On this episode of Firebrand, Rep. Corey Mills (R-Florida) joins Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Representative) in calling for the impeachment of former Defense Secretary Lloyd A. Austin for his alleged dereliction of duty. Rep. Mills joins us to discuss what he thinks of the situation, and why he thinks it's time to impeach him. We also hear from Rep. Mike McCarty and Sen. Marco Rubio, both of whom have called for a hearing on the matter, and from Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who has been a long-time supporter of the cause. Finally, we are joined by Rep. Cory Mills, who is also a member of the House Armed Services Committee, to talk about his experience in the military and how he thinks Lloyd Austin should be impeached and what he believes needs to happen in order to hold him accountable for what he's done in the past and what's to come in the future. Firebrand is a production of the Firebrand Podcast, hosted by Firebrand's own Adam Schiff. Adam Schiff and Adam Schiff, and featuring Cory Mills and Rep. Michael McCarty. . Subscribe to Firebrand and listen to our new podcast Firebrand. Subscribe and Retweet to stay up to date on all things Firebrand! Subscribe, share, and spread the word to your friends and family about our new show! about what we're doing what we cover! on this episode! We're on Firebrand with Adam Schiff's new book Firebrand: A Call for Impeachment of the Defense Secretary of Defense. coming soon! coming out on Tuesday, February 6th, 2020! and we'll have a special bonus episode with a new episode coming out in the next episode of the podcast next week! Thank you, Adam Schiff! - Adam Schiff & Co! Adam Crandell. - Subscribe to our newest podcast, Firebrand - Subscribe, Subscribe, Share, Retweet, and Shoutout, and Share it Outro Music: Firebrand Outtro Music: - Firebrand and Share It Outtrope, & Shout It Out! & Share it out on SoundCloud! (featuring Adam Schiff , Thank You, Adam Schecter, - Firebrands, @ , @ & @ and , & , and @ .
00:05:39.000This is an individual who failed to uphold his duties, and he basically vacated the seat without letting anyone know.
00:05:46.000Even Deputy Secretary Hicks, who was on vacation in Puerto Rico, did not know that she'd assumed his duties.
00:05:51.000Now you've got five to six days that we don't know what the incapacitation was for Secretary Lloyd, while we are seeing these increased attacks that we just talked about.
00:06:01.000We talk about the idea of not just striking and attacking the Houthi rebels, but also the fact that that shipping lane carries 12% of global trade, a majority of that for the United States.
00:06:10.000So this is an attempt to also disrupt us.
00:06:13.000I've submitted my impeachment articles long ago in August of last year.
00:06:17.000I think that the Republican House needs to take up these articles of impeachment, and we need to go forward with a dereliction of duty hearing.
00:06:26.000I think that we can look at the 2021 Afghan botched withdrawal, the failure to get status of forces agreements, the 33,000 recruitment deficit, and also his inability to allow the administration to know what's going on as reasoning for us to take this up and impeach him with bipartisan support.
00:07:00.000You saw this guy Lloyd Austin for what he was, a phony, a fraud.
00:07:05.000You called him out like I've never seen a member of Congress speak to a Secretary of Defense and that's a lot coming from me.
00:07:11.000I want to get into what's going on with the Secretary of Defense.
00:07:14.000What's going on more broadly in the Middle East, because you know a great deal about that region of the world.
00:07:19.000But first, you're in your first term here in Congress.
00:07:22.000You represent the great state of Florida.
00:07:23.000You have chosen to lead from the front of this fight.
00:07:27.000You take direct action rescuing Americans from some of the most dangerous places in the world.
00:07:32.000How would you answer the question on the street to a person in a minute or two about how did Cory Mills come to be in the United States Congress?
00:07:41.000You know, every single thing that I've done in my life, whether it was coming from a broken home, whether it was serving in the military, whether it was building successful businesses, I mean, it all basically was on a pathway that was set for me.
00:07:52.000So for me, it's kind of like the C.S. Lewis thing.
00:07:55.000So it's taking what I have, my capacity, capabilities, and stuff, and basically being able to apply that and make it forward.
00:08:00.000Because when we all meet our maker, I want to be able to say, are you proud of what I've done with all the things that you've blessed me with?
00:08:05.000And give us a little sense of your personal military experience and record to the extent that you can.
00:08:11.000So I served in the 82nd Airborne Division for a long time.
00:08:14.000Served on a scout reconnaissance team.
00:08:16.000Was a member of the Joint Special Operations Command and Iraq Invasion in 2003. Served a little bit of time with the State Department as well as for other agencies.
00:08:40.000You know the military, the bureaucracy, the interagency process.
