tell you that in our meeting with leadership yesterday, they seemed to get it. | ||
| They seemed to understand it. | ||
| There was no question as to whether or not we could retake control of the floor at any time for any purpose. | ||
| And so now what we're doing is we're getting members of Congress to file revocations of some of these national emergencies that have operated as massive slush lines. | ||
| You're talking about Gosar had the spirit of the case. | ||
| That's right. And that's playing out? | ||
| And we are getting those filed. | ||
| What about the Ken Buck authorizations? | ||
| Trying to get Congressman Buck on here. | ||
| Is that real? There are several committees. | ||
| Well, it is absolutely not performative. | ||
| It will build the muscle memory of the Congress to actually get to these unauthorized programs. | ||
| There are 1118 unauthorized programs in the federal government that the posse is sending money to every single day, and they're not even authorized programs. | ||
| And the real way to put downward pressure on spending is not some budgetary gimmick, with rescissions. | ||
| The real way is to pull it up, root and branch, is to ensure that you get a lot of these entities that have never gone through the scrutiny of congressional review sitting in those committees explaining how they spend every dollar. | ||
| And you know what, Steve? It may take a while to fully affect that strategy, but my hope is that it will last long beyond my tenure here. | ||
| I am on a mission to change this place, and January was a part of that change. | ||
| But as I told you then, and as I have repeated on this show, all we did in January was build a toolkit. | ||
| And now we actually have to do the spade work and plow through these agencies and Just deauthorize these programs that have been flush with cash for far too long. | ||
| Leadership, and you got Granger out. | ||
| They're talking about, you know, she's going to authorize. | ||
| What we cut the deal was, was actually the ceiling. | ||
| She's talking about the floor, the appropriations process, the regular order. | ||
| Isn't that performative? We're 100 days away. | ||
| I keep telling people, focus on September 15th to September 30th. | ||
| We're 100 days away. | ||
| Let's say the appropriations bills come in and they're at the 2022 levels. | ||
| So there's significant cuts. | ||
| Isn't that performative? The Senate's going to reject that, and we're going to be jammed in that last week of September about doing a CR or a mini-CR or everything that you worry about, another Omnibus? | ||
| Well, the Massey strategy, which is not one that I adhere to, but I think in fairness, you would have to say that the Massey strategy of a 99 % CR would be a cut. | ||
| Now, I am a critic of that because I don't believe that what we need is a horizontal cut system, Where we just shave a little bit off of everybody. | ||
| Frankly, there are some areas like Homeland Security veterans. | ||
| You want deep vertical cuts. Yes, I want the deep vertical cuts. | ||
| And I want to get rid of these programs. | ||
| Programatically. Yes. That's how you do it. | ||
| Not waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| That's ridiculous. Well, and just taking a program and using budgetary gimmicks to make it look like you spent 1 % less is a lot easier than, you know, for the big spenders. | ||
| And that's why we are trying to get the vertical cuts. | ||
| Have the moderates in this conference learned their lesson, the 149, about how the outrage back in their districts? | ||
| Are you guys being embraced by those people, or is it outright open-range warfare now? | ||
| Well, as I think you know, I'm not for everyone. | ||
| But I do get about 70 % of the vote every time I put my name on the ballot. | ||
| And so I know what my constituents want. | ||
| My constituents do not want me to come here to go along to get along. | ||
| They want me to fight to put down pressure. | ||
| No lobbyist money, no PAC money. | ||
| And by the way, I just walked out of a conference meeting with my colleagues on the way to the war room, and they were yelling at me saying, oh, well, you're just doing this for outrage and fundraising. | ||
| And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, you all go and prostitute yourself to lobbyists for money. | ||
| And you want to criticize me because hundreds of thousands of Americans all over this country give me $10, $15, $25 at MattGates.com? | ||
| Like, shame on you. You come to this place And go and shine the shoes of the special interest. | ||
| And then you go do their bidding with your vote card. | ||
| And so I wasn't taken too kindly to that criticism. | ||
| And one member of Congress got up and said, well, you know, I have an important bill to add 15 rail inspectors and you 11 who took control of the floor, you've blocked my ability to go get my 15 rail inspectors. | ||
| So just just imagine. | ||
| The worldview you'd have to have to believe that this country is 15 rail inspectors away from salvation and recovery. | ||
| We are not in the era of incrementalism. | ||
| The easy choices are over, okay? | ||
| We have to make hard choices now. | ||
| And the adults have to step up and do that. | ||
| And continuing the failure theater is not something I'm going to be a part of. | ||
| And if that means we have to grind this place to a halt, Then so be it. | ||
| But I want to move forward with the Gosar strategy, with my colleague Ken Buck's strategy. | ||
