The Anchormen Show with Matt Gaetz - November 02, 2023


Episode 126 LIVE： Elections Aren't Perfect – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz


Episode Stats


Length

30 minutes

Words per minute

160.01044

Word count

4,908

Sentence count

307

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Sen. Rand Paul (R-VA) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) join forces to fight back against the Deep State. Meanwhile, a judge in Connecticut upholds a ruling that casts doubt on the validity of the primary results in a hotly contested primary election.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Matt Gaetz, the biggest firebrand inside of the House of Representatives.
00:00:07.520 You're not taking Matt Gaetz off the board, okay?
00:00:09.900 Because Matt Gaetz is an American patriot and Matt Gaetz is an American hero.
00:00:14.640 We will not continue to allow the Uniparty to run this town without a fight. 1.00
00:00:19.820 I want to thank you, Matt Gaetz, for holding the line.
00:00:24.340 Matt Gaetz is a courageous man.
00:00:26.340 If we had hundreds of Matt Gaetz in D.C., the country turns around. It's that simple.
00:00:31.900 He's so tough. He's so strong. He's smart, and he loves this country. Matt Gaetz.
00:00:38.000 It is the honor of my life to fight alongside each and every one of you.
00:00:43.220 We will save America. It's choose your fighter time. Send in the firebrands. 1.00
00:00:48.600 Welcome back to Firebrand. We are broadcasting live out of room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building here at the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C.,
00:01:02.260 and it is quite a day on the Hill.
00:01:04.360 We're going to take you over to the Senate side where Senator J.D. Vance is fighting against some of the deep state rats over at the Department of Justice.
00:01:12.100 Rand Paul also dropping the hammer on Christopher Wray and the Censorship Industrial Complex.
00:01:18.160 We've got that testimony for you.
00:01:20.600 And single-subject spending bills, the thing that we've been talking about a lot on this platform and on the House floor, we march on.
00:01:27.720 Remember, it was seven months of Kevin McCarthy's speakership before we took on the first single-subject spending bill.
00:01:35.600 Well, now we've passed six. We're rolling through them.
00:01:39.240 I'm going to give you a little update on this week's work.
00:01:41.860 Last night, we passed the single-subject appropriations bill for the legislative branch.
00:01:46.540 We've also got work to do on the Department of the Interior.
00:01:49.840 But you're going to get to see that when you actually zero in on these things, you're able to get a lot more programmatic review,
00:01:56.960 and we're able to ripen votes on key questions that I think matter to the people,
00:02:01.620 and it is driving the lobbyists crazy, and I love it.
00:02:05.260 But if we want this appropriations process to have integrity, if we want our border to have integrity,
00:02:12.280 our elections must have integrity.
00:02:14.840 And you heard time and again the mainstream media crow about how now our elections are so technically proficient.
00:02:22.780 We're so resilient. These are the most secure elections of all time.
00:02:26.100 There can't possibly be fraud to impact the outcome of American elections.
00:02:30.180 We are better than that.
00:02:31.240 We've got news out of Bridgeport, Connecticut, that suggests otherwise.
00:02:36.400 There, we are seeing an entirely new election having to be run because of some of the very tactics we were concerned about from the 2020 election.
00:02:46.340 We've got a NewsNation report from Bridgeport, Connecticut.
00:02:50.540 Take a listen.
00:02:50.920 Stunning video put out by the Gomez campaign appeared to show a Bridgeport City employee and local Democratic Party official
00:03:00.340 walking up to a drop box in the early hours of the morning of September 5th
00:03:04.900 and making multiple deposits of absentee ballots.
00:03:08.400 You can see a woman who the Gomez campaign identifies as Bridgeport City Hall employee Wanda Jeter-Petiki
00:03:17.600 walking up to the drop box and placing multiple ballots inside.
00:03:22.960 And a few seconds later, she comes back, does it again.
00:03:26.280 The Gomez campaign posted this on social media as part of a three-minute compilation showing irregularities in the vote.
00:03:34.760 And it wasn't just her.
00:03:35.620 The Gomez campaign played in court nine different people making 24 drops of apparently multiple ballots into absentee ballot boxes.
00:03:45.120 In his ruling, Connecticut State Superior Court Judge William Clark said he found the evidence from the Gomez campaign credible,
00:03:53.100 said, quote,
00:03:53.800 The number of ballots at issue when considering the corroborating evidence of the video and documentary evidence
00:03:58.380 brings the reliability of the primary into serious doubt.
