Bannon's War Room - Episode 3299： Where is Llyod Austin; Elections In Taiwan

00:00:00.000 Well, 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.

00:00:13.460 And 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.

00:00:23.760 These 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.

00:00:40.640 And 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.

00:01:01.280 I'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.

00:01:16.860 Because, you know, you think about those left-wing radicals that are doing this.

00:01:20.840 You think about those freaks at the Federalist Society, those left-wing Marxist, wait, I'm sorry, no, wait, they're really conservative legal scholars.

00:01:30.540 But that Judge Luton, who's been at the center of every left-wing, radical, harebrained, progr...

00:01:38.400 Wait a second.

00:01:41.120 No.

00:01:42.100 Oh, 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.

00:01:55.820 This is Obi-Wan Kenobi, right? This is the Obi-Wan Kenobi trick.

00:02:00.540 Strike me down, constitutionalists, and I, Trump, will only become more... No, it's not that...

00:02:09.280 We've set up an architecture of identification of ill people at the senior level.

00:02:15.920 Should we be up in an uproar if the Secretary of Defense was ill over the last number of days?

00:02:21.660 We 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.

00:02:30.400 Four 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.

00:02:37.580 ISIS 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.

00:02:51.460 There are protocols designed to prevent something like that from happening.

00:02:56.040 Those protocols all broke down. Something more serious than a mealy-mouthed apology from the Defense Secretary.

00:03:03.600 The bipartisan uproar is going to be tangible, but I would suggest it will focus on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

00:03:10.000 What should be the response of the White House?

00:03:12.760 Well, the White House should demand something more substantive by way of an apology from the Secretary of Defense.

00:03:20.740 And 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.

00:03:34.140 This seems like a very basic, simple mistake to make.

00:03:39.460 And had this happened in any major corporation, heads would have rolled.

00:03:43.560 Lisa, you can move on quickly from this. I get all of that.

00:03:50.380 But it's not exactly like the global backdrop at the moment. It's quiet. It's anything but.

00:03:54.620 That's the issue. And I think that Bobby actually raised one of the key points, which is,

00:03:58.300 is this White House going to hold the Secretary of Defense responsible for really violating the chain of command

00:04:03.900 and really giving the White House a heads up when there is a material shift in leadership?

00:04:08.700 Several big events took place last week, Tom. And I'm just wondering who spoke to who?

00:04:14.020 Was there no conversation between the White House and the Defense Secretary when those things were happening?

00:04:20.020 All that will be analyzed. And I agree, it's a busy time when you're looking at defense.

00:04:23.660 But far more than that is the heritage, the history of America across the 20th century.

00:04:28.400 We have a constitutional amendment on this. We need healthy people at the top.

00:04:32.740 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.

00:04:40.500 Pray for our enemies. Because we're going medieval on these people.

00:04:45.720 Here's the time I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.

00:04:49.980 The people have had a belly full of it. I know you don't like hearing that.

00:04:53.320 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.

00:04:56.020 It's going to happen.

00:04:57.280 And where do people like that go to share the big lie?

00:04:59.980 Mega Media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

00:05:07.460 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?

00:05:11.220 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

00:05:17.560 War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.

00:05:20.820 It's Monday, 8 January, the year of our Lord, 2024.

00:05:30.920 You're seeing the collapse of the illegitimate Biden regime having nothing to run on.

00:05:36.260 Their central point of what they're running on is that you, the most powerful audience, the War Room posse,

00:05:41.220 the cadre of the War Room being the most powerful audience in all media, that you're the problem. 0.93

00:05:47.360 You're a domestic terrorist. You're a white nationalist. You're a Christian nationalist. 1.00

00:05:51.700 You're the worst, just worst humans on earth. 0.99

00:05:54.660 You're trying to resurrect Hitler's regime in 1932 by voting Donald Trump back into office in a landslide 0.93

00:06:02.940 and then taking over the government and never having another election.

00:06:06.420 It's on and on and on. That's what they're running on because they can't point to anything they touch.

00:06:11.800 They haven't totally screwed up either by design or by just pure incompetence.

00:06:17.860 We've got so much to go through today.

00:06:19.860 Obviously, the sellout on the debt deal, we're going to get to that.

00:06:23.320 Raheem's going to join us. Russ Fote's going to join us.

00:06:25.540 But I've got to start with, have to start with this absolutely putting our troops

00:06:32.040 and putting the United States of America in harm's way on something that is so mind-boggling.

00:06:38.420 It's very hard to even get your arms around it.

00:06:41.120 I want to bring it, we're going to start with Jack Posobiec and Jeff Clark

00:06:43.580 to kind of lay out what's going on.

00:06:45.840 Posobiec, you know, I was an aide or special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations

00:06:49.740 when I came out of sea duty back in 1981.

00:06:52.600 I showed up on the day of Reagan's inauguration.

00:06:54.680 It is inconceivable, Brother Posobiec, that it's, I mean, it's inconceivable.

00:06:59.760 And it's by law that, and the audience, you're not up to speed on this.

00:07:05.340 Lloyd Austin was in ICU and never told anybody, including the President of the United States,

00:07:11.120 I think for five days, and three days hard down.

00:07:15.020 And nobody knew about it.

00:07:16.260 Posobiec, give me your perspective before I get Clark in here.

00:07:19.380 Well, Steve, what we're seeing is not only obviously a massive violation of U.S. national security,

00:07:24.100 that's a massive violation of U.S. law as pertains to the National Command Authority

00:07:30.260 and also as pertains to the military's personnel readiness program.

