In this episode, Alex Blumberg and Lisa Abdurrahman joins us to discuss the fallout from the revelation that the President didn t know that his Secretary of Defense was ill and hospitalized for four days, and that he didn t tell the White House about it.
00:00:00.000Well, the Times had a great rundown of what happened after Trump lost, what happened on January the 6th, how Trump was pushed to the side, and how one by one by one they all folded.
00:00:13.460And now we're seeing in the media, we're now seeing in the media because they want to get close to Donald Trump and some media people, I guess, want to have access to him on the campaign trail.
00:00:23.760These Republicans. I mean, can you call them Republicans? I don't know what you call them actually when they're quoting Hitler and they're channeling Hitler, but be that as it may, the transformation, it keeps going.
00:00:40.640And now we're seeing the rise once again and expect to see it in all the same spots we saw it in 2020 in that campaign, the rise of the anti-anti-Trump forces who say, if you hold Donald Trump to account for stealing nuclear secrets, you have Trump derangement syndrome.
00:01:01.280I'm a New York Times columnist actually this Sunday going, oh, but if you actually read the Constitution the way the Constitution should be, people will look back for centuries and say, this is the moment American democracy died.
00:01:16.860Because, you know, you think about those left-wing radicals that are doing this.
00:01:20.840You think about those freaks at the Federalist Society, those left-wing Marxist, wait, I'm sorry, no, wait, they're really conservative legal scholars.
00:01:30.540But that Judge Luton, who's been at the center of every left-wing, radical, harebrained, progr...
00:01:42.100Oh, wait a second. These are constitutional conservatives who are saying this, and yet you're seeing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times saying, if you actually hold Donald Trump to account like you'd hold any other politician, it's only going to make him sorry.
00:01:55.820This is Obi-Wan Kenobi, right? This is the Obi-Wan Kenobi trick.
00:02:00.540Strike me down, constitutionalists, and I, Trump, will only become more... No, it's not that...
00:02:09.280We've set up an architecture of identification of ill people at the senior level.
00:02:15.920Should we be up in an uproar if the Secretary of Defense was ill over the last number of days?
00:02:21.660We should be, and the White House should be. The fact that the Secretary of Defense was ill and hospitalized, and the president didn't know about it for four days.
00:02:30.400Four days, I beg your pardon. We're in a situation where there are two raging wars with strong U.S. interests, let's put it that way.
00:02:37.580ISIS is active again. There are crises after crises after crises, and the president of the United States didn't know that his Secretary of Defense was out of pocket.
00:02:51.460There are protocols designed to prevent something like that from happening.
00:02:56.040Those protocols all broke down. Something more serious than a mealy-mouthed apology from the Defense Secretary.
00:03:03.600The bipartisan uproar is going to be tangible, but I would suggest it will focus on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
00:03:10.000What should be the response of the White House?
00:03:12.760Well, the White House should demand something more substantive by way of an apology from the Secretary of Defense.
00:03:20.740And the president has to figure whether he's satisfied with the answer that he gets from the Secretary about why he was incommunicado for so long, or at least he was that the White House was not told.
00:03:34.140This seems like a very basic, simple mistake to make.
00:03:39.460And had this happened in any major corporation, heads would have rolled.
00:03:43.560Lisa, you can move on quickly from this. I get all of that.
00:03:50.380But it's not exactly like the global backdrop at the moment. It's quiet. It's anything but.
00:03:54.620That's the issue. And I think that Bobby actually raised one of the key points, which is,
00:03:58.300is this White House going to hold the Secretary of Defense responsible for really violating the chain of command
00:04:03.900and really giving the White House a heads up when there is a material shift in leadership?
00:04:08.700Several big events took place last week, Tom. And I'm just wondering who spoke to who?
00:04:14.020Was there no conversation between the White House and the Defense Secretary when those things were happening?
00:04:20.020All that will be analyzed. And I agree, it's a busy time when you're looking at defense.
00:04:23.660But far more than that is the heritage, the history of America across the 20th century.
00:04:28.400We have a constitutional amendment on this. We need healthy people at the top.
00:04:32.740This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:04:40.500Pray for our enemies. Because we're going medieval on these people.
00:04:45.720Here's the time I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
00:04:49.980The people have had a belly full of it. I know you don't like hearing that.
00:04:53.320I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
00:09:29.480It's the commander-in-chief, which is the president, and the secretary of defense.
