Feb. 22, 2024 - Firebrand - 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 Gates, for holding the line. | |
| Matt Gates is a courageous man. | |
| If we had hundreds of Matt Gates 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 Gates. | |
| 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! | |
| I'm sending the firebrands. | |
| Is it worth it? | |
| More and more high profile Republicans are asking themselves that question and deciding the answer is no. | |
| CNN's Melanie Zenona out today with a new piece looking at why so many name brand Republicans are just heading, running even for the exit smell. | |
| She joins us now. | |
| What's the consensus about why this is happening? | |
| Well, of course, there are a lot of factors that go into a decision like this. | |
| It's a very personal decision. | |
| Some lawmakers cited family reasons. | |
| Others are running for higher office. | |
| But one thing that me and my colleague Annie Greer really picked up on was that there is an overwhelming amount of frustration right now with just how dysfunctional the House, particularly the House Republican conference, has been, from all of the chaotic speaker drama to even just the struggle to pass basic procedural votes on the floor. | |
| Just take a look What some members told us on the record here, Ken Buck, one of those members retiring, said, we're not doing serious things. | |
| Carlos Jimenez told us, I thought that some of our members would be smarter. | |
| Steve Womack, we are fractured. | |
| And Don Bacon told me, when you have folks on your own team with their knives out, It makes it less enjoyable. | |
| And, you know, it's not just the number of Republicans who are retiring. | |
| It is the caliber of the people who are deciding to call it quicks. | |
| There are five committee chairmen, chairwomen and chairmen, who are deciding to retire, and that includes Kathy McMorris-Rogers. | |
| She is not even term-limited yet on her top post on the Energy and Commerce Committee. | |
| That's a very powerful position that some members work their entire careers to achieve. | |
| And then also Mike Gallagher. | |
| He's only 39 years old and he was once seen as a rising star in the GOP. So there is a lot of concern right now about a brain drain as these senior members decide to leave and take all of their institutional knowledge with them. | |
| And there's also concern about what this means for the governing wing of the GOP as those members decide to exit and its members, hardliners like Bob Good, who are largely blamed for a lot of the turbulence and chaos, who are deciding to stick around. | |
| Jess? | |
| A big, big difference, because to your point, that graphic we just saw, those are some big names who have been there for a very long time and really are responsible for making things go. | |
| All right, Melanie Zinona, great reporting. | |
| Thanks so much. | |
| Welcome to Firebrand. | |
| We are live. | |
| I'm Congressman Matt Gaetz. | |
| We are back, simulcast, streaming out of room 2021 in the Rayburn House Office building here in the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. We're glad you're with us. | |
| At CNN, they're melting down because the high caliber, the name brand, the governing wing of the Republican Party, they're deciding to call it quits because it's not so enjoyable when we actually focus on I don't know. | |
| Using the leverage that we need to in this town to fix the border, drive down spending. | |
| They don't like it, but you know what? | |
| If they want to blame me for it, if they want to blame Bob Good for the fact that we are changing Congress because we don't think we can win with the team we have, well, I think that's blame that we're willing to take. | |
| So, quite interesting. | |
| Make sure, by the way, if you're watching this program, you go download the Rumble app and then turn notifications on. | |
| That's the best way to get those live updates, to get the news posted. | |
| Immediately direct from the source. | |
| And the news in Northwest Florida is certainly sad today that I have to share. | |
| There are around 10 million illegal immigrants that have invaded our country since President Biden took office. | |
| This number includes 1.8 million known gotaways. | |
| And remember, there are also unknown gotaways. | |
| but also 7.3 million border crossers, most of whom have largely been paroled into the interior of the country, and they're waiting up to eight years for a court date. | |
| Now, this reckless abuse of authority by Alejandro Mayorkas and President Biden is not without real-life consequences. | |
| Yesterday, a 21-year-old constituent of mine was killed when Byron Pineda recklessly changed lanes, crashing into the 21-year-old constituent of mine's motorcycle, knocking it into the median. | |
| Byron Pineda, as it turns out, is wanted by ICE. | |
| We don't know yet all the details of the crash, and we don't know how Byron Pineda came into the country, whether he crossed the southern border and disappeared, whether he was paroled by Alejandro Mayorkas, or maybe he's overstaying a visa. | |
| But if Alejandro Mayorkas and the Department of Homeland Security were doing their job, then my constituent might still be alive today, and Byron Pineda would be out of this country. | |
