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June 23, 2023 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
37:17
Episode 109 LIVE: John Durham's Cover-Up – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
In battle, Congressman Matt Gates.
Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem for the Democratic Party.
He can cause a lot of hiccups in passing applause.
So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots!
You are in the right place!
This is the movement for you!
You ever watch this guy on television?
It's like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
They aren't really coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just in the way.
I'm just in the way.
I'm just in the way.
I'm just in the way.
So I'm going to give you an update as to where all of that stands in this episode as well.
But first, I want to chat about the National Defense Authorization Act.
If you're a regular viewer of Firebrand, You have gone on this journey with us, exposing the grifter generals and the woke military, the radical gender ideology, the divisive racial ideology.
We want to put an end to that.
We love our military.
We respect our service members.
We understand that for America to be strong and free, our military has to reflect the values of the country and not the values of the CHAZ, which unfortunately we've seen from a small but unfortunately far too influential group of people at the Pentagon as part of the Biden administration.
So to break that down, first, I thought I'd give you a context.
Of just the broad scope of the cost of some of these DEI initiatives.
It's called diversity, equity, and inclusion, but that's a misnomer like so many things that we observe in Washington and in corporate culture.
In fact, DEI is the opposite of inclusion.
It's very divisive, and they're pushing it in the military.
My colleague, Jim Banks, Got into a little debate with Democrat lead on the committee, Adam Smith.
It was pretty interesting to see the perspectives.
I'm with Jim Banks.
Take a listen.
Six million man hours of DEI training that has occurred in the military under the Biden administration.
First of all, that would be person hours, not necessarily man hours.
We do have women serving in the military.
Which oddly kind of drives home the point of why it might be worth it to think about a world that isn't just your own world.
Oh my goodness, understand a world not your own.
That's what Adam Smith thinks that the purpose of the military is and unfortunately it's just this crazy virtue signal.
Banks and I continue to make the point throughout the hearing That the time that we have from our service members is precious.
And that training has to be used for things like cyber and AI, not LGBTQAI+. But the wokeism did have its defenders.
Representative Takudo made arguments in favor of critical race theory.
She said, we need it in the military because we can't possibly win battles in the absence of understanding how racist we all are.
Play the clip.
We have definitely made mistakes as a country.
And as I listen to the kinds of rhetoric I hear here and the amendments that I see today that we will be voting on, I am terrified for my children and more so I am saddened for our country that it looks very clearly we have not made any progress in learning from the mistakes of our past.
So fortunately, that was not the prevailing thinking at the hearing.
Matter of fact, there was an amendment by Congressman Waltz of Florida and myself to completely eliminate critical race theory in the military.
And I am proud to report to you that the Waltz-Gates amendment to vanquish CRT and the DOD passed.
It passed out of committee.
It's part of the bill.
That turned out to be a losing argument.
That was just made by Representative Takuto.
We also had discussion about this position, this chief diversity officer position.
Now, of all the officers we need, of all the special operators we need, of all the special warfare and irregular warfare that we have to prepare for, the pilots, the maintainers, the PJs, the load masters, they're spending an insane amount of money on these DEI officers.
Some of them make as much as $183,500 a year.
That's more than a member of Congress makes.
And so we passed amendments in this bill to completely eliminate the position of the DEI officer at DOD. And we capped the amount of salary that can be made for anyone that's working in this field At like around $50,000 so that it wouldn't be this place for people to go to make more money at the expense of some of the very important skills stacks and readiness capabilities that
we need to be on the razor's edge.
Salud Carbajal debated against, he's a congressman, a Democrat congressman from California, He debated against these amendments to get rid of the chief DEI official.
The amendments passed.
But here was the bizarre response from the Democrats.
You know, there's some people that were born on third base and they think they hit a triple.
And they carry that bias with them that, hey, everybody else should have hit a triple.
But they were born on third base.
Born on third base.
And that's really...
What the left wants to convert the Department of Defense into.
Another moral shaming enterprise.
Because we do plenty of that at the Department of Education, at the EPA. And it's really interesting.
When you look at every major institution that the left has consumed, they've functionally destroyed it.
And we can never allow that to happen to our military.
But there are still those in Congress who claim that the reason that we did not win in Afghanistan...
It was because we didn't have enough DEI and critical race theory.
This is that preposterous argument by my colleague, Democrat Congresswoman from California, Sareb Jacobs.
Play the clip.
Learning about systemic racism and cultural differences and bias, it's not only about cohesion within our military, it actually is about our military operations around the world.
Our failures in Afghanistan, the Sahel, Vietnam, are due in part to our superficial understanding of history, society, culture.
More woke is what they want.
So when you see people from the Biden administration come forward and say, oh, no, we don't want any of the wokeness in our military.
We're against that.
You have Sarah Jacobs, Democrat Congresswoman, close ally of President Biden, saying the quiet part out loud that this is their design.
This is their grand plan.
This is what they want.
And unfortunately, it may come at the expense of America's hegemony or safety and security.
We have to be able to hold the high ground, and this is not what's going to get it done.
Now, there's another feature of this argument that played out in the hearing.
Democrat Congressman Horsford says that, well, we have to have all these DEI officers at DOD because they exist in corporate America.
They exist at the defense contractors.
And amazingly, my Florida colleague, Carlos Jimenez, Republican, you're going to see him respond to Horsford by pointing out That a lot of these defense contractors only have the DEI obsession and the DEI officials because we require them to, by law.
Take a listen.
I hear from my colleagues all the time on the other side of the aisle, government should work more like a business.
Well, is Northrop Grumman wrong for having a Vice President of Chief Diversity?
Is Lockheed Martin wrong for having a Director of Enterprise Operations and Global Diversity and Inclusion?
Is Boeing wrong for having a President of Global Equity, Diversity and Inclusion?
Is Raytheon wrong for having a Chief Diversity Officer?
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And much was made in the last discussion about the fact that major companies have DEI executives and the DOD requires DEI diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates of its contractors.
In 2020, the DOD issued a memorandum that requires all contractors to implement DEI training programs for their employees.
The memorandum states that the contractors must provide training on systemic racism, unconscious bias, and other cultural competencies to their employees who work on DOD contracts.
The training must be provided within 60 days of the award of a contract and must be recurring.
Additionally, the contractors must demonstrate that their compliance with DEI mandates through regular reporting.
So to say that these, you know, are they wrong or are they right, it's mandated by DOD. Thank you and I yield back.
What a face crush.
A terrific job by Carlos Jimenez to point out that so often these bad emergences of policy that exist in the private sector can actually be lashed back to too much government.
And the government making these demands of private entities in order to engage in government contracting.
Outstanding job.
It absolutely deflated the Horsford argument.
But here's the bad news.
While the NDAA does great legislative work to ban CRT completely, to get rid of these chief diversity officers, to stop the drain of resources away from our service members into these diversity programs, we did not achieve what I think would have been the most meaningful amendment to push back against DEI, and that is to totally defund it.
That's right.
I had an amendment in committee To say, no more funding at all, period.
Not one red cent for this DEI agenda that has been so misused and tortured and weaponized against people.
And unfortunately, two of my Republican colleagues on the committee joined with Democrats and blocked that amendment's passage.
Now, I have great respect for these colleagues of mine, Don Bacon of Nebraska and Mike Turner of of Ohio.
They voted in favor of the DEI funding that would have been entirely precluded by my amendment.
But I look forward to working with them to try to see if when this legislation gets to the floor, I can understand their concerns better because they didn't really offer a lot of criticism during the time allotted for debate.
General Bacon has put out a statement that he didn't want any amendment to be misconstrued that you couldn't kick racists out of the military.
And of course, if people show up and are virulently racist, they would be in violation of many other standards that have existed, gosh, some of which in practice or in writing since the days of the Revolutionary War.
Certainly since World War I, those standards have evolved and been developed, and they don't have to lean into DEI to ensure that we have the right protection and the right environment to keep our service members safe and focused on the mission.
And that ought to be our objective, not to try to tell people that they are somehow bad or oppressors or oppressed by virtue of their immutable traits, like the color of their skin.
But that argument wasn't enough for some Republicans, and it was not enough for Congresswoman Strickland.
Now, what she offered in debate was this theory that CRT just needs a rebrand because Republicans are weaponizing critical race theory.
Play the clip.
Listen to the lived experience of people who are part of minority groups.
Look at the stark difference between one side of this room and the other side of this room.
When you are taking time to listen, you make better decisions.
When you are taking time to learn from others, you're going to be more effective.
If we want a stronger military, we cannot run from CRT and we must embrace DEI as a central part of how we lead.
I yield back, sir.
CRT has indeed been weaponized by the left, and that's one weapon.
We're not going to continue to fund in this National Defense Authorization Act.
I'm going to continue to update you regarding how the work we have exposed on firebrand and in committees will, I think, really give fuel to the NDAA this year and give a lot of Republicans a reason to vote for it, a reason to support our troops, and to support really give fuel to the NDAA this year and give a lot of Republicans a reason to vote for it, a reason to support our troops, and to support them not just with pay increases, which we
do, not just with new weapon systems, which we do do and we should do, but also with the support they need so that they are not mistreated by some of this wokeism that they've complained to our office and many others about.
