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Nov. 2, 2023 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
34:54
Episode 126 LIVE: Elections Aren't Perfect – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
You're not taking Matt Gaetz off the board, okay?
Because Matt Gaetz is an American patriot and Matt Gaetz is an American hero.
We will not continue to allow the Uniparty to run this town without a fight.
I want to thank you, Matt Gaetz, for holding the line.
Matt Gaetz is a courageous man.
If we had hundreds of Matt Gaetz in D.C., the country turns around.
It's that simple.
He's so tough, he's so strong, he's smart, and he loves this country.
Matt Gaetz.
Wow!
It is the honor of my life to fight alongside each and every one of you.
We will save America.
It's choose your fighter time.
and send in the Firebrands.
Welcome back to Firebrands.
We are broadcasting live out of room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building here at the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. And it is quite a day on the Hill.
We're going to take you over to the Senate side where Senator J.D. Vance is fighting against some of the deep state rats over at the Department of Justice.
Rand Paul also.
We've got that testimony for you.
And single subject spending bills.
The thing that we've been talking about a lot on this platform and on the House floor, we march on.
Remember, it was seven months Of Kevin McCarthy's speakership before we took on the first single subject spending bill.
Now we've passed six.
We're rolling through them.
I'm going to give you a little update on this week's work.
Last night we passed the single subject appropriations bill for the legislative branch.
We've also got work to do on the Department of the Interior.
But you're going to get to see that when you actually zero in on these things, you're able to get a lot more programmatic review.
And we're able to ripen votes on key questions that I think matter to the people.
And it is driving the lobbyists crazy.
And I love it.
But if we want this appropriations process to have integrity, if we want our border to have integrity, our elections must have integrity.
And you heard time and again the mainstream media crow about how now our elections are so technically proficient.
We're so resilient.
These are the most secure elections at all time.
There can't possibly be fraud to impact the outcome of American elections.
We are better than that.
Thank you.
We got news out of Bridgeport, Connecticut, that suggests otherwise.
There, we are seeing an entirely new election having to be run because of some of the very tactics we were concerned about from the 2020 election.
We've got a News Nation report from Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Take a listen.
Stunning video put out by the Gomez campaign appeared to show a Bridgeport City employee and local Democratic Party official walking up to a dropbox in the early hours of the morning of September 5th and making multiple deposits of absentee ballots.
You can see a woman, who the Gomez campaign identifies as Bridgeport City Hall employee Wanda Jeter-Petiki, walking up to the dropbox and placing multiple ballots inside.
And a few seconds later, she comes back, does it again.
The Gomez campaign posted this on social media as part of a three-minute compilation showing irregularities in the vote.
And it wasn't just her.
The Gomez campaign played in court nine different people, making 24 drops of apparently multiple ballots into absentee ballot boxes.
In his ruling, Connecticut State Superior Court Judge William Clark said he found the evidence from the Gomez campaign credible, said, quote, the number of ballots at issue when considering the corroborating evidence of the video and documentary evidence brings the reliability of the primary into serious doubt.
Judge Clark has ordered the two sides and city election officials to come together on a new date for a revote by November 17th, but there's all sorts of details there.
This is a wild story.
It is indeed a wild story.
We're back live.
That was Dan Abrams with NewsNation breaking the story.
And here's what I think we need to think about.
The remedy here.
See, we talked very frequently about the affidavits that have been filled out, the videos that have been taken, some of the geo-tracking information that Dinesh D'Souza so aptly put out in the 2000 Mules documentary.
We saw that go on.
But then in debates in Congress, you frequently hear people like Jamie Raskin and Jim McGovern say, but there was no court that ever granted you relief, that ever said you were right when you made these claims about election integrity.
And they're right.
No court did exercise jurisdiction.
And the reason this was an utter failure of Article III courts in the 2020 election is It's because they never had the evidentiary hearings because they understood that even if there were polluted ballots, once those ballots gets co-mingled with legitimate ballots, I have never seen a court in the land call for a replacement election as the remedy.
That is what is so interesting about what is going on in Connecticut to me.
They're actually saying that when an election goes awry, when you can no longer have confidence in the result, That the answer isn't just to take it and endure, but to have a revote.
It's quite something.
We're going to continue to follow it.
And it doesn't seem as though this is going to get stayed by some appellate court.
The court giving the sides, apparently, this opportunity to negotiate a re-vote.