| It's a sad, sad state of affairs that we allow dereliction of duty at the federal level to mean life or death in every congressional district in America. | |
| And the fact that this man was wanted by ICE and yet felt bold enough to just drive around the streets of our community, that's terrifying. | |
| The brazenness of it. | |
| And you know why? | |
| Because nobody is getting deported. | |
| And especially not people whose chief crime is unlawful entry into the country. | |
| So the fact that this guy is on the list that ICE actually was looking for to get rid of... | |
| That's alarming. | |
| My guess is he's one bad hombre. | |
| That's not just fentanyl or gang violence. | |
| The externalities of rampant illegal immigration affect every aspect of our daily lives, even in the paradise of Northwest Florida. | |
| There is no escaping this crisis. | |
| And the Biden-Mayorkas administration has made their position clear. | |
| They have no intention of putting a stop to it. | |
| They're actually facilitating it. | |
| This is why it's more important than ever to impeach Secretary Mayorkas, to hold him accountable, to convict him in the Senate, And then to ensure that Joe Biden cannot do harm to our border or our nation going forward. | |
| We cannot survive 10 million more Byron Pinedas crossing our border of the next four years. | |
| Can't even survive hundreds of thousands of those types of circumstances. | |
| Now, there are other developments I want to talk to you about regarding illegal aliens and voting. | |
| A Chinese national named Kelly Wong, who cannot vote in the United States, has recently been sworn in to San Francisco's election commission despite her lack of citizenship, this news from the New York Post. | |
| This means that a non-citizen who spoke Cantonese during an interview with local media before swearing in, despite knowing English fluently, will take part in overseeing critical aspects of our election process. | |
| This includes voter registration, vote-by-mail policies, balloting, voting locations, drop boxes, election observation, chain of custody review from someone who's not a citizen. | |
| This is a basic premise. | |
| If you're not an American citizen, you should not be in a position to have authority over our elections. | |
| I can't even believe we're having that debate. | |
| That's why Ms. Wong's unanimous appointment by San Francisco's Board of Supervisors to the city's Elections Commission demands more attention for multiple reasons. | |
| Coming from Hong Kong in 2019, Wong has worked with a San Francisco-based advocacy group, Chinese for Affirmative Action. | |
| Quite the name. | |
| She reportedly plans to continue to work in this role even though she's going to be part of the elections infrastructure. | |
| The group was previously responsible for lobbying the government to change the law to allow non-citizens to vote in San Francisco school board elections if their children attended school in the district. | |
| This alone was controversial, but Wang's appointment to the Election Commission takes things to a new level. | |
| Additionally, the implications for national security cannot be overstated. | |
| With hundreds of Chinese nationals entering the United States illegally through the southern border from Mexico, Wang's position on the Election Commission adds another layer of complexity to the debate on immigration and electoral integrity. | |
| The principle here is simple. | |
| The integrity of our elections is something that should be reserved for our citizens, non-citizens, It only erodes our democracy to put them in positions to have that kind of primacy and that kind of influence. | |
| So, it's not about xenophobia. | |
| It's about safeguarding the electoral system for all Americans and giving us confidence in it. | |
| The decision to appoint Wong is a stark reminder of the need for a serious conversation about who should hold authority. | |
| It isn't just a local issue. | |
| It's a national concern that strikes at the heart of our democracy and our sovereignty. | |
| In just moments, I've got this terrific interview for you. | |
| So Clint Lancaster is a guy who's a fantastic whiz lawyer in Arkansas. | |
| He ends up representing Joe Biden's, I'm sorry, Joe Biden's really his granddaughter's mother. | |
| So the woman who had a child with Hunter Biden who resides in Arkansas and has this family law dispute with Hunter Biden, the lawyer for that case that got the DNA swab, That got the child support matter sorted out. | |
| That saw a lot of the financial stuff. | |
| Going to be here in just moments for an interview. | |
| But I wanted to let you know of a few other things that are cooking. | |
| FloridaPolitics.com is reporting that the primary runoff proposal that the state of Florida was considering has been temporarily postponed in its first House hearing. | |
| So the state of Florida is... | |
| A system that is first past the post, which means if you have the highest number of votes, you advance from the primary election to the general election. | |
| Seems like a pretty democratic and reasonable process. | |
| And that process has produced prosperity, safe streets, good schools, a clean environment in Florida. | |