So we'll keep you posted on that.
But now I want to get to another important activity that occurred in the House of Representatives this past week, and that was the examination in person of John Durham, Special Counsel John Durham.
So I'm going to lay out for you right now where I have a perspective that is different from that of some of my Republican colleagues.
What Chairman Jordan and many of my Republican colleagues rightly, justly, virtuously want to do is use the Durham report as a basis to get rid of some of these illegal spying authorities and the illegal political activity that emerges out of the FBI and DOJ. And in Durham's report, indeed, he is critical of the FBI and DOJ. But I don't think that is the whole story.
I think John Durham's part of the cover-up.
I think that John Durham's report, his flimsy, lame, unsuccessful prosecutions, the purpose of all of that was not to expose the true bad actors in the deep state.
It was to contain the damage.
It was to ensure that, yeah, you can make kind of broad, sweeping criticisms of the FBI and the bureaucracy, and yeah, it's this clunky thing and needs to change, and sometimes they don't follow all the rules they're supposed to follow.
Sometimes a few people...
Give in to their biases as humans do.
But we never found out who gave the order to run this op.
And what we know is that the Russia hoax was not the manifestation of some incompetence or tomfoolery at the FBI. It was an explicit operation to try to take the presidency away from Donald Trump after the voters had elected him.
And so here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to play for you in just a moment.
The full exchange that I have with John Durham.
And what I want you to ask yourself as you're watching, do you agree with my Republican colleagues that John Durham is a do-gooder who really did everything he could to get to the bottom of this?
Or was he just another person containing the damage and playing the part?
You watch.
You analyze.
I'm going to be eager to see everybody's reactions in the comments.
Play the clip.
Mr. Durham, this seems to all started with one person, but I don't see his name in your report.
I see it in Mueller's report 89 times.
Who did Mr. Papadopoulos meet with that gave him this supposed Russian information?
When Mr. Papadopoulos was interviewed by the FBI, he had identified Joseph Mifsud as a person who had provided him that information.
Did you interview Joseph Mifsud?
We attempted to interview him.
We pursued every lead that we had.
We talked to a lawyer that he had in Europe, but we never were able to actually make contact with him so we could interview him.
Do you think he's a Western source?
Is he associated with Western intelligence?
It's hard to say who Mr. Mifsud is associated with.
He was tied up with Link University, Mr. Scoti, who had involvement in the Italian government, and they were appointed.
It's hard to say who Mifsud is.
I'm going to yield the remainder of my time to Mr. Gates.
Hard to say who Mifsud is.
He's the guy who started the whole thing.
We've known it for years.
Go ahead and play the video.
When the special counsel's office interviewed Mifsud, did he lie to you guys too?
Can't get into that.
Did you interview Mifsud?
Can't get into that.
Is Mifsud Western intelligence or Russian intelligence?
Can't get into that.
Well, I'm reading from your report.
Mifsud told Papadopoulos, Papadopoulos tells the diplomat, the diplomat tells the FBI, the FBI opens the investigation July 31, 2016, and here we are three years later, July of 2019, the country's been put through this, and the central figure who launches it all, Lies to us, and you guys don't hunt him down and interview him again, and you don't charge him with a crime.
Maybe a better course of action is to figure out how the false accusation started.
Maybe it's to go back and actually figure out why Joseph Nipset was lying to the FBI. And here's the good news.
Here's the good news.
That's exactly what Bill Barr's doing.
And thank goodness for that.
That's exactly what the Attorney General and John Durham are doing.
Mr. Durham, was that what you were doing?
I'm sorry, is that what?
Was finding out who Mifsud was, what you were doing?
We pursued them that avenue, yes.
Right, but was he...
This whole thing was an op, Mr. Durham.
This wasn't like a bumbling, fumbling FBI that, like, couldn't get FISA straight.
They ran an op.
So who put Mifsud in play?
You don't know, do you?
I do not know that.
I can't give you the answer.
For years, you had years to find out the answer to what Mr. Jordan said was the seminal question and you don't have it.
And it just begs the question whether or not you were really trying to find that out.
Because it's one thing to criticize the FBI for their FISA violations, to write a report.
They've been criticized in plenty of reports.
Some have referred to your work as just a repackaging and regurgitation of what the Inspector General already told us.
So if you weren't going to do what Mr. Jordan said you were going to do in that video and give us the basis for all of it, what's this all been about?
Well, I'm not exactly sure the import of your question.
If your question is, did we try to locate and interview Mr. Mifsud, the answer is yes.
