Dec. 7, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
48:58
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| A growing pile of allegations against him, from allegations of sexual misconduct and alcohol abuse, as well as alleged financial mismanagement, to say nothing of Hegsess extremist views about things like the medieval crusades and what the New York Times describes as Hegsess, quote, praised for the brutal religious military campaigns of the past, which according to the Times, Hegsess sees as, quote, a model for today. | ||
| So it was notable when after days of remaining conspicuously silent on the fate of Hegseth's nomination, today Donald Trump weighed in on how, quote, Pete Hegseth is doing very well and how, quote, Pete is a winner in all caps. | ||
| But what Donald Trump is doing outside of posting on social media is a very different story. | ||
| Washington Post reports this, quote, Hegseth has been told not to expect Donald Trump to apply pressure to Republican senators to get him over the finish line for confirmation next month. | ||
| That is according to two people familiar with the discussions who spoke anonymously. | ||
| Meaning, Donald Trump appears to be unwilling to spend any of his own political capital to save Hegseth, preferring what looks like a Hunger Games, may the odds be ever in your favor approach, a sink or swim gambit that could prove politically risky, given that after four straight days of a wannabe charm offensive on Capitol Hill, Hegseth still doesn't have the votes to be confirmed. | ||
| The Hill crunched those numbers. | ||
| Hegseth can only afford three Republican defections. | ||
| But, quote, a Senate Republican aide told The Hill that as many as eight Republican senators are prepared to vote against Hegseth, most of them not willing to call publicly for Hegseth to resign because they don't want to be criticized by Trump's MAGA allies. | ||
| One Republican senator put it a little more bluntly, telling The Hill this, quote, I think most people do not expect Hegseth to make it. | ||
| There's seven or eight Republican votes against him. | ||
| It's a matter of time. | ||
| Hegseth's nomination is on death watch, end quote. | ||
| And the hurdles Hegseth still has to clear are formidable. | ||
| Arguably one of the most influential Senate Republicans in terms of Hegseth nomination, Senator Joni Ernst, who yesterday told Fox that she is not yet a yes, has no plans to meet with Hegseth again today. | ||
| Next week, Hegseth is expected to sit down with Republican Senator Susan Collins, who has Stated that the charges of impropriety against Hegseth are exactly why cabinet picks ought to be subjected to FBI background checks. | ||
| In other words, anything could happen, buckle up. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| 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'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
|
MAGA Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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
|
War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | ||
| It's Friday, 6th December, year of our Lord, 2024. | ||
| You're in the War Room. | ||
| Thank you for tuning in to our late afternoon, early evening show. | ||
| We're going to get into it, Pete Hegseth. | ||
| What does Nicole Wallace say? | ||
| Buckle up and get ready. | ||
| Well, look, we know the tide is turning. | ||
| The inside baseball is the tide is turning for Pete Hexas. | ||
| People know that. | ||
| One of the reasons is Pete's a very charismatic individual. | ||
| President Trump has seen the – President Trump is not going to work the phones. | ||
| He doesn't have to work the phones. | ||
| Pete Hegseth has a responsibility to go up there and make his case to these folks in the Senate. | ||
| He's making his case. | ||
| He's charismatic. | ||
| He's got good ideas. | ||
| People are supporting him. | ||
| And I think this is going to come down. | ||
| I think when Joni Ernst says, hey, I support Pete Hegseth and Pete Hegseth is going to be fine. | ||
| We're going to get this thing done. | ||
| And I think the key thing for right now for Senator Ernst is we've got to find an off-ramp for her, right? | ||
| She's a little bit out there on the limb. | ||
| She didn't want to be primaried. | ||
| She's in cycle. | ||
| You don't want to have MAGA all over you in Iowa. | ||
| No need to do that. | ||
| Very unnecessary, particularly for a guy like Pete Hexeth. | ||
| Who can be a and will be a great Secretary of Defense, especially in the time we're in the early years of the kinetic part of the Third World War. | ||
| I'm going to bring in somebody who knows him very well from the Article III project, Mike Davis. | ||
| We got Mark Lucas. | ||
| He's one of Mike's partners over there. | ||
| Mark, you've got a long history with Pete. | ||
| Can you walk us through it, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you, Steve. | |
| I've known Pete Hegseth for over 10 years. | ||
| And we served together in the 34th Infantry Division. | ||
| He was in the Minnesota National Guard. | ||
| I was in the Iowa National Guard. | ||
| It's the famous Red Bull Division. | ||
| Our motto is attack, attack, attack. | ||
| And I've also served with Pete with Concerned Veterans for America. | ||
| Pete was my predecessor and I was able to see what Pete was able to accomplish with CVA. I inherited his executive team, his strategy, and Pete Hegseth along with President Donald Trump and myself were able to usher in some of the most historic victories in the history of the VA. We were able to pass the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and also the Mission Act. | ||
| And Pete understood the VA inside and out. | ||
| He's got incredible pedigree. | ||
| He went to Harvard. | ||
| He went to Princeton. | ||
| And Steve, you're absolutely right. | ||
| Pete is so charismatic. | ||
| He connects with people all across the country. | ||
| I brought him to my home state of Iowa. | ||
| We live broadcasted my Iowa caucus in Iowa City. | ||
| And you should have seen the love that people had for Pete. | ||
| Normal caucus goers absolutely love him. | ||
| He can communicate to the grassroots, but he can also hold his own in serious, in-depth policy conversations. | ||
| And that's the one thing that Pete was so helpful for me, too, was that when it came to reforming the bureaucracy of the VA, when we're looking forward towards the DOD and understanding the threats inside the building, but also the threats OCONUS, Pete understands all of that. | ||
| So I think that Pete Hegseth is going to be one of the stars in the cabinet for President Trump. | ||
| And I believe that he will sail through with the confirmation. | ||
| Okay, I want to go back. | ||
| By the way, when you're accepted as an undergraduate at Princeton, I would argue even more than Harvard and Yale, my beloved Harvard and Yale, that it is – and I was in the graduate school there, the trade schools. | ||
| I'm talking about at the college level. | ||
| Princeton, I think, is at Stanford level is the hardest to get into. | ||
| I mean it's the most selective. | ||
| So if you're at Princeton, you're bringing some heat intellectually. | ||
| But I want to go back – The 34th Infantry Division. | ||
| Yesterday we had a tweet that Pete put up in Denver, if you'd be so kind, had the battlefield cross on it. | ||
| And Pete had tweeted it out about his experiences. | ||
| Talk to me about the formative years of Pete Hegseth and yourself as combat vets. | ||
| Walk me through that. | ||
| What were the lessons he learned and why is that important? | ||
| We keep pushing the fact that We've had enough older guys. | ||
| We've had enough, you know, what we need now. | ||
| Clearly there's an issue with field grade officers. | ||
| Some of these generals and admirals are being woke. | ||
| What were the lessons you guys took from the battlefield and why are they important for application in the Pentagon today, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Pete is a warfighter first. | |
| He's a true pipe hitter. | ||
| We're both infantry platoon leaders. | ||
| He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| I was an infantry platoon leader along the Afghan-Pakistani border in 2010 and 2011. It was the deadliest period of the war. | ||
| We had more KAs at that point than at any other point in the war. | ||
| So Pete understands what it means to take fire. | ||
| Washington, D.C. is not going to scare him. | ||
| He was a door kicker. | ||
| He saw real combat. | ||
| And that's part of the reason why these guys in the Pentagon are nervous. | ||
| He never became a colonel or a general officer. | ||
| He never worked within the military industrial complex. | ||
| He comes from a junior officer mentality, which means he cares about his soldiers. | ||
| I introduced him to some young enlisted soldiers here in Iowa, and he could cut it up with them like he was one of the guys. | ||
| And yet he could go to the Pentagon. | ||
| And I'll tell you what, Steve, I don't care what rank these guys are. | ||
| I don't care how long they spend in Washington. | ||
| They will not be able to keep up with Pete Hegseth. | ||
| So with his formidable years experiencing IEDs and calling in close air support, he understands what it takes to win. | ||
| And he is not going to give up. | ||
| He's in a fight. | ||
| And I was so happy to see him this week start talking with the media, engaging them, because the best defender of Pete Hegseth and the best defender of the new direction that we need to go at the Pentagon is Pete Hegseth. | ||
| Let me talk about that direction for a second, besides the budgets and material. | ||
| I mean, you guys are over there. | ||
| We're fighting these two wars. | ||
| They take 20 years. | ||
| Combined, if you leave the contractors out, the contractors are all just former enlisted and junior officers, but you've got almost 10,000, I think, KIAs. | ||
| You've got another 50,000 wounded casualties. | ||
| I've heard, I think the number's another 15,000 contractors who are all former military guys. | ||
| And you look back in those years, do you think what you guys went through would inform his decisions of when we actually commit combat troops to a situation, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| You know, I joined the military after 9-11. | ||
| I remember that morning very vividly. | ||
| It left a lasting impression on my life, and I wanted to go over there and get some. | ||
| To be quite honest, I wanted to take the fight to these radicals who were willing to kill Americans, innocent Americans, and that's why Pete and I joined. | ||
| But I didn't get to Afghanistan until 2010. Nine years after the initial attack. | ||
| And what I learned when my boots hit the ground was we had no strategy to win. | ||
| My men and I, we did not lose a single fight. | ||
| I told my men that we were going to be the dominant predator. | ||
| We were going to be the most ruthless people the enemy's ever seen, but we were also going to be the most compassionate to the local populace. | ||
| And so we were surging forces under General Petraeus nine years after the initial invasion, year after year, their new strategy after new strategy. | ||
| And I was young, I was in my 20s, but I quickly realized that this wasn't about winning. | ||
| There's no plan to win. | ||
| It was all about having a recurring revenue stream for the big military-industrial complex. | ||
| That's what it was all about. | ||
| So Pete understands that. | ||
| And because we had to endure this combat, because we know what the true cost of combat entails, we will ensure that when we dedicate forces overseas, that is the right thing to do. | ||
| Because we learned from Iraq and from Afghanistan, we were duped once, we're not going to be duped again. | ||
| This is so important. | ||
| I think this is what the thing itself is. | ||
| I want to go back over this. | ||
| Because you're a conservative, you're a Republican, you're a patriot. | ||
| I'm going to volunteer, I'm going to sign up, I'm going to go. | ||
| And you get there in 2010, you wake up, call. | ||
| In 2017, President Trump tasked me originally to be, let's get everything on the table about how do we wind down Afghanistan. | ||
| This is seven years later. | ||
| Seven years later. | ||
| In the Pentagon, in the apparatus, the intelligence, they just want to tap you along. | ||
| They want to completely tap you along. | ||
| We didn't get out until Biden's watch and then a fiasco in 20 years. | ||
| This is why Pete Hegseth, in the angle of attack, I'm talking about over the National Security Council and the Kennedy Conference Room. | ||
| Your thoughts, Mark? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, you're absolutely right. | |
| I also volunteered to go to South Korea at the height of the crisis with Kim Jong-un. | ||
| And what I saw during that experience was how much of a disruptor President Donald Trump was in foreign policy. | ||
| And Pete Hegseth shares that mentality. | ||
| I thought we were destined for war. | ||
| I remember going over there. | ||
| I worked in a bunker every day. | ||
| I was looking at high-resolution imagery of North Korean soldiers. | ||
| It was getting very serious. | ||
| Completely challenged the status quo. | ||
| And he said, well, why don't I talk to Kim Jong-un? | ||
| I think it's good to talk to people with nuclear weapons. | ||
| And I saw President Trump's leadership completely change the dynamics on the peninsula. | ||
| And the American people don't understand. | ||
| It would have been one of the most mass casualty events in the history of the world. | ||
| I don't think people would be prepared for that. | ||
| Pete Hegseth shares that same mentality. | ||
| He's not going to go along with all these policy, think tank policy wonks who say, oh, we have to do this or we have to do that because we've been doing it for generation after generation. | ||
| He's going to challenge things. | ||
| He's going to be fully aligned with President Trump. | ||
| And that's going to be refreshing. | ||
| Mark, hang on for one second. | ||
| We're holding you through the break. | ||
| Natalie Winters is going to join us. | ||
| She's going to be riding shotgun. | ||
| We've got a lot to talk about. | ||
| Some of our favorite folks over at the White House trying to get themselves some blanket preemptive pardons. | ||
| Whatever in the hell that is. | ||
| Some of the folks in back of these color revolutions. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| When we return, we've got Mark Lewis from Article 3 talking about his buddy, Pete Hexeth. | ||
| Short break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Visions only make you indoctrinate the mind. | |
| See, ain't always believing Doesn't mean it's true Here's your host, Stephen K. Band Welcome back Um... | ||
| Mark Lucas from Article 3 joins us. | ||
| This morning, if you caught the morning show, we started this morning with a clip. | ||
| From Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, 1957, Paths of Glory. | ||
| And the famous scene where Kirk Douglas is about to lead his troops. | ||
| It's the French army about to lead their troops over the top into no man's land. | ||
| As we told you, it was fixed bad nets on defense of Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy. | ||
| Because if we don't have the backs of these folks, they're going to pick them off one at a time, Linsky-like. | ||
| And Pete was looking a little grim yesterday. | ||
| And I think President Trump was seeing what Pete could do, the resilience of Pete. | ||
| What President Trump likes is resilience. | ||
| The ability to take a punch and to respond to a punch. | ||
| Pick yourself up off the mat and punch back. | ||
| And you're seeing that from Pete Hexes. | ||
| And I think we've turned this thing around. | ||
| One of the reasons we've done that or how we've done it is, Mark, tell us about the Article III Action Center. | ||
| What do you guys have over there? | ||
| Because we're looking for as many touch points as possible. | ||
| We've got Bill Blaster. | ||
| You guys have the Action Center. | ||
| We want people engaged as possible. | ||
| The War Room Posse throws a big punch. | ||
| People know that. | ||
| Got a lot of media attention today on our open. | ||
| And quite frankly, this block of shows at Real America's Voice in the Morning, the two hours of War Room, two hours of Charlie Kirk, one hour of Jack Posobiec, kind of five hours of With a break and then back to another two hours of the war room that has Pete's back into making a priority because, you know, Jack and I are former military knowing how important this Secretary of Defense is. | ||
| So tell me about the Action Center. | ||
| What can people do now to help Pete out in the audience? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Steve. | |
| If you remember, Kash Patel was supposed to be dead on arrival. | ||
| But you quickly went to his defense. | ||
| So did Mike Davis. | ||
| The Article III project launched our action alert to encourage the U.S. Senate to confirm Kash Patel. | ||
| And we had over 20,000 messages lobbed in to U.S. senators all across the country. | ||
| And because of you doing your shaping operation, Steve, on War Room, because of the grassroots efforts from Bill Blaster and also from the A3P Action Center, Cash went from being DOA to he's going to need a speedy confirmation. | ||
| And even Joni Ernst, my home state senator who's experienced some speed bumps with Pete Hegseth, she came out strongly in support of Cash Patel. | ||
| And with Pete Hegseth, we just launched our Action Alert yesterday. | ||
| Just a little less than 24 hours ago, we've been able to recruit close to 3,000 activists who have taken close to 6,000 actions. | ||
| So if you go to a3paction.com or the article number 3project.org... | ||
| You can click on our Action Center, and you can contact both your U.S. Senators. | ||
| You can email them. | ||
| You can tweet at them. | ||
| You can even call them. | ||
| You can conduct all those actions in less than two minutes. | ||
| So go to a3paction.com, and I think Joni Ernst is going to become a yes on Pete Hegseth. | ||
| We just got to let her know that the grassroots support Pete Hegseth. | ||
| They support President Trump, and I believe she'll come along just like she did with Kash Patel. | ||
| Look, I agree with women in combat. | ||
| I mean Mo went to West Point, served in Iraq. | ||
| I disagree with Pete on some stuff. | ||
| You're not going to agree on everything. | ||
| Pete is an open-minded guy and Senator Ernst is a combat vet. | ||
| She's a colonel, a tenant colonel. | ||
| I want to go back because another hit on Pete. | ||
| Is that he's on the curvy couch on weekends and he's never run anything more than an organization with five people. | ||
| So and the Pentagon is the most complex industrial entity institution in the world. | ||
| So you know this guy for a long time and you particularly know him in a professional. | ||
| How is he going to scale up? | ||
| What's the leadership style here that people are going to feel comfortable that Pete Hex is going to come from a Saturday morning talk show host where they're cooking pancakes and having run a small veterans organization to actually enforce his will into what they call the building, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so there's this misnomer that Concerned Veterans for America was just a complete train wreck. | |
| When Pete Hegseth left, well, I became the CVA Executive Director after Pete left, and I retained his top staff. | ||
| He had three people in particular that were just incredible, some of the brightest policy minds, and also he had a grassroots army. | ||
| And so before I joined CVA, I worked for a group called Americans for Prosperity, and we were very well known in state capitals for being effective in passing tax cuts, reducing spending and regulation. | ||
| But we really struggled in D.C., and we had conversations. | ||
| Do we just kind of take a step back and focus on state capitals? | ||
| Well, when I went to CVA, it was completely a different story. | ||
| Pete had CVA's grassroots army ready to deploy once President Trump got elected. | ||
| He had a shaping operation that was unbelievable on Capitol Hill with the VA House Committee and the Senate Committee. | ||
| And so when I came into CVA, I saw an incredible leadership team. | ||
| I had an incredible plan that I took from Pete Hegseth and we were able to pass two of the largest reforms in the history of the VA because of Pete Hegseth. | ||
| And those grassroots volunteers all across the country, it's not easy to wrangle those guys. | ||
| And so Pete has the leadership experience, but he also has the vision. | ||
| So I was able to brief President Trump on CVA's plan, which was Pete Hegseth's plan, and I was able to tell President Trump that the CVA plan will help him achieve all of his objectives, the 10 objectives he had on the campaign trail when he campaigned for President on helping our vets, and we were able to implement that in two quick years. | ||
| And I see that Pete Hegseth understands the vision, but he also knows how to put together a team. | ||
| And I know that because I inherited this team and it was world class. | ||
| Well, over at MSNBC, which we break down every night with CNN, brother Chris Hayes, Lawrence O'Donnell, Joanne Reed, the whole crowd over there, I thought CVA was a complete train wreck. | ||
| I thought it was destroyed. | ||
| I thought he ran everybody off. | ||
| Either he made passes at the women or got drunk in front of the guys and everybody was repulsed so there was nothing. | ||
| You're breaking some news here. | ||
| You're actually saying that you relieved the watch in a real organization and were actually able to take that organization, go brief President Trump, and that was one of the foundational elements of the big VA changes President Trump made in his first term? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| And I remember when I briefed President Trump on the VA plan, it was the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act. | ||
| And I was really pushing the President and his staff in the room that they need to put that bill on Mitch McConnell's desk in the first 100 days. | ||
| And I was able to also leverage Pete Hegseth because I told President Trump that he was my predecessor and President Trump's eyes lit up. | ||
| He said, you know, Pete, I love Pete. | ||
| I want to hire him. | ||
| But he said that my staff is telling me he's better for me on Fox, which is kind of true because Pete was able to come down from time to time online. | ||
| Part-time, on his own time, to help us with some serious policy conversations along with other veteran service organizations. | ||
| And so Pete Hegseth is really responsible, along with President Trump, for some of those big reforms that delivered those key victories, Steve, that you remember early on in his first term when Paul Ryan and those guys in Congress were trying to figure out who's President Trump and we couldn't get tax reform done quicker enough because Congress was in the way. | ||
| Pete Hegseth and his vision for the VA was the biggest and earliest policy victory for President Trump in 2017. No, this was the 2017, that and the tax cut because Paul Ryan and the guys did a faceplant on the Obamacare. | ||
| Mark, where can people get you? | ||
| I think you're going to be doing a lot of media here because here's the thing that's shocking. | ||
| I'm going to get Natalie here in a second. | ||
| Watch the mainstream media. | ||
| Literally, they say Pete Hex has destroyed both veterans groups. | ||
| And here we got Mark Lucas who said, no, he didn't destroy it. | ||
| Turn it over. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I was able to go to President Trump. | ||
| And this is one of the big, this is one of the foundational elements for President Trump's wins in 2017. It just shows you the complete lies and how they spin things. | ||
| So I want to make sure this word gets out that Hex is the real deal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Steve, also, I'm putting my name and my face on all of this. | |
| I'm not doing anonymous sources. | ||
| I volunteered this morning to testify in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee to be a character witness for Pete's nomination. | ||
| My good friend Mike Davis, who I've known since college, who's the expert on confirmations, Article 3 Project is all in on Pete Hegseth. | ||
| And you can go to article3project.org. | ||
| I'm not quite as hot on Twitter or X or Getter as my friend Mike Davis. | ||
| I'm not nearly as angry or as Irish, but you can follow me at LucasIowa on all those channels. | ||
| Hang on a second, Lucas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When Davis first came on, he was a nice, calm guy like you. | |
| Now he's the Viceroy. | ||
| He's a whole thing. | ||
| So we're going to watch the arc of you over at Article 3. You guys do amazing work, and I think this center... | ||
| Mike is known as the pro's pro for these confirmations. | ||
| So it's so, I think, powerful and necessary for President Trump to have outside groups like yourselves that really know the ins and outs of this. | ||
| So I really thank you. | ||
| Once again, do you have personal Twitter? | ||
| Can we get that up? | ||
| What is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, it's at LucasIowa. | |
| And be sure to also go to the Article 3 Project's website to take action to let Joni Ernst and every U.S. senator know that we need to support Pete Hegseth. | ||
| So thank you so much, Steve, for having me on. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| I tell you what, I'm going to do whatever I'm going to hold Natalie. | ||
| I want to play her call open and I'll bring her in there. | ||
| We're going to bring in Natalie Winters who's going to join us for the next block. | ||
| We've got a lot to talk about. | ||
| Some of the folks that Natalie focuses on, on color revolution and some of her investigative reporting, you know where they're spending their time? | ||
| They're spending their time over the White House, burning the midnight oil, burning Because Cash Patel, Natalie Winters, Mike Benz, Darren Beattie have been picking on them, have been picking on Fauci and picking on these people. | ||
| Throw in Julie Kelly. | ||
| Been picking on these people. | ||
| Jack Smith. | ||
| They're over there looking for, they're working on a new concept, a new contract. | ||
| Take your number two pencil out. | ||
| We have some nomenclature. | ||
| A blanket preemptive pardon. | ||
| A blanket preemptive pardon. | ||
| For any known or unknown crime now or anywhere at any time in eternity or back to the beginning of time or even beforehand in any part of the universe. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Natalie Wynn is going to join us after a short commercial break. | ||
| Birchgold.com slash Bannon. | ||
| Get the end of the dollar empire. | ||
| Also, get direct access to Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| We're going to go through a little turbulence. | ||
| France, the government fell because trying to, you know, cut these budgets and they're trying to put the burden on working people. | ||
| The Front National or National Assembly, I think they call themselves now, said, no, not going to do that. | ||
| So, government fell. | ||
| Find out about gold as a hedge. | ||
| Birchgold.com slash Bannon. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Natalie Winters joins us next in the War Room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've handled tax and weapons cases over my many years as a defense lawyer. | |
| Nobody else, not named Biden, would have been prosecuted for these tax peccadilloes. | ||
| Certainly the no jail plea, which was agreed with the government, would have been proper. | ||
| Hunter Biden is at risk of being persecuted by a coming Trump administration. | ||
| The former president and incoming future president has said he would target the Bidens. | ||
| So the larger logic Justice says a partner is proper. | ||
| Whereas when you look at other worthy people who are targets of likely persecution, like Mr. Cohen, they'd serve their senses. | ||
| So I think This was a start, but I hope the White House will proceed. | ||
| President Biden will proceed to, in the name of justice, pardon others as well. | ||
| Dr. Bonham's case in England. | ||
| And it's still true today. | ||
| And there's another limitation on the president's pardon power. | ||
| Nobody thinks the president could take bribes to issue pardons. | ||
| So if the president were to act corruptly, for example, if he were to pardon Michael Flynn or Paul Manafort or Donald Trump Jr. in order that the president himself avoided being implicated by those individuals if they testified at their trials, | ||
| that would be a corrupt It depends on the breadth of the wording, and that's why folks like me will sit and wordsmith some of these things if President Biden decides to do them, because they want to insulate these preemptive pardons from challenge. | ||
| But Jose, a preemptive pardon is not without its own dangers. | ||
| Remember, if you pardon someone, You're removing their criminal exposure in the past, I mean, for their past actions. | ||
| And that means they can't invoke the Fifth Amendment, for example, with respect to that conduct if they're called upon to testify in other criminal proceedings or even before Congress. | ||
| That would mean if Joe Biden were to preemptively pardon, for example, Jack Smith and others on his team, he would also be subjecting them to Lengthy congressional hearings, potentially, at which they could not say, I invoke the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| They may have other privileges, including the attorney-client privilege that applies to their work for the Justice Department, but it could expose other people to having to talk ad nauseum about what they have done and, of course, subject themselves to future charges for perjury if they're found not to be telling the truth. | ||
| Natalie Winters. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Thank you guys. | ||
| Great cuts. | ||
| Let's take the first one. | ||
| One of your nemesis, Norm Eisen. | ||
| Explain to the audience who he is and why is he becoming such a big deal? | ||
| He wrote a huge op-ed in Newsweek magazine. | ||
| He's becoming a major player in these. | ||
| I want people to get the number two pencils out. | ||
| Blanket preemptive pardons. | ||
| This is what the Biden regime is spending their time on in the closing days of the regime. | ||
| Norm Eisen, who is he? | ||
| Why is he important? | ||
| And why has he become such a player in this process, ma'am? | ||
| Well, Norm Eisen is a complete and utter hack, and I think you see it on full display right there. | ||
| But I think you have to contextualize this moment, particularly of the sort of democracy protectorate class, which Norm Eisen is one of the leading voices of. | ||
| You know, the same people who sit up there and say that, well, we can't have Pete Hegseth because he tarnished the reputation of an organization that advocated for veterans. | ||
| I'm sorry, what has Norm Eisen or frankly any senator done in the past to actually help American veterans? | ||
| You know, absolutely nothing, right? | ||
| It's selective outrage and it's performative. | ||
| I wish these senators would audit the what is it trillion dollar black hole that the Pentagon has with the same level of intensity and scrutiny that they're going after Pete Hegseth's character. | ||
| But I think that you can sort of extrapolate out that critique and just frankly, the double standard BS performative activism coming from these people all the way to, like I said, the sort of democracy sect of people, of which Norm Eisen has been one of the leading voices, the people who pushed for months, for years, saying that Donald Trump is the largest existential threat ever. | ||
| To American democracy, he's Hitler 2.0. | ||
| If anything, he's probably worse. | ||
| Remember, this is the same Norm Eisen, who quite literally wrote the Color Revolution textbook playbook for the Brookings Institution, talking about how in countries abroad like Hungary- Particularly, it's interesting that the countries that they always like to invoke in the mainstream media of the sort of think tank Washington, D.C. groups to draw parallels to President Trump here domestically because they're trying to bridge that gap so they can lay the pretext to roll out similar color revolution tactics. | ||
| Here at home. | ||
| And why Norm Eisen is so important, right? | ||
| He's the chosen lackey to hit the airwaves on CNN to defend these blanket preemptive pardons. | ||
| We're not even talking about just run of the mill pardons. | ||
| We're talking about the fantastical creation of an entirely new form of pardon derived for what? | ||
| The most innocent people who I only ever hear them say, you know, how they've never committed any crimes, yet they have to create an entirely new form. | ||
| I mean, It is next level gaslighting. | ||
| The carbon footprint of it would make the environmentalist mad. | ||
| But the most wild part of it, Steve, is that clip that I played after. | ||
| And maybe people were able to tell that it was from 2017 because he didn't have the Victorian lady white powder makeup on like he did for CNN. But in that exact clip, I'm really making you laugh, for a clip for the Brookings Institution, He literally says that Trump cannot pardon his son. | ||
| And you know we love receipts here in the war room, so I'll remind Norm, who loves Norm so much, he probably created his name to be named after it. | ||
| But he tweeted then in December 2017, and I quote, why Trump can't pardon himself at all, or Jared, Don Jr., and others. | ||
| He literally said that Trump could not pardon his family members, and he went on an entire social media and think tank terror about why they couldn't do this. | ||
| But besides the obvious top-line hypocrisy, how easy it is, To dunk on Norm for this double standard, it's something much deeper, right? | ||
| And this goes all the way back, like it always does, to the Transition Integrity Project, which was, of course, that Soros, even Chinese Communist Party-funded operation to steal the election from Donald Trump in 2020. And what was so interesting about this was that they actually had an entire section In the memo, where they were gamed out all the ways that Donald Trump—and if Denver wants to put the picture up on screen, you can see it—how they thought that President Trump was going to go on a pardoning spree. | ||
| They had a whole entire section called Pardon Everyone. | ||
| In almost every Transition Integrity Project scenario, Team Trump executed or prepared for the pardon of relatives, campaign associates, and himself. | ||
| In other words, you can't get a more clear example of projection. | ||
| And just to cap this all off, because again, like I said, you talk about seizing the institutions right now. | ||
| This is also about dominating the narrative against these people who have bashed us over the head with the word democracy. | ||
| They can't get through a sentence without saying it 27 times. | ||
| That these are the people who are now quite literally using the same tactics and playbook that they have written Soros-funded white papers on about how countries in Eastern Europe and countries that have taken up the populist mantle, the same tactics that they have used that they call corrupt. | ||
| So much so that Norm Eisen back in 2021, Steve, felt the need to write An entire New York Times op-ed. | ||
| We can toss the headline up on screen. | ||
| The problem with Trump's odious pardon of Steve Bannon. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Norm, thank you. | ||
| Hey, I want to play – Natalie, hang on for one second. | ||
| If Debra could play the lawyer in the second part because I want you – when she talks about, hey, these pardons aren't free because then you take about the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| Listen to what she talks about of what will happen to these people. | ||
| Let's go ahead and – can we play that again? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Depends on the breadth of the wording, and that's why folks like me will sit and wordsmith some of these things if President Biden decides to do them, because they want to insulate these preemptive pardons from challenge. | |
| But Jose, a preemptive pardon is not without its own dangers. | ||
| Remember, if you pardon someone, you're removing their criminal exposure in the past. | ||
| I mean, for their past actions. | ||
| And that means they can't invoke the Fifth Amendment, for example, with respect to that conduct, if they're called upon to testify in other criminal proceedings or even before Congress. | ||
| That would mean if Joe Biden were to preemptively pardon, for example, Jack Smith and others on his team, he would also be subjecting them to lengthy congressional hearings, potentially, at which they could not say, I invoke the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| They may have other privileges, including the attorney-client privilege that applies to their work for the Justice Department. | ||
| But it could expose other people to having to talk ad nauseum about what they have done and, of course, subject themselves to future charges for perjury if they're found not to be telling the truth. | ||
| And Natalie, talk ad nauseum about what they've done. | ||
| I mean, come on, baby. | ||
| Isn't this what we want? | ||
| I mean, I think we went either way because this is a search for truth and a search for justice. | ||