00:07:34.840 Keep in mind, this guy is somebody who is part of the nuclear weapon chain of command,

00:07:39.760 the nuclear response.

00:07:41.180 The idea that he would be in the ICU, we don't know whether intubated or what,

00:07:46.240 but unconscious for a period of days.

00:07:50.040 The President didn't know.

00:07:51.720 We're told that his own aides may not have known.

00:07:54.860 Potentially just his chief of staff knew about this.

00:07:57.780 But she was out as well and didn't inform anyone.

00:08:01.200 You got an undersecretary now of policy essentially running our military.

00:08:06.240 And this is at a time where, and Steve, I've talked to people who are deployed right now.

00:08:11.840 I've talked to people who are deployed.

00:08:13.280 You see what the Navy's doing in the Red Sea, where they're picking off Houthi drones every other day.

00:08:18.400 We're talking about people that are having Iranian drones fired at them

00:08:22.300 and rockets fired at them across Syria and Iraq.

00:08:26.900 And keep in mind that Taiwan has an election this Saturday.

00:08:30.600 Steve, the service secretaries did not know.

00:08:33.200 Secretary of the Army, Secretary of the Navy, they did not know about this.

00:08:36.000 Secretary of the Air Force, the combatant commanders, the COCOMs, did not know about this.

00:08:41.500 So if you've got an operation that needs authority up at that level,

00:08:46.420 you've got the entire military potentially in deadlock.

00:08:49.500 And Steve, I'll just throw one more thing out there.

00:08:51.420 This is what the media has been saying about the Russians since the start of the war in Ukraine.

00:08:58.000 They said that Putin's comatose, that Shoigu's comatose.

00:09:01.640 They died. They've been replaced by body doubles.

00:09:04.280 But it turns out, Steve, that it's not the leaders of the Kremlin that are actually comatose and lying about it.

00:09:10.240 It's actually the leaders of the United States government and the United States military.

00:09:13.920 Okay, it's the act itself and it's the cover-up.

00:09:18.140 Real quickly before I get Clark in, and Jackson, I'll stick around until we get this sorted.

00:09:22.040 We're bringing other guests in the next segment.

00:09:23.640 Pacific will stay with us. 0.98

00:09:25.100 The National Command Authority.

00:09:27.240 This is by law.

00:09:28.300 There's only two.

00:09:28.880 There's two people.

00:09:29.480 It's the commander-in-chief, which is the president, and the secretary of defense.

00:09:32.560 Like on the nuclear codes, the president has the codes and can order the strike.

00:09:35.900 The 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.

00:09:43.880 It's just a way of fishing.

00:09:45.300 This is black-letter law.

00:09:47.080 My point is laws are broken.

00:09:48.460 Crimes were committed.

00:09:50.360 Crimes were committed in failing to defend the United States of America. 0.54

00:09:55.240 And this doesn't even deal with the carrier battle group under attack last week, taking incoming in Iraq, basically a non-nuclear situation.

00:10:04.420 But 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.

00:10:15.700 Look, I've never seen anything like it.

00:10:17.940 You talk about the fact that this is someone who's supposed to be there authorizing these operations.

00:10:25.140 God only knows what operations couldn't get authorization because he was gone.

00:10:31.340 Then, if, and keep in mind that we know the Iranians have intel assets all throughout the Pentagon and the State Department.

00:10:38.720 We know that the Chinese are all over the U.S. government. 1.00

00:10:41.280 We know the Qataris are all over D.C. 1.00

00:10:43.140 So here's the real question.

00:10:44.900 Did our adversaries know about this?

00:10:46.960 Because you got China all over Twitter all weekend laughing about this, making fun of us. 0.97

00:10:52.580 So they're talking big because Taiwan's election comes up this Saturday.

00:10:56.240 This Saturday, Taiwan's got an election.

00:10:58.540 China knows we've lost our secretary of defense.

00:11:01.440 The Chinese minister of defense, he says, oh, that's interesting.

00:11:04.320 The Russian minister of defense says, oh, that's interesting.

00:11:07.020 North Korea is out there popping off their shells at YPDO and PYDO up there on the northern limit line.

00:11:13.880 And 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.

00:11:25.260 So compare that now to if you're talking about the U.S.

00:11:30.080 The 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.

00:11:40.380 We're preserving the freedom of the sea.

00:11:41.680 Well, here's the problem.

00:11:43.580 If 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.

00:11:58.980 And then the question is, all right.

00:12:00.240 So 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.

00:12:10.140 They're failing to put together coalitions.

00:12:12.260 They're bogged down in Ukraine.

00:12:13.800 And they don't even have a secretary of defense.

00:12:17.740 Lloyd Austin lied.

00:12:19.000 The government lied.

00:12:20.220 They don't know if this guy is conscious or not.

00:12:22.620 The White House doesn't know.

00:12:23.720 So every single person involved with this needs to be fired, starting with Lloyd Austin and then proceeding to the White House.

00:12:32.460 Jack, just hang on for one second.

00:12:33.900 By the way, when we talk about the Red Sea, that's just a prosecutor for the Suez Canal.

00:12:38.440 A fire and prosecuted.

00:12:39.280 Jeff 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.

00:12:51.300 Sir.

00:12:51.920 Sure.

00:12:52.100 Before I do some law, Steve, let me do a couple of extra facts, right?

00:12:55.780 So the president didn't know about this until January 4th, you know, three days into this emergency hospital stay while Austin's in ICU.

00:13:05.420 Blinken didn't know about it.

00:13:06.880 Jake Sullivan didn't know about it.

00:13:08.260 It's totally inexcusable.