00:04:02.240 Judge Clark has ordered the two sides and city election officials to come together on a new date for a revote by November 17th,
00:04:11.020 but there's all sorts of details there.
00:04:12.980 This is a wild story.
00:04:15.120 It is indeed a wild story.
00:04:19.280 We're back live.
00:04:20.040 That was Dan Abrams with NewsNation breaking the story.
00:04:23.260 And here's what I think we need to think about.
00:04:25.940 The remedy here.
00:04:27.580 See, we talked very frequently about the affidavits that have been filled out, the videos that have been taken,
00:04:33.420 some of the geo-tracking information that Dinesh D'Souza so aptly put out in the 2000 Mules documentary.
00:04:40.460 We saw that go on, but then in debates in Congress, you frequently hear people like Jamie Raskin and Jim McGovern say,
00:04:49.800 but there was no court that ever granted you relief, that ever said you were right when you made these claims about election integrity.
00:04:57.280 And they're right, no court did exercise jurisdiction.
00:05:00.540 And the reason this was an utter failure of Article III courts in the 2020 election,
00:05:06.200 it's because they never had the evidentiary hearings, because they understood that even if there were polluted ballots,
00:05:12.440 once those ballots gets co-mingled with legitimate ballots, I have never seen a court in the land call for a replacement election as the remedy.
00:05:24.140 That is what is so interesting about what is going on in Connecticut to me.
00:05:27.400 They're actually saying that when an election goes awry, when you can no longer have confidence in the result,
00:05:33.020 that the answer isn't just to take it and endure, but to have a re-vote.
00:05:39.140 Like, it's quite something, we're going to continue to follow it, and it doesn't seem as though this is going to get stayed by some appellate court,
00:05:46.140 the court giving the sides, apparently, this opportunity to negotiate a re-vote.
00:05:51.240 And you wonder why there was not terrific factual development of some of the concerns we had in the 2020 election.
00:05:57.900 And let me be clear, I do not believe every single claim made about the 2020 election was true by either side, right?
00:06:06.120 I don't think it was the most secure election in history, and probably there were people who thought they observed fraud,
00:06:12.920 but were observing something different.
00:06:15.600 I'm most concerned about the unilateral changes in law, and then this huge universe of unaccounted-for mail-in ballots
00:06:23.360 that was created as a consequence of those changes in law.
00:06:26.000 And then when you saw ballots being voted, unable to be tied to an actual human being intending to cast that vote,
00:06:33.720 that's when you start undermining the people's confidence in the results.
00:06:37.020 And that's not something that we want to see in any American election, at any level of government.
00:06:41.740 But the Department of Justice did not do their job.
00:06:44.640 And this is what is at issue in some of these just total whack job Trump trials that are going on right now.
00:06:51.120 See, I was aware that there were circumstances where senior officials at DOJ were blocking the evidentiary development
00:07:00.520 over the mail-in vote and the potential that people were harvesting ballots that weren't tied to an actual voter.
00:07:08.940 And the DOJ was doing everything they could from Washington, D.C. to throw a wet blanket on those investigations.
00:07:15.260 Well, now they have rested the fate and the entire credibility of the DOJ, Merrick Garland, on these prosecutions of Trump.
00:07:30.140 And one senator has stood up to show tremendous courage to fight back against the Department of Justice,
00:07:36.280 and that is my good friend from Ohio, J.D. Vance.
00:07:38.740 Now, you've probably heard about Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville showing great courage to stop some of the DOD appointments
00:07:48.180 so that the Department of Defense does not become an abortion travel agency in perpetuity.
00:07:54.260 So he's gotten a lot of attention from that.
00:07:56.720 I thought it was a great move. I've supported Senator Tuberville.
00:07:59.520 But what Senator Vance has done has been the Department of Justice corollary to the Tuberville doctrine on the Department of Defense.
00:08:09.800 And he is not allowing the DOJ to continue to repopulate the swamp with more vermin.
00:08:16.160 He is blocking those appointments, and we are in support of Senator Vance's efforts.
00:08:20.700 Here's some of that work on the Senate floor.
00:08:22.380 I think it takes a special amount of gall to be from Joe Biden's political party
00:08:29.660 and to complain about the fentanyl crisis that is ravaging not just Ohio but the entire country
00:08:34.860 because it is Joe Biden's border policies that have invited this fentanyl into our country at record levels.
