Episode 1.1

Show Notes

This is the original episode of Liberty & Justice--episode 0.   In this episode, former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker walks through the problems with the new voting act being considered in Congress and interviews General Keith Kellogg. They discuss General Kellogg's new book War by Other Means: A General in the Trump White House.  Get it here!

Matthew G. Whitaker was acting Attorney General of the United States (2018-2019).  Prior to becoming acting Attorney General, Mr. Whitaker served as Chief of Staff to the Attorney General. He was appointed as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa by President George W. Bush, serving from 2004-2009. Whitaker was the managing partner of Des Moines-based law firm, Whitaker Hagenow & Gustoff LLP from 2009 until rejoining DOJ in 2017. He was also the Executive Director for FACT, The Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust, an ethics and accountability watchdog, between 2014 and 2017.   Mr. Whitaker is the Author of the book--Above the Law, The Inside Story of How the Justice Department Tried to Subvert President Trump.

Mr. Whitaker graduated with a Master of Business Administration, Juris Doctor, and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Iowa.  While at Iowa, Mr. Whitaker was a three-year letterman on the football team where he received the prestigious Big Ten Medal of Honor.

Mr. Whitaker is now a Co-Chair of the Center for Law and Justice at America First Policy Institute, a Senior Fellow at the American Conservative Union Foundation and Of Counsel with the Graves Garrett law firm.  Whitaker appears regularly to discuss legal and political issues on Fox News, Newsmax and other news outlets.  He splits his time between Iowa, Florida and Washington, D.C.

Keith Kellogg is Co-Chairman Center for American Security @A1Policy Former NatSec to VP Pence & Pres. Trump. Author of War by Other Means. FOX News Contributor.
 

Eposode Transcript

Announcer [00:00:18] Welcome to Liberty and Justice with your host, Matt Whitaker.

Matt Whitaker [00:00:28] Welcome to Liberty and Justice. I'm Matt Whitaker. Today, I'm going to be talking about what a lot of folks are talking about around the country, and that is voting rights and specifically what is in the Democrat's bill pending in the Senate and in the House regarding voting rights? And what do they mean by voting rights? Well, this would be a fundamental change to a lot of states voting regulations, and I wanted to dig deep into it and explain to you why this bill is a bad idea. First of all, as many of you know, the election clause of the Constitution provides primarily that elections are handled by the states. Now, as you see from the language, there is an ability for. Congress to ultimately regulate elections for federal office. But traditionally and historically, that has been rarely exercised only in certain extreme situations. In fact, the Constitution provides that the time, place and manner for voting shall be governed primarily by the states. Now, you know, the Democrats have had two bills, really three bills. You remember H.R. 1, which was a complete disaster, but you know, these two bills that they've now combined into one, first of all, one was the Freedom to Vote Act, and the other was the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. They've been combined into the freedom to vote John R Lewis Act. And many of the provisions are concerning. Many of the provisions are straight out of H.R. 1. I think the first concern is when those bills were combined. They added the phrase that the bill and the law guarantees the right to vote, "free from any burden on the time, place or manner of voting." Now, obviously, that is an exception that liberal courts could run a truck through. And as I look at it and think about how this would be applied in the future, this could be the biggest challenge of this bill and one of the reasons why this bill is bad. But let's look at some of the other provisions of this bill. One is that it would require states to allow voters to apply for absentee ballots online. Obviously, this could be a potential area for fraud and disaster. You know, and especially when this is combined with another clause and the other clause is the voter ID provision, which states that allow voter ID, there is a uniform both photo and non-photo list that can be presented. So a voter registers online, proceeds to the ballot location or provides for an absentee ballot and provides only a non-photo ID. This could be a complete loophole fraught with fraud and potential for non-voters not eligible voters to vote. Remember, the whole purpose of the voting laws is to make voting easy and fraud hard. So we want to make voting easy for legal voters to cast a legal ballot and have that vote counted, but also prevent illegal votes from being counted because that dilutes and cancels legal votes. And so we want to make fraud hard. Those two provisions, I think, are the most concerning. It also allows individuals to register to vote online, request an absentee ballot online, and it prohibits states from requiring that absentee ballots be notarized or have witnesses. And many states have looked at this either the notarization or witnessing as a way to prevent potential fraud. Another area where this bill goes beyond voting rights is requiring what they termed "dark money" groups to disclose their donors. Obviously, this would infringe people's ability to associate under the First Amendment. And, you know, to protect their privacy and to prevent, you know, patriots who donate to patriotic causes from being targeted by, you know, these liberal press and operatives that are going to attack them publicly. A couple of other provisions the Voting Rights Act as this term, requires that polling places limit waiting to less than 30 minutes and also reverses, for example, the Georgia law that prevents people from providing food and water at the polling places, while people wait in line. That's another area where there is potential for electioneering. There is a provision in this bill that also really severely limits state's ability to take voters off the voting rolls, even if they are ineligible, deceased or otherwise. And then finally, it provides for the establishment of specific redistricting criteria to ensure, "fair maps." Now, many states obviously do their own redistricting and should do their own redistricting. This would fundamentally change the way that redistricting is accomplished in the country. And so that is a brief overview of some of the most concerning provisions of the new Voting Rights Act pending in the Congress as we speak. If you have more questions, you can always send me a message @Whitaker.TV. I'm Matt Whitaker. This is liberty and justice. When we come back, we're going to talk to Patriot and Great American Lieutenant General retired Keith Kellogg, who's going to be talking about his new book War by Other Means.

