Sen. Rand Paul joins today's Liberty Report with an exclusive report on recent Senate actions on War Powers and Iran. Plus - what's happening on the Hill after the explosive "Afghanistan Papers" revealed the 18 year lie. Bonus: Rand on Snowden. Don't miss this one!
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Iran's War Powers Debate
00:09:45
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| Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. | |
| Today, we have a special guest. | |
| He happens to be related, Senator Rand Paul, my son. | |
| And Rand, welcome to our program. | |
| Good morning. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| Good. | |
| Well, there's lots to talk about, but we are going to talk about foreign policy, obviously, because you've been working hard on that. | |
| You even brought up the subject of the trial by whistleblower, so we could fill a lot of time. | |
| But I think I'll start off with what the Senate was talking about yesterday, and that had to do, I think, the war powers resolution dealing with Iran. | |
| And you had a preliminary vote to bring it up, and there'll be amendments today. | |
| Yeah, the War Powers Act allows for a privileged vote. | |
| It's hard to get a vote on the Senate floor. | |
| The powers that be Republican or Democrat don't want to end any war, and so they don't want to have any debate over war. | |
| They don't want to allow any votes. | |
| But when you have a privileged vote, it means that we've passed a law previously that sort of forces a vote if someone brings it up. | |
| So Tim Kaine is a senator on the Democrat side. | |
| He's brought it up, and I've sided with him. | |
| We initially had four Republicans on his side, but yesterday we actually had seven Republicans vote with the Democrats. | |
| So I think the vote was 54 to 46 in favor of proceeding to the war powers debate. | |
| And the war powers debate for me is not just about Iran. | |
| This one is particularly worded towards Iran, but to me it's about Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, all these places, whether or not there should have to be a vote or a vote of the Congress to give permission. | |
| And, you know, I've always been a great fan of the Madison quote where he says that the executive is the branch most prone to war, and therefore the Constitution, with studied care, vested that power in the legislature. | |
| And really all the founding fathers, even Hamilton, all of them, really agreed that war would only be declared by Congress. | |
| And we've gotten away from that. | |
| And the Afghan war in particular is grabbing a lot of my time because we've been there 20 years. | |
| And I often will say that one generation shouldn't be able to bind another generation. | |
| 20 years is like a whole new generation now. | |
| Now, this resolution is called a concurrent resolution. | |
| And the president doesn't have to sign this. | |
| And he can't veto. | |
| And I think that's the way the war powers resolution, the original one in 73 was written. | |
| Does that mean also then that if the House paces one, it would have to be identical to consider it authentic? | |
| And the House has passed something as of now, haven't they? | |
| Yeah, that's a good question. | |
| I'm not sure I know the answer to. | |
| I thought that he would veto this. | |
| I didn't realize that it could go without his veto. | |
| So I think if that's true, there's some question of whether or not it can have force of law because there have been Supreme Court cases back and forth about whether or not something has force of law or whether or not maybe it's just a chastisement if it passes. | |
| But I thought, you know, in the past, we did this over selling arms. | |
| We rebuked the president and said, you can't keep selling arms to the Saudi Arabians who are bombing civilians in Yemen. | |
| We won that vote, and I believe he vetoed that one. | |
| So I assumed that that was what was going to happen, but I'll check into that. | |
| I think actually it's going to veto. | |
| Yeah, I think it's different. | |
| But then if that is the case, I would think the wording has to be identical. | |
| But it was deliberately written that way in 73 when this came up. | |
| And of course, Nixon was horribly opposed to this. | |
| All presidents are opposed to it because it encroaches on what they consider their constitutional power to do whatever they want. | |
| And yet it was designed. | |
| Matter of fact, it's a thing that you can have a mixed belief on because it's far from perfect. | |
| Actually, it legalizes war for up to 60 days before they have to leave and to get, you know, get out of the area. | |
| But the Constitution, if it were followed, you wouldn't need this. | |
| But the executive branch always sees this as an encroachment. | |
| Then, of course, they have a lot of support in the Congress because they represent the military-industrial complex. | |
| But the War Powers Act is kind of interesting in a way, also, because part of it, you could say, legalizes war for 60 days. | |
| But the interesting thing is, if you read the first part of it, it says you can only go to war if the war has been declared, if the war has been authorized, or if there's an imminent attack. | |
| And so, really, the 60-day requirement, I think, is dependent on meeting the first requirement is that it either be declared, authorized by Congress, or there is even an attack. | |
| So, I think the reporting requirements is really only for properly instituted wars. | |
| And we've gotten around, and it's been interpreted, oh, you can do whatever you want for 60 days. | |
| But I think actually, if you read it, there may be an argument that you can't do anything. | |
| You can only really go to war under those sort of three. | |