00:09:32.560Like on the nuclear codes, the president has the codes and can order the strike.
00:09:35.900The mechanics of actually doing the strike has to be the secretary of defense because the combatant commanders, nor all of them, report directly to them.
00:09:50.360Crimes were committed in failing to defend the United States of America.
00:09:55.240And this doesn't even deal with the carrier battle group under attack last week, taking incoming in Iraq, basically a non-nuclear situation.
00:10:04.420But this is the biggest, darkest mistake I've seen a U.S. government make since I was a naval officer in my early 20s, sir.
00:10:15.700Look, I've never seen anything like it.
00:10:17.940You talk about the fact that this is someone who's supposed to be there authorizing these operations.
00:10:25.140God only knows what operations couldn't get authorization because he was gone.
00:10:31.340Then, if, and keep in mind that we know the Iranians have intel assets all throughout the Pentagon and the State Department.
00:10:38.720We know that the Chinese are all over the U.S. government.
00:10:46.960Because you got China all over Twitter all weekend laughing about this, making fun of us.
00:10:52.580So they're talking big because Taiwan's election comes up this Saturday.
00:10:56.240This Saturday, Taiwan's got an election.
00:10:58.540China knows we've lost our secretary of defense.
00:11:01.440The Chinese minister of defense, he says, oh, that's interesting.
00:11:04.320The Russian minister of defense says, oh, that's interesting.
00:11:07.020North Korea is out there popping off their shells at YPDO and PYDO up there on the northern limit line.
00:11:13.880And you've also, of course, got the carrier battle group under strike in the Red Sea, which, by the way, U.S. military, if you noticed, or I should say the U.S. government in this case, not able to put together a naval coalition in the Red Sea.
00:11:25.260So compare that now to if you're talking about the U.S.
00:11:30.080The reason that we have, Steve, the stated reason that we have for U.S. military power projection around the world is for keeping open the sea lines of communication, keeping open the sea lines.
00:11:40.380We're preserving the freedom of the sea.
00:11:43.580If the U.S. Navy and the U.S. government can't politically get their act together to put together a coalition to defend the Red Sea, you're seeing the fall apart of this in off the Strait of Babel Mendeb when it comes to Somalia.
00:12:00.240So if China is now looking at this situation and say, do we want to make a move on Taiwan, they could say, well, it looks like the U.S. is failing to meet their diplomatic obligations.
00:12:10.140They're failing to put together coalitions.
00:12:39.280Jeff Clark, without getting too technical of 32 Chapter C, walk through the structure, the legal structure of what we have and the violations of that.
00:13:46.420So as a matter of law, the Vacancies Reform Act has been violated, Steve.
00:13:52.320And that has a provision in it that requires whenever there is a head of an agency, especially a cabinet officer, and especially one as important as the SEC DEF, that each House of Congress and the Comptroller General be informed.
00:14:09.700That happened just before the Pentagon released a press statement in the evening on Friday the 5th.
00:14:15.520So this is a situation where a flat law of the United States was violated.
00:14:20.720And I know that what they might say in response to that is, well, that's really for situations where someone's resigned or died.
00:14:26.680But the statute's very clear and says that it applies whenever someone is essentially incapable of carrying out the duties of the office for any reason.
00:14:36.200So this is a black letter violation of the Vacancies Reform Act.
00:14:40.620And what can Congress do if it doesn't even know about this situation?
00:16:58.780Any commander knows that they have to notify their boss when something serious is going on that might take them out of the loop.
00:17:05.100But it appears that the right procedures were put in place.
00:17:08.540He named his deputy, Kathy Hicks, to take over for him.
00:17:12.640And from what I understand, and I've talked to senior administration officials, he was always in communications with the people at the Defense Department and the White House.
00:17:26.320That's not what these stories are talking about.
00:17:29.040But that's where we've got to drill down.
00:17:30.240I think you get five or six scalps on this thing.
00:17:33.320Posobiec, Tom Nichols is a former instructor at the Naval War College and one of the leading Trump haters.
00:17:39.840He writes for the Atlantic Magazine, which, as you know, is the intelligentsia's, the uniparty elite intelligentsia's platform for pure Trump hate every day.
00:17:50.840He wrote a piece yesterday in The Atlantic that called these guys out and said, hey, this needs to be answered immediately and all the details.