Announcer [00:06:39] Liberty and Justice with Matt Whitaker.

Matt Whitaker [00:06:43] So glad to be joined right now by a true patriot and one of the types of people that makes America great. General Keith Kellogg. I've been looking forward to this interview since we had it on the schedule. And, you know, I mean, your career of service as a lieutenant general in the Army and you're now retired, you were the acting national security adviser and you were chief of staff to the National Security Council Council in addition to everything you've done in your career. But the reason I wanted to talk to you is this new book You have out War by Other Means. Why don't you tell us about that title and then tell me the reason that you wanted to write this book?

Keith Kellogg [00:07:22] Yes, thanks, man. I wanted to write the book. And frankly, I got the impetus from President Trump when we were sitting in the Oval Office one day and he said, Hey, you need to write a book. And I said, Do you know, told the president, you know, Mr. President, I don't do books. You said, Look, you've been with me every single day. We've been in the White House, plus the time on the campaign. And I was the only national security adviser that had been with him all, all four years. And when you add up the time of Mike Flynn and H.R. McMaster and John Bolton and Robert O'Brien, you put all their time together. I still beat him by 33 days. But the reason I wanted to write the book very candidly was I wanted to give an unvarnished view of what I saw in President Trump and from the campaign through the four years, because it's a caricature out there about Donald J. Trump that is just not true. And you know that  because you've seen them and you've been in the Oval Office with him. Has a different way of looking at the world. He's very, very thoughtful about how he approaches things. He's got a very firm belief on what we should be doing. He's a great leader. And I wanted people to see that because all they saw was the histrionics that you see on television then and sometimes the when the lights, klieg lights go on. People would see a part of Donald Trump that I didn't see because I wouldn't be very reflective mood going forward. So when I wrote the book War by Other Means, and Thank You for mentioning it, an old military strategist named Karl van Clausewitz that I had to study when I was in the military. And he wrote that politics is war is politics by other means. And I just took that time and said, You know, that's really true because when you look at politics, it really is a war. It's a battlefield here in Washington, D.C. and this battlefield elsewhere. And I said, that's a good title for it. And I want to, you know, show people that it actually is a battle enough to fight for the good, the mind and soul of America. And I wanted to do that. But again, and in a point I think is very, very important. The reason I made a comment about Donald J. Trump is because I just saw him so much differently than what's been portrayed out there. He's made some incredibly good decisions. I was really proud of the four years that we handled in the White House, what we did, and he did something incredibly great things out there and he made those decisions hard. But it was very, very reflective. And it was also when we'd get together. It was very, very, very collaborative. So I was just proud to work with him, and I want to make sure I wrote a book that showed that and said, Hey, there's another view out there that needs to be read about.

