J.D. Vance has a new piece that s setting Capitol Hill on fire, and it s written by the editor-in-chief of The American Conservative, Kurt Mills. He argues that the McConnell strategy on Ukraine is actually an impeachment trap for President Trump if he runs for re-election in 2020. Plus, a special counsel report from Rob Herr concludes that Joe Biden is too senile to be charged with a crime, and that he should be excused because he s "too senile" to be held responsible for it. Firebrand is a production of the Firebrand Podcast Network. Engineered in Baltimore, MD, Firebrand's mission is to inform, inform, and empower Americans across the country about what's going on in Washington, D.C. and around the country. In this episode, we'll cover: 1. What's happening in Ukraine, and why it matters. 2. Why Joe Biden should be impeached. 3. Why he's too old to be president. 4. Why it's a good idea to impeached Trump. 5. Why a special prosecutor should be appointed. 6. Who's going to win in 2020? 7. What s going to indict Trump? 8. Is it time to indict the standard bearer of the Republican Party for a crime? 9. What does it mean for the country? 10. Is this a political ploy? 11. What are the odds of impeachment a real possibility? 12. Is there any chance for impeachment? 13. 14. What will it be effective? 15. 16. Does it have any chance to impeaching the president? 17. Can the president be a good thing? or is it a bad thing for him? 18. Is he a crock? 19. What is the best thing for Trump s chances of winning the 2020 election? 21. Can he be stopped from running for president in 2020 by a primary? 22. Does he really have a chance to run for President in 2020 or not by running for President? ? Is he really that bad? And so much more? Is it possible that he s running for the White House in 2020, or does he have a better chance of winning in 2020 than he s a good chance of being impeached by the other guy? Do we have a shot at winning the election in 2020 at all?
00:02:38.000I'm sending the Firebrand. - Welcome back to Firebrand.
00:02:46.000We are broadcasting again live out of the Rumble Studios, brand new here in Washington, D.C. An excellent opportunity for us to get our message directly to you and make sure that you have got the Rumble app downloaded with notifications turned on.
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00:03:06.000you hit the bell, then every time we've got something important to share with you, like right now, you'll be added to the conversation and right here for that live discussion.
00:03:15.000And today I have with me my good friend, one of the smartest foreign policy thinkers here in Washington.
00:03:20.000He's the editor-in-chief of the American Conservative, Kurt Mills, Kurt was one of the first folks I met, actually, when I came to D.C., and I followed his scholarship and his journalism.
00:03:30.000And I guess you followed a little bit about what we've been doing on the Hill.
00:03:33.000And we've got a lot to talk about in The American Conservative today.
00:03:37.000The big piece that is setting Capitol Hill on fire is the J.D. Vance piece on how the McConnell strategy on Ukraine is actually an impeachment trap for President Trump were he to be elected in the upcoming presidential contest.
00:03:51.000But, Kurt, we haven't talked in a while.
00:03:53.000I can't believe we're living in a time where, on this records matter, Trump is facing down hearings and criminal process.
00:04:03.000We get a special counsel report from Rob Herr.
00:04:07.000I've had to work on matters where Rob Herr was working on the same matters.
00:04:12.000And the beginning of this report is that Joe Biden essentially committed the criminal offense that is laid out that Trump's being charged with, that he had the intent to commit that offense, that he shared the information, but that he won't be charged for two principal reasons.
00:04:27.000First, that he cooperated fully with the investigation upon the discovery of these classified documents.
00:04:34.000And second, that he's too senile to be held responsible.
00:04:38.000So what was your take when you saw this report?
00:04:40.000Yeah, I mean, my view is that the takeaway will be the opposite in the American mind.
00:04:46.000So you have the Democrats who are willing to prosecute Mr. Trump for almost 100 different felonies, I think, last I checked, and they've only seen his political appeal objectively explode, at least if we believe polling.
00:05:00.000The opposite occurred with the case of Mr. Herr, which is they declined to indict, which I think In fairness, honorably doesn't further politicize politics or further criminalize politics.