00:08:44.000And I took note of early in your congressional career, you sussed out Lloyd Austin.
00:08:51.000And by the way, every single person in our military, even at the high end of it, under Joe Biden, isn't a bad person, isn't a bad strategist.
00:08:58.000But you seem to think that this guy in particular didn't have it.
00:09:03.000Well, one, I've talked to people who've actually served under Lloyd Austin when he was a flag officer, and they've talked about the fact that most of his promotions was part of that kind of the diversity, you know, portion of this.
00:09:16.000I mean, that's the honest truth from many of the commanders who had actually served with him.
00:09:19.000Now you fast forward into what has he done since he's become the Secretary of Defense.
00:09:24.000He's failed horribly in prioritizing the things like being ready, having us have the right equipment, Making sure that we're prioritizing increased lethality.
00:09:32.000Instead, we're on diversity, equity, and inclusion, which has resulted in 33,000-plus people who no longer want to serve in our recruitment deficit, plus the 9,600 people who are unconstitutionally purged for refusing the vaccine for religious or medical freedom reasons.
00:09:48.000They seem to be missing out on the inclusion part of the diversity, equity, and inclusion because if you were a patriotic American, a devout Christian, someone of any faith that had a legitimate basis to seek an exemption, you got totally screwed.
00:10:06.000Lloyd Austin screws up the VAX mandate.
00:10:07.000You were very critical of the Afghanistan stuff.
00:10:11.000And here's what the Lloyd Austin defenders would say on the Afghanistan withdrawal.
00:10:15.000Well, that was the State Department's fault.
00:10:17.000We would have done it differently, but really at the end of the day, the White House listened to Blinken and the State Department and this belief that there would be this durable Afghan government led by Ghani or whomever.
00:10:32.000It was just a money laundering operation with a lot of those guys.
00:10:35.000Well, but it has been for a long time.
00:10:37.000I think the further investigation after we remove people like Secretary of Austin, who has a dereliction of duty...
00:10:42.000We need to be doing investigations into these defense contractors who is responsible for the training like NPRS or any of the others and saying you were giving reports to say that this battalion was ready to fight and had the necessary sustainability.
00:10:56.000Were you feeding bad intel to continue your contracts or continue to try and bleed the government dry?
00:11:01.000There's a bigger portion of this that we need to be looking at outside of procurement reform and how the military-industrial complex works.
00:11:06.000This needs to be about people who are signing up to do a job that are not scared to tell the president when he's right and when he's wrong.
00:11:12.000Secretary Lloyd had no escalation of force.
00:11:14.000He had no rules of engagement, and that's what resulted in 13 heroes losing their lives in 13 new brave Gold Star families.
00:11:23.000Because I'm looking at what we've got going on in the Red Sea right now, and we've got a lot of force posture there.
00:11:29.000And are we setting up for some Gulf of Tonkin moment as a consequence of just poor decision-making at the tactical level?
00:11:36.000I mean, it's poor decision at a tactical level, but it's really, as Secretary Gates said when Biden was vice president, he's wrong on 100 percent of foreign policy.
00:11:44.000This is, you know, the result of the Houthis increasing their attacks was when they got delisted as a terrorist organization.
00:11:50.000The increase in funding in mid-range ballistic missiles is because Iran has the largest oil revenue they've ever had.
00:11:57.000So we have to start, you know, instead of treating the symptoms, we have to recognize the disease.
00:12:02.000The disease is Joe Biden has failed foreign policies.
00:12:04.000We have to look at Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea and their geopolitical alignment.
00:12:09.000But to your point, we also have to address the fact that 12% of global shipping goes to the Suez Canal, of which we're a large importer of, and that this is an actual attempt by the Houthis, by Iran, and by China to disrupt commerce for America.
00:12:22.000So you believe the American people have a specific, definable interest vis-a-vis global shipping in the Suez Canal?
00:12:30.000Look, the bottom line is we've become way too reliant on adversarial nations like China.
00:12:34.000We're continuing to water ourselves down by doing what we just did last year, which is the $14.4 billion sale of our last and largest steel manufacturer.
00:12:43.000So yes, we have a national security interest and an economic interest when it comes to the global shipping lanes.
00:12:51.000Apparently, Blinken is stuck in Davos right now.
00:12:53.000We got a lot of people on the live chat saying, leave him there.
00:13:03.000You talk about the interconnectivity of what's going on in the world.
00:13:05.000And then Lloyd Austin goes to get a medical procedure, does not disclose that to the White House or the president, doesn't really set up the next person in command to even come off of a vacation.