| See, I think the reporting requirement is if the president goes to war imminently, there's an imminent attack, within 60 days he has to tell you something, which is sort of a requirement to control the imminent attack. | |
| But I think they never, even though those who passed the War Powers Act, never contemplated that we'd be at war like for 20 years. | |
| People still keep saying, oh, well, we don't need any, you know, any kind of approval of Congress. | |
| But just like the Congress allows this to happen, they don't do much to stop it. | |
| It hasn't been all that effective. | |
| And I don't expect next week all of a sudden they're going to respond to your efforts and their others. | |
| Because, you know, I think the important thing is what you're doing. | |
| You're calling attention to it. | |
| And I see the polls, and we've talked to a lot of people. | |
| I know you've been exposed to them. | |
| People are saying that they don't like these wars. | |
| They're an outrage. | |
| And I think that sort of supported the position of the Afghan papers. | |
| I know you're familiar with that, where it's nothing but deliberate cover-up. | |
| I'm amazed that some of the truth about the Afghan papers arrived in the Washington Post. | |
| That may be progress for all we know. | |
| Well, we had a hearing this week in my committee that I, a subcommittee that I chair, and we did it on the Afghan papers. | |
| We ended up inviting in General Doug Lutz, who I think is a reasonable voice. | |
| And one of the questions I ask him is, are there still people in the military that are saying that we have a mission? | |
| And he ended up responding that he really thinks there is no mission and that many of the military, many of the military really have come to that conclusion. | |
| Yeah, well, anyway, I think this is all very good. | |
| And I guess the resolution to, you know, to prevent a war breaking out in Iran is absolutely well-intentioned. | |
| And when you look at the statistics, there's absolutely no need for us to declare war against Iran. | |
| And also the whole idea of starting to bring the troops home. | |
| I mean, that usually gets written down, but it never seemed to happen. | |
| We have superficial support. | |
| You talk to the people and they say, yeah, bring them home. | |
| What are they doing over there? | |
| Especially when they know we're going broke doing this. | |
| But as long as we keep sending troops over there, we're not accomplishing much. | |
| This has been sort of the problem I've had with people. | |
| Tim Kaine is good on some of these issues, but he wants to reauthorize the war. | |
| He thinks the only problem is they don't have proper authority, but he's willing to give them the authority. | |
| So a year or so ago, he brought forward a new AUMF, authorization of military force. | |
| But we read it and it would give the government or the military the authority to have be at war in 26 different countries. | |
| And we're like, no, our problem is not that there's just not authority. | |
| We don't want to give them authority to be at war in 26 countries. | |
| So some of them are legalistic and they're actually promoting a new authorization, but it would be equally as bad because we'd still be at war. | |
| I'm proposing just that we repeal the 2001 authorization for the war after 9-11 and repeal the 2002 for the war with Iraq. | |
| And, you know, they can debate war, but I'll be a no vote because I think really that, you know, I don't see anybody that's looming on the horizon to attack us. | |
| I see, you know, civil wars around the world that have been going on and on where I'm not so sure we make it better. | |
| You know, I think the people are with us the majority and they're getting louder voices. | |
| And also, there's a lot of veterans groups that are speaking out as well. | |
| And it always amazes me that people are shocked. | |
| When I was campaigning, I got support from the military. | |
| And Tulsi now gets support on the Democratic side from the military more than the rest of them. | |
| But for some reason, you know, they're not as pragmatic on this because I think the power of the military-industrial complex has tremendous influence. | |
| It's very hard because patriotism and all this stuff works in, and it's old-fashioned to talk about the Constitution. | |
| So hopefully all what you're doing and the efforts by many up there will change the attitude and play on the fact that statistically the people are on our side. | |
| Yeah, and one of the things that made Senator Lee and I mad at this last briefing we got is in the briefing, they told us that we would be damaging the war effort and would be doing something bad for morale of the troops if we discussed whether the constitutional standard had been met. | |
| If we discussed whether or not the Congress needed to vote on it, they basically told us we wouldn't be good patriots if we brought the issue up at all. | |
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Why Whistleblowers Are Mistreated
00:10:16
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| And that really annoyed Senator Lee and myself. | |
| And it's, you know, that's the thing is, is I think we're a mature country and we can withstand a debate. | |
| But also if no one brings up the debate, the war will go on forever and ever. | |
| And I think we are making some progress on changing minds with regard to the Afghan war. | |
| We have many senators who used to be on the other side of the fence have now come to our closer to our position. | |
| Getting set with Republicans was a pretty good success yesterday on the War Powers Act. | |
| We also are finding people, and I've had probably a half a dozen senators come up who are big hawks on the intelligence state who said, oh, you know, we should let them do whatever. | |
