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Jan. 17, 2024 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
32:15
Episode 142 LIVE: SecDef Missing In Action (feat. Rep. Cory Mills) – 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.
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!
I'm sending the firebrands. - Well, he wasn't trying to remain a little subtle.
He was trying to remain secretive.
This is an individual who failed to uphold his duties, and he basically vacated the seat without letting anyone know.
Even Deputy Secretary Hicks, who was on vacation in Puerto Rico, did not know that she'd assumed his duties.
Now you've got five to six days that we don't know what the incapacitation was for Secretary Lloyd, while we are seeing these increased attacks that we just talked about.
We talk about the idea of not just striking and attacking the Houthi rebels, but also the fact that that shipping lane carries 12% of global trade, a majority of that for the United States.
So this is an attempt to also disrupt us.
I've submitted my impeachment articles long ago in August of last year.
I think that the Republican House needs to take up these articles of impeachment, and we need to go forward with a dereliction of duty hearing.
I think that we can look at the 2021 Afghan botched withdrawal, the failure to get status of forces agreements, the 33,000 recruitment deficit, and also his inability to allow the administration to know what's going on as reasoning for us to take this up and impeach him with bipartisan support.
Welcome back to Firebrand.
He's calling for impeachments and hearings regarding Secretary Lloyd Austin not upholding his duties as the Secretary of Defense.
It's Congressman Florida man and Firebrand Corey Mills, my good friend, who's joining us here on Firebrand.
You made big news last year.
You saw this guy Lloyd Austin for what he was, a phony, a fraud.
You called him out like I've never seen a member of Congress speak to a Secretary of Defense and that's a lot coming from me.
I want to get into what's going on with the Secretary of Defense.
What's going on more broadly in the Middle East, because you know a great deal about that region of the world.
But first, you're in your first term here in Congress.
You represent the great state of Florida.
You have chosen to lead from the front of this fight.
You take direct action rescuing Americans from some of the most dangerous places in the world.
How would you answer the question on the street to a person in a minute or two about how did Cory Mills come to be in the United States Congress?
I mean, look, it's a God thing.
You know, every single thing that I've done in my life, whether it was coming from a broken home, whether it was serving in the military, whether it was building successful businesses, I mean, it all basically was on a pathway that was set for me.
So for me, it's kind of like the C.S. Lewis thing.
It's like the talents, right?
So it's taking what I have, my capacity, capabilities, and stuff, and basically being able to apply that and make it forward.
Because when we all meet our maker, I want to be able to say, are you proud of what I've done with all the things that you've blessed me with?
And give us a little sense of your personal military experience and record to the extent that you can.
So I served in the 82nd Airborne Division for a long time.
Served on a scout reconnaissance team.
Was a member of the Joint Special Operations Command and Iraq Invasion in 2003. Served a little bit of time with the State Department as well as for other agencies.
So I spent seven years in Iraq.
I spent three years in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Pakistan, North Somalia area.
Lived out in Kenya for a little bit.
So quite a bit of time overseas and speak fluent Arabic.
So you know the region.
You know the players.
You know the military, the bureaucracy, the interagency process.
And I took note of early in your congressional career, you sussed out Lloyd Austin.
And by the way, every single person in our military, even at the high end of it, under Joe Biden, isn't a bad person, isn't a bad strategist.
But you seem to think that this guy in particular didn't have it.
How did you know?
Well, one, I've talked to people who've actually served under Lloyd Austin when he was a flag officer, and they've talked about the fact that most of his promotions was part of that kind of the diversity, you know, portion of this.
I mean, that's the honest truth from many of the commanders who had actually served with him.
Now you fast forward into what has he done since he's become the Secretary of Defense.
He's failed horribly in prioritizing the things like being ready, having us have the right equipment, Making sure that we're prioritizing increased lethality.
Instead, we're on diversity, equity, and inclusion, which has resulted in 33,000-plus people who no longer want to serve in our recruitment deficit, plus the 9,600 people who are unconstitutionally purged for refusing the vaccine for religious or medical freedom reasons.
Where's their inclusion?
Exactly.
They seem to be missing out on the inclusion part of the diversity, equity, and inclusion because if you were a patriotic American, a devout Christian, someone of any faith that had a legitimate basis to seek an exemption, you got totally screwed.
You were excluded explicitly.
So we go through all this.
Lloyd Austin screws up the VAX mandate.
You were very critical of the Afghanistan stuff.