00:05:16.000But Mr. Herr opined negatively on the one key vulnerability that Mr. Biden has, his age, his mental fitness.
00:05:26.000I think it's going to go down in the history books.
00:05:29.000As intently clever that he were to utilize this political vulnerability of Biden, I guess 86% of Americans now believing Joe Biden's too old to be president, using that as a feature of criminal process to unlink himself from a prosecution.
00:05:47.000Is that applying the facts in the law or is that like a political operative utilizing his role as special counsel to max political effect?
00:05:58.000I mean, I think if you actually score it here, I mean, indicting the standard bearer of the Republican Party for a number of felonies during a presidential year, I think is greater political abuse.
00:06:09.000I think it makes the Republicans look like straight shooters, which is that they aren't going to indict you for a crime if you're in the political arena, but they're going to call it straight.
00:06:17.000And I think that'll be important to a pretty wide swath of the electorate as these questions of democracy and chaos start to form.
00:06:25.000There's actually a good portion of that electorate who looks and says, well, who's been playing fair?
00:06:32.000I remember working with her when we were trying to get Jeff Sessions kind of off the mark And getting us a little more transparency on where things were going on the Hillary Clinton investigations.
00:06:44.000And Hur was the guy working at Justice, standing right alongside Rod Rosenstein, blocking and tackling for Jeff Sessions when I think Hillary Clinton got off without having to face accountability because Sessions got Stockholm Syndrome with the folks over at the Department of Justice.
00:07:04.000If Hur is like a capo in the deep state, right?
00:07:08.000What if they just decided they're not riding with Biden?
00:07:10.000If the deep state is not Republican versus Democrat, but it's institutionalist versus outsider, and Trump's going to represent an outsider view on foreign policy, on the administrative state, and if they look at where Biden is, historically low poll numbers,
00:07:26.000and think, well, we've got to take this guy out, and there was no mechanism to do that, really, in the primaries of the caucuses with how centralized his power is as the sitting president of the Democratic Party, And so you have to take him out like this, with some sort of damning report that results in Biden pardoning himself,
00:07:44.000pardoning Hunter, getting out before the convention, but not yet, not until after any sort of like democratic process could occur in the primary or caucuses, then lo and behold, you have a convention and in ride, who knows, Michelle Obama, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, J.B. Pritzker, you give any prospect to that?
00:08:05.000I know that people want to gravitate towards this.
00:08:08.000Look, I'm not going to tell you, you have combated the deep state in Congress, perhaps more than any member.
00:08:16.000But in some ways, I think what we just saw over the last week was evidence of a lack of a conspiracy.
00:08:21.000Which is that the President of the United States actually does have some authority and actually does make some decisions.
00:08:25.000So like the decision to call a 7.45 p.m.
00:08:29.000Eastern Time press conference, be 10 minutes late to it, and then claim you're not senile while demonstrating that you have memory lapses, I think is evidence that he's actually in charge, and he seems like he wants to fight it to the end.
00:08:50.000When I was a state representative, this was a huge amount of my casework.
00:08:53.000People were trying to get their parents who lived with them a driver's license revoked and somehow wanted me as a state lawmaker to go do that when they didn't want to have that.
00:09:03.000uncomfortable discussion in the family that grandpa shouldn't be driving anymore.
00:09:06.000But you say the fact that he grabbed the keys and got behind the steering wheel, even if he ran over a few mailboxes in that press conference, shows grandpa's still going to be behind the wheel for the foreseeable future.
00:09:18.000And so the easiest way for me to sell magazines is to say there's going to be an imminent 25th Amendment meeting where Kamala Harris coups I mean, she's going to be the president or something like that.
00:10:32.000I think it's going to be very hard to dislodge him if he wants it.
00:10:34.000And that may be the reason why we get Biden, because her own persona is viewed as pretty frail politically as well.
00:10:43.000And so that, you know what, having the wrong number two might have been the right choice for Biden.
00:10:48.000I mean, 2020 was the identity election, right?
00:10:51.000Which is like, you know, Ms. Harris has to be on the VP ticket because she's the black female.