| We just have to trust the intelligence community to take care of us. | |
| They won't spy on Americans. | |
| We should trust them. | |
| And a half a dozen have come up and said, you and Mike were right, meaning Mike, Lee, and I, that we should have been more skeptical of the FBI, that there could be rogue elements in the FBI who bring their bias to work. | |
| And so the one thing that should come out of, and we're trying to have come out of this impeachment process, is that the intelligence community needs more severe limitations. | |
| The FISA court, the secret court, I think should never, ever investigate a political campaign. | |
| And so I have an amendment that I'm going to put forward on the bill that will come up in the next month to reauthorize part of the Patriot Act. | |
| I'm going to put an amendment on there saying that the FISA court should never be used for a political campaign or an issue campaign, and that if people want to search that database, they actually have to get a warrant from an Article III judge, and that the information in that database can't be used against Americans for domestic crime. | |
| We'll see. | |
| There are many Republicans who have switched position on this, who used to be for unlimited authority for the intelligence powers. | |
| But now many of them, because of what happened to Trump, have come to the realization maybe we do need more constraint on the intelligence powers. | |
| Yeah, no, you got a bit of attention when you talked about the logic of knowing who the whistleblower was and what the credibility is. | |
| And yet they turned that on his head. | |
| And the first thing is, is why did that happen? | |
| Why were they so strongly opposed to it? | |
| You'd think that more Republicans would have come because the whole process was, you know, sort of this trial that was going on and a lot of fake stuff going on. | |
| But how much your opinion about the guy, and I think you brought up his name, the whistleblower, was he technically a whistleblower according to the law? | |
| Well, and here's the real thing is, is my question actually didn't identify anybody as the whistleblower. | |
| I didn't accuse anybody of being a whistleblower. | |
| I don't know who the whistleblower is. | |
| I've seen the reports, but I've seen no government or official documents that that person is the whistleblower. | |
| So the ironic thing is, is you've got Adam Schiff over there saying he doesn't know who the whistleblower is. | |
| The president's team doesn't know. | |
| So I submitted a question with two people's name on it. | |
| One of them works for Adam Schiff, and one of them used to work in the National Security Council with Adam, with Adam Schiff's man. | |
| And there are stories now that they had been plotting for years to begin an impeachment process against the president and use the whistleblower statute. | |
| But my question never accused any of them of being a whistleblower. | |
| I just asked, did Adam Schiff know they knew each other? | |
| And did he know that they'd been discussing impeachment for years before the process began? | |
| And the chief judge, the justice, John Roberts, disallowed the question. | |
| But the interesting thing is, how does Chief Roberts know who the whistleblower is? | |
| How does he know to stop this? | |
| And so it's kind of a bizarre thing. | |
| And so reporters were hounding me from CNN. | |
| And I said, well, look, I didn't out the whistleblower, but I think the chief justice may have. | |
| Y'all need to ask him why he outed the whistleblower by saying this guy was a whistleblower. | |
| And so in some ways, there is a little bit of irony to the whole thing. | |
| But my point about whether he's a whistleblower is I think that a whistleblower should be protected from being fired. | |
| I'm for the whistleblower statutes. | |
| I think the greatest whistleblower of all time was probably Edward Snowden. | |
| And I think he deserves some kind of ability to come back home or some kind of ability to make a plea bargain and come back home. | |
| And what he did was reveal a real constitutional crisis in our country that they were collecting all of our phone records without our permission. | |
| And I think that was a noble thing that he intended to do. | |
| And Edward Snowden has written that had there been a whistleblower statute for contractors, he wasn't a government employee, he was a contractor, that he would have tried to use a whistleblower statute. | |
| We now have extended that, but I've actually introduced legislation to make the whistleblower statute retroactive so Edward Snowden would be covered by the whistleblower statute as a contractor. | |
| So I'm in favor of it. | |
| But I think in this instance, this was a phone call that was listened to by like 300 people. | |
| At least 200 people thought it was okay, including Vindeman's boss. | |
| So Vindeman's a lieutenant colonel. | |
| His boss is the lieutenant general. | |
| They both listened to the phone call and had exactly the opposite kind of reaction to it. | |
| The lieutenant general, who was Vinman's boss, said it wasn't. | |
| So Vinman didn't go through his command chain as an officer in the military. | |
| He tried to use this whistleblower statute, and he calls up this buddy who wasn't supposed to be on the phone call, who works in the CIA, the so-called whistleblower. | |
| In reality, Vinman is probably the whistleblower. | |
| But Vindman also gets advice from the chief ethics officer for the National Security Council. | |
| And guess who the chief ethics officer is? | |
| His twin brother. | |
| So Vindman and his twin brother also are good buddies with the whistleblower. | |
| They're also good buddies with three of the lawyers that are staff members on Adam Schiff's impeachment process. | |