Why didn't you subpoena him to a grand jury?
I'm sorry, why not?
Why didn't you send him a grand jury subpoena?
Mr. Mifsud?
You'd have to find Mr. Mifsud before you could serve a grand jury subpoena on it.
You guys were out in Italy.
Was it you and Bill Barr looking for authentic pasta over there or Mifsud?
No, we not.
We were looking for information that might help us locate Mifsud.
But you know who I think could probably locate him?
The features of Western intelligence and possibly our own government that put him in play.
Like, your report seems to be less an indictment of the FBI and more of an inoculation, lowercase i, of course.
And like many inoculations, it may have worse consequences down the road.
We'll have some time to discuss this matter further, but it's just hard to pretend as though this was a sincere effort when you don't get to the fundamental thing that started the whole deal.
Yeah, I agree with Mr. Biggs.
You've given us testimony today that you're disappointed that the FBI didn't cooperate more, right?
That was your testimony.
I've said that.
We're disappointed too, but the difference is when regular folks do things that are wrong and unlawful, there's typically greater effort to try to get those people before a grand jury to utilize criminal process where appropriate, not for other purposes.
And it's just like, oh, well, Bill Priestep, the guy who might have set this whole op in motion, he just didn't want to talk to you about certain things, and you were real accommodating to that.
And then Mifsud, the person who juices Papadopoulos to create this Predicate that you find improper.
You guys, I mean, did you ever know who his lawyer was, Mifsud's lawyer?
We talked to his lawyer in Europe.
I don't know if he represented him.
You could find the guy's lawyer, but you couldn't find him?
We contacted somebody that we knew had represented him in a part of the effort to try to locate him.
And you got the lawyer?
And then now you're sitting here in front of the judiciary saying you could find the guy's lawyer, but you couldn't effectuate the service of a subpoena because you couldn't find him?
First of all, as you may or may not know, we wouldn't have the authority to serve a subpoena overseas.
The lawyer didn't know where Mifsud was.
He was in communication with him, but he claimed not to know where he was.
And we were trying to arrange an opportunity to talk to Mifsud.
Did you take possession of two Blackberry phones from Mifsud in any way?
There were phones that were provided to us by the guy.
Do you see how silly this looks?
Like you found the lawyer, you found the phones, but the actual dude who got ordered by Western intelligence to go start this thing you couldn't find?
It's kind of laughable.
It seems like more than disappointment.
It seems like you weren't really trying to expose the true core of the corruption, that you were trying to go at it another way.
As we said in the report and as I said in my opening remarks, we pursued the facts as best we could.
How about this fact, Mr. Durham?
The entire Mueller team does a hard reset on their Apple phone in synchronization to wipe away evidence.
Did you investigate that?
I've read that.
Why did you investigate it?
Who gave the order on the Mueller team to wipe the phones?
Yeah, that was not something that we were That's not true, Mr. Durham.
That is not true, because I'm holding the document that authorizes your activity, and it specifically says the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller.
Mr. Chairman, I seek unanimous consent to enter into the record the order that says that you're supposed to investigate these things.
Whether it's the Mueller team, Mifsud, how about Azra Turk?
What's Azra Turk's real name?
Do you know that?
I'm not going to be disclosing the names of FBI personnel that are otherwise unavailable.
So the FBI sends somebody to go honeypot George Papadopoulos.
Who gave the order to do that?
I think that's beyond the scope of what's in the report.
It's literally the scope of what your charging order is.
Who put it in motion?
We get, after it was put in motion, the FBI did a bunch of wrong and corrupt things.
Totally understand.
We're trying to deal with that.
But when you are part of the cover-up, Mr. Durham, then it makes our job harder.
Yeah, well, if that's your thought, I mean, there's no way of dissuading you from that.
I can tell you that it's offensive and that the people who worked on this investigation have spent their lives trying to protect people in this country and pursue within the law what it is that we are authorized to do.
You tried two cases, lost both of them, and then the one plea, guilty plea you got, Kleinsmith?
Kleinsmith is back to practicing law in Washington, D.C. today.
That's beyond my control.
Right, but the fact that you allowed that plea to occur, right, and then the punishment was insufficient, the fact that you didn't charge Andrew McCabe, you didn't convict the lying Democrats or the lying Russians, you didn't investigate Mifsud or the Mueller probe, even though, as we sit here today in black letter, that was your charge.
Have you ever heard of the Washington Generals?
The Washington Generals?
Yes.
Yeah, and they're the team that basically gets paid to show up and lose, right?
Well, you know, I'm sure that the players who exert blood, sweat, and tears don't view it that way, but you might...
I think they do.