| And with two weeks to go in the legislative session, there were efforts by the House Speaker Paul Renner to airdrop a piece of legislation into the process to change 20 years of election law over the course of two weeks. | |
| That is irresponsible. | |
| And the change they want to make is not a good one. | |
| Sure, it's great if you're a political consultant. | |
| When you go from two elections, the primary and the general, to three elections, the primary, the runoff, and then the general, oh, political consultants love it. | |
| They get to charge more money. | |
| They think it's great. | |
| The media will champion it because they get to place more advertisements. | |
| But what does it mean for us, we the people? | |
| One, it's a more target-rich environment for fraud feasors. | |
| Two, it costs way more money. | |
| And third, it's actually quite anti-democratic because the turnout and the runoff is so much lower than either the primary or the general, it becomes a funnel point. | |
| Some have predicted this was done to help the establishment ensure that if a firebrand candidate in any election in Florida was able to Accumulated plurality of the vote that that firebrand, that MAGA, that America First candidate would face an additional hurdle of a runoff election. | |
| So we're against this. | |
| We're glad this was temporarily postponed. | |
| Another matter I want to bring your attention to, Axios, is reporting House Democrat floats Mike Johnson protection measure. | |
| A moderate House Democrat is circulating a proposal to protect Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, from potential removal by an attempt of one of the party's hardliners. | |
| The resolution, authored by Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, would require Democrat or Republican Party leadership to To sanction any vote to vacate the Speaker's chair according to a copy that was obtained by Axios. | |
| Some Democrats have suggested they would oppose another conservative-led motion to vacate. | |
| They all were with me when we were vacating McCarthy. | |
| And as it comes to this... | |
| I've been very clear with the Firebrand audience. | |
| I am open to some increase in the threshold in the motion to vacate in exchange for other accountability tools, like a ban on congressional stock trading, a lifetime ban on members of Congress becoming lobbyists or registered foreign agents. | |
| And I don't think that lobbyists should be funding our campaigns. | |
| And we could do those things by House rule. | |
| And if we did, I'd be pretty open-minded to raising the threshold on the motion to vacate. | |
| But if they want to erode an accountability tool and then continue to not pass the accountability tools that the American people want on the stock trading ban, I'm not so up for that. | |
| Also wanted to bring your attention to a local story from the city of Pensacola. | |
| Pensacola is finalizing a key sailing deal with American Magic. | |
| Enhancing its national image on Tuesday, Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves, a good friend of mine, announced that the City Council will review a 10-year lease agreement with American Magic. | |
| As part of that deal, the club would pay more than $291,000 per year. | |
| The deal also would call on the team to host a preliminary regatta in Pensacola. | |
| That would be so cool to have one of the preliminary regattas in Pensacola Bay. | |
| I would be thrilled by that. | |
| It would also have two national or international events in Pensacola each and every year. | |
| My wife Ginger loves sailing. | |
| She's got friends on the American Magic team, and we love the fact that American Magic, out of the New York Yacht Club, will be calling Pensacola home. | |
| So they're just part of that great... | |
| Migration from New York to Florida for people that like nice things, sailing, good schools, great weather, low taxes. | |
| This Florida man, so proud of my state and so proud of Mayor Reeves for getting that done. | |
| So I now want to get you to this great interview with Clint Lancaster, phenomenal attorney, also an advocate on election integrity. | |
| You won't believe what's going on to block some of the accountability in the state of Wisconsin to try to get that state going the right direction on election integrity again. | |
| So a lot of Hunter Biden stuff, a lot of election stuff. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| Recently I had the chance to be in the great state of Arkansas with fellow conservatives, patriots, those fighting for election integrity, and I spent some time with Clint Lancaster. | |
| Now, Clint is an Arkansas attorney He served in the United States Marine Corps. | |
| He was on the streets as a certified public officer, a field training officer. | |
| And during his five-year career in law enforcement, Clint made countless arrests that led to successful prosecutions. | |
| Went to law school at the University of Arkansas. | |
| Now is the principal founder of the Lancaster Law Firm in Benton. | |
| He's litigated over 2,000 cases, including a number of very high-profile matters, family law matters. | |
| And he's on the program to talk a little bit about the new things he's doing on election integrity. | |