00:10:56.000And I think that made sort of a more political sense in 2020. And it's actually a vice grip in 2024. I think they are very stuck with Biden-Harris.
00:11:06.000I mean, if they actually do replace them, so let's say they replace them with Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or any of these names that we're having.
00:11:14.000So how do you find another black woman to be VP? This is like what they have to do.
00:11:19.000And then secondly, Newsom is utterly untested in terms of is he going to have Turnout problems, you know, turning out the inner-city vote in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Phoenix.
00:11:30.000Like, I understand this sounds like Las Vegas.
00:11:33.000I understand this sounds very good on paper, but he might actually be weaker than Biden.
00:11:37.000Like, so much of the key element of the Democratic appeal right now is that you have a fairly far-left administration, in my view.
00:11:45.000And the idea is that Biden is a guy from the 90s and is kind of senile, so how radical could it really be?
00:11:51.000Replace them with the actual governor of California or someone further left of Newsom, all of a sudden that appeal is stripped down.
00:11:59.000I know it sounds totally bizarre, but I actually think Biden is probably the strongest nominee the Dems have, which is really saying something about how poor their position is.
00:12:07.000I just don't know that they care about the ideology as much as the fitness at this point because there are so many people who probably don't really spend a lot of time thinking about their own ideology, but they know what it's like when someone is still insisting that they can do something that they no longer have the capability to do.
00:12:23.000Kurt Mills is the editor-in-chief of The American Conservative, and that is where we saw this amazing piece by J.D. Vance Platform.
00:12:30.000It's what I want to talk to you about next.
00:12:32.000First of all, before we get into the substance of that piece, readers at The American Conservative, what are they learning about this conflict in Ukraine?
00:12:40.000Oh, I mean, I think, look, TAC was a lonely voice two years ago when the war started that raised questions about unending support for the, I think, what is now laid bare, a controversial government in Kiev, or whether it makes sense for the U.S. to spend blood and treasure and military hardware and support on basically defending the fringe regions of a country very, very far away.
00:13:06.000We've continued to bang the drum on that, and I think the American public has come around to our perspective.
00:13:13.000I think this is an elective war, as far as America is concerned, in Europe, and it is the kind of thing that we will never extricate ourselves from if we don't make a firm decision.
00:13:25.000Because when these Ukrainian officials come over and talk to US lawmakers, they're talking about getting back every inch of their territory, including Crimea.
00:13:33.000I really do wonder what the attainable objective is there, or is the objective really to turn into another Afghanistan?
00:13:41.000Obviously very different dynamics, but just in terms of having a place to be engaging in perpetual low-yield war.
00:13:48.000No, I mean, I think you have an objectively irrational government in Kyiv.
00:13:51.000And I think there actually are historical parallels here.
00:13:57.000So if the U.S. ever actually wanted to negotiate with Russia or lead in negotiations, you would be in a position where the Ukrainian government might not actually be a party to the negotiations themselves.
00:14:08.000The armistice, which is still in effect from 1953 with Koreans, the South Koreans never formally signed onto it.
00:14:15.000That's how fanatical that government was.
00:14:17.000I think it's very similar with Zelensky.
00:14:19.000If Biden, I've argued in the press elsewhere, he might make a ceasefire deal to just get this off his plate this year, or if Trump, when he wins in November, tries to negotiate with him, I think we're setting up to actually have a situation where Zelensky won't negotiate and will be able to save face internally while the U.S. cuts and runs.
00:14:38.000Mike Lee put out a memo recently where he talked about how the CIA had to directly confront Zelensky about Zelensky's corruption.
00:14:47.000Now the big memo circulated by J.D. Vance makes this argument.
00:14:51.000Mitch McConnell is currently crafting a national security...
00:14:54.000omnibus bill that would lash together Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, refilling of American stockpiles.
00:15:01.000And as I've said frequently, however you feel about any of those questions, they definitely deserve their own dignity and their own vote.
00:15:08.000And they should be subject to itemized review and amendment so that, I don't know, you're not funding some other countries R&D for the next 15 years based on a state of affairs that may be temporary, it may be resolvable, maybe getting resolved.
00:15:22.000We may be the factor that's causing some of these circumstances to not be resolved.
00:15:26.000And so I think that As that's going on, you've got to ask yourself, what are the specifics?
00:15:32.000J.D. Vance finds, tied into the Ukraine provisions, a requirement to continue this Ukraine assistance program.
00:15:41.000And Vance argues that the requirement in law that Mitch McConnell is trying to get in law right now is actually an impeachment trap Because if Trump does what he did previously and pauses any aid to Ukraine, that would then function as a basis for some sort of impeachment effort.
00:15:58.000So I thought it was very well put together.
00:16:05.000How are your readers reacting to J.D. Vance's essay on that memo?
00:16:09.000Yeah, so I think Senator Van's argument is actually likely to be the argument that's going to be most effective in the whole history of this conflict so far, so going back 24 months.
00:16:20.000The argument about ammunition that was made last year I think is all true.
00:16:25.000The U.S. has expended and has dangerously depleted ammunition as a result of its support for the Zelensky government.
00:16:31.000But that's kind of nebulous and academic for a lot of people.
00:16:34.000Like, it's not actually a problem until, like, China invades Taiwan or something, you know, very acute happens.
00:16:39.000This is hyper acute and immediate, which is Trump's essential pitch to the American public is that he was a private citizen who thought there was problems with the government and that there were, you know, booby traps and landmines all over the place.
00:16:54.000and he didn't feel like he could govern and he feels like he can maybe do a better job This is the kind of thing that he has been demonizing and attacking in the press, which is that you would have a provision that would precede his tenure, that would give Congress legal pretext to impeach him if he did not do what this legislation And so while I think,
00:17:19.000you know, a lot of people on the Republican side should come around to what I believe is our shared perspective here, the reality is that there still is a lot of residual support for some sort of fundraising or some sort of financing of Ukraine.
00:17:32.000If that financing is then tied to essentially, I think, an illegitimate pretext to remove Trump, I think that shuts down the conversation.
00:17:41.000So I think what we're going to see is Vance and company in the Senate stall this thing out.
00:17:46.000It'll eventually come to the House where people like you are going to have to kill it.
00:17:49.000I read the Vance argument also to be that if there is a financing structure for a certain period of time, that functions as a ballast against any peace negotiations.
00:18:19.000In the Vietnam period, there was something that was introduced called the War Powers Act, which has actually never been, I believe, tested at the Supreme Court.
00:18:27.000It is a well-documented 50-year phenomenon of the legislature abdicating its responsibility to the executive.
00:18:35.000What the executive has principally tried to do is start most of these endless wars, which haven't worked since the 90s.
00:18:41.000This is actually an escalation in the other direction, which is Congress is potentially poised to enact legislation that stops the president from stopping the wars.
00:18:54.000Well, I think we're getting better at it.
00:18:56.000And I'm actually getting the blame, according to the Washington Examiner.
00:18:59.000The Washington Examiner out with a piece, Ukraine would have aid by now if Democrats had not voted with Gates.
00:19:06.000And the argument the Washington Examiner makes is that Kevin McCarthy was going to fast track any Ukraine aid, that that was a priority that he was going to muscle the Republicans into.
00:19:17.000And that if Democrats had not voted with me to replace McCarthy, and if Mike Johnson Who, for whatever flaws folks may see in him, certainly has been more skeptical on Ukraine aid than Kevin McCarthy has.
00:19:30.000But for that, there would have been another endless authorization.
00:19:34.000So I don't know if I deserve the credit for it, but I will take it if they'll give me the credit for it.
00:20:10.000I do think this episode and this article particularly lays bare a lot of the criticisms of Trumpism and also your actions last year, which is that they were essentially substance-free nihilism.
00:20:22.000There was nothing but personal vendetta between you and McCarthy, and there's nothing but personal vendetta between Trump and a whole litany of characters.
00:20:29.000This is a concrete example of if there was a different leadership in the House, we would not be having this discussion.