| Retribution is going to be President Trump having four amazing years and get, you know, we get to close to the sunlit uplands. | ||
| But we can never again allow to happen what happened over the last four years. | ||
| So if they give the pardons, they strip away their Fifth Amendment rights, and then at both congressional hearings and other inquests, they can't hide behind the Fifth Amendment, correct? | ||
| So we got a win-win going here? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, also, too, I love her admission where they're saying that in the media they're going to have to quote wordsmith President Biden's pardons. | ||
| I mean, what kind of collaboration is going on there? | ||
| I think that's an interesting admission that I probably look forward to Lisa Rubin testifying about in some capacity. | ||
| But I think the sort of buried lead, if not the tacit admission in everything she says, I mean, she's the one that uses the word, and I quote, They're worried about testifying. | ||
| What do you have to hide? | ||
| I mean, that was what they bashed us over the head with, with all things President Donald J. Trump. | ||
| And like you said, the best revenge is and always has been, you know, making America great again. | ||
| It's not retribution. | ||
| It's actual accountability and justice. | ||
| So if they wanna issue these preemptive pardons, Then, sure, go ahead. | ||
| I guess we'll have to just use other levers and mechanisms of justice to get them. | ||
| But I think the audience shouldn't underestimate the extent to which they are really planning and plotting on actually doing this. | ||
| Right now, you're sort of seeing them lay the media and narrative groundwork to bring up Norm Eisen. | ||
| Again, it was just yesterday in Newsweek that he had a long op-ed, pardons may be key to protecting people from political persecution. | ||
| And in the same vein, Steve, The Jonathan Martin Politico piece that sort of broke this whole story, they were saying that they wanted to pardon people who, quote, may be in President Trump's crosshairs. | ||
| So they're playing a very, very funny and cunning analytical game where they're trying to, I always say victim blame, the American people. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's not the American people or Donald Trump who has a vendetta for these people. | ||
| These people brought it on themselves. | ||
| And I think the best evidence that you need for all of this is just the fact that Hunter Biden's pardon extends back so far to 2014, to what was going on in Ukraine with all things Burisma. | ||
| Because the most important part, and Steve, frankly, I think the messaging opportunity that House Republicans and James Comer really failed to hit and hammer home Is that Hunter Biden was not an isolated incident. | ||
| There were lasting, enduring ramifications that we have seen to the present day that affect Joe Biden's approach to Ukraine and that region more broadly. | ||
| And I don't think that they ever really did an effective job of getting that message across. | ||
| But Joe Biden did just that by placing that pardon all the way back to the year 2014. Natalie, hang around for a second. | ||
| We're a little jammed for time, but I want to work something out. | ||
| Mike Benz gave a great... | ||
| Account of himself the other day on Joe Rogan. | ||
| He's got a clip in there I want to play and get your response. | ||
| Also, I want to talk about color revolutions for a second. | ||
| The heat on cash that was white hot, Natalie, really has dissipated a lot, right, over the last 24, 48 hours. | ||
| And I think because the Republicans in the Senate understand that there was some very bad stuff that went on, not just the FBI, but in other places, and it has to be investigated. | ||
| I think the sea change we've seen here on Cash Patel is one of the most important sea changes I have seen in Washington, D.C. | ||
| I think as people have come to the conclusion that you're going to need somebody very focused, very tough, that knows this and doesn't have to get – it doesn't need a learning curve. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| My Patriot Supply. | ||
| One of the things we pride ourselves in is that when we take a sponsor on, we make sure they're best in class. | ||
| My Patriot Supply in the preparation industry. | ||
| You don't have to be a prepper anymore to want to get ahead of the curve in times of turbulence. | ||
| MyPatriotSupply.com. | ||
| Their consultants are standing by. | ||
| If you've never used their services or bought their products before, make sure you talk to one of their consultants. | ||
| MyPatriotSupply.com. | ||
| Go check it out today. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Natalie Winters on the other side. | ||
| When Trump won in 2016, at the same time that all these right-wing populist parties who were just like Trump also won between 2016 and 2018, primarily using free speech on social media and their popularity there, They argue that right-wing populism was the same authoritarian threat that left-wing socialism, left-wing communism was. | ||
| And so they said, well, populism is the people's ground-up revolt against institutions, against democracy. | ||
| Government, science, media, against the NGOs, the experts, the academics. | ||
| So what they did is they argued that democracy has to be defended from demagoguery. | ||
| Democracy needs guardrails. | ||
| We need bumper cars on democracy that go beyond What people vote for. | ||
| Because people voted for Hitler. | ||
| People voted for Trump. | ||
| And they were doing this at U.S. government conferences, by the way, in 2017. I can show you some funny ones if you're interested. | ||
| But they were arguing that we need these institutional guardrails against people voting for the wrong person. | ||
| And those institutional guardrails are so-called democratic institutions, which is another cute rhetorical trick, because that's the CIA State Department watchword for asset. | ||
| When USAID, for example, goes in and funds university centers, media outlets, Parliamentarian groups, activist groups, legal scholars, you name it in a region, they are building up their assets to exert soft power influence on that society, on that government, in order to influence the passage of laws. | ||
| You know, the span of operations that they're doing that touch the U.S. Embassy in the region. | ||
| And so what they argued is, actually, democracy is not about the will of individuals. | ||
| It's about the consensus of institutions. | ||
| So if there's institutional consensus building between... | ||
| The military, the diplomatic sphere, the intelligence community, the NGOs, the media outlets, the universities. | ||
| That's really democracy. | ||
| Those are the institutional guardrails, the people who know best. | ||
| That's a difficult process, by the way. | ||
| That's a process that takes months, years. | ||
| There are these major consensus-building institutions like the Atlantic Council and the Council on Foreign Relations and Wilson Center and the Carnegie Endowment. | ||
| We have a whole suite of consensus-building institutions to bring together the banks, the corporations, the government officials, the outside interests, so they all get on the same page about a certain policy or initiative or regional drive or industrial change. | ||
| If at the end of that process A bunch of people vote for a politician because he does funny TikTok videos or he's got a popular dance and throws a monkey wrench in those years of consensus building. | ||
| That they began to view as an attack on democracy. | ||
| And so they said democracy is really about institutions. | ||
| And you can actually look up, for example, Reid Hoffman. | ||
| In 2019, they were doing all of these conferences where they said elections are a threat to democracy. | ||
| Elections corrupt democracy. | ||
| Because we can't think of democracy as elections anymore. | ||
| For example, Ukraine has banned elections. | ||
| We still say we are providing $300 billion of military support to promote democracy in Ukraine, even though they don't have elections. | ||
| It's controlled by U.S. institutions. | ||
| One of the smartest guys out there, Mike Benz. | ||
| And man, I hope, I hope, I hope that Mike Benz goes in and helps President Trump to so much that Mike Benz can add. | ||
| I mean, one of the heavyweight public intellectuals out there. | ||
| What I'm going to do is I'm going to hold Natalie over. | ||
| Jack Posobiec is going to join me the next hour. | ||
| There's a lot going on in Ukraine, but in Syria... | ||
| I think you may have Turkey involved. | ||
| Syria has turned into a very serious situation, not just for Israel but for the entire region. | ||
| And we're going to break it all down, what's happening in Syria and also this – their favorite playpen, their favorite playbox is – sandbox is Ukraine. | ||
| We've got to break down about that. | ||
| That's Mike Benz on Joe Rogan the other day, and that was a master class. | ||
| We just cut three and a half minutes, but you can listen to the whole thing. | ||
| If you haven't, you ought to go over it and listen to Rogan. | ||
| Nat is going to stick with us for the 6 o'clock hour. | ||
| I want to make sure – by the way, we're putting out on Birch Gold. | ||
| We're going to come out with Modern Monetary Theory here in a couple of weeks. | ||
| Make sure you go to birchgold.com slash bandit. | ||
| Get all the end of the dollar empire up until now. | ||
| I think it's seven or eight installments. | ||
| All free. | ||
| All totally free. | ||
| So you can get it and read it and get it totally up to speed. | ||
| Make sure you go check it out. | ||
| Mike Lindell joins us. | ||
| Mike, sell us some Pellicer on a Friday afternoon. | ||
| Well, it's a special to the specials, but I want to quick tell you about the flannel sheets here, everybody. | ||
| They are going fast. | ||
| Once they're gone, they're gone. | ||
| And I know the War Room Posse, these are your sheets. | ||
| These are all different styles of colors, but it's a very limited supply, and they will be gone. | ||
| Best Christmas gifts ever. | ||
| Everyone's going to love them. | ||
| Your extended 60-day money-back guarantee goes to March 1st of 2025. As low as $59.98 a set. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Promo code WARROOM. Go to the website. | |
| We've got over, I think, 300 products, over 2,000 SKUs, but there it is. | ||
| All the Christmas specials. | ||
| Get yourself a bed. | ||
| Save 50% and take another $100 off for the promo code WARM. There's the mattress topper. | ||
| Get yourself some. | ||
| You've got to be sleeping well. | ||
| Remember, you're waking up from that bed and you're back sore. | ||
| You need a different input to get a different output. | ||
| That's as simple as that. | ||
| All the slippers we just put on sale. | ||
| All the slippers that's going to be a very limited for the War Room Posse. | ||
| All the slippers made out of that impact shell. | ||
| You wear them like shoes. | ||
| The most comfortable slippers in history. | ||
| There's the bathrobes we talked about this morning. | ||
| Once they're gone, they're gone. | ||
| We got very limited supplies of those two items. | ||
| And then you have the things that made us famous, the MyPillow, 1888-1988 for the King and Queen. | ||
| All the kitchen towels, there's all them. | ||
| They're on sale for the lowest price in history, $14.98. | ||
| So we have you guys right now. | ||
| Get the stuff, the planal sheets here. | ||
| All these different styles. | ||
| Look at this for the winter sheets are here, but they're very limited. | ||
| Call 800-873-1062. | ||
| Remember, they work from home, and we won that fight. | ||
| These are across our country. | ||
| Moms and dads working from home, taking your calls. | ||
| They love it. | ||
| Pre-shipping option available to the promo code war room, Steve. | ||
| Let's hit it. | ||
| Let's light those phones up. | ||
| Mike Lindell, thank you very much. | ||
| We'll see you tomorrow morning on Saturday, our favorite show of the week. | ||
| Mike Lindell will join us. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to leave you with Billy Strings and the Book of Revelations from St. John the Evangelist. | ||
| When the man comes around, Natalie Winters, Jack Posobiec, Naomi Wolf, next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You partake of that last offered cup Or disappear into the potter's mouth When the man comes around Hear the trumpets, |
Export Selection