00:13:09.840 And then you come to find out that the deputy secretary of defense was on vacation in Puerto Rico during this time.

00:13:17.160 And they didn't even tell her why she was assuming some of his duties.

00:13:21.460 And that's a problem in and of itself.

00:13:23.380 You can't just deal with some of the duties being devolved upon the deputy, you know, the first, you know, principal officer.

00:13:30.580 You've got to deal with all of them.

00:13:32.220 And so there was a gap at the very least.

00:13:33.980 And then they talked to the chief of staff and the chief of staff was out sick.

00:13:37.720 So now they're trying to deflect blame onto her and say she was the one who failed to tell the White House.

00:13:43.760 I mean, it's truly an absurd situation.

00:13:46.300 Okay.

00:13:46.420 So as a matter of law, the Vacancies Reform Act has been violated, Steve.

00:13:52.320 And 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.

00:14:06.500 That did not happen until Friday.

00:14:09.700 That happened just before the Pentagon released a press statement in the evening on Friday the 5th.

00:14:15.520 So this is a situation where a flat law of the United States was violated.

00:14:20.720 And I know that what they might say in response to that is, well, that's really for situations where someone's resigned or died.

00:14:26.680 But 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.

00:14:36.200 So this is a black letter violation of the Vacancies Reform Act.

00:14:40.620 And what can Congress do if it doesn't even know about this situation?

00:14:44.640 It's a complete violation of law.

00:14:47.820 It's a travesty.

00:14:49.280 Jeff, hang on for one second.

00:14:51.620 I want to keep you.

00:14:52.760 Frank Gaffney, General Boykin, Colonel Harvey.

00:14:55.600 We're going all in on this this morning.

00:14:57.340 There's got to be some heads rolling.

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00:16:19.320 Abigail Spamberger, who's on the Intel Committee, former CIA officer, Democrat, say it's not appropriate how this was handled.

00:16:26.500 Do you agree?

00:16:28.740 I do agree with that.

00:16:30.580 I think Secretary Austin did make a mistake or his staff made a mistake in not notifying the correct people.

00:16:35.900 But I think we'll learn more about this when he is released, and he's allegedly going to be released today, what happened on the 23rd.

00:16:45.860 And he was on leave during that period.

00:16:48.460 He took leave specifically to do a medical procedure and then came back and was readmitted due to, from my understanding, pain.

00:16:56.340 I fault them for that.

00:16:58.780 Any commander knows that they have to notify their boss when something serious is going on that might take them out of the loop.

00:17:05.100 But it appears that the right procedures were put in place.

00:17:08.540 He named his deputy, Kathy Hicks, to take over for him.

00:17:12.640 And 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.

00:17:22.200 Wow, that's new information.

00:17:26.320 That's not what these stories are talking about.

00:17:29.040 But that's where we've got to drill down.

00:17:30.240 I think you get five or six scalps on this thing.

00:17:33.320 Posobiec, Tom Nichols is a former instructor at the Naval War College and one of the leading Trump haters.

00:17:39.840 He 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.

00:17:50.840 He 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.

00:17:58.540 But he gave an example.

00:18:00.260 On 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.

00:18:18.040 There's, you know, hundreds of nuclear weapons headed to the United States.

00:18:22.680 It will hit D.C. and everywhere.

00:18:24.340 And within 20 minutes, can you notify the president?

00:18:27.900 And and as he put he didn't even wake his wife up because he said, hey, we're going to be incinerated in about 18 minutes.

00:18:33.840 As he sets up to call the White House and wake up the president, Odom calls back and says, stop, stop, stop.

00:18:39.500 It's a massive mistake.

00:18:40.800 Somebody booted into a computer, a training exercise.

00:18:43.580 This is not really happening.

00:18:44.540 The 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.

00:18:57.520 And you don't have any you don't have a second to mess around.

00:19:00.700 You have to know where Brown is, where the red phone is, the command structure, all of it.

00:19:06.280 There can't be any question whatsoever of what's going on.

00:19:10.060 How big a violation do we have?

00:19:12.260 And now the lies and spin.

00:19:14.180 You just heard they're trying to do a limited hangout right there by saying, hey, I talked to administration officials.

00:19:18.820 He was always conscious and always in communication.

00:19:21.520 Jack Posobiec.

00:19:23.200 Yeah, he's in the ICU with the what did he bring the red phone into the ICU with him?

00:19:27.900 Did he make sure that that that that was that a skiff?

00:19:30.380 Is that he's got access to all that communicate?

00:19:32.380 It's a joke, Steve.

00:19:33.460 This is a complete joke. 0.96

00:19:34.880 We 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. 0.95

00:19:48.720 The chickens with their heads cut off, lying out of both sides of their mouth.

00:19:52.840 You got the White House didn't know what was going on.

00:19:54.700 You got the Pentagon lying about what went on.

00:19:57.160 I said, OK, he's not he's not fully hospitalized, not in to be in Walter Reed.

00:20:00.840 OK, but he's in Walter.

00:20:01.860 He's still in Walter.

00:20:02.680 Is he in Walter Reed now?

00:20:03.720 Do we know if he's in Walter Reed?

00:20:05.480 They won't even tell you what his current status is.

00:20:08.520 And 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.

00:20:21.400 That's open between Biden, the State Department and the Department of Defense after Afghanistan and the failures of Ukraine.

00:20:29.640 So he's out. He's on the outs with Blinken.

00:20:31.760 He's on the outs with with Austin, clearly.

00:20:34.520 And then after October, they said Austin barely even talks to the White House anymore, barely even goes over there.