00:08:41.020 And I heard a briefing from the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Patrol today
00:08:46.060 that confirmed that very fact.
00:08:47.860 Second of all, the Senator said something I actually agree with,
00:08:50.960 that this whole policy that I've implemented on Department of Justice nominees is unprecedented.
00:08:56.520 He mentions that we have in the past, this body before I got here,
00:09:00.660 approved a number of Department of Justice nominees through unanimous consent.
00:09:04.880 What the Senator from Illinois doesn't mention, Madam President,
00:09:08.020 is that in that time when these nominations sailed through unanimous consent,
00:09:13.000 the Department of Justice was not trying to throw the political rival of the President of the United States in prison.
00:09:20.400 I object to this because we are living in a banana republic
00:09:23.860 where the President is using his Department of Justice to go after his chief political rival,
00:09:29.460 the person he will appear on the ballot with in about a year.
00:09:33.140 If the Department of Justice will use these nominations for law instead of politics,
00:09:38.440 I am happy to end this whole policy.
00:09:41.500 But so long as the Department of Justice uses its nominations and uses its personnel
00:09:47.140 to go after its political opponents from the President of the United States on down,
00:09:51.800 I will object.
00:09:52.700 Because of that, Madam President, I do object.
00:09:57.480 We are back live.
00:09:58.800 Senator Vance holding the Senate floor, objecting.
00:10:02.040 That's what actual accountability for the Biden administration looks like,
00:10:05.560 not allowing them to continue to weaponize the government against we the people.
00:10:10.500 And while far too many in this town are willing to send out the mean tweets and the press releases,
00:10:15.460 very few are willing to show the courage of a J.D. Vance or a Tommy Tuberville.
00:10:20.860 And we stand with them, and we know they stand with us.
00:10:24.360 There is a lot of positive sentiment on the live stream for these two senators.
00:10:29.060 Kimbry on Getter says that Tuberville and Vance are doing a good job.
00:10:33.200 Free SC on Rumble wants to know if Laura Ingram has apologized to me yet.
00:10:38.820 Laura doesn't owe me any apology.
00:10:40.780 We love Laura Ingram.
00:10:42.140 Sometimes on the internal machinations of the House,
00:10:45.880 we would like a little more trust and confidence from our friends at the Fox News channel.
00:10:50.240 But no apology and certainly not one expected.
00:10:53.420 Rooster on Getter says,
00:10:55.100 I need to get with Trump and talk about the VP position.
00:10:58.200 I don't know that President Trump is going to be considering folks from Florida for vice president,
00:11:04.560 given the constitutional requirement that the president and vice president have to be electors of different states.
00:11:10.880 You'll remember Dick Cheney was living in Texas and actually had to move back to Wyoming to establish residence in order to run with George W. Bush.
00:11:18.900 So not that we're following the Bush-Cheney mantra on too much of anything,
00:11:23.120 but it is constitutionally reflective that that would have to be the process that one would have to go through.
00:11:29.540 It wasn't just J.D. Vance doing great work in the Senate, holding the deep state accountable.
00:11:33.740 One of the things that I've been really concerned about is this censorship industrial complex.
00:11:37.560 And we learned about the depth and breadth of the FBI specifically putting pressure on social media platforms to shape public sentiment
00:11:46.460 because of the Missouri v. Biden litigation.
00:11:50.860 This was really landmark stuff.
00:11:52.540 I don't know that it got enough credit.
00:11:54.560 Eric Schmidt, who's now a senator from Missouri, doing a great job.
00:11:58.020 He was the attorney general at the time,
00:11:59.760 and he actually got senior FBI folks in the witness chair,
00:12:04.520 and they admitted that they were engaging in trying to shape how information would be boosted or taken down, promoted, diminished.
00:12:15.900 And when the court made their injunction ruling in Missouri v. Biden,
00:12:20.520 they said that the FBI couldn't do this anymore.
00:12:23.900 So we got a great opportunity to see the follow-up questions from that fact pattern and procedural posture
00:12:29.980 when Kentucky's Rand Paul had FBI Director Christopher Wray in the witness chair.
00:12:35.560 Here's what happened.
00:12:38.400 Is the FBI still meeting with social media companies?