| But first, Clint actually ended up serving as the attorney for the mother of one of Hunter Biden's children, or his child. | |
| And so I wanted to talk to Clint because, in a lot of ways, the discovery that they got in that litigation over family law issues revealed a lot about the Biden family. | |
| And some of the allegations and pleadings in family court in Arkansas are really interesting to talk about and review through the lens of what we see Biden family members testifying to in the halls of Congress. | |
| One of the jokes around here is that Clint Lancaster might have done more actual oversight work than some of our committees tasked with that very purpose. | |
| So, Clint, thanks so much for joining us. | |
| Why don't you start by explaining to the Firebrand audience how you got to be involved in a case that dealt with the first family. | |
| Of course, Matt. | |
| It's good to see you again, and thank you for having me on your show. | |
| So literally, I had a woman call my office and schedule an appointment, and usually we always ask who the other party is to make sure we don't have a conflict, but she wouldn't say. | |
| So I was like, okay, just come on in. | |
| And so it was London Roberts. | |
| I want to say her sister-in-law or something like that, was a former client of ours, mine and my wife. | |
| And she came in, we met with her. | |
| I told her, yeah, sure, I'd do it. | |
| And that's how I got the case. | |
| Now, when thinking about these family law matters, generally, one of the first things you have to do in a case where there's a child support question is establish paternity. | |
| So talk a little bit about how the law on establishing paternity in the state of Arkansas functions and how, in the matter you were litigating, you actually got the dispositive DNA test on Hunter Biden. | |
| Well, it was a trick. | |
| So, you know, right after we filed, maybe six hours after we filed the lawsuit, I got a phone call from George Mazares from Chicago. | |
| And George was going to work with us kept promising to do stuff and then he never would deliver so I'm like okay you either you're going to deliver or we're going to serve your client and he laughed and said good luck and uh so I found uh I did a pretty comprehensive nationwide search and I found one address off of uh Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood I thought well that's it you know and so we sent our process server out and it was uh the same apartment that he he did a story with with the New Yorker But yeah, | |
| nobody trusted each other with this DNA test. | |
| They didn't trust us and we didn't trust them. | |
| And my wife was adamant about not letting Hunter get out of this DNA test somehow. | |
| So she found a DNA lab in Oklahoma City that opened up just for us on a Saturday. | |
| And so we headed to Oklahoma City listening to Sean Hannity talk about Hunter Biden and the China money. | |
| And we got there and they had a... | |
| I brought Hunter in. | |
| It was Hunter, his wife, Melissa. | |
| And I watched him take the DNA out of his mouth. | |
| Like physically watched him do it in the same room. | |
| Had a conversation with Melissa. | |
| Then they brought my client... | |
| And when was this, Clint? | |
| When did this DNA swab occur in Oklahoma City on a Saturday? | |
| November of 2019. Okay, so way before you had any subpoenas going to Hunter Biden from the House or the Senate, way before we were getting documents or really any of the most significant wire transfers or bank records, You are literally getting his DNA. And is that something that usually happens in an Arkansas paternity case? | |
| Is this stuff usually stipulated? | |
| You do a lot of family law, so give us a flavor of how unusual this was. | |
| This was unusual in how the DNA was obtained because usually, you know, most people will say, okay, I know that's my kid and we don't have to do that. | |
| Or they'll say, you know, I want a DNA test, at which point you just go to a laboratory and you send them in at separate times. | |
| It could have been very easy for a hunter just to walk into a DNA lab in California and get a DNA swab and for us to do it in Arkansas and avoid this. | |
| But having him actually physically come and I didn't trust him. | |
| I didn't trust any of them. | |
| And so I wanted to watch the DNA process work. | |
| I wanted to know that the sample they took from Hunter was the sample they were testing. | |
| And that established paternity, right? | |
| I mean, you having that chain of custody where you were observing it right there in the lab, you get the results that you were expecting based on the proffers of your client, and you find out that Hunter Biden has fathered a child with your client. | |
| And as I understand it, part of the litigation you're involved in is over money and payments and finances. | |
| How did money kind of play into how you were learning about the Biden family and their activities? | |
| So at that time period, Hunter was still just kind of a blip on the national radar. | |
| And he had the Burisma money and nobody really knew how much he got. | |
| They knew it went to his firm. | |
| But we were going to dive into it and know exactly what he got. | |
| And we did. | |