| I want to make sure that when we're appropriating, we're not using funny budgetary gimmicks, but that we're getting rid of these programs that are wasteful and often weaponized. | ||
| Okay, we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| That's a great summary. I know you've got to go back to work. | ||
| I would ask you to give us 10 or 15 minutes to the other side. | ||
| We're going to play Grassley's speech, either the highlight reel from the beginning, Anique Gates' comment, and we're going to get Natalie Winters in here as soon as we get audio set up. | ||
| Short commercial break. Back in the war room. | ||
| Our guest in the house, he was going to be the co-host, but he's got to run, is Matt Gates. | ||
| We got Natalie Winters, Captain Bannon, Caroline Wren, down on the scene of the crime in Miami. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll return in a moment. | |
| Members of justice in this country will turn our constitutional republic upside down. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks to the political infections within the Biden Justice Department and the FBI, we were well along the road for that to happen. | ||
| This senator will do all that he can to fight political infection in the Department of Justice and the FBI. And you fight it then by bringing transparency to what this government does. | ||
| The public's business ought to be public. | ||
| Transparency brings accountability. | ||
| With respect to the 1023 shown to that House Oversight Committee, from what I've been told by folks who've reviewed it, it's filled with redactions. | ||
| Now the document that Comer and I read, had maybe two or three half-inch redactions. | ||
| Not all sentences redacted, as I'm told the document in the SCIF is. | ||
| So, Director Wray placed redactions on a document that's already unclassified. | ||
| As I've said before, unclassified. | ||
| More than that, the FBI made Congress review a redacted unclassified document in a classified facility. | ||
| That goes to show you the disrespect that the FBI has for Congress. | ||
| On a previous time on this Senate floor, I think I told my fellow senators that what's so unusual about an unclassified document being given to the public when I think it was May the 18th of this year there was leaked to the New York Times a classified document and even the name of a confidential human source. | ||
| So We're kind of in a strange situation here. | ||
| Classified document can be leaked to the New York Times, but a non-classified document can't be made public to 300 million Americans if they're interested in reading it. | ||
| Now, accordingly, Congress still lacks a full and complete picture with respect to what that document really says. | ||
| That's why it's important that the document be made public without unnecessary redactions for the American people to see. | ||
| Can you believe redacting an unclassified document? | ||
| So now, let me assist for the purposes of more transparency on this subject. | ||
| The 1023 produced to the House Committee's redacted reference That the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversation with them. | ||
| Seventeen such recordings. | ||
| According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses 15 audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden. | ||
| According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses two audio recordings of phone calls between him and then Vice President Joe Biden. | ||
| These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case that he got into a tight spot. | ||
| The 1023 also indicates that then Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burma, employing Hunter Biden. | ||
| Based on the facts known to the Congress and the public, it's clear that the Justice Department, the FBI, haven't nearly had the same laser focus on the Biden family. | ||
| Special Counsel Jack Smith has used a recording against former President Trump. | ||
| Well, what is US Attorney Weiss doing with respect to these alleged Joe and Hunter Biden recordings that are apparently relevant to the high-stakes bribery scheme? | ||
| Getting a full and complete 1023 is critical for the American people to know and understand the true nature of the document and to hold the Justice Department and the FBI accountable. | ||
| It's also important for asserting congressional, constitutional congressional oversight powers against an out-of-control executive branch, obviously drunk, with political infection. | ||
| Remember, Congress has received 1023s in the past, and they've been made public. | ||
| So asking for this 1023 to be turned over to the American people to read is not an unusual thing that goes on with 1023s. | ||
| Congress owes it to the American people, And the brave and heroic whistleblowers to continue to fight for transparency in this matter and make this document public without unnecessary redactions. | ||
| And I want everybody to remember that I have read the unredacted version, except for a couple or three half minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Half-inch redactions, I'd say. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I yield the floor. | ||
| Okay, this is a blockbuster because that old Iowa farmer is a tough nut. | ||
| God bless Senator Grassley. | ||
| He has done some of the most serious oversight work and the development of these whistleblowers. | ||
| I have debriefed the whistleblower that brought a lot of this information forward. | ||
| This is not some low-level special agent somewhere. | ||