00:18:00.260On 9 November of 1979 at 3 o'clock in the morning, Mika Brzezinski's father, Dr. Brzezinski, who was National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, got a call from Major General William Odom, the head of NORAD, at 3 o'clock in the morning and said there's been a massive launch from Russia.
00:18:18.040There's, you know, hundreds of nuclear weapons headed to the United States.
00:18:44.540The point Nichols makes is that immediately if he had called Carter, the person that actually would execute on the firing of nuclear weapons in retaliation to the Russians would be Secretary of Defense Harold Brown.
00:18:57.520And you don't have any you don't have a second to mess around.
00:19:00.700You have to know where Brown is, where the red phone is, the command structure, all of it.
00:19:06.280There can't be any question whatsoever of what's going on.
00:19:34.880We are living we've become the the LGBT version of the Soviet Union because we're running around up there with the White House in this Pentagon running around with their heads cut off.
00:19:48.720The chickens with their heads cut off, lying out of both sides of their mouth.
00:19:52.840You got the White House didn't know what was going on.
00:19:54.700You got the Pentagon lying about what went on.
00:19:57.160I said, OK, he's not he's not fully hospitalized, not in to be in Walter Reed.
00:20:05.480They won't even tell you what his current status is.
00:20:08.520And honestly, Steve, I think it's because they didn't know what I've been told as well from White House staffers is that this is a situation that's been really bleeding over since Biden has a massive, massive rift.
00:20:21.400That's open between Biden, the State Department and the Department of Defense after Afghanistan and the failures of Ukraine.
00:20:29.640So he's out. He's on the outs with Blinken.
00:20:31.760He's on the outs with with Austin, clearly.
00:20:34.520And then after October, they said Austin barely even talks to the White House anymore, barely even goes over there.
00:20:42.600And this, of course, after the brutal Hamas attack in southern Israel.
00:20:46.120And so the fact of the matter is these guys don't even want to talk to Biden.
00:20:51.080Now, now I'm sure, by the way, that a lot of Biden senior staff knew.
00:20:55.060But here's the problem. They didn't want to tell Biden about it.
00:21:36.220We do know the only two people that can launch are the commander in chief and the secretary of defense at his direction on an execution of that order.
00:21:44.480But we don't really know many of the details because it's not available to the public.
00:21:49.820And but, Steve, look, what we do know is that the two people who have authority in the nuclear chain, you know, consistent with civilian control of the military.
00:21:59.080And you have to ask questions about whether that's really actually occurring here or instead you're dealing with the situation where the military is running itself, which is unconstitutional in our in our government's design, are the president and the secretary of defense.
00:22:13.460And so if Lloyd Austin is AWOL and that's really what he is.
00:22:17.540Right. And I'm sure he's court martialed or overseen court marshals of soldiers who've gone AWOL.
00:23:00.640Both houses and the comptroller was the president told about that or basically just the staffers over there, you know, running their own operation and deciding what the president needs to know.
00:23:09.420It's it's in a situation that cannot be tolerated, has to be explored by Congress extensively and heads do need to roll like one of those national security officials said in one of your cold open clips.
00:24:49.340Without Ronald Reagan knowing exactly where he was and, you know, in probably very, very routine contact.
00:24:56.100The key piece of this is, and I just have to put it boldly, how could it possibly be that nobody noticed Lloyd Austin was gone for three days or more?
00:25:06.760Which, again, raises some of these questions about did some people know when they're just not, you know, copping to it or they didn't want to tell Biden.
00:25:17.360And more broadly, what I think we've heard in the course of this conversation is we have now a dysfunctional national security apparatus manned by people who, let's face it, are mostly diversity, equity, inclusion hires.
00:25:33.860And the Defense Department, I think, is now rife with this, Steve.
00:25:41.920Tommy Tuberville was trying to hold them up so that we could avoid compounding this problem.
00:25:47.700The rot starts at the head of this fish.
00:25:51.080It's absolutely clear Lloyd Austin has to go.
00:25:55.040And it seems to me that that probably requires successive levels down.
00:26:00.500People who were in the loop or should have been in the loop, when they tell you that, no, no, no, no, the deputy secretary was on the job, she knew it.
00:26:09.660She was on vacation, for heaven's sakes.
00:26:30.720Would there be a moment if anything happened that you couldn't get in touch with?
00:26:34.720Now, the decision making is different, but actually the direct communications to think that the secretary of defense is gone for five days and nobody knows.