| We found out down to the penny of what he got and we used that that Burisma money was a basis to set child support and so we never really so you found the Burisma money how did you find it did you get it through the normal request for production did you have to subpoena banks how did how did you in this family law matter uncover the Burisma stuff even before the united states congress was really on it They had to give it to us through the discovery process and we compelled them to do it. | |
| What we missed at that time period, we didn't know we had missed it, was the China money. | |
| And so we knew about that the second time around. | |
| But Hunter Biden wasn't making payments to your client as was previously occurring, right? | |
| Was there some interruption in the payments he was making? | |
| Well, so London had worked for Hunter, and that's one of the ways they knew each other, and he was paying her around $1,000 a month. | |
| And Hunter had acknowledged that this was his kid long before the baby was born, but after the baby was born, he cut off the money. | |
| He got out of rehab, and I guess he needed money or saw that he was short, so he was like, I'm cutting all these people off. | |
| And so my client just wanted the thousand bucks a month and, you know, and so he ghosted her. | |
| And so she found me and just, you know, what I do is I put pressure on people until they give me what I want. | |
| And so that's what I began doing to Hunter Biden. | |
| No doubt. | |
| And it's just something when I'm hearing the testimony of Jim Biden regarding the millions of dollars flowing in from the Chinese, all of all of this Activity that they're doing under the Biden name. | |
| You've got the other people in this orbit really describing an enterprise that is influence peddling. | |
| And sometimes influence peddling is legal and sometimes it's illegal, right? | |
| That's why we're sorting through all this stuff. | |
| But as they've got that operation going, here you are representing this woman. | |
| And one thing that we saw the media do, that we saw really the Biden operation do, was try to smear your client and to try to call her a bunch of bad names and refer to Work that she had done or hadn't done. | |
| Talk about what it was like advising and counseling someone who's on the opposite end of the Biden and the media smear campaign. | |
| Well, I'll tell you, for my wife and I, it was a lot like living in a John Grisham book that we couldn't get out of. | |
| Every day, it was something. | |
| It was always just going. | |
| I never really had any training in how to deal with the media, but I became the media front person. | |
| And what we did was, when it came down to things we didn't like, we just didn't address them. | |
| We'd just say, well, you know, they'd call and say, was your client a stripper? | |
| And we'd say, well, what does that have to do with the fact that Hunter is this kid's father and he needs to support her? | |
| You tell me what that has to do with that. | |
| Well, they're trying to smear. | |
| They're trying to say if she was a stripper, then she's somehow less worthy of the resources to be able to raise this child, which is a pretty grisly and offensive suggestion, but it's obviously the suggestion made when they try to ripen that as a question, right? | |
| Yeah, so fortunately for us, the media had also just come out and reported that Hunter Biden was going across the street from strip clubs and buying dildos for the strippers to use on him. | |
| And so we have fed it back to him pretty heavily with that. | |
| Well, they might have opened up a can of worms there. | |
| They were not too interested in pursuing further than if you had that level of factual development. | |
| Yeah, they shut up after that, but we did make a policy that if you published that my client was a stripper, we would not comment to you, period. | |
| And Fox News, you know, Jesse Waters, he always likes to say baby mama, and he says it like that, and I'm pretty sure he's talking to me because I told him I wasn't going to talk to him because of what he said. | |
| Well, nothing wrong with being a baby mama, right? | |
| I mean, that's not a smear. | |
| Well, you know, she's a great mom and, you know, the child support laws changed, but, you know, his attorney in open court said that before it changed that London was getting five figures a month from Hunter and child support. | |
| So where does that case stand now? | |
| Is it resolved? | |
| Is there a final order? | |
| Is there anything else you've got to police regarding that jurisprudence going forward? | |
| No, it's over with. | |
| It's done. | |
| We sat down for a deposition in Little Rock and Hunter showed up for a deposition and my client was there. | |
| And, you know, we started asking him questions. | |
| My client wasn't supposed to stay very long and I didn't want to get into like a lot of grilling questions with her there. | |
| But then she and Hunter started talking. | |
| And, you know, I tell people she's not anti-Biten. | |
| She didn't get pregnant because she doesn't like Bidens, and the kid wants a relationship with her dad, and that was more important. | |
| Than the amount of money that we were talking about. | |