| We're talking about someone high up in the system. | ||
| You've debriefed the actual whistleblower that we're talking about. | ||
| Yes, I have. And I found the claims credible, but I want to be very clear about something. | ||
| Even what's on a 1023 is an allegation. | ||
| And the important work ahead is not to reflexively lurch into some sort of legislative procedural posture. | ||
| It is to track down the bank records. | ||
| It is to look for these 17 audio recordings that I knew were alleged to have existed several months ago. | ||
| But not all this stuff is in the United States, is my belief. | ||
| And so there's going to have to be some very serious work. | ||
| We may have to take some foreign trips to go and hustle it up and ensure that we get the information necessary for our oversight. | ||
| Here's, I think, the frustration. | ||
| We had Garrett Ziegler on yesterday on the great website. | ||
| You had Ray and Barr, two Republican nominees of President Trump's, had the laptop from hell no later than one December of 19. | ||
| These allegations come out of Rudy's putting forward to a U.S. attorney at Bill Barr's request in Pittsburgh in a 100-page report in January of 2020. | ||
| This is June of 2023. | ||
| It's important then to use that analysis to bifurcate the work ahead, right? | ||
| One is the crime. | ||
| Did Joe Biden take these bribes? | ||
| And no one pays a bribe without getting a deliverable, and we already know the deliverable happened. | ||
| It was the firing of a prosecutor that the bribe payers wanted fired. | ||
| The other question, which is very important to the country, no less important than Joe Biden being compromised, is whether or not our national security apparatus is compromised. | ||
| It's the cover-up. | ||
| It's the effort to take this 1023 that came in from truly one of the best sources that the FBI has, someone who has initiated Hundreds of cases that led to real prosecutions. | ||
| So the opposite of Christopher Steele. | ||
| This is one of the best sources in the FBI that brought this information forward, and then it was a rat hold. | ||
| And it was a rat hold because there are special teams of people at the FBI task forces whose entire job it is to go and find any derogatory information about the Bidens and label it as foreign disinformation. | ||
| It's the same op that they were running on the outside With the 51 citing the Hunter Biden level, they have a parallel op that they run on the inside to try to discredit and shelve important information that federal law enforcement and the Congress should be able to review. | ||
| Okay. How is this going to come together in this country? | ||
| You guys are fighting each other. | ||
| One of the reasons that you're saying in the 20, you're saying we're not being aggressive enough. | ||
| Not that you want to get over your skis. | ||
| Let me just be blunt about this, okay? | ||
| For all the people who are saying, Gates, why haven't you moved to vacate in like the last, you know, 20 minutes? | ||
| The answer is a motion to vacate would end the oversight agenda. | ||
| It would. Take my word for it. | ||
| It would end the oversight agenda. | ||
| Because they would use that as a shit against you to end this fight? | ||
| Of course. Look, if we moved to vacate, McCarthy would immediately go cut a deal with Hakeem, and the key feature of that deal would be Hakeem Jeffries would have veto power over any subpoena we would send out to get these recordings, to get this information. | ||
| And as mad and frustrated as we all are at the Speaker over this debt limit deal, this oversight work ahead is going to define whether or not we lose the country or not. | ||
| I really believe it. And while we've got to have a simultaneous strategy in place to put downward pressure on spending, and I've laid that out, we cannot take the eye off the ball when it comes to the first family being compromised and our own federal law enforcement functioning as their plumbers. | ||
| Walk me through, then, how do you pull this together, given the fight you guys are having every day? | ||
| Next week you're saying, hey, we're taking the floor back. | ||
| Until we get a fully negotiated new deal, walk us through how this proceeds. | ||
| Well, I think these things have to proceed in parallel. | ||
| What's the saying here in Washington? | ||
| You've got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. | ||
| Look, we are in a state of financial crisis in this country with the dollar and just what you described about how the deficits are going to be bigger than they ever anticipated. | ||
| One of the things we got in Limit Save Grow was that it was a date or a dollar amount to trigger the debt limit again. | ||
| Whichever came first. Right now- We would be back here in October. | ||
| Exactly. And we'd have another chance to win another spending fight. | ||
| But now we have to use the other tools in the toolbox, right? | ||
| The tools we developed in January, whether it's zeroing out the salaries of bureaucrats or using points of order against any type of omnibus that would come to the floor. | ||
| We can't allow Washington to function as usual. | ||
| But by God, I want to pick up on this work that Senator Grassley and his phenomenal team have done. | ||
| I want to make sure that we run down every one of these leads that the FBI was unwilling to run down. | ||
| I want to pull the camera back. | ||
| We've got two minutes. I know you've got to bounce. | ||