And here's what the Lloyd Austin defenders would say on the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Well, that was the State Department's fault.
We would have done it differently, but really at the end of the day, the White House listened to Blinken and the State Department and this belief that there would be this durable Afghan government led by Ghani or whomever.
Which they knew was never the case.
Yeah, well, it was a patina.
It was just a money laundering operation with a lot of those guys.
Well, but it has been for a long time.
I think the further investigation after we remove people like Secretary of Austin, who has a dereliction of duty...
We need to be doing investigations into these defense contractors who is responsible for the training like NPRS or any of the others and saying you were giving reports to say that this battalion was ready to fight and had the necessary sustainability.
Clearly that was wrong.
Were you feeding bad intel to continue your contracts or continue to try and bleed the government dry?
There's a bigger portion of this that we need to be looking at outside of procurement reform and how the military-industrial complex works.
This needs to be about people who are signing up to do a job that are not scared to tell the president when he's right and when he's wrong.
Secretary Lloyd had no escalation of force.
He had no rules of engagement, and that's what resulted in 13 heroes losing their lives in 13 new brave Gold Star families.
And do you think they've fixed it?
Because I'm looking at what we've got going on in the Red Sea right now, and we've got a lot of force posture there.
And are we setting up for some Gulf of Tonkin moment as a consequence of just poor decision-making at the tactical level?
I mean, it's poor decision at a tactical level, but it's really, as Secretary Gates said when Biden was vice president, he's wrong on 100 percent of foreign policy.
This is, you know, the result of the Houthis increasing their attacks was when they got delisted as a terrorist organization.
The increase in funding in mid-range ballistic missiles is because Iran has the largest oil revenue they've ever had.
So we have to start, you know, instead of treating the symptoms, we have to recognize the disease.
The disease is Joe Biden has failed foreign policies.
We have to look at Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea and their geopolitical alignment.
But to your point, we also have to address the fact that 12% of global shipping goes to the Suez Canal, of which we're a large importer of, and that this is an actual attempt by the Houthis, by Iran, and by China to disrupt commerce for America.
So you believe the American people have a specific, definable interest vis-a-vis global shipping in the Suez Canal?
I absolutely do.
Look, the bottom line is we've become way too reliant on adversarial nations like China.
We're continuing to water ourselves down by doing what we just did last year, which is the $14.4 billion sale of our last and largest steel manufacturer.
So yes, we have a national security interest and an economic interest when it comes to the global shipping lanes.
Apparently, Blinken is stuck in Davos right now.
We got a lot of people on the live chat saying, leave him there.
Maybe they can have him.
He's comfortable with the globalist elites.
So we have this eruption of conflict.
You talk about the interconnectivity of what's going on in the world.
And then Lloyd Austin goes to get a medical procedure, does not disclose that to the White House or the president, doesn't really set up the next person in command to even come off of a vacation.
And now a lot of people are looking back to the articles of impeachment that you originally filed against Lloyd Austin, and folks are starting to ask some really tough questions.
Sasha, put up the tweet from Congressman Chris DiLuzio.
This is a Democrat congressman on the House Armed Services Committee where Representative Mills and I do a lot of our work.
And here it is.
I've lost trust in Secretary Austin's leadership of the Defense Department due to the lack of transparency about his recent medical treatment and his impact On the continuity on the chain of command.
I have a solemn duty in Congress to conduct oversight of the Department of Defense through my service on the House Armed Services Committee.
That duty today requires me to call on Secretary Austin to resign.
So here is a House Democrat on our committee calling for that resignation.
Your reaction?
Well, look, Deluzio is exactly right.
Not only was there a violation of protocol, which is the Rule 3349-6, Which allows the people to announce a vacancy if they're going under any type of medical procedure.
The presidents do it when they do colonoscopies or whatever the case may be.
But the other thing is that we had a national security breach.
We've got attacks increasing like we've not seen at any point in time in Syria and Iraq.
And I just want to point out the fact that both you and I fought to repeal the authorization of use of military force to AUMS that was keeping our troops there since 01-02, which is being wrongfully and being abused for the wrong reasons.
But The whole point is that you've got increased attacks.
You've got the shipping lanes and commerce and economic trade that's getting threatened.
You've got an increase in China's rhetoric about the unification to take Taiwan.
And meanwhile, for five days, you have the Secretary of Defense, who doesn't tell anyone to include Deputy Secretary Hicks, who's on vacation in Puerto Rico, that she's now assumed his duties.