00:13:16.000And now a lot of people are looking back to the articles of impeachment that you originally filed against Lloyd Austin, and folks are starting to ask some really tough questions.
00:13:25.000Sasha, put up the tweet from Congressman Chris DiLuzio.
00:13:28.000This is a Democrat congressman on the House Armed Services Committee where Representative Mills and I do a lot of our work.
00:13:36.000I've lost trust in Secretary Austin's leadership of the Defense Department due to the lack of transparency about his recent medical treatment and his impact On the continuity on the chain of command.
00:13:47.000I have a solemn duty in Congress to conduct oversight of the Department of Defense through my service on the House Armed Services Committee.
00:13:53.000That duty today requires me to call on Secretary Austin to resign.
00:13:59.000So here is a House Democrat on our committee calling for that resignation.
00:14:08.000Not only was there a violation of protocol, which is the Rule 3349-6, Which allows the people to announce a vacancy if they're going under any type of medical procedure.
00:14:17.000The presidents do it when they do colonoscopies or whatever the case may be.
00:14:20.000But the other thing is that we had a national security breach.
00:14:23.000We've got attacks increasing like we've not seen at any point in time in Syria and Iraq.
00:14:28.000And I just want to point out the fact that both you and I fought to repeal the authorization of use of military force to AUMS that was keeping our troops there since 01-02, which is being wrongfully and being abused for the wrong reasons.
00:14:41.000But The whole point is that you've got increased attacks.
00:14:44.000You've got the shipping lanes and commerce and economic trade that's getting threatened.
00:14:46.000You've got an increase in China's rhetoric about the unification to take Taiwan.
00:14:51.000And meanwhile, for five days, you have the Secretary of Defense, who doesn't tell anyone to include Deputy Secretary Hicks, who's on vacation in Puerto Rico, that she's now assumed his duties.
00:15:01.000So during those missile attacks, those counterattacks, my question is, who is authorizing those attacks whenever you've got no one at the helm?
00:15:10.000And God forbid the plan doesn't go exactly according to plan.
00:15:13.000As you well know, some of these attacks, there can be problems in targeting.
00:15:18.000Let's keep in mind, this is the crew that went and bombed some family on their way to a barbecue in Afghanistan and told the rest of us it was a good kill.
00:15:27.000It was a virtuous strike on a terrorist.
00:15:31.000And the fact that this guy's being totally not transparent about this, you've got someone who did some of the most intense work like you, you've got Democrat Congressman Deluzio, and even Seth Moulton, Democrat Congressman from Massachusetts, former Democrat presidential contender, also on the House Armed Services Committee.
00:15:49.000Here's what Congressman Moulton had to say.
00:15:52.000What he did is completely unacceptable.
00:15:55.000I can't imagine that happening at the lowest levels of the military chain of command, like where I was as a mere lieutenant platoon commander in Iraq.
00:16:04.000I can't even imagine it happening when I was a 15-year-old busboy.
00:16:09.000I mean, if I was going to be out for a week, I had to tell my boss.
00:16:13.000So this is a major breakdown in the chain of command.
00:16:16.000And the commander in chief needs to make a decision here.
00:16:19.000It's up to the president as to whether he fires secretary Austin.
00:16:22.000But I tell you what, he needs to send a decisive message that this is never going to happen again.
00:17:11.000Then the question becomes, what is the Republican response?
00:17:14.000You've laid out the protocols, the procedures in a very kind of dispassionate matter-of-fact way.
00:17:19.000And we have from the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee a strongly worded letter to Lloyd Austin.
00:17:25.000This comes from Mike Rogers, who is from the state of Alabama, a Republican.
00:17:29.000And in this letter, Chairman Rogers asks nine really good questions regarding the occurrences of any sedation or general anesthesia, regarding any orders or instructions to other people in the Defense Department regarding the hospitalization or medical condition, regarding the authorities that were given to Deputy Secretary Hicks, who, by the way, was on vacation in Puerto Rico, as Corey Mills pointed out, and really an overall accounting of all official actions.
00:17:59.000When you have two Democrats calling for the firing or resignation of the leader of the United States Defense Department, and you are in a global era of erupting conflict, as Corey Mills just laid out, a strongly worded letter is insufficient.
00:18:19.000We should be holding hearings right now, this week, in the committee that Moulton and Deluzio and Mills and Gates all serve on to find out what the hell happened and who's making the decisions.
00:18:32.000Because, as you just heard Corey say, this stuff isn't over.
00:18:36.000We're still in the kill zone with a lot of people in the Middle East right now and I think the Pentagon is in shambles over this.
00:18:45.000So I guess you've asked Lloyd Austin some of the toughest questions in committee.