00:20:36.000So, I mean, it's just unimaginable if Trump's not on the field and you had not taken the actions that we would even be having this debate.
00:20:43.000So the idea that this is all personal, I think, has been contradicted by events.
00:20:48.000In terms of what the Ukraine position is, look, I mean, they have taken a maximal position, which is that any recognition of reality, which is that, you know, the Russians have taken control of Crimea for over a decade now, And that essentially there isn't the moral, political, and military and financial support to die over Donetsk and the rest of the East.
00:21:13.000Any recognition of that is somehow highly immoral or highly immoral.
00:21:17.000And I think we're just sort of trapped in this sort of, you know, endless...
00:21:22.000It is quite redolent of World War I, where it was very clear that the battle lines were frozen in Alsace and in the eastern part of France at the beginning of the war, and they wasted untold blood and treasure, delaying the inevitable, and eventually collapsed a lot of governments in Europe, and I think potentially literally could collapse the Biden government.
00:21:45.000It has such a risk for the accident and the escalation.
00:21:50.000That's what worries me so much is that you could have some sort of downstream power, some sort of missed signal.
00:21:55.000I mean, my goodness, evidence seems to suggest that we lost Americans because of some Signaling malfunction on a drone coming in that otherwise we would have had the ability to intercept, but there was a malfunction in how we would normally approach that.
00:22:12.000You get to a situation in rising tensions with nuclear powers.
00:22:16.000I just worry about that a lot more than I worry about some broke down Russian tank in the Donbass region.
00:22:21.000Look, I mean, you saw the Carlson interview with Mr. Putin.
00:22:26.000I know you and I are both like Tucker-philes, so what did you think of that?
00:22:30.000Yeah, look, I think you saw with Putin, somebody who was fundamentally rational, but also, you know, there's a gangster ruthlessness to him, for sure.
00:22:41.000I think that Mr. Putin isn't going to be traitor-happy to use a nuclear weapon.
00:22:46.000However, I mean, we do know if you look at what the Kremlin has been commissioning, who they're talking to, there are people within the Russian sphere who make the moral and military case for a nuclear first strike.
00:23:01.000And if the Russians feel that they are endlessly isolated and, you know, Up against a wall on this, this is something that they're going to consider.
00:23:09.000And like, look, a 10, 20% chance for a nuclear war is way too, way too high for my blood.
00:23:16.000And critically, the Russians have signaled their willingness to negotiate.
00:23:23.000And like, I just see very little downside to getting them started.
00:23:26.000The American Conservative is really founded on foreign policy realism and has been willing to be a contrarian voice in an era of neoconservatism.
00:23:35.000One of your founders, Pat Buchanan, I think effectively made that argument in the media, on the campaign trail, and certainly in his journalism.
00:23:43.000Now with Trump ascendant in Republican politics, coming in saying he's going to resolve the Ukraine war immediately, that his presence alone is going to deter China.
00:23:53.000I know your readers must be interested in how the Trump government is going to take shape and form.
00:24:00.000I don't know that we'll have to go through the Boltonista phase and the Mike Pompeo phase.
00:24:06.000I have optimism that in a second Trump term you would have more foreign policy realists in positions to effectuate the Trump agenda.
00:24:15.000Is that optimism shared by your readers?
00:24:19.000I mean, look, the reality is, we have an imperial presidency for good or ill.
00:24:24.000The president can do a ton on foreign policy.
00:24:27.000And if Trump were to win, we don't actually know what the lay is going to be.
00:24:31.000Like, I think it probably means GOP control, but the House, you can attest to it more, is probably going to be pretty close unless it's an absolute blowout for Trump.
00:24:38.000So the reality is, his governing agenda might actually be heavy on foreign policy, where, assuming this bill doesn't pass, There are very, very, very little of any checks on his authority.
00:24:50.000And so he could totally reshape the map.
00:24:53.000And I think his unpredictability is one of the virtues.
00:24:55.000With Biden and Jake Sullivan, it just always feels like everything is some Georgetown School of Foreign Service essay exam.