00:26:42.160Also, we had a carrier battle group and combatants under attack in the Red Sea last week.
00:26:50.900We had troops up in Iraq took, I think, 118 hits or a portion of the 118 hits.
00:29:54.540But more importantly, call Philip Patrick and his team and start asking them the simple question, why has gold been a hedge against turbulence for 5,000 years of man's history?
00:30:05.540Because, folks, 2024 is starting off with a bang about turbulence.
00:30:46.780And we've got Matt Boyle and Natalie Winters on, so it's really going to be kind of the hour three of the war room on Human Events Daily today.
00:30:53.520But this is a horrific day for the U.S., the United States' prestige, certainly in terms of the United States' military force readiness around the world.
00:31:02.380But, Steve, we also have to – people need to know that the Secretary of Defense isn't just some employee of the Pentagon.
00:31:07.000This guy has round-the-clock military support in terms of a detail.
00:31:14.200He's got an entire command center around him.
00:31:16.040They all had to know about this, and that means they lied to the White House.
00:31:21.660Also, we need to know now what orders came down from the SECDEF's office over the – we haven't even gotten the actual dates when this really started or ended.
00:31:32.560I'm not confident that they're telling us the truth in any which way.
00:31:35.460And so we're going to have to go look at the last several weeks of every single order that came down or signed out by the Secretary of Defense's office to figure out what's going on.
00:31:46.480And we're not going to stop because that means that these all came down without the authority or the informed consent of the National Security Council.
00:31:54.580Let's set the command of nuclear weapons to a side.
00:32:36.540Okay, go look at what happened to the Moskva last year in the Black Sea.
00:32:40.420Obviously, every single Navy in the entire world should pay attention to that because if these drones or water-based drones, underwater drones, UUVs, can take out a Russian destroyer, then guess what, boys and girls?
00:32:53.300They can take out an American destroyer.
00:32:56.300That means our men and women at sea are at risk right now.
00:33:43.360Colonel Derek Harvey, you've worked for a couple of Secretaries of Defense.
00:33:47.400Give me perspective about how big a deal this is, sir.
00:33:50.680Well, Steve, everyone's been on point with this this morning.
00:33:55.880The key thing here is there's a tremendous amount of high-intensity key decisions being made every day in the Pentagon.
00:34:05.620There was an absence of leadership, and that means there was lack of coordination.
00:34:10.580What I see, and I'm concerned about the natural security implications here, is either the leadership team in the Pentagon, the civilian leadership team, has become irrelevant.
00:35:07.200This would not have happened under Dick Cheney, who I worked for when he was Secretary of Defense, and it wouldn't have happened during the Rumsfeld time when I was there, too.
00:35:32.900You know, Biden, all they do is hammer us that we're the Hitler youth, and they're so squared away, and they care about democracy.
00:35:40.380This is an out-of-control, illegitimate regime, and it's spinning out-of-control right now.
00:35:44.620You fire – they won't fire Austin because they can't take a confirmation hearing.
00:35:49.040If they had a confirmation hearing, Frank Gaffney and the Committee on the President of Danger guys would have – it would be – it would put the Biden regime's disastrous foreign policy and national security policy on trial.
00:35:59.600That's why they won't fire these guys.
00:36:03.780Derek Harvey, what should happen here?
00:36:05.760Well, let's talk about what they're doing already.
00:36:08.120They've moved to a cover-up stage where they're going to hunker down, and you've seen that already on CNN where they have references.
00:36:14.360This is the administration's spokespersons saying that people were in the loop.
00:36:19.120It wasn't as bad as it's being characterized.
00:36:22.100The key thing here is we have a situation where the Pentagon leadership team, in my view, has become irrelevant, although they have statutory and legal authorities.
00:36:33.620You know, decisions are being made elsewhere, it seems.
00:36:36.860And what I know about General Austin, now Secretary Austin, is he's always been a person who just takes orders, and he's the person in the room, but he's not an impactful person.
00:36:50.620He doesn't – he's not the brightest light bulb, is what I would say.
00:36:53.680We've had far better four-star generals, and I could go down a list, and we've had far better secretaries of defense that were engaged intellectually, had leadership, had vision.
00:37:04.140We have a figurehead there right now, and that's the problem.
00:37:08.160And they're going to place a figurehead in to replace him if that opportunity should come because of pressure.
00:37:14.740And they don't want to go through that, so they're just going to ride this out.