00:20:42.600 And this, of course, after the brutal Hamas attack in southern Israel.

00:20:46.120 And so the fact of the matter is these guys don't even want to talk to Biden.

00:20:51.080 Now, now I'm sure, by the way, that a lot of Biden senior staff knew.

00:20:55.060 But here's the problem. They didn't want to tell Biden about it.

00:20:59.920 So that's why they're all lying.

00:21:01.840 Well, that's the case.

00:21:03.220 To protect themselves.

00:21:04.600 The arms, the House Armed Services Committee to meet tomorrow and go behind closed doors and start to get facts here.

00:21:10.060 This is.

00:21:10.600 You have a question.

00:21:11.180 Did the House know about this?

00:21:12.560 Was the Speaker of House authorized?

00:21:14.920 Was he informed?

00:21:16.880 Did he know about this?

00:21:18.080 He's only second in the chain of command.

00:21:19.520 He's only he's only the second chain of command.

00:21:22.220 Jeff, before I go to Frank, I got Frank Gaffney, General Boykin, Colonel Harvey.

00:21:26.580 Clark, the actual the National Command Authority is a I guess the the details of it are behind are behind are classified.

00:21:34.960 We don't really know.

00:21:36.220 We 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.

00:21:44.480 But we don't really know many of the details because it's not available to the public.

00:21:48.160 That's right.

00:21:49.820 And 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.

00:21:59.080 And 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.

00:22:13.460 And so if Lloyd Austin is AWOL and that's really what he is.

00:22:17.540 Right. And I'm sure he's court martialed or overseen court marshals of soldiers who've gone AWOL.

00:22:23.040 He was AWOL.

00:22:24.360 This is something where he should be fired immediately by the president of the United States in the president of the United States.

00:22:30.580 Being kept in the dark about it also raises obviously serious concerns about the competency of the president of the United States.

00:22:37.380 There's an even bigger factual question here. Right.

00:22:40.120 That this has clearly been going on for longer than this. Right.

00:22:43.380 He's in the hospital now in the ICU from complications from elective surgery.

00:22:47.620 On December 22nd, he apparently entered the hospital first to have the surgery before he then had to go back after the complications.

00:22:55.860 Well, he probably was placed under anesthesia for that.

00:22:59.020 Was Congress notified about that?

00:23:00.640 Both 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.

00:23:09.420 It'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.

00:23:23.480 Trump is a basis.

00:23:25.120 By the way, that was from Bloomberg.

00:23:26.400 That's liberal progressive hate.

00:23:28.080 That's Bloomberg's network.

00:23:29.980 They hate Trump and they're sitting there going heads of got a roll.

00:23:32.580 Trump is a center of stability.

00:23:35.540 Trump's a center of stability.

00:23:36.920 The Biden, as Jack just laid out, is nothing but chaos, chaos and anarchy and making up as you go along.

00:23:43.100 Jeff, how do people get to you over at CRA?

00:23:47.120 Sure.

00:23:47.680 So the center is America Renewing dot com.

00:23:50.120 I'm at Jeff Clark U.S. on Getter and Twitter and at Real Jeff Clark on Truth Social, Steve.

00:23:56.700 Thank you, brother.

00:23:57.460 You guys do amazing work.

00:23:58.900 You and Pagliato, the whole team.

00:24:00.980 In fact, vote.

00:24:01.720 Russ Votes going to join us here.

00:24:02.940 Surely talk about this debacle on the budget.

00:24:05.440 Frank Gaffney.

00:24:07.060 You've been to a few rodeos over.

00:24:09.380 Frank, just how incomprehensible is it even what we're talking about, sir?

00:24:13.780 It beggars belief on so many different levels, Steve, that a guy who is the secretary of defense would contemplate doing this.

00:24:24.380 We're hoping you're going to have General Boykin on.

00:24:27.320 He worked for a secretary of defense by the name of Donald Rumsfeld.

00:24:32.040 We're going to have Derek Harvey on.

00:24:33.320 He worked closely with, I think, at least one, maybe two of the Trump secretaries of defense.

00:24:37.940 I worked for Cap Weinberger.

00:24:39.680 Cap Weinberger would not have been gone for an hour AWOL.

00:24:44.460 And Jeff's absolutely right in describing this.

00:24:46.200 Absent without leave.

00:24:49.340 Without Ronald Reagan knowing exactly where he was and, you know, in probably very, very routine contact.

00:24:56.100 The 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?

00:25:06.760 Which, 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.

00:25:17.360 And 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.

00:25:33.860 And the Defense Department, I think, is now rife with this, Steve.

00:25:39.480 We've talked about the promotions.

00:25:41.920 Tommy Tuberville was trying to hold them up so that we could avoid compounding this problem.

00:25:47.700 The rot starts at the head of this fish.

00:25:51.080 It's absolutely clear Lloyd Austin has to go.

00:25:55.040 And it seems to me that that probably requires successive levels down.

00:26:00.500 People 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.

00:26:09.660 She was on vacation, for heaven's sakes.

00:26:13.140 And apparently she didn't know.

00:26:14.580 Let me go.

00:26:14.900 This is a scandal on so many different moments.

00:26:16.900 Let me go. Hang on.

00:26:17.420 Totally intolerable.

00:26:18.640 This is a scandal.

00:26:19.880 Look, I was the aide to the chief of naval operation and one of his special assistants, Doran Weinberger.

00:26:24.360 Remember, you knew every second you knew exactly where the contacts had to be.

00:26:29.120 There wasn't even a question.

00:26:30.720 Would there be a moment if anything happened that you couldn't get in touch with?