00:18:50.000If you had Lloyd Austin or a senior Defense Department official before us in a hearing, which should happen, which should already be happening, what would you ask?
00:19:06.000I asked if some of the things that he didn't know was reading his own resume, but I asked if you would have removed an officer for dereliction of duty based on these principles.
00:19:15.000Now, this furthers my argument on my impeachment articles from last year that was filed, which I still don't know why the speaker is refusing to take up or our committee chairman is refusing to start investigating.
00:19:25.000This is a willful dereliction of duty.
00:19:28.000It's not as if he didn't know what he was doing.
00:19:30.000He vacated his seat, didn't have responsibility, had no continuity, and committed a national security breach.
00:19:35.000And meanwhile, he's allowed to still consider himself to be Secretary of Defense.
00:19:39.000If any of his officers or even his deputies would have done what he'd done, he would have had them removed.
00:19:46.000One of the key questions that the Mike Rogers letter asks is whether or not other people in the Defense Department were involved in this concealment.
00:19:54.000And that's a really important question, right?
00:19:55.000Because I do think it's appropriate to say, well, if I'm making a personal choice, maybe it doesn't fit in with work, but once I start to involve others in the cover-up...
00:20:34.000Tonight, the 9-1-1 call just obtained by CBS News reveals an aide to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asked the dispatcher to keep the emergency discreet.
00:20:46.000Can I ask, can the ambulance not show up with lights and sirens?
00:20:51.000We're trying to remain a little subtle.
00:20:55.000Yeah, usually when they turn into a residential neighborhood, they'll turn them off, but they're required by law to run with them with the main street.
00:21:02.000The operator then asks for details about Austin's condition.
00:21:06.000Did he pass out or does he feel like he's going to pass out?
00:21:12.000If we need them to take him to Walter Reed Medical, is that a possibility?
00:21:18.000Let them know that when they get there.
00:21:20.000Like I said, I'm noting all this in the call.
00:21:22.000The 911 call adds to questions about why President Biden did not find out about Austin's hospitalization for three days.
00:21:30.000Neither did his deputy, who had taken over Austin's duties while she was on vacation in Puerto Rico.
00:21:39.000We're back live with Congressman Cory Mills.
00:21:41.000Clemo on Rumble wants to know if there were any umbrella drinks in Puerto Rico with the person that was running our defense department while Lloyd Austin was comatose.
00:21:50.000And National Interest on YouTube wants to know if he can be arrested for desertion.
00:21:54.000Well, I think that desertion is definitely something, but to answer Clint Mose, she was probably having Mai Tais the same way that Joe Biden has ice cream in the White House.
00:22:04.000We literally have a vacancy at 1600 and a vacancy at the Pentagon during a time when all our adversaries are running amok, when we're running towards economic collapse, when Congress can't get their shit together.
00:22:15.000We really need to face the facts that we're in a worse position than we've ever been.
00:22:20.000That's why both you and I, and I know you were just out in Iowa as well, but That's why we have to have President Trump back in office.
00:22:26.000We need him now more than ever from a military diplomatic and economic perspective and I tell you We have to get accountability for the American people.
00:23:00.000Everyone talks about the fact that Republicans have the majority.
00:23:02.000Let me just go ahead and clear the air.
00:23:04.000If your definition of having the majority is having an R next to your name and counting and tallying those up and saying, okay, you have the majority...
00:23:10.000Then you're not focused on what's actually happening, which is the ideological alignments.
00:23:14.000If you're not a true constitutionalist, you're not a true conservative, but you're a Republican from the old guard, we don't have the majority.
00:23:21.000That's why in most of the real tough votes that protect the American people, there's 21 of us, 73 of us.
00:23:26.000Maybe we get to an 80-plus stance when it comes to things like blocking FISA that's been violated 287,000 times.
00:23:33.000But the reality is that we have the numbers, if you look at the R's next to us, But ideologically, as conservatives who want to fight for the American people, we are not the majority.
00:23:43.000And we see that play out not just in lackluster oversight at times, but in how we are funding the government.
00:23:49.000And I want to turn our attention to that next.
00:23:52.000Let's put up the Jake Sherman tweet from Punch Mobile News reporting that the Stop Gap funding bill, which is the pending business in the Senate, is riding on H.R. 2872, the Permanent Electronic Duck Stamp Act.
00:24:10.000We have a bill that we've sent over to the Senate where duck hunters have agreed to pay a little bit extra when engaged in migratory duck hunting over certain species so that that can go into various conservation funds to support ducks and duck hunting.