I think they do, because the job of the Washington Generals is to show up every night and to play the Harlem Globetrotters.
And their job is to lose.
So their job is to lose.
And I'm kind of wondering, and it just seems so facially obvious, that it's not what's in your report that's telling, it's the omission, it's the lack of work you did.
And for the people, like the chairman, who put trust in you, I think you let them down, I think you let the country down, and you are one of the barriers to the true accountability that we need.
Do I get to respond to that or comment on that?
Yeah.
Well, I don't know if you've ever investigated a crime.
I don't know that you have.
You didn't investigate these, Mr. Durham.
How about Andy McCabe?
Did you charge him?
Did you investigate him?
Gentlemen, time has expired.
The witness can respond and then we'll move on to our last...
I don't know, sir, whether or not you've ever had occasion to try to investigate crimes under the rules and regulations and under the Constitution that we're bound by.
We can gather evidence in particularly lawful ways.
Can't charge people because we might think something we can charge people.
You didn't investigate the Mueller team wiping their phones, and you won't tell us who gave the orders because you're protecting those people.
Gentleman's time has expired.
We are back live.
So after watching that, what do you think?
Do you really think that that guy took this multi-year project and millions of dollars And didn't ask those basic questions.
Didn't find out who gave the order to get the entire Russia hoax going.
Leo on Twitter says at one point he had confidence in Durham, but now not so much.
And if you are watching this on Rumble, and we hope you are, we hope you're subscribed, or on YouTube, or on Twitter, one of the most interesting things is to watch my colleague Mike Johnson, who's sitting next to me during that nine-minute exchange, And I love Mike Johnson, great congressman from Louisiana.
And you could tell he's just slowly being convinced along the way that this is bullshit, that the whole Durham thing was bullshit, that it was there to ensure that any flesh wounds the deep state had to take would never really result in the structural change or the personal accountability that was necessary.
And as I listen to that again, I'm thinking about this Bill Barr John Durham trip to Italy.
So we're supposed to believe that these two guys, what, are they walking around like Sherlock Holmes with their magnifying glass looking for clues to see if Mifsud's around?
They found the guy's phones.
They found the guy's lawyer.
The reason they didn't find Mifsud is that they didn't want to.
They didn't want to tell you Who put intelligence assets in play overseas to try to create a false predicate to use national security authorities for politics.
To take political dirt and use it to try to ruin the Trump presidency.
And here's the thing.
It's not backward looking.
Because if we don't now go do this work as the Judiciary Committee, then it will happen again.
In a way, they got away with it.
We cannot let that occur.
We cannot put our faith in people like Bill Barr and John Durham.
I think we ought to haul Bill Barr before the Judiciary Committee and ask him these questions.
If John Durham can't answer them, maybe Bill Barr should be able to answer why this investigation never produced any real storyline for what actually happened.
I don't think that is a bug of the system.
I think it's a feature.
And I think that that questioning Pretty dispositively proved it.
I think Mike Johnson knew that.
I think everybody watching knew that.
I think John Durham knew that.
Before we get out of here, I want to give you an update on some spending matters that are very much being hotly debated and contested in the halls of Congress here.
So on September 30th, the government funding bill that Pelosi and McConnell negotiated runs out.
So we have to have the new structure to fund the government.
I don't want to do continuing resolutions.
I don't want to ice in forever, cast in cement, if you will, the spending levels of the Biden era and post-COVID. So we thought the most modest thing we could do is say you've got to have your budget at 2022 spending levels, not 2023, which is substantially higher.
That's what you should mark to.
Put some downward pressure on spending.
We're working to get that done, and we've got some great allies in that fight, one of whom is the budget chairman, Jody Arrington.
And I got this great note from Chairman Arrington, and he starts the note with a quote from James Madison.
Here's what Madison says.
I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse, and in a Republican government, more than any other.
So Madison's poignant quote captures the consequence of borrowing on the backs of our children and bankrupting their future.
And to reverse the curse, remember, public debt is a public curse.
Mr. Arrington gave me a new nameplate.
And just to remind me what the charge is, he put on the back a reverse the curse.
So thank you to Jody Arrington for bringing us that, for reminding us of the words of Madison.
And we've got to do something to start tackling these major drivers of the debt.
It's not going to be enough to just do pathetic incrementalism.
We need bold solutions.
The easy answers are in the past.
And we need leaders willing to make the tough choices.
I know our budget chairman, Jody Arrington, is one such leader.
So as you may have noticed, Firebrand, this was one of the first episodes we had in a while.
It's been a minute.
But we've been making arguments on the critical issues before the Congress on our Rumble channel, on our YouTube channel.
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