And you wonder why there was not terrific factual development of some of the concerns we had in the 2020 election.
And let me be clear.
I do not believe every single claim made about the 2020 election was true by either side, right?
I don't think it was the most secure election in history.
And probably there were people who thought they observed fraud but were observing something different.
I'm most concerned about the unilateral changes in law and then this huge universe of unaccounted for mail-in ballots that was created as a consequence of those changes in law.
And then when you saw ballots being voted unable to be tied to an actual human being intending to cast that vote, that's when you start undermining The people's confidence in the results.
And that's not something that we want to see in any American election at any level of government.
But the Department of Justice did not do their job.
And this is what is at issue in some of these just total whack job Trump trials that are going on right now.
See, I was aware that there were circumstances where senior officials at DOJ were blocking the evidentiary development over the mail-in vote and the potential that people were harvesting ballots that weren't tied to an actual voter.
And the DOJ was doing everything they could from Washington D.C. to throw a wet blanket on those investigations.
Well, now They have rested the fate and the entire credibility of the DOJ, Merrick Garland, on these prosecutions of Trump.
And one senator has stood up to show tremendous courage to fight back against the Department of Justice, and that is my good friend from Ohio, J.D. Vance.
Now, you've probably heard about Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville showing great courage to stop some of the DOD appointments So that the Department of Defense does not become an abortion travel agency in perpetuity.
So he's gotten a lot of attention from that.
I thought it was a great move.
I've supported Senator Tuberville.
But what Senator Vance has done has been the Department of Justice corollary to the Tuberville doctrine on the Department of Defense.
And he is not allowing the DOJ to continue to repopulate the swamp with more vermin.
He is blocking those appointments, and we are in support of Senator Vance's efforts.
Here's some of that work on the Senate floor.
I think it takes a special amount of gall to be from Joe Biden's political party and to complain about the fentanyl crisis that is ravaging not just Ohio but the entire country because it is Joe Biden's border policies that have invited this fentanyl into our country at record levels.
I heard a briefing from the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Patrol today that confirmed that very fact.
Second of all, the Senator said something I actually agree with, that this whole policy that I've implemented on Department of Justice nominees is unprecedented.
That we have in the past, this body, before I got here, approved a number of Department of Justice nominees through unanimous consent.
What the Senator from Illinois doesn't mention, Madam President, is that in that time when these nominations sailed through unanimous consent, the Department of Justice was not trying to throw the political rival of the President of the United States in prison.
I object to this because we are living in a banana republic where The President is using his Department of Justice to go after his chief political rival, the person he will appear on the ballot with in about a year.
If the Department of Justice will use these nominations for law instead of politics, I am happy to end this whole policy.
But so long as the Department of Justice uses its nominations and uses its personnel to go after its political opponents from the President of the United States on down, I will object.
Because of that, Madam President, I do object.
We are back live.
Senator Vance holding the Senate floor, objecting.
That's what actual accountability for the Biden administration looks like.
Not allowing them to continue to weaponize the government against we the people.
And while far too many in this town are willing to send out the mean tweets and the press releases, very few are willing to show the courage of a J.D. Vance or a Tommy Tuberville.
And we stand with them and we know they stand with us.
There is a lot of positive sentiment on the live stream for these two senators.
Kimbree on Getter says that Tuberville and Vance are doing a good job.
FreeSC on Rumble wants to know if Laura Ingram has apologized to me yet.
Laura doesn't owe me any apology.
We love Laura Ingram.
Sometimes on the internal machinations of the House, we would like a little more trust and confidence from our friends at the Fox News channel.
But no apology and certainly not one expected.
Rooster on Getter says, I need to get with Trump and talk about the VP position.
I don't know that President Trump's going to be considering folks from Florida for vice president, given the constitutional requirement that the president and vice president Have to be electors of different states.
You'll remember Dick Cheney was living in Texas and actually had to move back to Wyoming to establish residence in order to run with George W. Bush.
So not that we're following the Bush-Cheney mantra on too much of anything, but it is constitutionally reflective that that would have to be the process that one would have to go through.
It wasn't just J.D. Vance doing great work in the Senate holding the deep state accountable.
One of the things that I've been really concerned about is this censorship industrial complex.
And we learned about the depth and breadth of the FBI specifically putting pressure on social media platforms to shape public sentiment because of the Missouri v. Biden litigation.