So during those missile attacks, those counterattacks, my question is, who is authorizing those attacks whenever you've got no one at the helm?
And God forbid the plan doesn't go exactly according to plan.
As you well know, some of these attacks, there can be problems in targeting.
Let's keep in mind, this is the crew that went and bombed some family on their way to a barbecue in Afghanistan and told the rest of us it was a good kill.
It was a virtuous strike on a terrorist.
So they don't nail it every time.
And the fact that this guy's being totally not transparent about this, you've got someone who did some of the most intense work like you, you've got Democrat Congressman Deluzio, and even Seth Moulton, Democrat Congressman from Massachusetts, former Democrat presidential contender, also on the House Armed Services Committee.
Here's what Congressman Moulton had to say.
What he did is completely unacceptable.
I can't imagine that happening at the lowest levels of the military chain of command, like where I was as a mere lieutenant platoon commander in Iraq.
I can't even imagine it happening when I was a 15-year-old busboy.
I mean, if I was going to be out for a week, I had to tell my boss.
So this is a major breakdown in the chain of command.
And the commander in chief needs to make a decision here.
It's up to the president as to whether he fires secretary Austin.
But I tell you what, he needs to send a decisive message that this is never going to happen again.
What would you do?
I'm curious if you had to make the call.
If I were the president of the United States, I would fire him in about five minutes.
So here we are with A Joe Biden crime family that not a single Democrat will stand up against.
There's not a single Democrat that will vote to impeach Joe Biden over the bribes that we've shown.
We have an open border We have 8 million people we've let in.
And there's not a single Democrat that will vote to impeach Mayorkas over the open border.
But here, to their credit, and I don't always agree with Moulton and Delusio, disagree with them more frequently than not.
But when you have two Democrats willing to step up and say, this is unacceptable.
I would fire him.
He should resign.
Then the question becomes, what is the Republican response?
You've laid out the protocols, the procedures in a very kind of dispassionate matter-of-fact way.
And we have from the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee a strongly worded letter to Lloyd Austin.
This comes from Mike Rogers, who is from the state of Alabama, a Republican.
And in this letter, Chairman Rogers asks nine really good questions regarding the occurrences of any sedation or general anesthesia, regarding any orders or instructions to other people in the Defense Department regarding the hospitalization or medical condition, regarding the authorities that were given to Deputy Secretary Hicks, who, by the way, was on vacation in Puerto Rico, as Corey Mills pointed out, and really an overall accounting of all official actions.
Let me give you this take.
When you have two Democrats calling for the firing or resignation of the leader of the United States Defense Department, and you are in a global era of erupting conflict, as Corey Mills just laid out, a strongly worded letter is insufficient.
It is necessary, but insufficient.
We should be holding hearings right now, this week, in the committee that Moulton and Deluzio and Mills and Gates all serve on to find out what the hell happened and who's making the decisions.
Because, as you just heard Corey say, this stuff isn't over.
We're still in the kill zone with a lot of people in the Middle East right now and I think the Pentagon is in shambles over this.
So I guess you've asked Lloyd Austin some of the toughest questions in committee.
If you had Lloyd Austin or a senior Defense Department official before us in a hearing, which should happen, which should already be happening, what would you ask?
What are you going to drill down on?
Look, when I asked him in our last hearing about what is willful dereliction of duty...
I read the definition.
He acknowledged it.
I asked if some of the things that he didn't know was reading his own resume, but I asked if you would have removed an officer for dereliction of duty based on these principles.
He said, yes, I would.
Now, this furthers my argument on my impeachment articles from last year that was filed, which I still don't know why the speaker is refusing to take up or our committee chairman is refusing to start investigating.
This is a willful dereliction of duty.
It's not as if he didn't know what he was doing.
He vacated his seat, didn't have responsibility, had no continuity, and committed a national security breach.
And meanwhile, he's allowed to still consider himself to be Secretary of Defense.
If any of his officers or even his deputies would have done what he'd done, he would have had them removed.
But he thinks he's above the law.
One of the key questions that the Mike Rogers letter asks is whether or not other people in the Defense Department were involved in this concealment.
And that's a really important question, right?
Because I do think it's appropriate to say, well, if I'm making a personal choice, maybe it doesn't fit in with work, but once I start to involve others in the cover-up...
But we know that there was.
Exactly.
Because his staffer called the ambulance and asked for it to be subtly turned the sirens off, turned the lights off.
Look, this wasn't about subtlety, as the 911 called.
It was about secrecy and him withholding information that is pertinent to national security.
So this headline we get from the Daily Beast, Lloyd Austin's secret ambulance request revealed in audio of 911 Call.
And let's go ahead and take a listen to that audio that Congressman Mills just pointed out.
9-1-1, where is your emergency?
Tonight, the 9-1-1 call just obtained by CBS News reveals an aide to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asked the dispatcher to keep the emergency discreet.
Can I ask, can the ambulance not show up with lights and sirens?
We're trying to remain a little subtle.
Yeah, I understand.
Yeah, usually when they turn into a residential neighborhood, they'll turn them off, but they're required by law to run with them with the main street.
The operator then asks for details about Austin's condition.
Did he pass out or does he feel like he's going to pass out?
Uh, no.
If we need them to take him to Walter Reed Medical, is that a possibility?
Let them know that when they get there.
Like I said, I'm noting all this in the call.
The 911 call adds to questions about why President Biden did not find out about Austin's hospitalization for three days.
Neither did his deputy, who had taken over Austin's duties while she was on vacation in Puerto Rico.
We're back live with Congressman Cory Mills.
Clemo on Rumble wants to know if there were any umbrella drinks in Puerto Rico with the person that was running our defense department while Lloyd Austin was comatose.
And National Interest on YouTube wants to know if he can be arrested for desertion.
Well, I think that desertion is definitely something, but to answer Clint Mose, she was probably having Mai Tais the same way that Joe Biden has ice cream in the White House.
So this is the problem.
We literally have a vacancy at 1600 and a vacancy at the Pentagon during a time when all our adversaries are running amok, when we're running towards economic collapse, when Congress can't get their shit together.
We really need to face the facts that we're in a worse position than we've ever been.
That's why both you and I, and I know you were just out in Iowa as well, but That's why we have to have President Trump back in office.
We need him now more than ever from a military diplomatic and economic perspective and I tell you We have to get accountability for the American people.
That's why I ran.
That's why I promised that I was going to come up here and be a fighter.
Austin's my first target.
The border is the most important issue.
But if we're unwilling to actually get that done, let's take out Austin for his dereliction of duty and his desertion.
There's over 200 Republicans.
We can get a smart team to dig into these facts.
Isn't it embarrassing that the Daily Beast did better oversight over the Pentagon than we did?
Matt, you know this all too well.
Everyone talks about the fact that Republicans have the majority.
Let me just go ahead and clear the air.
If your definition of having the majority is having an R next to your name and counting and tallying those up and saying, okay, you have the majority...
Then you're not focused on what's actually happening, which is the ideological alignments.
If you're not a true constitutionalist, you're not a true conservative, but you're a Republican from the old guard, we don't have the majority.
That's why in most of the real tough votes that protect the American people, there's 21 of us, 73 of us.
Maybe we get to an 80-plus stance when it comes to things like blocking FISA that's been violated 287,000 times.
But the reality is that we have the numbers, if you look at the R's next to us, But ideologically, as conservatives who want to fight for the American people, we are not the majority.
And we see that play out not just in lackluster oversight at times, but in how we are funding the government.
And I want to turn our attention to that next.
Let's put up the Jake Sherman tweet from Punch Mobile News reporting that the Stop Gap funding bill, which is the pending business in the Senate, is riding on H.R. 2872, the Permanent Electronic Duck Stamp Act.
So let's set the stage here.
We have a bill that we've sent over to the Senate where duck hunters have agreed to pay a little bit extra when engaged in migratory duck hunting over certain species so that that can go into various conservation funds to support ducks and duck hunting.
I'm not a duck hunter.
I love duck hunters.
Great people.
But this seemed to be a pretty non-controversial agreed-upon.
The hunters liked it.
The conservation community liked it.
Duck hunting stamps.
Yay.
And they are adding as an amendment to that bill the funding of the entire government of the United States through March.
And I'm looking at this saying, this is no way to fund the government and it's not even the right way to pass a duck hunting bill.
So we fought hard throughout this Congress to try to change the way business is done.
And this just looks like the same swampy nonsense to me where we are punting.
We are kicking the can down the road.
And so you can share with all the folks watching from Florida and around the country what you think about how we're approaching government funding because it seems deeply unserious to me.
Well, it is unserious.
And again, we're continuing to not look at things like We voted for in rules.
The germaneness.
I'm not sure what the Duck Stamp Act has to do with everything else.
We talked about 12 single-point appropriation bills.
We talked about going through committees of jurisdiction and making sure that we had regular order.
Why did we fight so hard for all these things if it's going to constantly be waived or dismissed?
People need to understand, this is not DC as usual.
I have never voted for a CR. I never will.
I will vote for 12 single-point appropriation bills, but not looking at these minimal cuts that they think that they're making in there.
The reality is that, and I've explained this, of every dollar we borrow, and it's borrowed because we didn't make it, of every dollar we borrow, we got 73 cents on average that's already pre-allocated to our mandatories that we're scared to reform to improve and preserve.
And then you've got roughly 11 cents of every dollar that is just going towards servicing our interest payments, which is going to be like $844 billion next year on our $34 trillion deficit, which means that when you- I think it'll be more as well.
It'll be a national defense spending level.
Because think about all the debt that we finance at lower interest rates that's now rolling off that that we have to refinance at higher interest rates.
No, you're absolutely right.
But my whole point is that in the reality of things, when you eliminate defense, you eliminate interest rates, you eliminate mandatories, we're all fighting over the idea that, oh, we're going to cut 20%, 30%.
Yeah, of the available 8 cents that you actually have available to you with zero economic growth strategy.
If you are a business owner today, you know it's simple math.
Account receivables have to exceed account payables, the same as our GDP to national debt ratio.
And you can't cut your way to profitability.
You have to grow through prosperity.
And the person who understood that, who got tax reform in play, was President Donald J. Trump.
And we saw more IRS revenue come in than ever before.
The Democrats fail to acknowledge the fact that we have $5 trillion that comes in in available revenue, but now it's like anyone else.
When they start making a new paycheck, they're like, well, I've got more money, so therefore I can spend more.
Well, when you're spending at $7.4, $7.5 trillion taking N5, driving up our inflation rates, driving up consumer suppression, that's why we are where we are.
I won't vote for a CR.
I've never voted for a CR.
I don't care if it's an omnibus, minibus, or a short bus.
I am not going to continue to do the DC dance.
No.
It only leads to one thing, and it's more despair and higher prices for the American people.
He laid it out perfectly.
Glad to have you.
And we do want to pay attention to what's going on with all the folks out in Davos right now.
And I've been watching it.
I've been paying attention.
And what I want to do, I want to close out the show.
Representative Mills and I have to roll back to some additional votes we have this afternoon.
But I want to give you a taste of what you heard from Mele, the newly elected leader with a populist nationalist spirit from South America.
He gets up and drops the hammer on these globalists in the World Economic Forum.
President Mele of Argentina, take a listen.
Today I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger.
And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.
Unfortunately, in recent decades, Motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.
We're here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world.
Rather, they are the root cause.
Do believe me, no one better place than us, Argentines, to testify to these two points.
When we adopted the model of freedom back in 1860, in 35 years we became a leaning world power.
And when we embrace collectivism over the course of the last 100 years, we saw how our citizens started to become systematically impoverished, and we dropped to spot number 140 globally.
They say that capitalism is evil because it's individualistic, and that collectivism is good because it's altruistic, of course, with the money of others.
So they therefore advocate for social justice.
But this concept, which in the developed world became fashionable in recent times, in my country has been a constant in political discourse for over 80 years.
The problem is that social justice is not just and it doesn't contribute either to the general well-being.
Quite on the contrary, it's an intrinsically unfair idea because it's violent.
It's unjust because the state is financed through tax.
And taxes are collected coercively.
Or can any one of us say that they voluntarily pay taxes?
Which means that the state is financed through coercion and that the higher the tax burden, the higher the coercion and the lower the freedom.
And it should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it's been tried out.
It's been a failure economically, socially, Culturally, and it also murdered over 100 million human beings.
Fortunately, there's more and more of us who are daring to make our voices heard, because we see that if we don't truly and decisively fight against these ideas, the only possible fate is for us to have increasing levels of state regulations, socialism, poverty, and less freedom, and therefore, we'll be having worse standards of living.
I would like to leave a message for all business people here and for those who are not here in person but are following from around the world.
Do not be intimidated either by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state.
Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges.
You are social benefactors.
You're heroes.
You're the creators of the most extraordinary period of Prosperity we've ever seen.
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral.
If you make money, it's because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being.
Do not surrender to the advance of the state.
The state is not the solution.
The state is the problem itself.
You are the true protagonist of this story.
And rest assured that, as from today, Argentina is your staunch Unconditional ally.
Thank you very much, and long live freedom.
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