| That took the, as it should, it took the precedent over financial aspects as the relationship that he might possibly have with Navy. | |
| No, we would hope that for every child, for every parent, no matter how much we disagree with them, if they're willing to be in any way a nurturing part and not a negative part of a child's life, that's something we're for. | |
| I want to move past that important work that you have done to now the important work that you're doing on election integrity. | |
| Help is not coming from the federal government on election integrity, right? | |
| In the Senate, it's their hope to block anything that we would produce here. | |
| The Democrats' vision that they presented under Nancy Pelosi, fortunately, we were able to get stopped in the United States Senate. | |
| So the battle space has largely become the several states. | |
| And you've got states like Arizona and Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan on the front lines of this. | |
| Talk a little bit about how you've engaged now in the election integrity fight. | |
| So I got into election integrity. | |
| My wife got me into election integrity when she volunteered us both to go to Madison, Wisconsin for the 2020 Trump recount. | |
| And through her work there, we both got to represent Trump in Wisconsin. | |
| And I tell people not the release the Kraken team, the real team of lawyers. | |
| We split the Wisconsin Supreme Court and lost over turning the election by one vote. | |
| So that's how I initially got into it. | |
| And then when Justice Michael Gabelman was appointed to do his investigation, he hired me to come back to Wisconsin and help him with the investigation. | |
| And then after that, I came back and I just started, you know, had a lot of election law experience. | |
| So people started calling me to do recounts and make election challenges. | |
| And so we've evolved from that to now trying to change our election laws to make voting more secure. | |
| And how would you describe to like even a casual observer what the state of our election integrity infrastructure is now, particularly in a state like Wisconsin that could be highly dispositive where you've got some experience? | |
| So in Wisconsin they have a lot of problems and it's very weak in Wisconsin. | |
| There's no doubt. | |
| I mean, we had evidence of improper election activities that swayed the 2020 election in Wisconsin for Biden. | |
| That if they hadn't done this, you know, we're talking 20,000 votes and they knew that. | |
| And so the problem is a lot of those infrastructure changes, regardless of what the Liberals say, that were made to support 2020 are still in place. | |
| You know, you can still go in there and just request a ballot be sent to you, tell them you're in the military, and basically with no proof of ID, no verification, they will mail you absentee ballots. | |
| And they did this to fictional people. | |
| We found that. | |
| And so what's the antidote? | |
| The antidote is to strengthen the laws. | |
| The state laws, right? | |
| You're talking about state laws. | |
| Okay. | |
| Yeah, I think state laws, and I would say state laws because of the cause. | |
| You know, the federal constitution doesn't permit the federal government to regulate elections, and we don't want that because as soon as the power tide turns, that's going to be used against us. | |
| But at the state level, to make our elections secure has to happen on a local level. | |
| And that's also important because elections happen at a local level. | |
| Even the presidential race, the voting happens at a very, very local level. | |
| So to stop the fraud, to stop the abuse, you have to stop it at the local level. | |
| So we saw that in Georgia, right? | |
| The folks in Georgia proved capable of such shame and embarrassment that they went and fixed their laws. | |
| They got stronger signature match. | |
| They got better chain of custody laws with their ballots. | |
| And certainly I'm not entirely convinced that we're going to have everything cleaned up in Fulton County and DeKalb County. | |
| But we've got more tools at our disposal to catch the cheating as it's happening, rather than trying to unwind the facts when you've had legitimate ballots polluted with illegitimate ballots. | |
| In Wisconsin, how are you tracking the legislature's willingness to make those changes? | |
| How are the grassroots efforts to try to get legislators on board with ending this indiscriminate mailing of ballots? | |
| So the biggest problem in Wisconsin right now is Speaker of the Assembly, Robin Voss. | |
| So he will not advance legislation that will remove the WEC administrator, the Wisconsin Election Commission's administrator, who under her watch is where all the fraud happened in 2020. She's still there and she's still going to do it. | |
| What's the Speaker's basis for this, for blocking it? | |
| What argument is made? | |
| He doesn't have any real good arguments other than what he says is, well, we don't know who will get in there, or we don't need to change it this soon, or something along those lines. | |
| But really what I think it is, is that I think he's got a financial connection to a vendor that the Wisconsin Elections Commission is using. | |
| Oh, so you think it's just corrupt? | |