This was really landmark stuff.
I don't know that it got enough credit.
Eric Schmidt, who's now a senator from Missouri, doing a great job, he was the attorney general at the time, and he actually got senior FBI folks in the witness chair, and they admitted that they were engaging in trying to shape how information would be boosted or taken down, promoted, diminished.
And when the court...
made their injunction ruling in Missouri v Biden.
They said that the FBI couldn't do this anymore.
So we got a great opportunity to see the follow-up questions from that fact pattern and procedural posture when Kentucky's Rand Paul had FBI Director Christopher Wray in the witness chair.
Here's what happened.
Is the FBI still meeting with social media companies?
We're having some interaction with social media companies, but all of those interactions have changed fundamentally in the wake of the court's rulings.
That's sort of an acknowledgement that perhaps you weren't just talking about national security, child pornography, and human trafficking, right?
You had other areas of discussion that did involve constitutionally protected speech.
No, no, that's not an acknowledgement of that.
How did you change your behavior?
Out of an abundance of caution in order to make sure that we don't run afoul of any court ruling.
I would say, by the way, of course, that the injunction has been stayed by the Supreme Court.
Did anybody from the FBI ever discuss constitutionally protected speech with social media organizations?
Not to my understanding.
Vaccine efficacy never discussed any post concerning vaccine efficacy.
Well, certainly not, because to my understanding, as you know, the FBI was the first and for a long time the only agency in the intelligence community to assess that the COVID origin was most likely from a lab leak.
I commend you for that.
The Twitter files and other indications, as well as the Missouri v.
Biden, list many cases of both DHS and FBI discussing constitutionally protected speech, vaccine efficacy, mask efficacy, people who said, my brother got the vaccine and died yesterday.
And the brother actually did die, but proof of cause and effect is one thing.
But taking down posts like that was part of the discussion in these meetings.
Not by the FBI. We would not have been engaging with social media companies about vaccine efficacy, to my knowledge, certainly.
Director Wray, in 2017, the Department of Justice issued subpoenas to members of the House Intelligence Committee, congressional staffers, as well as Senate Judiciary Committee staffers, to turn over private information.
Were you involved with that investigation, aware of it at the time?
I'm not familiar with that specific investigation.
This had to do with the leaks, I believe.
We have never been told completely.
But the leaks concerning the crossfire hurricane and the leaks concerning the conversation between Flynn and Kislyak that was wiretapped, that was classified, that somehow got out.
But you're not aware of anybody from Congress being investigated?
Well, as I sit here right now, that's not something that's ringing a bell for me.
Do you see a problem with the Department of Justice issuing subpoenas to congressional staffers who are providing oversight to the very organization that's issuing the subpoenas?
Well certainly anytime there's an investigative activity that touches upon a separate branch of government, namely the legislative branch, it has to be done extraordinarily carefully and there are all kinds of policies that the department has in place to make sure that that's done appropriately.
Director A, did the FBI pay Twitter money to moderate content moderation?
I'm not aware of us paying money to moderate content there or anywhere else.
What was the three million dollars for that the FBI gave that's been revealed in Twitter files, which has been characterized by those writing the Twitter files as payment for content moderation?
Basically, they said Twitter, you know, you guys were meet with them all the time.
You had them taken down so many posts.
They said, well, gosh, it's a lot of work.
Why don't you pay us?
And so you did.
You paid them three million dollars.
Are you aware of the payment?
I'm not aware of that specific payment, but I can tell you that when it comes to payments, going back well over four decades, when we are required by federal law, when a company, like in this instance a provider, goes through expenses to produce information, we're required to reimburse them for those expenses.
And so I think that a lot of the questions about payments revolve around exactly that.
And you will repeat under oath that there was never any discussion of the FBI to take down constitutionally protected speech.
You think it's all national security, child pornography, sex trafficking, no discussion of constitutionally protected speech because this is all going to come out and a lot of it's come out already in depositions, but you're saying there was never any discussion by any of your agents in any of these meetings of constitutionally protected speech being taken down?
To my knowledge, Our agents conducted themselves in compliance with the law throughout.
Same question to Secretary Mayorkas.
You're not aware of your agents ever discussing any constitutionally protected speech with any of the social media companies?
The same answer as Director Wray provided to you, Ranking Member Paul.
Oh, Christopher Wray is so slick, but the way Dr. Rand Paul questions is downright clinical, surgical at times.