00:26:34.720 Now, 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.

00:26:42.160 Also, we had a carrier battle group and combatants under attack in the Red Sea last week.

00:26:50.900 We had troops up in Iraq took, I think, 118 hits or a portion of the 118 hits.

00:26:57.280 How is Jake Sullivan not talking?

00:26:59.540 How does Jake Sullivan not know this?

00:27:01.100 How does the national security advisor to the president of the United States not know that Austin is not around?

00:27:06.800 Is he not talking to the secretary of defense every day?

00:27:09.360 I mean, Frank, help me out there.

00:27:10.800 We've got 30 seconds before we go to break.

00:27:13.140 He should be in the normal course of things at a time like this, especially, Steve.

00:27:19.100 And you've mentioned some of the things that are already underway.

00:27:21.820 I'm particularly worried, and thank you for putting an article we call Red Alert up on warroom.org.

00:27:29.680 This is a time when the Chinese Communist Party, I believe, is poised to go to a shooting war over Taiwan.

00:27:36.740 And they will start it, I'm convinced, with a bonfires of the tyrannies conflagration here at home.

00:27:44.820 It is unimaginable that people are not at general quarters and every hand is on deck.

00:27:51.300 Okay, Frank, hang over a second.

00:27:55.300 General Boykin is going to join us.

00:27:56.740 Colonel Harvey, Jack Posobiec is going to hang for a few more minutes.

00:28:00.480 We've got Russ Vogt.

00:28:01.720 We're going to get into this.

00:28:02.780 Okay, let's just be blunt.

00:28:04.300 A full and total surrender by the Speaker of the House.

00:28:09.300 Unbelievable.

00:28:10.140 Short commercial break.

00:28:11.000 Back in a moment.

00:28:11.600 You can't handle the truth. 0.99

00:28:20.620 The truth is the clowns running this joint live for chaos. 0.97

00:28:24.620 Many of our problems as a country could be solved overnight. 0.98

00:28:29.160 But the establishment lets them be.

00:28:32.240 Destruction fuels them.

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00:29:38.380 Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. 0.83

00:29:42.820 You talk about turbulent times, you ain't seen nothing yet because you have these people incompetent and full of malfeasance.

00:29:48.780 Make sure you go to Birchgold, Birchgold.com, slash Bannon.

00:29:51.520 Get the end of the dollar empire.

00:29:53.040 Read it, download it.

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00:29:54.540 But 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?

00:30:05.540 Because, folks, 2024 is starting off with a bang about turbulence.

00:30:10.100 It's going to be crazy.

00:30:11.400 Tomorrow, by the way, just announced President Trump is actually going to be in court.

00:30:15.160 He's going to federal court on this immunity hearing.

00:30:17.940 Julie Kelly is going to be covering for us this whole thing. 1.00

00:30:20.480 This week's going to be intense.

00:30:21.600 Next week's going to be more intense.

00:30:23.200 Turbulence, turbulence, turbulence.

00:30:24.780 That's why you've got to look at how do you hedge your financial situation.

00:30:28.580 We don't give financial advice here, but we point you in the direction of people that can talk to you.

00:30:32.620 That would be the folks at Birchgold, Birchgold.com, slash Bannon.

00:30:35.960 Jack Posobiec, I know you've got to bounce.

00:30:37.960 You've been all over this from the very beginning.

00:30:40.180 Give me your closing thoughts.

00:30:41.200 I take it Human Events Daily is going to be all over this this afternoon.

00:30:45.900 Steve, we are.

00:30:46.780 And 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.

00:30:53.520 But 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.

00:31:02.380 But, Steve, we also have to – people need to know that the Secretary of Defense isn't just some employee of the Pentagon.

00:31:07.000 This guy has round-the-clock military support in terms of a detail.

00:31:11.840 He's got military staff.

00:31:13.240 He's got E-Force.

00:31:14.200 He's got an entire command center around him.

00:31:16.040 They all had to know about this, and that means they lied to the White House.

00:31:21.660 Also, 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.

00:31:32.560 I'm not confident that they're telling us the truth in any which way.

00:31:35.460 And 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.

00:31:46.480 And 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.

00:31:54.580 Let's set the command of nuclear weapons to a side.

00:31:59.920 That's massive.

00:32:01.140 We had two carrier battle groups in the Red Sea because we can't put together a coalition to keep the ceilings open of the Suez Canal.

00:32:08.100 That's what it's about.

00:32:09.380 They were under attack by the Houthis last week, not backing off.

00:32:12.780 We just have an announcement that a Hezbollah leader has been killed in Lebanon by the Israelis.

00:32:18.300 We had the guys in Iraq under attack. 0.99

00:32:20.260 Your sons and daughters are in harm's way, and they're pulling this crap? 0.99

00:32:23.820 No, no, no, no. 0.99

00:32:25.100 We're going to – we need 10 scalps on this thing at least.

00:32:29.060 And by the way, Steve, they haven't targeted the ships themselves yet.

00:32:34.080 They can take out our destroyers. 0.88

00:32:36.540 Okay, go look at what happened to the Moskva last year in the Black Sea.

00:32:40.420 Obviously, 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?

00:32:53.300 They can take out an American destroyer.

00:32:56.300 That means our men and women at sea are at risk right now.

00:33:01.980 In harm's way.

00:33:03.160 And the Secretary of Defense is not even around and people covering it up.

00:33:05.860 Jack, where do people go to get human events daily in you, particularly your Twitter feed,

00:33:10.000 which is a little spicy?

00:33:12.800 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:13.220 People can find out my Twitter.

00:33:15.180 The Ivy League professors are finding out about Twitter.

00:33:18.640 They started coming – they dipped their toes in, and they're already getting burned.

00:33:22.280 You've got the Swifties dipping their toes in now. 1.00

00:33:24.360 They're getting burned.

00:33:25.080 Of course, we're up there, x.com.

00:33:26.740 Everywhere else we know, Truth Social, Getter.

00:33:29.140 And then, of course, we'll be up 2 p.m. every single day, Rumble, YouTube, Getter, wherever they let us up.

00:33:34.220 And we will be live, and we will be alive, as opposed to the current Secretary of Defense.

00:33:39.980 Okay.

00:33:41.820 All over it.

00:33:42.700 Okay, thank you.

00:33:43.360 Colonel Derek Harvey, you've worked for a couple of Secretaries of Defense.

00:33:47.400 Give me perspective about how big a deal this is, sir.

00:33:50.680 Well, Steve, everyone's been on point with this this morning.

00:33:55.880 The key thing here is there's a tremendous amount of high-intensity key decisions being made every day in the Pentagon.

00:34:05.620 There was an absence of leadership, and that means there was lack of coordination.

00:34:10.580 What 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.

00:34:19.860 They're not talking to others.

00:34:21.500 They're not involved.

00:34:23.080 People don't notice that they're gone, as we've heard already.

00:34:26.320 Or there's dysfunctionality, and both of those are of significant concern.

00:34:32.660 It also reflects, I think, poor leadership and competency of General Austin and Secretary of Defense Austin, and that's of concern, too.

00:34:45.540 We have a team there at the Pentagon that people didn't even know that they were not engaged.

00:34:51.500 Where was Jake Sullivan?

00:34:54.380 You know, you've got lots of interagency stuff going on.

00:34:57.740 You've got operations, critical operations throughout the world, and as others have said, we've got potential threats in Taiwan.

00:35:05.100 So this is of significant concern.

00:35:07.200 This 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.

00:35:16.200 So what should happen here?

00:35:22.340 I'm going to ask you and Frank that.

00:35:23.560 Russ Vogt's going to come on a second when we get into this budget situation.

00:35:26.440 And folks should know we're going to do this in detail every day because this is an outrage.

00:35:30.600 You put troops in harm's way.

00:35:32.900 You 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.

00:35:40.380 This is an out-of-control, illegitimate regime, and it's spinning out-of-control right now.

00:35:44.620 You fire – they won't fire Austin because they can't take a confirmation hearing.

00:35:49.040 If 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.

00:35:59.600 That's why they won't fire these guys.

00:36:00.880 They have to be forced out.

00:36:03.780 Derek Harvey, what should happen here?

00:36:05.760 Well, let's talk about what they're doing already.

00:36:08.120 They'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.

00:36:14.360 This is the administration's spokespersons saying that people were in the loop.

00:36:19.120 It wasn't as bad as it's being characterized.

00:36:22.100 The 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.

00:36:33.620 You know, decisions are being made elsewhere, it seems.

00:36:36.860 And 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.

00:36:48.160 He's not a significant leader.

00:36:50.620 He doesn't – he's not the brightest light bulb, is what I would say.

00:36:53.680 We'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.

00:37:04.140 We have a figurehead there right now, and that's the problem.

00:37:08.160 And they're going to place a figurehead in to replace him if that opportunity should come because of pressure.

00:37:14.740 And they don't want to go through that, so they're just going to ride this out.

00:37:17.680 Colonel Harvey, how do people get to – well, we've got to make sure they can't ride it out.

00:37:23.900 How do people get to you?

00:37:26.100 First of all, DerekHarvey.org is my webpage, and then I'm on Twitter at ColonelDHarvey, H-A-R-V-E-Y, and on Truth Social at DerekHarvey.

00:37:41.500 By the way, it's 6 o'clock tonight.

00:37:43.080 We're going to be live.

00:37:44.040 We've got a live show from Taiwan.

00:37:46.560 We're going to have – we've got John Mills over there.

00:37:48.600 The new federal state of China has an entire team.

00:37:51.440 We're kicking off wall-to-wall coverage on this massive election that's coming up this week in Taiwan.

00:37:56.340 Brian 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.

00:38:06.100 It will make your head blow up.

00:38:08.480 So that's all at 6 o'clock today.

00:38:10.220 Colonel Harvey, thank you very much for changing your schedule coming on here, brother.

00:38:13.100 Appreciate it.

00:38:13.980 Good to see you.

00:38:14.840 Bye.

00:38:16.560 Gaffney, what should happen here?

00:38:20.300 Steve, 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.

00:38:37.080 So we're looking now at the most critical question of our time.

00:38:43.300 But 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.

00:38:59.900 Okay, hold it, hold it, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on one second.

00:39:05.040 Eric Prince, and I hold you and Eric Prince up as two of the smartest guys in this space.

00:39:09.500 Eric Prince said the other day on this podcast – not our podcast, it's another podcast, and I'm trying to track Eric down.

00:39:14.300 He 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.

00:39:22.600 Are you actually coming in and having Prince's back?

00:39:27.260 Do you believe that we're heading to a kinetic conflict in the South China Sea and Taiwan in the next six months?

00:39:34.600 Yeah, I tried to get Eric on today.

00:39:36.160 As a matter of fact, I think he's on a train in the U.K. at the moment, so he's out of pocket.

00:39:39.580 But we did have a conversation about this, Steve.

00:39:42.400 The only thing we disagree about, and he's got a lot of good arguments on his side, is the timing.

00:39:50.620 Do the sea state such that they have to wait until April or May, or are they going to go for it sooner than that?

00:39:57.680 And 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.

00:40:06.920 But here's the thing that we've got to be paying attention to, and it's the point of this essay I did.

00:40:12.400 At warroom.org.

00:40:14.340 Red Alert.

00:40:15.860 What 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.

00:40:24.100 There'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.

00:40:36.780 And 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. 0.90

00:40:58.740 Steve, 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. 0.99

00:41:17.240 That'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.

00:41:29.780 I 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.

00:41:45.240 We're at the unrestricted warfare phase, for sure, but we are now facing the imminent prospect.

00:41:51.100 Maybe it's my great concern.

00:41:59.780 We're ready for that.

00:42:00.800 We're not even focused on it, let alone putting the nation on a war footing.

00:42:05.260 PresentDatureChina.org is where you can get all of our webinars.

00:42:09.940 SecureFreedom.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.

00:42:23.700 A red alert is up on War Room right now.

00:42:26.100 I'm going to push it out with some commentary later in the day.

00:42:28.720 See, Raheem's going to be on here, but the American people are hip to this.

00:42:31.840 They say two-thirds of the American people say, hey, guess what?

00:42:34.060 This is an invasion.

00:42:35.080 That's the term to use.

00:42:36.500 What 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?

00:42:51.040 Eric Prince says the spring.

00:42:52.800 Frank Gaffney says right away.

00:42:54.660 So we've got to be – this is a red alert.

00:42:56.460 The CCP is our existential mortal enemy.

00:42:59.680 And when they see the fiasco that is the national security apparatus around this illegitimate president, they start thinking about making a move.

00:43:07.160 Gaffney, thank you so much.

00:43:08.380 Honored to have you on here.

00:43:09.280 How can we stay so on point early in the morning?

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00:43:34.920 Short break.

00:43:35.860 Russ Foe joins us next.

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00:45:30.400 Make sure you take action on this today.

00:45:33.220 This IRS grind is only going to get much worse.

00:45:36.020 Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.

00:45:44.000 Joe Allen is at the Consumer Electronics Show for us for the week,

00:45:48.200 covering everything to do with transhumanism.

00:45:49.900 And there's a lot there.

00:45:50.880 Remember, that's where all the big breaks come on things on the computer,

00:45:54.340 internet, all of it.

00:45:55.420 He'll be on the show tonight in the 6 o'clock hour.

00:45:58.000 One thing I can tell you is cybercrime and AI are combining,

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00:46:31.940 Russ Vogt, I've got to ask you.

00:46:33.020 You were OMB under Trump, and I tell people all the time,

00:46:36.260 if you want to know how the apparatus works, Russ Vogt's the man.

00:46:38.840 I call Russ up with the most bizarre question.

00:46:41.080 He goes, it would always be the same.

00:46:42.260 Give me 10 minutes, give me 20 minutes.

00:46:43.620 Boom, come in at the answer.

00:46:45.440 Real quickly, this Austin situation, how mind-boggling is that,

00:46:49.560 given the tight controls even on the programmatic side you guys have on the cash

00:46:52.760 and what's happening?

00:46:53.360 How insane is it that the guy's out of pocket for five days and nobody knows about it?

00:46:59.000 National Security Advisor, the Commander-in-Chief, sir.

00:47:01.780 I can't believe that any member of the Cabinet would not give the President and his Chief of Staff

00:47:08.060 an awareness of their availability on something like this.

00:47:12.240 And my thought over the weekend was this is an indicator.

00:47:14.720 The fact that he wasn't noticed, this is a strong indicator of how far we've come from having

00:47:19.480 civilian control of the military.

00:47:21.360 They didn't even notice.

00:47:22.860 But this is certainly a complete impropriety that should lead to him being fired today.

00:47:31.380 So Russ Vogt, we're going to pull that quote.

00:47:34.120 You're saying that Austin should be fired immediately.

00:47:36.460 No questions.

00:47:37.720 No question.

00:47:38.380 You can't.

00:47:38.860 You're the Secretary of Defense.

00:47:40.200 Assuming the White House themselves are not lying.

00:47:43.060 But you cannot tell, you cannot go into the hospital and under these procedures, not even

00:47:49.840 tell your deputy that you've relinquished control to her.

00:47:55.440 That kind of gap is such a critical post like the Secretary of Defense is a fireable one.

00:48:02.040 The last time we left this about the budget, we had Johnson down the border with 50 guys

00:48:11.000 who wouldn't raise their hand about, you know, they went down there for a photo op.

00:48:14.260 When Burkwam asked him, if they don't secure the border, do you shut down the government?

00:48:18.480 Not one to raise their hand.

00:48:19.540 He then goes on Face the Nation yesterday and gives a terrible interview.

00:48:23.180 But when we left it, Raheem's got research out there.

00:48:25.840 He's going to come on next thing.

00:48:26.680 Two-thirds of the American people, two-thirds, say that what's happening at the border, the

00:48:32.100 best way to describe it, is an invasion of the United States of America.

00:48:35.780 Given that, as when we left this, everybody was talking, oh, if you don't shut down the

00:48:41.060 border, we're going to shut down the government and just bring it on to this total and complete

00:48:45.160 collapse that we saw delivered to the members.

00:48:47.980 I talked to many members yesterday who were outraged.

00:48:49.980 They got the delivery by Twitter.

00:48:51.720 Sir?

00:48:53.500 No, it's unbelievable, honestly.

00:48:55.700 You know, the left was freaking out because the way they did the debt limit deal, to make

00:49:01.480 it look more conservative and more fiscally responsible, they hid a lot of the spending,

00:49:07.440 about $69 billion worth of the spending, in what was known as a side deal.

00:49:12.220 They did it outside of the law, but they invested it in the person of Kevin McCarthy, basically

00:49:16.680 saying, I will get this done.

00:49:18.420 It will allow you to have higher spending, and then you'll be able to keep the bureaucracy

00:49:22.180 going at a certain rate, right?

00:49:23.900 That's why we were so outraged, and we crushed the deal at the time.

00:49:28.340 So by virtue of him no longer being the speaker, that side deal went away, and they had an

00:49:33.320 ability to spend dramatically lower, even under a continuing resolution.

00:49:39.380 If they did nothing, if they just extended it, it would have locked in across-the-board

00:49:43.080 cuts by virtue of the fact that there was a new speaker.

00:49:45.440 So they had massive leverage here.

00:49:47.980 The Democrats were freaking out.

00:49:49.520 All the appropriators were saying, this isn't complete outrage that they would walk away

00:49:53.440 from our deal.

00:49:54.400 They had all of the leverage in the world, and they walked away from it.

00:49:59.360 And what was agreed to last night would be $100 billion more than a long-term CR that

00:50:06.920 triggered the across-the-board cuts.

00:50:09.080 You might think, okay, well, is that going to just really hurt defense?

00:50:12.500 No, defense would have been frozen.

00:50:14.300 It would have been an across-the-board cut all to non-defense spending.

00:50:18.420 And yet, instead of doing that, they took away all the leverage two weeks before any kind

00:50:23.260 of an actual expiration date, and they said, we're going to give you everything you want,

00:50:28.920 and we're going to be at these levels, and we're going to continue to move forward at such—not

00:50:33.560 only at the current speaker's deal, the debt limit deal, but they're actually going to

00:50:38.560 be able to increase spending.

00:50:40.480 And the speaker's office will say, well, no, we're at a much lower level.

00:50:45.560 Because what they do, the Democrats, they do the spending equivalent of pumping and dumping.

00:50:51.480 When they have an opportunity, they throw a ton of money at something like the IRS.

00:50:56.380 They'll use a lot of it, but they have no intention of ever using all of that.

00:50:59.980 They are intentionally trying to provide a little bit of reserve so they come back, steal that

00:51:05.900 money later, and score it to make the bills look lower.

00:51:09.800 So Mike Johnson today will be out there saying, no, Russ Vogt's numbers are too high.

00:51:14.400 That's not what this does.

00:51:15.520 It's much lower.

00:51:16.560 That's not true.

00:51:17.620 They are much higher, and the Democrats are rightfully getting everything that they want.

00:51:21.880 And I would—my suggestion is that we should stop negotiating with this OMB director, because

00:51:27.480 they are eating the lunch of the House Republicans literally every time they go into the room

00:51:32.520 with this woman.

00:51:35.200 But what is it—I'm going to get into some more details.

00:51:37.920 We can just hold through the break for a few minutes, but I've got to get to the psychology.

00:51:41.440 We had all the leverage.

00:51:42.700 Look, we're totally against the one-year CR, because we don't think the cuts are big enough.

00:51:47.180 But even that is better.

00:51:48.920 How does Johnson, understanding the firestorm, just agree to this and not even mention anything

00:51:55.760 on the border?

00:51:56.380 He's funding everything he said on the border he was going to shut down.

00:51:59.060 I just don't understand.

00:52:00.620 Look, if this guy's the Christian, what you're doing, because of the lack of fight and being 1.00

00:52:05.780 a wimp, you're going to have—I mean, this is people who are going to be looking to convert 1.00

00:52:09.200 to Islam. 0.91

00:52:10.300 I mean, they're going to look to fight somewhere.

00:52:11.920 What is this guy doing? 0.89

00:52:13.140 Why is he such a weasel?

00:52:14.400 Look, I think that the speaker is managing his conference to avoid conflict.

00:52:21.560 His conference hates the fact that we could have a potential government shutdown.

00:52:26.780 And I think that's the problem, right?

00:52:28.560 You've got to—you have to manage for conflict.

00:52:31.480 You're not going to be able to beat the Democrats without conflict.

00:52:34.320 And he's afraid of it.

00:52:35.580 And he can't be.

00:52:36.340 And the way to deal with his moderates is to produce success.

00:52:40.560 And you can produce success by using your leverage points, having big wins, which basically

00:52:47.660 was the first few weeks of his speakership before he really started to go backwards.

00:52:52.960 That is the method of success.

00:52:55.080 And to your point, Steve, the way to prevent a government shutdown was—he had all the

00:53:02.860 leverage in the world to be able to have $100 billion in lower spending than he just agreed

00:53:07.860 to with House and Senate Democrats.

00:53:10.420 So there's just no excuse for it.

00:53:14.300 Hang on one second.

00:53:15.300 90-second break.

00:53:16.140 We'll start the second hour.

00:53:17.240 Raheem Ghassan will join us.

00:53:18.740 Lara Logan, Natalie Winters.

00:53:20.860 We're wall-to-wall in the next hour.

00:53:22.360 Rust folks are going to stick around. 1.00

00:53:23.480 We're going to go to the ramparts today, folks.

00:53:25.660 I told you, you're in the fight club.

00:53:27.980 We want to fight.

00:53:28.880 And, brother, we got one.

00:53:30.600 Short break.

00:53:31.320 Back in the warm-in moment.

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Bannon's War Room - January 08, 2024

Episode 3299： Where is Llyod Austin; Elections In Taiwan

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