00:12:43.200 We're having some interaction with social media companies,
00:12:46.220 but all of those interactions have changed fundamentally in the wake of the court's rulings.
00:12:52.860 That's sort of an acknowledgment that perhaps you weren't just talking about national security,
00:12:57.200 child pornography and human trafficking, right?
00:12:59.800 You had other areas of discussion that did involve constitutionally protected speech.
00:13:04.500 No, no, that's not an acknowledgment of that.
00:13:06.360 But then how did you change your behavior?
00:13:08.240 Out of an abundance of caution in order to make sure that we don't run afoul of any court ruling.
00:13:14.320 I would say, by the way, of course, that the injunction has been stayed by the Supreme Court.
00:13:19.840 Did anybody from the FBI ever discuss constitutionally protected speech with social media organizations?
00:13:25.560 Not to my understanding.
00:13:27.260 Vaccine efficacy.
00:13:28.500 You never discussed any post concerning vaccine efficacy?
00:13:32.020 Well, certainly not, because to my understanding, as you know,
00:13:37.160 the FBI was the first and for a long time the only agency in the intelligence community
00:13:42.580 to assess that the COVID origin was most likely from a lab leak.
00:13:47.080 I commend you for that, but the Twitter files and other indications, as well as the Missouri
00:13:55.120 versus Biden, list many cases of both DHS and FBI discussing constitutionally protected speech,
00:14:01.860 vaccine efficacy, mask efficacy.
00:14:05.300 People who said, my brother got the vaccine and died yesterday.
00:14:08.940 And the brother actually did die, but proof of cause and effect is one thing.
00:14:13.780 But taking down posts like that was part of the discussion in these meetings.
00:14:17.620 Not by the FBI.
00:14:18.940 We would not have been engaging with social media companies about vaccine efficacy, to my knowledge, certainly.
00:14:24.800 Director Wray, in 2017, the Department of Justice issued subpoenas to members of the House Intelligence Committee,
00:14:34.260 Congressional staffers, as well as Senate Judiciary Committee staffers, to turn over private information.
00:14:42.800 Were you involved with that investigation, aware of it at the time?
00:14:46.480 I'm not familiar with that specific investigation.
00:14:48.980 This had to do with the leaks, I believe.
00:14:51.580 We have never been told completely.
00:14:53.420 But the leaks concerning the crossfire hurricane and the leaks concerning the conversation between Flynn and Kislyak
00:15:01.580 that was wiretapped, that was classified, that somehow got out.
00:15:05.040 But you're not aware of anybody from Congress being investigated?
00:15:09.520 Well, as I sit here right now, that's not something that's ringing a bell for me.
00:15:13.520 Do you see a problem with the Department of Justice issuing subpoenas to congressional staffers
00:15:19.480 who are providing oversight to the very organization that's issuing the subpoenas?
00:15:24.060 Well, certainly, any time there's an investigative activity that touches upon a separate branch of government,
00:15:31.000 namely the legislative branch, it has to be done extraordinarily carefully.
00:15:34.960 And there are all kinds of policies that the department has in place to make sure that that's done appropriately.
00:15:40.760 Director A, did the FBI pay Twitter money to moderate content moderation?
00:15:47.860 I'm not aware of us paying money to moderate content there or anywhere else.
00:15:51.840 What was the $3 million for that the FBI gave that's been revealed in Twitter files,
00:15:56.460 which has been characterized by those writing the Twitter files as payment for content moderation?
00:16:02.020 Basically, they said Twitter, you know, you guys were meeting with them all the time.
00:16:05.820 You had them taken down so many posts.
00:16:07.620 They said, well, gosh, it's a lot of work.
00:16:09.180 Why don't you pay us?
00:16:09.960 And so you did.
00:16:10.600 You paid them $3 million.
00:16:12.360 Are you aware of the payment?
00:16:14.020 I'm not aware of that specific payment.
00:16:15.660 But I can tell you that when it comes to payments, going back well over four decades,
00:16:21.180 when we are required by federal law, when a company, like in this instance a provider,
00:16:27.720 goes through expenses to produce information, we're required to reimburse them for those expenses.
00:16:34.560 And so I think that a lot of the questions about payments revolve around exactly that.
00:16:38.500 And you will repeat under oath that there was never any discussion of the FBI to take down constitutionally protected speech.
00:16:47.500 You think it's all national security, child pornography, sex trafficking,
00:16:52.260 no discussion of constitutionally protected speech because this is all going to come out,
00:16:56.900 and a lot of it's come out already in depositions.