00:25:09.000And so you can share with all the folks watching from Florida and around the country what you think about how we're approaching government funding because it seems deeply unserious to me.
00:25:25.000I'm not sure what the Duck Stamp Act has to do with everything else.
00:25:28.000We talked about 12 single-point appropriation bills.
00:25:30.000We talked about going through committees of jurisdiction and making sure that we had regular order.
00:25:35.000Why did we fight so hard for all these things if it's going to constantly be waived or dismissed?
00:25:39.000People need to understand, this is not DC as usual.
00:25:42.000I have never voted for a CR. I never will.
00:25:44.000I will vote for 12 single-point appropriation bills, but not looking at these minimal cuts that they think that they're making in there.
00:25:50.000The reality is that, and I've explained this, of every dollar we borrow, and it's borrowed because we didn't make it, of every dollar we borrow, we got 73 cents on average that's already pre-allocated to our mandatories that we're scared to reform to improve and preserve.
00:26:02.000And then you've got roughly 11 cents of every dollar that is just going towards servicing our interest payments, which is going to be like $844 billion next year on our $34 trillion deficit, which means that when you- I think it'll be more as well.
00:26:17.000It'll be a national defense spending level.
00:26:19.000Because think about all the debt that we finance at lower interest rates that's now rolling off that that we have to refinance at higher interest rates.
00:26:25.000But my whole point is that in the reality of things, when you eliminate defense, you eliminate interest rates, you eliminate mandatories, we're all fighting over the idea that, oh, we're going to cut 20%, 30%.
00:26:34.000Yeah, of the available 8 cents that you actually have available to you with zero economic growth strategy.
00:26:40.000If you are a business owner today, you know it's simple math.
00:26:43.000Account receivables have to exceed account payables, the same as our GDP to national debt ratio.
00:26:48.000And you can't cut your way to profitability.
00:26:52.000And the person who understood that, who got tax reform in play, was President Donald J. Trump.
00:26:56.000And we saw more IRS revenue come in than ever before.
00:27:00.000The Democrats fail to acknowledge the fact that we have $5 trillion that comes in in available revenue, but now it's like anyone else.
00:27:07.000When they start making a new paycheck, they're like, well, I've got more money, so therefore I can spend more.
00:27:11.000Well, when you're spending at $7.4, $7.5 trillion taking N5, driving up our inflation rates, driving up consumer suppression, that's why we are where we are.
00:27:45.000And what I want to do, I want to close out the show.
00:27:48.000Representative Mills and I have to roll back to some additional votes we have this afternoon.
00:27:53.000But I want to give you a taste of what you heard from Mele, the newly elected leader with a populist nationalist spirit from South America.
00:28:02.000He gets up and drops the hammer on these globalists in the World Economic Forum.
00:28:07.000President Mele of Argentina, take a listen.
00:28:12.000Today I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger.
00:28:18.000And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.
00:28:33.000Unfortunately, in recent decades, Motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.
00:28:55.000We're here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world.
00:29:07.000Do believe me, no one better place than us, Argentines, to testify to these two points.
00:29:14.000When we adopted the model of freedom back in 1860, in 35 years we became a leaning world power.
00:29:25.000And when we embrace collectivism over the course of the last 100 years, we saw how our citizens started to become systematically impoverished, and we dropped to spot number 140 globally.
00:29:40.000They say that capitalism is evil because it's individualistic, and that collectivism is good because it's altruistic, of course, with the money of others.
00:29:49.000So they therefore advocate for social justice.
00:29:52.000But this concept, which in the developed world became fashionable in recent times, in my country has been a constant in political discourse for over 80 years.
00:30:02.000The problem is that social justice is not just and it doesn't contribute either to the general well-being.
00:30:09.000Quite on the contrary, it's an intrinsically unfair idea because it's violent.
00:30:14.000It's unjust because the state is financed through tax.
00:30:20.000Or can any one of us say that they voluntarily pay taxes?
00:30:25.000Which means that the state is financed through coercion and that the higher the tax burden, the higher the coercion and the lower the freedom.
00:30:34.000And it should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it's been tried out.
00:30:43.000It's been a failure economically, socially, Culturally, and it also murdered over 100 million human beings.
00:30:52.000Fortunately, there's more and more of us who are daring to make our voices heard, because we see that if we don't truly and decisively fight against these ideas, the only possible fate is for us to have increasing levels of state regulations, socialism, poverty, and less freedom, and therefore, we'll be having worse standards of living.
00:31:15.000I would like to leave a message for all business people here and for those who are not here in person but are following from around the world.
00:31:25.000Do not be intimidated either by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state.
00:31:31.000Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges.