Jan. 8, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
48:29
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Well, the Times had a great rundown of what happened after Trump lost, what happened on January the 6th, how Trump was pushed to the side, and how one by one by one they all folded. | ||
| And now we're seeing in the media, we're now seeing in the media, because they want to get close to Donald Trump, and some media people, I guess, want to have access to him on the campaign trail. | ||
| I mean, can you call them Republicans? | ||
| I don't know what you call them, actually, when they're quoting Hitler and they're channeling Hitler, but be that as it may, the transformation, it keeps going. | ||
| And now we're seeing the rise once again and expect to see it in all the same spots we saw it in 2020. | ||
| In that campaign, the rise of the anti-anti-Trump forces who say, If you hold Donald Trump to account for stealing nuclear secrets, you have Trump derangement syndrome. | ||
| A New York Times columnist actually this Sunday going, oh, but if you actually read the Constitution the way the Constitution should be... | ||
| People will look back for centuries and say, this is the moment American democracy died. | ||
| Because, you know, you think about those left-wing radicals that are doing this, you think about those freaks at the Federalist Society, those left-wing Marxist... Wait, um... I'm sorry, no, wait. | ||
| They're really conservative legal scholars. | ||
| But that Judge Lute, who's been at the center of every left-wing radical harebrained progre... | ||
| Wait a second. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Oh, wait a second. | ||
| These are constitutional conservatives who are saying this, and yet you're seeing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times saying, if you actually hold Donald Trump to account like you'd hold any other politician, it's only going to make him sorry. | ||
| This is Obi-Wan Kenobi, right? | ||
| This is the Obi-Wan Kenobi trick. | ||
| Strike me down, constitutionalists, and I, Trump, will only become more powerful. | ||
| No, it's not that. | ||
|
unidentified
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We've set up an architecture of identification of ill people at the senior level. | |
| Should we be up in an uproar if the Secretary of Defense was ill over the last number of days? | ||
| We should be and the White House should be. | ||
| The fact that the Secretary of Defense was ill and hospitalized and the President didn't know about it for days. | ||
| We're in a situation where there are two raging wars with strong U.S. | ||
| interests. | ||
| Let's put it that way. | ||
| ISIS is active again. | ||
| There are crises after crises after crises, and the President of the United States didn't know that his Secretary of Defense was out of pocket. | ||
| There are protocols designed to prevent something like that from happening. | ||
| Those protocols all broke down something more serious than a mealy-mouthed apology from the Defense Secretary. | ||
| The bipartisan uproar is going to be tangible, but I would suggest it will focus on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. | ||
| What should be the response of the White House? | ||
| Well, the White House should demand something more substantive by way of an apology from the Secretary of Defense. | ||
| And the president has to figure whether he's satisfied with the answer that he gets from the secretary about why he was incommunicado for so long. | ||
| Or at least he was, that the White House was not told. | ||
| This seems like a very basic, simple mistake to make. | ||
| And had this happened in any major corporation, heads would have rolled. | ||
| Lisa, you can move on quickly from this. | ||
| I get all of that. | ||
| But it's not exactly like the global backdrop at the moment is quiet. | ||
| It's anything but. | ||
| That's the issue. | ||
| And I think that Bobby actually raised one of the key points, which is, is this White House going to hold Secretary of Defense responsible for really violating the chain of command and really giving the White House a heads up when there is a material shift in leadership? | ||
| Several big events took place last week, Tom. | ||
| And I'm just wondering, who spoke to who? | ||
| Was there no conversation between the White House and the Defense Secretary when those things were happening? | ||
| All that will be analyzed. | ||
| And I agree, it's a busy time when you're looking at defense. | ||
| But far more than that, it's the heritage, the history of America across the 20th century. | ||
| We have a constitutional amendment on this. | ||
| We need healthy people at the top. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| Here's how I got a free shot of 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'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? | ||
|
unidentified
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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. Babb. | |
| It's Monday, 8 January, The Year of the Lord 2024. | ||
| You're seeing the collapse of the illegitimate Biden regime having nothing to run on. | ||
| Their central point of what they're running on is that you, the most powerful audience, the War Room Posse, The cadre of the war room being the most powerful audience in all media, that you're the problem. | ||
| You're domestic terrorists, you're white nationalists, you're Christian nationalists, you're the worst, just worst humans on earth. | ||
| You're trying to resurrect Hitler's regime in 1932 by voting Donald Trump back into office in a landslide and then taking over the government and never having another election. | ||
| It's on and on and on. | ||
| That's that's what they're running on because they can't point to anything they touch. | ||
| They haven't totally screwed up either by design or by just pure incompetence. | ||
| We've got so much to go through today. | ||
| Obviously the sellout on the debt deal. | ||
| We're going to get to that. | ||
| Raheem's going to join us. | ||
| Russ Vogt's going to join us, but I've got to start with have to start with this. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Putting our troops and putting the United States of America in harm's way on something that is so mind-boggling. | ||
| It's very hard to even get your arms around it. | ||