| Because you hear a lot of rhetoric thrown around a lot. | ||
| But Grassy is a very serious person. | ||
| And I tell people all the time, you're very serious. | ||
| Particularly when you look at things, the reality of it. | ||
| How deep a problem do we have with the administrative and deep state now that you're finding more and more information about this situation? | ||
| Well, I mean, this was truly the great win of the Obama Holder administration. | ||
| It wasn't healthcare. The great win of the Obama administration is that they were able to vertically integrate some of the smartest operatives that they had in the movement on the left into these positions of power where they count the votes and they decide who the handcuffs go on. | ||
| And once you kind of control who counts the votes and who puts the handcuffs on people and can charge people, a lot of the senators, congressmen, governors, that becomes a mirage of power. | ||
| That's not the real power. | ||
| But I want to pin you down on this. | ||
| Do you see what I'm saying regarding a motion to vacate killing the oversight agenda? | ||
| You agree with that? So far better to try to shape the environment. | ||
| That's a blunt force instrument right now. The posse is helping me immeasurably. | ||
| I want to shape the battlefield on the oversight agenda and on the spending front. | ||
| And I think we've got to do both at the same time. | ||
| Hey, look, this nation fought a world war in two theaters. | ||
| I think you and I can fight this war in two theaters. | ||
| Fantastic. Thank you for doing this today. | ||
| I know you can't stay with us. How do people get to all your content, the podcast, all of it? | ||
| Firebrand is the podcast that's everywhere on the internet and at Matt Gates and at RepMattGates. | ||
| If they want to toss you five bucks, where do they go? | ||
| MattGates.com, funded only by the people of this country, not by the lobbyists in special interest, and I'm the only Republican in Congress who can say so. | ||
| You're in your armed services, so you don't take any defense. | ||
| You don't take any of the defense contractor cash. | ||
| Yeah, no need. I don't need it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I need the people. Congressman Gates, thank you very much. | |
| Short commercial break. We're going to toss it back to Miami when we come back in a second. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We rejoice when there's no more. | |
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| They've been after Trump from the beginning, but... | ||
| Questions swirl around President Biden's handling of classified documents. | ||
| Found in President Biden's garage. | ||
| Multiple classified documents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You and the former president are both now under investigation by the Justice Department. | |
| But they didn't indict Biden. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Instead, Biden's DOJ went after Trump. | |
| Anything to block him from becoming president again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stand with President Trump against Biden's corruption. | |
| Make America Great Again, Inc. | ||
| is responsible for the content of this advertising. | ||
| Okay, great ad right there. | ||
| Let me toss to Natalie Winters in Miami. | ||
| And by the way, all the war and posse that's down there wants you to come by Real America's Voice where war room is. | ||
| Natalie, there's a lot of activity and commotion. | ||
| You and Mo, take it away. Tell us what's happening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Certainly, there's been quite a few developments since we last joined you. | |
| One, we got the addition of the MAGA hat, but the security presence has certainly increased. | ||
| They've sort of quartered off the media section. | ||
| They've probably reduced it by about 75%, but it seems like the primary material that they're using To make these barricades, again, I just want to lay markers down here since we know, I've learned from history with January 6th, is just police tape on both sides. | ||
| There doesn't really seem to be any other physical fortifications. | ||
| There are a lot of personnel here. | ||
| We have, as you said, had a lot of war room posse come by and say hi, which is wonderful to see them. | ||
| I can't say the same for NBC, which is next to us. | ||
| Not a lot of NBC fans here, no shade. | ||
| But in terms of the protesters, I will say it is starting to heat up. | ||
| A little bit. There's definitely been some back and forth between the pro-Trump people who definitely outnumber the anti-Trump protesters. | ||
| I will say it is interesting. | ||
| There was one, I've really only seen one, maybe two anti-Trump banners, but the mainstream media anytime they see One of the anti-Trump signs. | ||
| They run over to them faster than I think I've ever seen anyone in the mainstream media run. | ||
| So I think there is some interesting coverage. | ||
| It'll be interesting to see the bias come out in that regard. | ||
| But other than that, I would say the police presence is interesting. | ||
| Like I said, it's mainly personnel as opposed to actual physical fortifications. | ||
| And also, you asked me earlier about the MAGA base. | ||
| The MAGA base is already... | ||
| Oh, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, the MAGA base is already strong. | |
| It's not even 11 a.m. | ||