00:16:59.320 But you're saying there was never any discussion by any of your agents in any of these meetings
00:17:03.560 of constitutionally protected speech being taken down?
00:17:06.160 To my knowledge, our agents conducted themselves in compliance with the law throughout.
00:17:14.020 Same question to Secretary Mayorkas.
00:17:16.200 You're not aware of your agents ever discussing any constitutionally protected speech with any of the social media companies?
00:17:23.660 The same answer as Director Wray provided to you, ranking member Paul.
00:17:27.200 Oh, Christopher Wray is so slick, but the way Dr. Rand Paul questions is downright clinical, surgical at times.
00:17:38.660 You saw right there at the beginning of that clip that Wray had to change the conduct of the FBI
00:17:45.480 in interacting with these social media companies because of this court order that resulted from the oversight work
00:17:53.020 and the investigations and the depositions from the Missouri Attorney General's office.
00:17:56.980 So it shows the progress.
00:17:58.560 It shows that really to attack this thing, you've got to have multiple layers.
00:18:02.540 You've got to take control of the executive branch through elections and ensure that you've got good people,
00:18:07.900 certainly better people than Christopher Wray.
00:18:10.080 You've got to use the power of the purse and the Congress to starve some of those entities of the resources that they use
00:18:17.600 in order to censor digital speech.
00:18:20.540 And then you have to use these oversight tools, the depots, the hearings, sometimes even litigation,
00:18:28.240 to try to put the handcuffs on those who would do us harm
00:18:32.620 and who would think that their view of truth ought to dominate over the marketplace of ideas that's always made our nation great.
00:18:39.200 So to be able to do that, you must have these single-subject spending bills
00:18:43.700 with the opportunity for amendment, cutting programs, limiting authorities.
00:18:48.720 And just last night, the House of Representatives passed the Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill.
00:18:55.620 Now, this isn't the most sizzling of single-subject bills,
00:18:59.440 but if you're going to do these things one at a time,
00:19:02.040 I think it's really important for the Congress to show all of you that it's working,
00:19:04.960 that we're actually doing the work that was contemplated in the 1974 Budget Act
00:19:10.560 that we haven't done since the late 90s.
00:19:13.460 So the bill that we passed on funding the Legislative Branch
00:19:17.120 is $51.8 million less than the fiscal year 2024 request.
00:19:22.880 And what I like about the bill is that it would restrict funds from being used to incentivize
00:19:27.960 or award contractors who have been chronically behind
00:19:32.660 and haven't met the capabilities that we need to be able to serve you.
00:19:36.720 Another thing I really like about this bill,
00:19:38.940 it prevents the purchasing of telecom equipment from China and other adversaries.
00:19:44.400 We know that one way the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in unrestricted,
00:19:49.040 asymmetric warfare against the United States is to own our manner of communication.
00:19:54.060 The ones they don't own, then they're going to engage in malign actions toward.
00:19:59.760 And so decoupling ourselves from China certainly involves our work in the Congress too.
00:20:05.100 Very glad there's a specific focus on that.
00:20:08.160 Also this week, we're taking up our single-subject appropriations bill
00:20:11.540 on the Department of the Interior.
00:20:13.660 So I want to give you the information that House Republicans have developed
00:20:18.120 regarding this bill with the Department of the Interior, environment,
00:20:23.080 and related agencies that deal with those issues.
00:20:25.860 So the argument is that the bill will help cut the bureaucracy, cut the spending,
00:20:31.240 expand access to a lot of our critical minerals that we have here in the United States,
00:20:35.120 but somehow we limit ourselves from being able to get to those things that we need
00:20:39.080 to run the economy of tomorrow.
00:20:41.580 And we also defund a lot of the regulations of the EPA.
00:20:44.560 I'm going to go through some of those.
00:20:45.840 This legislation rescinds $7.8 billion from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund
00:20:53.560 and $1.4 billion from the Environmental and Climate Justice Fund
00:20:58.520 that was provided in the Inflation Reduction Act.
00:21:01.620 Remember, it wasn't about making the environment cleaner for all of us.
00:21:06.380 It was about making sure that we use the power of federal government
00:21:09.520 for more equity in outcomes with the environment.
00:21:13.760 It's crazy.