| And there's also word that they've been discussing this for years and that they wrote it up. | |
| The whole complaint was written up by a cabal of all these people who hated the president. | |
| And you have to keep in mind that the National Security Council is a pure function of the president. | |
| He appoints them. | |
| They're to give advice for him. | |
| And as he, they're to execute his policy that he tells them. | |
| He is their boss. | |
| So I was glad to see 80 of them got, they don't really get fired. | |
| You can't fire anybody in the federal government. | |
| They got pushed somewhere else, and all the liberals are squawking. | |
| But how can you say you're working for the president when you're plotting to bring the president down every day? | |
| That can't happen. | |
| So I was glad to see 80 of them out the door. | |
| You know, I think I can distinguish between the good and the bad because if you're a good whistleblower and you're telling the truth, you get into a lot of trouble. | |
| We had a conference once where we had several whistleblowers in and they were all mistreated by the law and they all told the truth and they weren't protected by a whistleblower law. | |
| But of course, if you have a suspicious, and I don't want to cast any suspicion on whoever the whistleblower is, but if there's suspicion on it and it doesn't serve the interests of those in charge, I just wonder why it was, well, bipartisanship sometimes occurs when you don't think it should. | |
| In foreign policy, they do that, and there's a lot of play back and forth on power and prestige because when it comes to foreign policy and a few other things, you know, they're not fighting with each other as much and they go along. | |
| And that's what I see you and your friends in the Senate contending with is that there's an outside force. | |
| That's why it's delightful to see you working with people like Mike Lee. | |
| Yeah, no, we've been really pleased with it. | |
| And the other thing about the whistleblower statute is it guarantees that you're not fired and there are no repercussions about it. | |
| But it really does not say that you're completely anonymous. | |
| It says that your boss can't out your name, but there's no regulation on anybody else. | |
| So the people have been saying, oh, I broke the law, this or that. | |
| There is no law for anyone other than his immediate bosses not to reveal who he is. | |
| But I also think there's a competing interest in the Sixth Amendment that when you're accused of a crime, you get to confront your accusers. | |
| This was not some sort of thing to reveal a secret. | |
| This was to go after a person. | |
| This was to bring down the president. | |
| And if we're going to take a president down, which we've never actually done, and it's extraordinary, shouldn't the president get to confront his accusers? | |
| And people need to realize when they say, oh, it was a sham trial and there were no witnesses. | |
| We had 17 witnesses that were hand-selected by the Democrats. | |
| There were no witnesses selected by the president, and the president was not allowed to cross-examine the Democrat witnesses. | |
| In addition, while Vinman is their big star witness saying it was a terrible thing that he said on the phone, his boss, who's a general, who's been in for probably 15 more years than Vinman and is a highly decorated general, believes the opposite. | |
| So when you have two people believing the opposite, it's not like you're, you know, Snowden revealed that the whole government was involved with snatching up all of our records without a warrant. | |
| All Vinman revealed is like, oh, the president didn't listen to my talking points and I disagree with what he's doing with the Ukraine money, but his boss didn't disagree with it. | |
| And so how in the world would that be whistleblowing? | |
| So they went to an initial process and some lawyers, some lawyers said it wasn't whistleblowing, and then another lawyer said it was. | |
| So, I mean, there's all this debate about whether it was or wasn't. | |
| But I think the bottom line is there were a lot of plotting going on, not only with the impeachment, but now it turns out that the original FBI investigation of Trump, the FBI lied 17 times to get a FISA warrant. | |
| So FBI agents are human. | |
| Some of them are partisan. | |
| We shouldn't let that happen again. | |
| But we really shouldn't be in a secret court talking about investigating politics or political campaigns or ideas. | |
| You know, to me, it was always strange how we were able to deal with Assange. | |
| You know, he's a foreign, from my viewpoint, I see him as a foreign journalist who's saying things that was revealing truth, and it affected our people here. | |
| So they go after him. | |
| But that sort of is complex. | |
| A foreigner, he's a journalist, and just think of what has happened there. | |
| But that legally is a little more complex than I think Edward Snowden. | |
| But there still is a lot of sympathy for both Assange and Ed Snowden. | |
| Well, it's funny how the left is all for speech until it's speech they don't like. | |
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Get Back In There And Vote
00:00:24
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| Yeah, there you go. | |
| Well, I think we better close. | |
| We could go on for a while longer, but we'll have to get you back after some more of these votes. | |
| But I believe the audience would be very pleased in congratulating you on what you've been doing. | |
| So glad you were able to make it. | |
| Get back in there and vote and keep them honest. | |
| All right. | |
| Thanks. | |
| All right. | |
| And I want to thank all our viewers today for tuning in. | |