You saw right there at the beginning of that clip that Ray had to change the conduct of the FBI in interacting with these social media companies because of this court order that resulted from the oversight work and the investigations and the depositions from the Missouri Attorney General's office.
So it shows the progress.
It shows that really to attack this thing, you've got to have multiple layers.
You've got to take control of the executive branch through elections and ensure that you've got good people, certainly better people than Christopher Wray.
You've got to use the power of the purse in the Congress to starve some of those entities of the resources that they use in order to censor digital speech.
And then you have to use these oversight tools, the depots, the hearings, sometimes even litigation, To try to put the handcuffs on those who would do us harm and who would think that their view of truth ought to dominate over the marketplace of ideas that's always made our nation great.
So to be able to do that, you must have these single subject spending bills with the opportunity for amendment, Cutting programs, limiting authorities.
And just last night, the House of Representatives passed the Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill.
Now, this isn't the most sizzling of single-subject bills, but if you're going to do these things one at a time, I think it's really important for the Congress to show all of you that it's working.
That we're actually doing the work that was contemplated in the 1974 Budget Act that we haven't done since the late 90s.
So the bill that we passed on funding the legislative branch is $51.8 million less than the fiscal year 2024 request.
And what I like about the bill is that it would restrict funds from being used to incentivize or award contractors who have been chronically behind and haven't met the capabilities that we need to be able to serve you.
Another thing I really like about this bill, it prevents the purchasing of telecom equipment from China and other adversaries.
We know that one way the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in unrestricted asymmetric warfare against the United States is to own our manner of communication.
The ones they don't own, then they're going to engage in malign actions toward.
And so decoupling ourselves from China certainly involves our work in the Congress too.
Very glad there's a specific focus on that.
Also this week, we're taking up our single subject appropriations bill on the Department of the Interior.
So I want to give you the information that House Republicans have developed regarding This bill with the Department of the Interior, Environment, and related agencies that deal with those issues.
So the argument is that the bill will help cut the bureaucracy, cut the spending, expand access to a lot of our critical minerals that we have here in the United States, but somehow we limit ourselves from being able to get to those things that we need to run the economy of tomorrow.
And we also defund a lot of the regulations of the EPA. I'm going to go through some of those.
This legislation rescinds $7.8 billion from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and $1.4 billion from the Environmental and Climate Justice Fund that was provided in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Remember, it wasn't about making the environment cleaner for all of us.
It was about making sure that we use the power of federal government for more equity in outcomes with the environment.
It's crazy.
But the bill that we'll be voting on today, I think this evening, will additionally rein in the EPA by repealing the Biden administration's WOTUS rule.
This is the waters of the United States regulation.
This is the regulation that can have some...
Just cattle pond all of a sudden under the jurisdiction of a gajillion federal regulators and the bill also defunds this social cost of carbon cost-benefit analysis that the government was running to really constrain access to the carbon that has allowed the American people to live at a higher quality of life than anyone in the world in no small part because of the cheap energy that we're able to get.
The legislation also deals with some Republican priorities for eco-grief.
Eco-grief.
I didn't know what eco-grief was, but I've learned that at the Department of the Interior, they are paying $4,000 for every virtual session of eco-grief.
Amazing.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology used to be funded out of some of these pots of money.
It won't be in the future.
And a lot of the Biden executive orders regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion are also thrown under the bus in some of the authorizing work that we've done to set up this appropriations bill.
The bill is a 39% reduction From the enacted fiscal year 2023 level.
So this is a funding cut.
And we've got to see that with a lot of these single subject spending bills.
So we've got still some more to do on that bill to get it into better shape.
There are other things that are funded in the bill that I don't particularly like.
And, you know, that happens with these single-subject bills.
There's going to be stuff that you like, stuff that you don't.
I mean, I don't think we should be funding the Kennedy Center or the National Endowment for the Arts or NPR. A lot of these things that kind of get wrapped up within interior and the environment.
And a lot of times it's wasting money, your money, and then devaluing the money that we have.
I want to give an update regarding what's going on on the border as well.
Actually, no.
Let's go first to our global story.
I think we've got a headline on this.
Pentagon sending another 300 troops to the Middle East.
And this is going to be, I think, focused on some of the explosive ordnance disposal.
Work that gets done when you've got some of this extensive mining activity and the roadside bombs that the Palestinians have been using against Israelis.