| We're going to start with Jack Posobiec and Jeff Clark to kind of lay out what's going on. | ||
| Posobiec, you know, I was an aide or special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations when I came out of sea duty back in 1981. | ||
| I showed up on the day of Reagan's inauguration. | ||
| It is inconceivable, brother Posobiec, That it's, I mean, it's inconceivable, and it's by law, that in the audience, you're not up to speed on this. | ||
| Lloyd Austin was in ICU and never told anybody, including the President of the United States, I think for five days, and three days hard down, and nobody knew about it. | ||
| Pasova, give me your perspective before I get Clark in here. | ||
| Well, Steve, what we're seeing is not only obviously a massive violation of U.S. | ||
| national security, it's a massive violation of U.S. | ||
| law as pertains to the National Command Authority and also as pertains to the military's personnel readiness program. | ||
| Keep in mind, this guy is somebody Who's part of the nuclear weapon chain of command, the nuclear response, the idea that he would be in the ICU. | ||
| We don't know whether intubated or what, but unconscious for a period of days. | ||
| The president didn't know. | ||
| We're told that his own aides may not have known. | ||
| Potentially just his chief of staff knew about this. | ||
| But she was out as well and didn't inform anyone. | ||
| You got an undersecretary now of policy essentially running our military. | ||
| And this is at a time where, and Steve, I've talked to people who are deployed right now. | ||
| I've talked to people who are deployed. | ||
| You see what the Navy's doing in the Red Sea. | ||
| Where they're picking off Houthi drones every other day. | ||
| We're talking about people that are having Iranian drones fired at them and rockets fired at them across Syria and Iraq. | ||
| And keep in mind that Taiwan has an election this Saturday. | ||
| Steve, the service secretaries did not know. | ||
| Secretary of the Army, Secretary of the Navy, they did not know about this. | ||
| Secretary of the Air Force. | ||
| The combatant commanders, the COCOMs, did not know about this. | ||
| So if you've got an operation that needs authority up at that level, you've got the entire military potentially in deadlock. | ||
| And Steve, I'll just throw one more thing out there, that this is what the media has been saying about the Russians since the start of the war in Ukraine. | ||
| They said that Putin's comatose, that Shoigu's comatose, they died, they've been replaced by body doubles. | ||
| But it turns out, Steve, that it's not the leaders of the Kremlin that are actually comatose and lying about it. | ||
| It's actually the leaders of the United States government and the United States military. | ||
| Okay, it's the act itself that's the cover-up. | ||
| Real quickly, Frege, Clark, and Jackson, stick around until we get this sorted. | ||
| We're bringing other guests the next time Pacific will stay with us. | ||
| The National Command Authority, this is by law, there's only two people. | ||
| It's the Commander-in-Chief, which is the President, and the Secretary of Defense. | ||
| Like on the nuclear codes, the President has the codes and can order the strike. | ||
| The mechanics of actually doing the strike. | ||
| It has to be the Secretary of Defense, because the combatant commanders, nor all of them, report directly to him. | ||
| It's just a way of officiating. | ||
| This is black-letter law. | ||
| My point is, laws are broken. | ||
| Crimes were committed. | ||
| Crimes were committed in failing to defend the United States of America. | ||
| And this doesn't even deal with the carrier battle group under attack last week, taking incoming in Iraq. | ||
| Basically, a non-nuclear situation. | ||
| But this is the biggest Darkest mistake I've seen a US government make since I was a naval officer in my early 20s, sir. | ||
| Look, I've never seen anything like it. | ||
| You talk about the fact that this is someone who's supposed to be there authorizing these operations. | ||
| God only knows what operations couldn't get authorization because he was gone. | ||
| Then if, and keep in mind that we know the Iranians have intel assets all throughout the Pentagon and the State Department. | ||
| We know that the Chinese are all over the U.S. | ||
| government. | ||
| We know the Qataris are all over D.C. | ||
| So here's the real question. | ||
| Did our adversaries know about this? | ||
| Because you got China all over Twitter all weekend laughing about this, making fun of us. | ||
| So they're talking big because Taiwan's election comes up this Saturday. | ||
| This Saturday, Taiwan's got an election. | ||
| China knows we've lost our Secretary of Defense. | ||
| The Chinese Minister of Defense, he says, oh, that's interesting. | ||
| The Russian Minister of Defense says, oh, that's interesting. | ||
| North Korea's out there popping off their shells at YP-Do and PY-Do up there on the northern limit line. | ||
| You've also, of course, got the carrier battle group under strike in the Red Sea, which, by the way, U.S. | ||
| military, if you noticed, or I should say the U.S. | ||
| government in this case, not able to put together a naval coalition in the Red Sea. | ||
| So, Compare that now to if you're talking about the U.S. | ||
| The reason that we have, Steve, the stated reason that we have for U.S. | ||
| military power projection around the world is for keeping open the sea lines of communication. | ||
| Keeping open the sea lines. | ||
| We're preserving freedom of the sea. | ||
| Well, here's the problem. | ||
| If the U.S. | ||
| Navy and the U.S. | ||
| government can't politically get their act together to put together a coalition to defend the Red Sea, you're seeing the fall apart of this off the strait of Bab el-Mandeb. | ||
| When it comes to Somalia. | ||
| And then the question is, all right, so if China is now looking at this situation and say, do we want to make a move on Taiwan? | ||
| They could say, well, it looks like the US is failing to meet their diplomatic obligations. | ||
| They're failing to put together coalitions. | ||
| They're bogged down in Ukraine. | ||
| And they don't even have a Secretary of Defense. | ||
| Lloyd Austin lied. | ||
| The government lied. | ||
| They don't know if this guy's conscious or not. | ||