| yet, and we already see a ton of pro-Trump personnel here with signs, you know, bullhorns cheering. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's going to get even bigger the later on we go today. | |
| Mo, let me ask you a question. | ||
| Is there any separation? | ||
| Is the police trying to separate the Antifa and anti-Trump elements from our MAGA base there? | ||
| Are they coming between them? | ||
| Are they barricading them off? | ||
| Are they in two different sets of areas? | ||
| Are they just intermingling? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're intertwined. | |
| As of right now, there's only a few counter-protesters, so they have been intertwined, predominantly MAGA support. | ||
|
unidentified
|
However, they have not separated the two. | |
| We will see later today if the two are separated. | ||
| Natalie, let me ask you, is that a recipe for disaster? | ||
| Because it's going to get a little heated down there, right? | ||
| Particularly as we get into the afternoon and President Trump is going to be booked with the FBI and then arranged here. | ||
| Aren't we looking for trouble unless they're separated? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do we? So, Steve, we are actually being told to move by the police right now as part of all of the media, so I think we're going to have to answer that question in a little bit. | |
| Unfortunately, we don't have a choice. | ||
| We have to go. But we will be back and be giving you breaking updates as they come. | ||
| Okay, guys, make sure you don't... | ||
| What we don't need, Natalie, is you and Mo put in the Who's Gow today, okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We need our coverage. Natalie Winters and Captain Bannon in Miami. | |
| Like I said, it's a very fluid situation. | ||
| Is Ben Berquam out in the crowd? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can I toss to Ben? Hey, Ben. | |
| Yes, sir. Hey, you're out in the crowd. | ||
| By the way. They've just rolled up our coverage. | ||
| Happy MAGA Pride Day. | ||
| Happy MAGA Pride Day to all the folks out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, go for it. I'm sorry. I've got to do it. | |
| I guess they're moving the media right now where the tents are, where the main coverage is. | ||
| Tell me what's happening to the crowd. | ||
| Particularly, are they separating out the Antifa and the anti-Trump haters from the MAGA populist patriots? | ||
| No, let me just move you around. | ||
| I'll give you a little view of this, and I want to introduce you to our Navy MAGA Posse friend here. | ||
| So this is, you can see the media, all the tents in the background there. | ||
| That's all media. As we come out this way, we're more in the front of the courthouse. | ||
| These are all the protesters and counter-protesters, and they kind of keep moving up and down the street. | ||
| You've got some crazies. | ||
| I recognize one of the ladies from Washington, D.C. She's out there screaming all kinds of nonsense. | ||
| But right now they're all intermingled. | ||
| The one thing, the one concern I have and a lot of people have is Antifa and BLM have said that they're going to come out. | ||
| And do what they do, which is violence, which is what they did for four years under President Trump, which is terrorized. | ||
| And so I anticipate if that ends up happening, the police will end up separating it. | ||
| Right now, there's some yelling back and forth, but for the most part, there's no violence. | ||
| People are heated. | ||
| But this is a media scrum like I've never seen before. | ||
| It goes all the way down, around the building. | ||
| There's more media here than I've ever seen. | ||
| Hey, Ben, just hang on. | ||
| We've got to take a commercial break. | ||
| I want you to stay right there. We're going to come back. | ||
| Okay. So let us reestablish. | ||
| They're shifting the media right now. | ||
| So Captain Ben and Natalie, our anchors, are moving around. | ||
| We've also got Caroline Wren is there for the War Room. | ||
| And of course, Ben Berquam, our investigative reporter. | ||
| What I see so far, I'm not crazy about. | ||
| And this is one of my observations yesterday. | ||
| If you're asking for trouble, you let these two groups get together because the anti-Trump, Antifa, BLM are violent people. | ||
| And they're always there to get in people's faces. | ||
| They're always there to try to pick fights. | ||
| And I'm just an observer here anchoring in Washington, D.C. But I've got to tell you, I'm not enthusiastic about what I'm seeing down there on the crowd control. | ||
| I think that we're just asking for problems. | ||
| And what we don't want today is problems. | ||
| This thing we want to get in and out of. | ||
| And I hope the Miami authorities and others do the job that the New York NYPD does. | ||
| And I realize NYPD does this every day and they're set for that. | ||
| Miami is not. But somebody's got to think this through. | ||
| Take a look at those crowd shots. | ||
| We're going to come back and look at more crowd. | ||
| We've got Ben Burquam. We have Captain Maureen Bannon. | ||
| We have Natalie Winters. | ||
| We've got Caroline Wren. Hopefully our anchors will be back in place after they move the tent. | ||
| Very fluid situation, but we're sticking with the signal, not the noise today. | ||
| Short commercial break. Back in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We will fight till they're all gone. | |
| We rejoice when there's no more. |
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