| I think there's a level of corruption there. | |
| There's really no other way to explain it. | |
| How do you, as a Republican, leave the woman in charge of your elections who let Who suspended voting deputies in nursing homes where they forced people to vote. | |
| We have videos of people in nursing homes that said, we were told we had to vote Joe Biden or we couldn't live here any longer. | |
| That happened under her watch. | |
| So if the Speaker is doing this and if you perceive that there could be some potential self-dealing feature to this, are there other lawmakers that are standing up to the Speaker and are working to advance this? | |
| Yes, Representative Janelle Brantgen from Wisconsin has been leading the fight up there. | |
| She led the fight on the election investigation that their house did up there. | |
| And she's the one who's actually proposed legislation to remove Megan Wolf through impeachment, which they can do. | |
| They have every ability to do that. | |
| And the speaker will not let that resolution be called to the floor so they can impeach in the House. | |
| And they hold a majority in the Senate. | |
| And the Senate's already, you know, they've already tested the waters and they'll have the votes in the Senate. | |
| But it's Robin Voss who's stopping it. | |
| Personnel is policy, particularly when it comes to election integrity. | |
| We knew this in Florida. | |
| When we had supervisors of elections who were breaking the law, who had been subject to judgments that they had violated the state constitution on transparency requirements, Ron DeSantis took the oath of office and then fired the supervisors of elections in Broward and Palm Beach County for their wicked Ron DeSantis took the oath of office and then fired the And the result was everybody else cleaned up their act a little bit because you got the sense that you weren't going to just be able to break the law and keep your cushy six figure job as a supervisor of elections. | |
| And we're all the better for that decision. | |
| So I would encourage folks, whether it's in Wisconsin, Georgia, anywhere really, if you have officials who are operating outside of the color of law in their actions, you have to use the tools that are available for legislative removal, executive removal, whatever you have to do. | |
| And what you'll find is, if you do that with a few folks, you will raise the floor. | |
| You will raise the behavior of everybody. | |
| I hope that that is something that the Wisconsin legislature takes real seriously. | |
| Just final question. | |
| Let me add this real quick if I could. | |
| There's a recall effort underway in Wisconsin to recall Voss Out of his position as the Senate or as the Speaker of the House to just take him out of the House completely. | |
| So if you have listeners that are in Wisconsin, please get out there and support that effort and, you know, get signatures. | |
| So we believe that Voss is very much an anti-Trumper. | |
| He said he'll do everything in his power to keep Trump from getting reelected. | |
| And so let's just get rid of him. | |
| We think we have the votes if we can get the signatures. | |
| Well, certainly if someone is standing in the way of good policy and if there's any connection to self-dealing, that would be a warranted endeavor. | |
| So, final question before we get out of here. | |
| I want to ask you, just big picture, what is your confidence level that the 2024 election will not be stolen? | |
| Low because right now a lot of the same things that existed are still out there and you don't have to what people don't understand is you don't have to steal an election through a massive amount of numbers. | |
| You don't have to have Widespread corruption to steal an election. | |
| You can do it in a localized area and it will be impactful. | |
| And so I'm not confident of it, but what I am confident about is that this time, what's different is I see the RNC and Trump and a lot of other people doing the groundwork ahead of time. | |
| Where in 2020, we were reactionary. | |
| We were just waiting for the plane to crash before we started even trying to stop it. | |
| And now we're trying to, we're saying, okay, We gotta make sure we have infrastructure in place. | |
| Trump's now got a lawyer, I think, in every state that's standing by and ready to do something with election stuff. | |
| It's a lot more preventative this time around. | |
| But what we're still in the process of doing is catching them cheating instead of ending the ways that they can cheat. | |
| Clint Lancaster, brilliant lawyer, election integrity advocate. | |
| He's doing it everywhere from Arkansas to Wisconsin. | |
| Clint, how can people follow your work and stay up with the front lines of this fight? | |
| Well, I'm on Twitter at ArkansasClan. | |
| I get on there and post it from time to time when I have something interesting or developing. | |
| You can also go to avii.org, and that's the organization that is supporting election integrity efforts across the United States. | |
| So you can find us and our team there. | |
| Awesome. | |
| Well, thank you for joining us on Firebrand. | |
| Thank you all for being with us. | |
| Roll the credits. |
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