| The White House doesn't know. | ||
| Every single person involved with this needs to be fired, starting with Lloyd Austin and then proceeding to the White House. | ||
| Jack, just hang on for one second. | ||
| By the way, when we talk about the Red Sea, that's just the prosecutor's side of it. | ||
| Before I do some law, Steve, let me do a couple of extra facts, right? | ||
| getting too technical of you know 32 chapter C, walk through the structure, the legal structure of what we have and the violations of that. | ||
| Sir. Sure, but before I do some law Steve let me do a couple of extra facts right. | ||
| So the president didn't know about this until January 4th you know three days into this emergency hospital stay while Austin's in ICU. | ||
| Blinken didn't know about it. | ||
| Jake Sullivan didn't know about it. | ||
| It's totally inexcusable. | ||
| And then you come to find out that the Deputy Secretary of Defense was on vacation in Puerto Rico during this time, and they didn't even tell her why she was assuming some of his duties. | ||
| And that's a problem in and of itself. | ||
| You can't just deal with some of the duties being devolved upon the Deputy, you know, the first You know, principal officer, you got to deal with all of them. | ||
| And so there was a gap at the very least. | ||
| And then they talked to the chief of staff and the chief of staff was out sick. | ||
| So now they're trying to deflect blame onto her and say she was the one who failed to tell the White House. | ||
| I mean, it's truly an absurd situation. | ||
| OK, so as a matter of law, the Vacancies Reform Act has been violated, Steve, and that has a provision in it that requires whenever there is a head of an agency Especially a cabinet officer, and especially one as important as the SecDef, that each House of Congress and the Comptroller General be informed. | ||
| That did not happen until Friday. | ||
| That happened just before the Pentagon released a press statement in the evening on Friday the 5th. | ||
| So, this is a situation where a flat law of the United States was violated, and I know that what they might say in response to that is, well, that's really for situations where someone's resigned or died, but the statute's very clear and says that it applies whenever someone is essentially incapable of carrying out the duties of the office for any reason. | ||
| So this is a black letter violation of the Vacancies Reform Act, and what can Congress do if it doesn't even know about this situation? | ||
| It's a complete violation of law. | ||
| It's a travesty. | ||
| Jeff, hang on for one second. | ||
| I want to keep you. | ||
| Frank Gaffney, General Boykin, Colonel Harvey, we're going all in on this this morning. | ||
| There's got to be some heads rolling. | ||
|
unidentified
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Um, Abigail Spanberger, who's on the Intel Committee, former CIA officer, Democrat, say it's not appropriate how this was handled. | |
| Do you agree? | ||
| I do agree with that. | ||
| I think Secretary Austin did make a mistake or his staff made a mistake in not notifying the correct people. | ||
| But I think we'll learn more about this when he is released and he's allegedly going to be released today. | ||
| What happened on the 23rd and he was on leave during that period. | ||
| He took leave specifically to do a medical procedure. | ||
| And then came back and was readmitted due to, from my understanding, pain. | ||
| I fault them for that. | ||
| Any commander knows that they have to notify their boss when something serious is going on that might take them out of the loop. | ||
| But it appears that the right procedures were put in place. | ||
| He named his deputy, Kathy Hicks, to take over for him. | ||
| And from what I understand, and I've talked to senior administration officials, he was always in communications with the people at the Defense Department and the White House. | ||
| Wow, that's new information. | ||
| That's not what these stories are talking about. | ||
| But that's where we got to drill down. | ||
| I think you get five or six scalps on this thing. | ||
| Tom Nichols. | ||
| Is a former instructor at the Naval War College and one of the leading Trump haters. | ||
| He writes for the Atlantic Magazine, which as you know is the intelligentsia's, the uniparty elite intelligentsia's platform for pure Trump hate every day. | ||
| He wrote a piece yesterday in the Atlantic. | ||
| They called these guys out and said, hey, this needs to be answered immediately and all the details. | ||
| But he gave an example. | ||
| On 9 November of 1979, at 3 o'clock in the morning, Mika Brzezinski's father, Dr. Brzezinski, who was National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, got a call from Major General William Odom, the head of NORAD, at 3 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| And said, there's been a massive launch from Russia. | ||
| There's, you know, hundreds of nuclear weapons headed to the United States. | ||
| It will hit DC and everywhere and within 20 minutes. | ||
| Can you notify the president? | ||
| And as he put, he didn't even wake his wife up because he said, hey, we're going to be incinerated in about 18 minutes. | ||
| As he sets up to call the White House and wake up the president, Odom calls back and says, stop, stop, stop. | ||
| It's a massive mistake. | ||
| Somebody booted into a computer, a training exercise. | ||
| This is not really happening. | ||
| The point Nichols makes is that if he had called Carter, the person that actually would execute on the firing of nuclear weapons in retaliation to the Russians would be Secretary of Defense Harold Brown. | ||
| And you don't have a second to mess around. | ||
| You have to know where Brown is, where the red phone is, the command structure, all of it. | ||
| There can't be any question whatsoever. | ||
| of what's going on. | ||
| How big a violation do we have? | ||
| And now the lies and spin, you just heard, they're trying to do a limited hangout right there by saying, hey, talk to administration officials. | ||
| He was always conscious and always in communication. | ||
| Jack Posobiec. | ||
| Yeah, he's in the ICU. | ||
| What, did he bring the red phone into the ICU with him? | ||
| Did he make sure that that was at a skiff? | ||
| Is that he's got access to all that communication? | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| Steve, this is a complete joke. | ||