00:25:19.000That's why there are other areas of the government, I'm sure, at the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, that the agency would take on the role of the secretary or the leader.
00:25:30.000But in foreign policy, I think Trump took such a great interest in it.
00:25:36.000In a way, he kind of views the world as a real estate transaction.
00:25:39.000He doesn't understand why Gaza is poor because it is beautiful.
00:25:43.000He doesn't understand why we can't seduce people like him in North Korea to capitalism with opportunity.
00:25:51.000And there's something to that that I think we've really been missing.
00:25:54.000And I think there's even more potential in the second term because you don't have to go through the phase of some of the people who We've talked a lot about how if you trace the people who stabbed Trump in the back and those who didn't, it almost has a perfect overlay as the neocons he trusted versus the non-neocons.
00:26:14.000No, I mean, it's clearly a neoconservative thing.
00:26:16.000I mean, look, if Trump had had all of the behavior that he exhibits, had all the policy preferences, had all the characteristics which we know about him, and he had had neocon foreign policy, I do not think he would have seen this massive rejiggering of the Republican Party.
00:26:33.000And I think it was absolutely central to his appeal that he had argued that the foreign policy of the post-war, since the 90s, had been this abject failure.
00:26:43.000And I think that Ukraine shows that this is a durable change that he's led, right?
00:26:48.000Because at the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, I think it was Massey, Gates, and Marjorie Taylor Greene who were standing up against these continued provocations with Russia.
00:26:58.000And we've seen the Congress come to us As a lagging indicator of where the people in the Republican Party are.
00:27:06.000And Republican primary voters in particular are anti-war.
00:28:17.000I think, I mean, if the economy were actually to go into like a real recession, that would potentially change it, you know, like in the 2008 way.
00:28:25.000But right now, immigration is the most acute issue.
00:28:28.000I mean, we see in all the polling, and I think there is a great anxiety about what kind of country this is becoming, whether or not we've had too much immigration too fast that's been unassimilated over the last 30 to 50 years.
00:28:41.000And I think you see this all borne out in the border crisis.
00:28:46.000And I think there's a grander recognition of democratic cynicism Which is that Biden both attracted and allowed this to occur.
00:29:56.000I mean, I think people can sense that this is a major shift.
00:30:00.000And then I think people also sense that the reality is that this is actually quite different.
00:30:04.000I think people are aware that this is not just Mexican immigration.
00:30:07.000The majority of it is not Mexican immigration, so far as we understand.
00:30:10.000I mean, I don't really know how much we trust any of these statistics.
00:30:13.000And I think people understand that the world has gotten a lot more dangerous than it was in the 90s, and we don't have the full picture here because we're not even trying to get the full picture.
00:30:21.000Yeah, I mean what really got me is when I met with the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security and of the 8 million people we've paroled into the country, 6 million of them, we don't know who they are or where they are because they just put down a fake name.
00:30:36.000There were like thousands of people registered at a McDonald's in one town.
00:30:41.000And that has just allowed people to fall between the cracks, which is inhumane, because oftentimes they're falling right back into the hands of the card hells operating within our country.
00:30:51.000And, you know, it's remarkable, the raw numbers, the trips we've taken to the border.
00:30:58.000Like you say, you just see the waves of humanity coming over and over, and people are feeling it in every community.
00:31:04.000And it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
00:31:06.000I mean, I think something that's very key from our magazine's approach is that, actually, immigration and trade are parts of foreign policy.
00:31:14.000And, I mean, you've seen, I think, sort of the neoconservative line, the country changed the entire way it did business.
00:31:22.000NSA, every time an American goes to the airport because of one attack that was horrendous and bad, and then versus an ongoing day-by-day thing that nobody really understands, nothing, no changes other than the ones that were started in the first Trump term.
00:31:42.000Kurt Mills, please let folks know how they can subscribe to The American Conservative, a great source of not only great foreign policy analysis, but really a lot of the stuff going on on Capitol Hill and impacting the American economy.
00:32:05.000Thanks so much for joining us, and please make sure you download the Rumble app that you turn your notifications on so that you're with us next time on Firebrand.