00:21:14.420 But the bill that we'll be voting on today, I think this evening,
00:21:20.020 will additionally rein in the EPA by repealing the Biden administration's WOTUS rule.
00:21:25.400 This is the waters of the United States regulation.
00:21:28.120 This is the regulation that can have some just cattle pond 0.64
00:21:32.760 all of a sudden under the jurisdiction of a gajillion federal regulators.
00:21:36.960 And the bill also defunds this social cost of carbon cost-benefit analysis
00:21:44.320 that the government was running to really constrain access to the carbon
00:21:49.000 that has allowed the American people to live at a higher quality of life
00:21:54.360 than anyone in the world,
00:21:56.240 in no small part because of the cheap energy that we're able to get.
00:21:59.500 The legislation also deals with some Republican priorities for eco-grief.
00:22:06.300 Eco-grief.
00:22:06.980 I didn't know what eco-grief was,
00:22:09.340 but I've learned that at the Department of the Interior,
00:22:12.600 they are paying $4,000 for every virtual session of eco-grief.
00:22:19.180 The Wuhan Institute of Virology used to be funded out of some of these pots of money.
00:22:26.600 It won't be in the future.
00:22:28.380 And a lot of the Biden executive orders regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion
00:22:32.300 are also thrown under the bus in some of the authorizing work
00:22:37.280 that we've done to set up this appropriations bill.
00:22:39.880 The bill is a 39% reduction from the enacted fiscal year 2023 level.
00:22:47.180 So this is a funding cut.
00:22:50.800 And we've got to see that with a lot of these single-subject spending bills.
00:22:54.500 So we've got still some more to do on that bill to get it into better shape.
00:22:59.360 There are other things that are funded in the bill that I don't particularly like.
00:23:03.260 And, you know, that happens with these single-subject bills.
00:23:06.420 There's going to be stuff that you like, stuff that you don't.
00:23:08.660 I mean, I don't think we should be funding the Kennedy Center
00:23:11.320 or the, like, National Endowment for the Arts or NPR.
00:23:18.080 A lot of these things that kind of get wrapped up within interior and the environment.
00:23:22.400 And a lot of times it's wasting money, your money,
00:23:25.640 and then devaluing the money that we have.
00:23:28.420 I want to give an update regarding what's going on on the border as well.
00:23:32.540 Well, actually, no, let's go first to our global story.
00:23:38.360 I think we've got a headline on this.
00:23:39.640 Pentagon sending another 300 troops to the Middle East.
00:23:43.920 And this is going to be, I think, focused on some of the explosive ordinance disposal work
00:23:50.300 that gets done when you've got some of this extensive mining activity
00:23:53.460 and the roadside bombs that the Palestinians have been using against Israelis.
00:23:58.080 We saw a lot of that in Iraq as well.
00:24:00.620 And also communications and support enablers.
00:24:04.520 The notice from the Pentagon is reported in the Hill says that there will not be troops going to Israel.
00:24:11.640 They will be at other regional installations helping to reset that regional deterrence.
00:24:16.200 So that's the update.
00:24:17.680 More troops headed to the Middle East.
00:24:19.940 But I want to bring us back to our border because we've gotten some information that is,
00:24:24.780 it is orders of magnitude worse than we ever expected when Joe Biden became president.
00:24:32.440 Since Joe Biden took office, there have been over 6.2 million illegal crossings of our southern border.
00:24:38.880 There have been 7.5 million enforcement encounters nationwide.
00:24:42.520 In September, there were 269,735 illegal immigrants encountered at the southern border.
00:24:50.440 This was an over 300% increase from September of 2020.
00:24:54.780 September was the 31st straight month where monthly illegal immigrant encounters have been higher
00:25:01.740 than even the highest month seen under President Trump.
00:25:06.420 Customs and Border Patrol has seized 27,023 pounds of fentanyl in fiscal year 2023.
00:25:13.280 This is a 464% increase from fiscal year 2020.
00:25:17.860 There were more fentanyl seizures in fiscal year 2023 than in 2021 and 2022 combined.
00:25:26.600 169.
00:25:27.500 Remember that number.
00:25:29.460 That's the number of people on the terrorist watch list who were stopped trying to cross the southern border in fiscal year 2023.
00:25:37.380 It's an all-time record.
00:25:38.720 It is more than all of the combined terror watch list encounters from 2017 through 2022.
00:25:46.100 There have been more than 267 individuals whose name have appeared on the watch list who we have seen just since Joe Biden became president.
00:25:57.300 In October, federal officials warned that members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah could be crossing through the southern border.
00:26:06.600 However, cartels are making $13 billion a year smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States,
00:26:12.420 and Joe Biden's far-left open border policies are to blame for this historic crisis.
00:26:17.520 It's not like we don't know how to fix this.
00:26:20.980 It's the Trump policies.
00:26:22.340 They worked.
00:26:23.020 But during Joe Biden's first 100 days in office, he took 94 executive actions on immigration.
00:26:30.560 And the whole sum of this included halting the border wall, changing the asylum policies,
00:26:36.580 totally destroying the relationships we'd made to keep people in their home country or in the first safe country that they come to.
00:26:43.740 In August 2022, Biden and his administration decided to make the border crisis worse
00:26:49.480 by formally ending a lot of the Trump policies, namely remain in Mexico.
00:26:55.640 The Biden administration announced on May 10, 2023,
00:26:58.940 that it would allow for the release of some migrants into the United States with absolutely no way to track them.
00:27:05.000 And Biden's Department of Homeland Security has now admitted that 40% of the catch-and-release migrants,
00:27:13.440 they've just disappeared.
00:27:15.820 They're not even being tracked anymore.
00:27:17.560 40% of them.
00:27:18.680 And we're talking about millions of people?
00:27:21.080 They're not showing up for any court date.
00:27:23.000 They're not ever going home.
00:27:24.220 You'll be paying for them forever.
00:27:26.520 Despite this historic crisis, Joe Biden has only visited the southern border once, 0.95
00:27:30.960 and it was widely panned as a pathetic photo op.
00:27:34.700 So make no mistake, House Republicans know that border security is national security.
00:27:39.700 That's why we passed H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act.
00:27:43.300 It is the strongest border security package in American history.
00:27:47.400 But that act is not law because the Senate won't act on it.
00:27:53.240 Do you agree with these things?
00:27:54.500 Here are the things that are in H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act.
00:27:56.820 First, force the Biden administration to restart construction of the border wall.
00:28:02.640 Deploy technology to the southern and northern borders.
00:28:05.940 Increase the number of Border Patrol agents and provide adequate pay.
00:28:09.860 Require transparency regarding the illegal crossings from the DHS that has been lying to us.
00:28:15.420 Strengthen current law to protect unaccompanied children from human trafficking and catch-and-release.
00:28:20.020 End the abuse of Executive Immigration Authority and the abuses of the Asylum Authority.
00:28:25.520 Strengthen and streamline the process for adjudications so that people that aren't here can get removed.
00:28:32.500 And then we actually have to stand with ICE when those removals become necessary.
00:28:37.500 Because right now when there are criminals that are apprehended,
00:28:39.940 a lot of our local police and sheriffs, there's an ICE detainer put on them.
00:28:44.260 ICE never shows up.
00:28:46.180 And a lot of times they're released right back onto our streets.
00:28:49.220 Final note, I know that it's been the Halloween weekend and, of course, in northwest Florida,
00:28:58.120 we have the friendliest trick-or-treaters.
00:29:00.140 For those who are on our audio platforms, you're not able to see this,
00:29:02.820 but you're watching a bear in Navarre, Florida, right in the heart of my district.
00:29:07.560 And what I love about the bear trick-or-treating is that it only took one piece of candy.
00:29:12.200 You know there's always that family that leaves the bowl out,
00:29:14.820 and the first trick-or-treater that comes, they just dump the whole bowl in their bag.
00:29:19.560 Well, this black bear, so polite.
00:29:23.100 So northwest Florida polite.
00:29:25.080 Thank you all so much for joining us on Firebrand.
00:29:27.660 I'm going to have a lot of updates coming regarding how all of this Israel-Ukraine border stuff is being evaluated.
00:29:34.140 My strong position is that that has to be evaluated independently.
00:29:38.140 I don't think we should send one more nickel to Ukraine.
00:29:40.920 I think our border should be sealed up, like the strongest Ziploc you've ever had.
00:29:46.100 Before, we're even debating sending more money to Ukraine.
00:29:48.940 But we've got a lot of people in both parties that aren't willing to put the needs of our citizens and our border first here.
00:29:55.480 We're going to continue to have those debates.
00:29:57.480 We're going to show you the consequences.
00:29:59.280 Make sure you're subscribed.
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