| We've become the LGBT version of the Soviet Union because we're running around up there with the White House and this Pentagon Running around with their heads cut off, the chickens with their heads cut off, lying out of both sides of their mouth. | ||
| You got the White House didn't know what was going on. | ||
| You got the Pentagon lying about what went on. | ||
| He said, okay, he's not, he's not fully hospitalized. | ||
| He's not intubated. | ||
| He's in Walter Reed. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But he's in Walter. | ||
| He's still in Walter. | ||
| Is he in Walter Reed now? | ||
| Do we know if he's in Walter Reed? | ||
| They won't even tell you what his current status is. | ||
| And honestly, Steve, I think it's because they didn't know. | ||
| What I've been told as well from White House staffers, is that this is a situation that's been really bleeding over since Biden has a massive, massive rift that's opened between Biden, the State Department, and the Department of Defense after Afghanistan and the failures of Ukraine. | ||
| So he's on the outs with Blinken, he's on the outs with Austin, clearly, and then after October they said Austin barely even talks to the White House anymore. | ||
| He barely even goes over there. | ||
| And this, of course, After the brutal Hamas attack in southern Israel. | ||
| And so the fact of the matter is these guys don't even want to talk to Biden. | ||
| Now, I'm sure, by the way, that a lot of Biden senior staff knew. | ||
| But here's the problem. | ||
| They didn't want to tell Biden about it. | ||
| So that's why they're all lying publicly to protect themselves. | ||
| The House Armed Services Committee to meet tomorrow and go behind closed doors and start to get facts here. | ||
| You have a question? | ||
| Did the Speaker of the House know about this? | ||
| Was the Speaker of the House authorized? | ||
| Was he informed? | ||
| Did he know about this? | ||
| He's only the second in the chain of command. | ||
| Jeff, before I go to Frank, I got Frank Gaffney, General Boykin, Colonel Harvey. | ||
| Clark, the actual National Command Authority, I guess the details of it are classified, we don't really know. | ||
| We do know the only two people that can launch are the Commander-in-Chief and the Secretary of Defense at his direction on an execution of that order. | ||
| But we don't really know many of the details because it's not available to the public. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But Steve, look, what we do know is that the two people who have authority in the nuclear chain, you know, consistent with civilian control of the military, and you have to ask questions about whether that's really actually occurring here, or instead you're dealing with the situation where the military is running itself, which is unconstitutional in our government's design. | ||
| are the President and the Secretary of Defense and so if Lloyd Austin is AWOL and that's really what he is right and I'm sure he's court-martialed or overseen court-martials of soldiers who've gone AWOL. | ||
| He was AWOL. | ||
| This is something where he should be fired immediately by the President of the United States. | ||
| The President of the United States being kept in the dark about it also raises obviously serious concerns about the competency of the President of the United States. | ||
| There's an even bigger factual question here, right? | ||
| This has clearly been going on for longer than this, right? | ||
| He's in the hospital now in the ICU from complications from elective surgery. | ||
| On December 22nd, he apparently entered the hospital first to have the surgery before he then had to go back after the complications. | ||
| Well, he probably was placed under anesthesia for that. | ||
| Was Congress notified about that? | ||
| Both houses and the comptroller? | ||
| Was the president told about that? | ||
| Or basically just the staffers over there, you know, running their own operation and deciding what the president needs to know. | ||
| It's in a situation that cannot be tolerated, has to be explored by Congress extensively and Heads do need to roll like one of those national security officials said in one of your cold open clips. | ||
| Trump is a basis. | ||
| By the way, that was from Bloomberg. | ||
| That's liberal progressive hate. | ||
| That's Bloomberg's network. | ||
| They hate Trump and they're sitting there going heads together. | ||
| Trump is a center of stability. | ||
| Trump's a center of stability. | ||
| The Biden, as Jack just laid out, is nothing but chaos and anarchy and making up as you go along. | ||
| Jeff, how do people get to you over at CRA? | ||
| Sure, so the center is AmericaRenewing.com. | ||
| I'm at JeffClarkUS on Getter and Twitter, and at RealJeffClark on TruthSocial, Steve. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| You guys do amazing work. | ||
| You and Pagliato, the whole team. | ||
| In fact, Russ Vogt's going to join us here shortly to talk about this debacle on the budget. | ||
| Frank Gaffney, you've been to a few rodeos over the years. | ||
| Frank, just how incomprehensible is it, even what we're talking about, sir? | ||
| It beggars belief on so many different levels, Steve, that a guy who is the Secretary of Defense would contemplate doing this. | ||
| We're hoping you're going to have General Boykin on. | ||
| He worked for a Secretary of Defense, and then with Donald Rumsfeld, we're going to have Derek Harvey on. | ||
| He worked closely with, I think, at least one, maybe two of the Trump Secretaries of Defense. | ||
| I worked for Cap Weinberger. | ||
| Cap Weinberger would not have been gone for an hour And Jeff's absolutely right in describing this. | ||
| Absent without leave. | ||
| Without Ronald Reagan knowing exactly where he was and, you know, in probably very, very routine contact. | ||
| The key piece of this is, and I just have to put it boldly, How could it possibly be that nobody noticed Lloyd Austin was gone for three days or more? | ||
| Which, again, raises some of these questions about did some people know and they're just not, you know, copying to it or they didn't want to tell Biden? | ||
| And more broadly, what I think we've heard in the course of this conversation is we have now a dysfunctional national security apparatus manned by people who, let's face it, are mostly Diversity, equity, inclusion, hires. | ||