00:37:17.680Colonel Harvey, how do people get to – well, we've got to make sure they can't ride it out.
00:37:46.560We're going to have – we've got John Mills over there.
00:37:48.600The new federal state of China has an entire team.
00:37:51.440We're kicking off wall-to-wall coverage on this massive election that's coming up this week in Taiwan.
00:37:56.340Brian Costello is also going to join us so you can see what the money that's pouring in to assist the CCP into major institutions in America, financial institutions.
00:38:20.300Steve, the biggest concern – and I'm delighted you're doing this kind of coverage of Taiwan because, as you know, at least the polls are correct at the moment – this isn't going to go the way that the election of president of Taiwan is not going to go the way Xi Jinping wants.
00:38:37.080So we're looking now at the most critical question of our time.
00:38:43.300But are we able to deter Xi Jinping from using one of presumably several different techniques, everything from a blockade to an actual invasion of Taiwan, to seize that ground, which he has made very clear.
00:38:59.900Okay, hold it, hold it, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on one second.
00:39:05.040Eric Prince, and I hold you and Eric Prince up as two of the smartest guys in this space.
00:39:09.500Eric Prince said the other day on this podcast – not our podcast, it's another podcast, and I'm trying to track Eric down.
00:39:14.300He said, hey, look, regardless of how this goes, but particularly if Xi loses, the kinetic part of this is going to start in the spring.
00:39:22.600Are you actually coming in and having Prince's back?
00:39:27.260Do you believe that we're heading to a kinetic conflict in the South China Sea and Taiwan in the next six months?
00:39:36.160As a matter of fact, I think he's on a train in the U.K. at the moment, so he's out of pocket.
00:39:39.580But we did have a conversation about this, Steve.
00:39:42.400The only thing we disagree about, and he's got a lot of good arguments on his side, is the timing.
00:39:50.620Do the sea state such that they have to wait until April or May, or are they going to go for it sooner than that?
00:39:57.680And my guess is that even with rough sea states and so on, they are going to start putting into place a blockade at a minimum and quite possibly go over the beach.
00:40:06.920But here's the thing that we've got to be paying attention to, and it's the point of this essay I did.
00:40:15.860What Xi has been doing, we've documented this extensively in our Committee on the Present Danger China webinar series, to which you've contributed and helped us publicize.
00:40:24.100There's every reason to believe there will be another act of arson by Xi Jinping after Ukraine, after Israel, after the Red Sea, and who knows where all else, but it's coming here, folks.
00:40:36.780And this Mickey Mouse operation, passing for the national security apparatus of the United States, is clearly failing to signal to the Chinese Communist Party, don't even think about this, let alone be prepared to deal with what they have in mind to torch on here in the United States.
00:40:58.740Steve, you've done as good a job as anybody documenting the thousands, probably now tens of thousands, divisions worth of Chinese People's Liberation Army, maybe special forces units that are in this country and good to go to take it down.
00:41:17.240That's what we're facing, and this is no time for people being AWOL, to say nothing of being utterly incompetent, or they're simply on the basis of the color of their skin or their sex.
00:41:29.780I mean, this is where you need warriors, and yes, it could be messy having a confirmation hearing in the moment, but we need warriors, both on the military side, but also on the political side, because we're at war.
00:41:45.240We're at the unrestricted warfare phase, for sure, but we are now facing the imminent prospect.
00:42:00.800We're not even focused on it, let alone putting the nation on a war footing.
00:42:05.260PresentDatureChina.org is where you can get all of our webinars.
00:42:09.940SecureFreedom.org is where we've got our Center for Security Policy site, and SecuringAmerica.tv, and on Substack is where you can go to get our show, the Securing America program here at Real America's Voice.
00:42:23.700A red alert is up on War Room right now.
00:42:26.100I'm going to push it out with some commentary later in the day.
00:42:28.720See, Raheem's going to be on here, but the American people are hip to this.
00:42:31.840They say two-thirds of the American people say, hey, guess what?
00:42:36.500What Frank Gaffney is warning people about, this election in Taiwan, if it goes the way that the patriots and the lovers of freedom want, and it's going to be tight, but if the non-appeasement party wins, is the balloon going to go up with Xi?
00:42:54.660So we've got to be – this is a red alert.
00:42:56.460The CCP is our existential mortal enemy.
00:42:59.680And when they see the fiasco that is the national security apparatus around this illegitimate president, they start thinking about making a move.