We saw a lot of that in Iraq as well.
And also communications and support enablers.
The notice from the Pentagon is reported in the Hill says that there will not be troops going to Israel.
They will be at other regional installations helping to reset that regional deterrence.
So that's the update.
More troops headed to the Middle East.
But I want to bring us back to our border because we've gotten some information that it is orders of magnitude worse than we ever expected when Joe Biden became president.
Since Joe Biden took office, there have been over 6.2 million illegal crossings of our southern border.
There have been 7.5 million enforcement encounters nationwide.
In September, there were 269,735 illegal immigrants encountered at the southern border.
This was an over 300% increase from September of 2020. September was the 31st straight month where monthly illegal immigrant encounters have been higher than even the highest month seen under President Trump.
Customs and Border Patrol has seized 27,023 pounds of fentanyl in fiscal year 2023. This is a 464% increase from fiscal year 2020. There were more fentanyl seizures in fiscal year 2023 than in 2021 and 2022 combined.
169. Remember that number.
That's the number of people on the terrorist watch list who were stopped trying to cross the southern border in fiscal year 2023. It's an all-time record.
It is more than all of the combined terror watchlist encounters from 2017 through 2022.
There have been more than 267 individuals whose name have appeared on the watchlist who we have seen just since Joe Biden became president.
In October, federal officials warned that members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah could be crossing through the southern border.
Cartels are making $13 billion a year smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States.
And Joe Biden's far left open border policies are to blame for this historic crisis.
It's not like we don't know how to fix this.
It's the Trump policies.
They worked.
But during Joe Biden's first 100 days in office, He took 94 executive actions on immigration.
And the whole sum of this included halting the border wall, changing the asylum policies, totally destroying the relationships we'd made to keep people in their home country or in the first safe country that they come to.
In August 2022, Biden and his administration decided to make the border crisis worse by formally ending a lot of the Trump policies, namely remain in Mexico.
The Biden administration announced on May 10, 2023, that it will allow for the release of some migrants into the United States with absolutely no way to track them.
And Biden's Department of Homeland Security has now admitted that 40% of the catch-and-release migrants They've just disappeared.
They're not even being tracked anymore.
40% of them.
And we're talking about millions of people?
They're not showing up for any court date.
They're not ever going home.
You'll be paying for them forever.
Despite this historic crisis, Joe Biden has only visited the southern border once, and it was widely panned as a pathetic photo op.
So make no mistake, House Republicans know that border security is national security.
That's why we passed H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act.
It is the strongest border security package in American history.
But that act is not law because the Senate won't act on it.
Do you agree with these things?
Here are the things that are in H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act.
First, force the Biden administration to restart construction of the border wall.
Deploy technology to the southern and northern borders.
Increase the number of Border Patrol agents and provide adequate pay.
Require transparency regarding the illegal crossings from the DHS that has been lying to us.
Strengthen current law to protect unaccompanied children from human trafficking and catch and release.
End the abuse of Executive Immigration Authority and the abuses of the Asylum Authority Strengthen and streamline the process for adjudications so that people that aren't here can get removed.
And then we actually have to stand with ICE when those removals become necessary.
Because right now when there are criminals that are apprehended and a lot of our local police and sheriffs, there's an ICE detainer put on them.
ICE never shows up.
And a lot of times they're released right back onto our streets.
Final note, I know that it's been the Halloween weekend, and of course, in Northwest Florida, we have the friendliest trick-or-treaters.
For those who are on our audio platforms, you're not able to see this, but you're watching a bear in Navarre, Florida, right in the heart of my district.
And what I love about the bear trick-or-treating is that it only took one piece of candy.
You know there's always that family that leaves the bowl out, and the first trick-or-treater that comes, they just dump the whole bowl in their bag.
Well, this black bear...
So polite.
So Northwest Florida polite.
Thank you all so much for joining us on Firebrand.
I'm going to have a lot of updates coming regarding how all of this Israel-Ukraine border stuff is being evaluated.
My strong position is that that has to be evaluated independently.
I don't think we should send one more nickel to Ukraine I think our border should be sealed up like the strongest Ziploc you've ever had before.
We're even debating sending more money to Ukraine, but we've got a lot of people in both parties that aren't willing to put the needs of our citizens and our border first here.
We're going to continue to have those debates.
We're going to show you the consequences.
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