| And the Defense Department, I think, is now rife with this, Steve. | ||
| We've talked about the promotions. | ||
| Tommy Tuberville was trying to hold them up so that we could avoid compounding this problem. | ||
| The rot starts at the head of this fish. | ||
| It's absolutely clear Lloyd Austin has to go. | ||
| And it seems to me that that probably requires successive levels down, people who were in the loop or should have been in the loop. | ||
| And when they tell you that, no, no, no, no, the deputy secretary was on the job, she knew it. | ||
| She was on vacation. | ||
| This is a scandal. | ||
| Look, I was the aide to the Chief of Naval Operations, one of his special assistants, Doran Weinberger. | ||
| You knew every second. | ||
| You knew exactly where the contacts had to be. | ||
| There wasn't even a question, would there be a moment If anything happened that you couldn't get in touch with. | ||
| Now the decision-making is different, but actually the direct communications to think that the Secretary of Defense has gone for five days and nobody knows. | ||
| We had a carrier battle group and combatants under attack in the Red Sea last week. | ||
| We had troops Up in Iraq took I think 118 hits or a portion of the 118 hits. | ||
| How is Jake Sullivan not talking? | ||
| How does Jake Sullivan not know this? | ||
| How does a National Security Advisor to the President of the United States not know that Austin's not around? | ||
| Is he not talking to the Secretary of Defense every day? | ||
| I mean, Frank, help me out there. | ||
| We got 30 seconds before we go to break. | ||
| He should be. | ||
| In the normal course of things at a time like this, especially, Steve, and you've mentioned some of the things that are already underway. | ||
| I'm particularly worried. | ||
| And thank you for putting an article we call Red Alert up on warroom.org. | ||
| This is a time when the Chinese Communist Party, I believe, is poised to go to a shooting war over Taiwan. | ||
| And they will start it, I'm convinced, with a bonfires of the tyrannies conflagration here at home. | ||
| It is unimaginable that people are not at general quarters and every hand is on deck. | ||
| Okay, Frank, hang over a second. | ||
| General Boykin's going to join us, Colonel Harvey, Jack Posobiec's going to hang for a few more minutes. | ||
| We got Russ Vogt. | ||
| We're going to get into this. | ||
| Okay, let's just be blunt. | ||
| A full and total surrender by the Speaker of the House. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
|
unidentified
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Back in a moment. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bamm. | ||
| You You talk about turbulent times. | ||
| You ain't seen nothing yet because you have these people incompetent and full of malfeasance. | ||
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| against turbulence for 5,000 years of man's history. | ||
| Because folks, 2024 is starting off with a bang about turbulence. | ||
| It's going to be crazy. | ||
| Tomorrow, by the way, just announced President Trump is actually going to be in court. | ||
| He's going to federal court on this immunity hearing. | ||
| Julie Kelly is going to be covering for us. | ||
| This whole thing. | ||
| This week's going to be intense. | ||
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| Jack Pasobic, I know you've got to bounce. | ||
| You've been all over this from the very beginning. | ||
| Give me your closing thoughts. | ||
| I take it Human Events Daily is going to be all over this this afternoon? | ||
| Steve, we are, and we've got Matt Boyle and Natalie Winters on, so it's really going to be kind of the hour three of the War Room on Human Events Daily today, but this is a horrific day for the US, the United States' prestige, certainly in terms of the United States' military force readiness around the world. | ||
| But Steve, we also have to... People need to know that the Secretary of Defense isn't just some employee of the Pentagon. | ||
| This guy has round-the-clock military support in terms of a detail. | ||
| He's got military staff. | ||
| He's got E-4s. | ||
| He's got an entire command center around him. | ||
| They all had to know about this, and that means they lied to the White House. | ||
| Also, we need to know now what orders came down We haven't even gotten the actual dates when this really started or ended. | ||
| I'm not confident that they're telling us the truth in any which way. | ||
| And so we're going to have to go look at the last several weeks of every single order that came down or was signed out by the Secretary of Defense's office to figure out what's going on. | ||
| And we're not going to stop because that means that these all came down without the authority or the informed consent of the National Security Council. | ||
| Let's set the command of nuclear weapons to a side for a second. | ||
| That's massive. | ||
| We had two carrier battle groups in the Red Sea because we can't put together a coalition to keep the sea lanes open of the Suez Canal. | ||
| That's what it's about. | ||
| They were under attack by the Houthis last week, not backing off. | ||
| We just have an announcement that a Hezbollah leader has been killed in Lebanon by the Israelis. | ||
| We had the guys in Iraq under attack. | ||
| Your sons and daughters are in harm's way and they're pulling this crap? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| We need 10 scalps on this thing, at least. | ||
| And by the way, Steve, they haven't targeted the ships themselves yet. | ||
| They can take out our destroyers. | ||
| Okay, go look at what happened in the Moskva last year in the Black Sea. | ||
| Every single navy in the entire world should pay attention to that. | ||
| Because if these drones, or water-based drones, underwater drones, UUVs, can take out a Russian destroyer, then guess what, boys and girls? | ||
| They can take out an American destroyer. | ||
| That means our men and women at sea are at risk right now. | ||
| In harm's way. | ||
| And the Secretary of Defense is not even around and people are covering it up. | ||
| Jack, where do people go to get Human Events Daily? | ||
| And particularly your Twitter feed, which is a little spicy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| People can find out my Twitter. | ||
| The Ivy League professors are finding out about Twitter. | ||
| They started coming. | ||
| They dipped their toes in, and they're already getting burned. | ||
| You got the Swifties dipping their toes in now. | ||
| They're getting burned. | ||
| Of course, we're up there. | ||
| X.com, everywhere else. | ||
| We know. | ||
| Truth Social, Getter. | ||
| And then, of course, we'll be up 2 p.m. | ||
| every single day. | ||
| Rumble, YouTube, Getter, wherever they let us up. | ||
| And we will be live, and we will be alive, as opposed to the current Secretary of Defense. | ||
| All over it. | ||
| Okay, thank you. | ||
| Colonel Derek Harvey, you've worked for a couple of Secretaries of Defense. | ||
| Give me perspective about how big a deal this is, sir. | ||
| Well, Steve, everyone's been on point with this this morning. | ||
| The key thing here is there's tremendous amount of high-intensity, key decisions being made every day in the Pentagon. | ||
| There was an absence of leadership. | ||
| And that means there was lack of coordination. | ||
| What I see, and I'm concerned about the national security implications here, is either the leadership team in the Pentagon, the civilian leadership team, has become irrelevant. | ||
| They're not talking to others. | ||
| They're not involved. | ||
| People don't notice that they're gone, as we've heard already. | ||
| Or there's dysfunctionality. | ||
| And both of those are of significant concern. | ||
| It also reflects, I think, poor leadership. | ||
| And competency of General Austin and Secretary of Defense Austin, and that's of concern too. | ||
| We have a team there at the Pentagon that people didn't even know that they were not engaged. | ||
| Where was Jake Sullivan? | ||
| You've got lots of interagency stuff going on. | ||
| You've got operations, critical operations throughout the world. | ||
| And as others have said, we've got potential threats in Taiwan. | ||
| So this is of significant concern. | ||
| This would not have happened under Dick Cheney, who I worked for when he was Secretary of Defense, and it wouldn't have happened during the Rumsfeld time when I was there, too. | ||
| What should happen here? | ||
| I'm going to ask you and Frank that. | ||
| Russ Vogt is going to come in a second and get into this budget situation. | ||
| Folks, you know we're going to do this in detail every day because this is an outrage. | ||
| You put troops in harm's way. | ||
| Biden, all they do is hammer us that we're the Hitler youth and they're so squared away and they care about democracy. | ||
| This is an out-of-control, illegitimate regime and it's spinning out of control right now. | ||
| They won't fire Alston because they can't take a confirmation hearing. | ||
| If they had a confirmation hearing, Frank Gaffney and the Committee on Present Danger guys would have, it would put the Biden regime's disastrous foreign policy and national security policy on trial. | ||
| That's why they won't fire these guys. | ||
| They have to be forced out. | ||
| Derek Harvey, what should happen here? | ||
| Well, let's talk about what they're doing already. | ||
| They've moved to a cover-up stage where they're going to hunker down, and you've seen that already on CNN where they have references to administration spokespersons to Saying that people were in the loop, it wasn't as bad as it's being characterized. | ||
| The key thing here is we have a situation where the Pentagon leadership team, in my view, has become irrelevant, although they have statutory and legal authorities. | ||
| You know, decisions are being made elsewhere, it seems. | ||
| And what I know about General Austin, now Secretary Austin, is he's always been a person who just takes orders and He's the person in the room, but he's not an impactful person. | ||
| He's not a significant leader. | ||
| He doesn't, he's not the brightest light bulb is what I would say. | ||
| We've had far better four-star generals. | ||
| I could go down a list and we've had far better secretaries of defense that were engaged intellectually, had leadership, had vision. | ||
| We have a figurehead there right now, and that's the problem. | ||
| And they're going to place a figurehead in to replace him. | ||
| If that opportunity should come because of pressure. | ||
| And they don't want to go through that, so they're just going to ride this out. | ||
| Colonel Harvey, how do people get to—well, we've got to make sure they can't ride it out. | ||
| How do people get to you? | ||
| First of all, DerekHarvey.org is my webpage, and then I'm on Twitter at Colonel D Harvey, H-A-R-V-E-Y, and on Truth Social at Derek Harvey. | ||
| By the way, at six o'clock tonight, we're going to be live. | ||
| We got a live show from Taiwan. | ||
| We're going to have we got John Mills over there. | ||
| The new federal state of China has an entire team. | ||
| We're kicking off wall-to-wall coverage on this massive election that's coming up this week in Taiwan. | ||
| Brian Costello is also going to join us. | ||
| So you can see what the money that's pouring in to assist the CCP into major institutions in America, financial institutions. | ||
| It will make your head blow up. | ||
| So that's all at six o'clock today. | ||
| Colonel Harvey, thank you very much for changing your schedule and coming on here, brother. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Gaffney, what should happen here? | ||
| Steve, the biggest concern, and I'm delighted you're doing this kind of coverage of Taiwan, because as you know, at least the polls are correct at the moment, this isn't going to go the way that the election of president of Taiwan is not going to go the way Xi Jinping wants. | ||
| So we're looking now at the most critical question of our time. | ||
| Are we able to deter Xi Jinping from Using one of presumably several different techniques, everything from a blockade to an actual invasion of Taiwan to seize | ||
| Eric Prince, and I hold you and Eric Prince up as two of the smartest guys in this space, Eric Prince said the other day on this podcast, not our podcast, it's another podcast, and I'm trying to track Eric down, he said, hey look, regardless of how this goes, but particularly if she loses, The kinetic part of this is going to start in the spring. | ||
| Are you actually coming in and having princes back? | ||
| Do you believe that we're heading to a kinetic conflict in the South China Sea and Taiwan in the next six months? | ||
| Yeah, I tried to get Eric on today. | ||
| As a matter of fact, I think he's on a train in the UK at the moment, so he's out of pocket. | ||
| But we did have a conversation about this, Steve. | ||
| The only thing we disagree about, and he's got a lot of good arguments on his side, Is the timing? | ||
| Are the sea states such that they have to wait until April or May, or are they going to go for it sooner than that? | ||
| And my guess is that even with rough sea states and so on, they are going to start putting into place a blockade at a minimum and quite possibly go over the beach. | ||
| But here's the thing that we've got to be paying attention to, and it's the point of this essay I did at warroom.org. | ||
| Red alert! | ||
| What Xi has been doing, we've documented this extensively in our Committee on the Present Danger of China webinar series, which you've contributed and helped us publicize. | ||
| There's every reason to believe there will be another act of arson by Xi Jinping, after Ukraine, after Israel, after the Red Sea, and who knows where all else, but it's coming here, folks. | ||
| And this Mickey Mouse operation, passing for the national security apparatus of the United States is clearly failing to signal to the Chinese Communist Party, don't even think about this, let alone be prepared to deal with what they have in mind to torch on here in the United States. | ||
| Steve, you've done as good a job as anybody documenting the thousands, probably now tens of thousands, divisions worth of Chinese People's Liberation Army, maybe Special Forces units, | ||
| That's what we're facing, and this is no time for people being AWOL, to say nothing of being utterly incompetent, or they're simply on the basis of the color of their skin or their sex. | ||
| I mean, this is where you need warriors. | ||
| And yes, it could be messy having a confirmation hearing in the moment, but we need warriors, both on the military side, but also on the political side, because we're at war. | ||
| We're at the unrestricted warfare phase for sure, but we are now facing the imminent prospect. | ||
| Maybe it's... is my great concern. | ||
| We're not even focused on that, let alone putting the nation on a war footing. | ||
| Presentaturechina.org is where you can get all of our webinars. | ||
| Securefreedom.org is where we've got our Center for Security Policy site. | ||
| And securingamerica.tv and on Substack is where you can go to get our show, the Securing America program here at Real America's Voice. | ||
| A red alert is up on War Room right now. | ||
| I'm going to push it out with some commentary later in the day. | ||
| Rahim's going to be on here, but the American people are hip to this. | ||
| They say two-thirds of the American people say, hey, guess what? | ||
| This is an invasion. | ||
| That's the term we use. | ||
| What Frank Gaffney is warning people about, this election in Taiwan, if it goes the way that the patriots and the lovers of freedom want, and it's going to be tight, But if the non-appeasement party wins, is the balloon going to go up with sheep? | ||
| Eric Prince says the spring. | ||
| Frank Gaffney says right away. | ||
| So we got to be this is a red alert. | ||
| The CCP is our existential mortal enemy. | ||
| And when they see the fiasco that is the national security apparatus around this illegitimate president, they know they start thinking about making a move. | ||
| Gaffney, thank you so much. | ||
| Honored to have you on here. | ||
| How can we stay so on point early in the morning? | ||
| You know what it is? | ||
| It's Warpath Coffee. | ||
| Get jacked up. | ||
| If you're in the war room, you need to be jacked. | ||
| No better way to do it than Warpath. | ||
| Warpath.coffee slash war room. | ||
| Get your discounts. | ||
| Try the dark roast. | ||
| Even if you've never tried before, try it. | ||
| I think you're going to love it. | ||
| We've taken as much of the acid out as you can and keep the flavor. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| Russ Voge joins us next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance. | |
| Joe Allen is at the Consumer Electronics Show for us for the week, covering everything to do with transhumanism, and there's a lot there. | ||
| Remember, that's where all the big breaks come on, on things on the computer, Internet, all of it. | ||
| He'll be on the show tonight in the six o'clock hour. | ||
| One thing I can tell you is, Cybercrime and AI are combining, cyber and AI combining, makes it more lethal than ever. | ||
| This is why you got to go to hometidalock.com today. | ||
| Just go, immerse yourself in the information. | ||
| Find out how they can protect what is 90% of your net worth. | ||
| Yes, that would be your home. | ||
| If you're fortunate enough to have one, because if you're under 35, you can't get one. | ||
| But if you're fortunate enough to have one, make sure that nobody can come in and take a second out. | ||
| On yours. | ||
| And Title Insurance doesn't cover this. | ||
| So go to HomeTitleLock.com, get all the information from the pros. | ||
| Russ Vogt, I gotta ask you, you were OMB under Trump, and I tell people all the time, if you want to know how the apparatus works, Russ Vogt's the man. | ||
| I call Russ up with the most bizarre question, he goes, it would always be the same, give me 10 minutes, give me 20 minutes, boom, come in at the answer. | ||
| This, real quickly, this Austin situation. | ||
| How mind-boggling is that, given the tight controls even on the programmatic side you guys have on the cash and what's happening? | ||
| How Insane is it that the guy's out of pocket for five days and nobody knows about it? | ||
| National Security Advisor, the Commander-in-Chief, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't believe that any member of the Cabinet would not give the President and his Chief of Staff an awareness of their availability on something like this. | |
| And my thought over the weekend was this is an indicator. | ||
| The fact that he wasn't noticed, this is a strong indicator of how far we've come from having civilian control of the military. | ||
| They didn't even notice. | ||
| But this is certainly a complete impropriety that should lead to him being fired today. | ||
| So Russ Vogt, we're going to pull that quote. | ||
| You're saying that Austin should be fired immediately. | ||
| No questions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No question. | |
| You're the Secretary of Defense. | ||
| Assuming the White House themselves are not lying. | ||
| But you cannot go into a hospital and under these procedures not even tell your deputy? | ||
| Uh, that you've, that you've, uh, relinquished control to her. | ||
| Uh, that kind of, that kind of gap is such a critical, uh, post like the Secretary of Defense is a fireable one. | ||
| The last time we left this, about the budget, we had Johnson down the border with 50 guys who wouldn't raise their hand about, you know, they went down there for a photo op, and when Burquam asked them if they don't secure the border, do you shut down the government, not wanting to raise their hand, he then goes on Face the Nation yesterday and gives a terrible interview. | ||
| But when we left it, Rahim's got research out there, he's going to come on next saying two-thirds of the American people, two-thirds, say that what's happening at the border The best way to describe it is an invasion of the United States of America. | ||
| Given that, as when we left this, everybody was talking, oh, if you don't shut down the border, we're going to shut down the government and just bring it on, to this total and complete collapse that we saw delivered to the members. | ||
| I talked to many members yesterday who were outraged. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They got the delivery by Twitter, sir. | |
| No, it's unbelievable, honestly. | ||
| The left was freaking out because the way they did the debt limit deal, to make it look more conservative and more fiscally responsible, they hid a lot of the spending, about $69 billion worth of the spending, In what was known as a side deal. | ||
| They did it outside of the law, but they invested it in the person of Kevin McCarthy, basically saying, I will get this done, it will allow you to have higher spending, and then you'll be able to keep the bureaucracy going at a certain rate, right? | ||
| That's why we were so outraged and we crushed the deal at the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, by virtue of him no longer being the Speaker, that side deal went away. | |
| And they had an ability to spend dramatically lower, even under a continuing resolution. | ||
| If they did nothing, if they just extended it, it would have locked in across-the-board cuts by virtue of the fact that there was a new speaker. | ||
| So they had massive leverage here. | ||
| The Democrats were freaking out. | ||
| All the appropriators were saying, this is a complete outrage that they would walk away from our deal. | ||
| They had all of the leverage in the world, and they walked away from it. | ||
| And what was agreed to last night would be $100 billion more than a long-term CR that triggered the across-the-board cuts. | ||
| You might think, OK, well, is that going to just really hurt defense? | ||
| No, defense would have been frozen. | ||
| It would have been an across-the-board cut, all to non-defense spending. | ||
| And yet, instead of doing that, they took away all the leverage two weeks before any kind of an actual expiration date, and they said, we're going to give you everything you want, and we're going to be at these levels, and we're going to continue to move forward. | ||
| Not only at the current Speaker's deal, the debt limit deal, but they're actually going to be able to increase spending. | ||
| And the Speaker's office will say, well, no, we're at a much lower level. | ||
| Because what they do, the Democrats, they do the spending equivalent of pumping and dumping. | ||
| They, when they have an opportunity, throw a ton of money at something like the IRS. | ||
| They'll use a lot of it, but they have no intention of ever using all of that. | ||
| They are intentionally trying to provide a little bit of reserve so they come back, steal that money later, and score it to make the bills look lower. | ||
| So Mike Johnson today will be out there saying, no, Russ votes numbers are too high. | ||
| That's not what this does. | ||
| It's much lower. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| They are much higher and the Democrats are rightfully getting everything that they want. | ||
| And I would, my suggestion is that we should stop negotiating with this OMB director because they are eating the lunch of the House Republicans literally every time they go into the room with this woman. | ||
| But what is it? | ||
| I want to get into some more details. | ||
| We can just hold through the break for a few minutes, but I got to get to the psychology. | ||
| We had all the leverage. | ||
| Look, we're totally against the one-year CR because we don't think the cuts are big enough, but even that is better. | ||
| How does Johnson, Understanding the firestorm, just agree to this and not even mention anything on the border. | ||
| He's funding everything he said on the border. | ||
| He was going to shut down. | ||
| I just don't understand. | ||
| Look, if this guy's the Christian, what you're doing because of the lack of fight and the being a wimp, you're going to have, I mean, this is people will be looking to convert to Islam. | ||
| I mean, they're going to look to fight somewhere. | ||
| What is this guy doing? | ||
| Why is he such a weasel? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, I think that the Speaker is managing his conference to avoid conflict. | |
| His conference hates the fact that we could have a potential government shutdown. | ||
| And I think that's the problem, right? | ||
| You have to manage for conflict. | ||
| You're not going to be able to beat the Democrats without conflict, and he's afraid of it, and he can't be. | ||
| And the way to deal with his moderates is to produce success. | ||
| And you can produce success by using your leverage points, having big wins, which basically was the first few weeks of his speakership before he really started to go backwards. | ||
| That is the method of success. | ||
| And to your point, Steve, the way to prevent a government shutdown was he had all the leverage in the world to be able to have $100 billion in lower spending than he just agreed to with House and Senate Democrats. |
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