Matt Whitaker [00:09:57] Yeah, and I want to encourage everyone to go out and get that book. General Kellogg, it's called War by Other Means. Why don't you tell us? I know having written a book myself, I know that there are, you know, you want to put those kind of intimate moments, but you don't want to betray confidences. So why don't you tell us one story from the book so that to encourage all of our listeners to go out and get a copy like I have my copy. But you know, why don't you tell one of the stories that you did you have in the book that, you know, was just kind of a remarkable moment in American history that you had a front row seat to?

Keith Kellogg [00:10:28] Yeah. Well, the most important story that I shall do was when we went after Soleimani, when that decision was being made to go after him, which was a pretty important moment in our lives as the attack on the embassy. And it was a very, very collaborative approach. Sitting in the Oval Office, in the White House and we sat around and we talked about it and we knew it was going to be a pretty important moment in American history because the Iranians were causing us a lot of problems. And Soleimani was probably the most important guy that he had to get in Iran and the president. He was telling the president at the time that, you know, if you go after Soleimani, you're going to start World War 3 in the Middle East because he's such a popular figure in Iran is so important to Iran. But the president went around the room and we just talked about it and he finally said, No, we need to get this guy. We need to send a message to the rest of the world that terrorism doesn't, you know, terrorism is not going to be tolerated going after Americans are going to be tolerated. He's responsible for killing Americans. And you know, as we were going around the room, he looked at me and he said, What do you think? And I said, Yeah, I think you need to do it. I think we need we need to escalate. Things really, really go bad. But everybody else, not everybody. 90 percent of people in the room said to him, Well, Soleimani is not going to travel. He's obviously got a target list. And I said, now he's going to travel because of hubris and he's going to travel outside of Iran. And it would be an opportunity to get him in. In a matter of fact, he did that and the president made a really hard decision. The reason that such an important decision is Netanyahu, then the prime minister of Israel, said after we killed Soleimani, he said, You know, you ate the arm of the tiger. And because of, you know, doing that. The Middle East is going to calm down, and it actually did. But Matt let me give you a second quick story because it's so important about Covid right now. And we were sitting in the Oval Office after COVID was going on, and this really ties into Donald J. Trump. We're sitting there just talking after everything was going on, and he looked at me and he said, You know, I just want Americans to get better. And I said to him, Man, stop right there, go out and say that in front of the press, because we because his empathy showed his concern showed. And it was a simple comment that most people would never see that he really did care about what was happening. But he wanted to put forth a very, very confident mood to the American people, and he didn't want to show any weakness because he said that's not what the President should do. They shouldn't show weakness at all in. And that was kind of the way he approached life. I told him, You know, you're a lot like Winston Churchill. And he started laughing. You know, you really there's a lot of what you do is

Matt Whitaker [00:13:23] a couple more minutes. I really want to get into your thoughts on the permanent damage that the Biden administration is doing to our foreign policy and our national security. I know you again, you've had a front row seat to this. I mean, are we going to be able to put this genie back in the bottle? Or are we are we going to be permanently weaker because of these terrible policies?

Keith Kellogg [00:13:45] You know, I don't think we're going to be permanently weaker, but we're really weak right now. And when you look at what's happening, there's actually three big issues on the on happening right now in America when it comes to national security. The first is clearly we've seen Russia and the problems we're having with Russia in Ukraine. And the second is China is dealing with Taiwan and the expanding power of China. And the third is the breakout of the Iranians because they aren't a guarantee amount to getting a breakout with a nuclear weapon. And when I say breakout that means they will have enough materials to create a single nuclear weapon and then once you get that breakout you, they have no idea where it's going to go to. And my concern with this current administration is we're walking past the graveyard. They're just not, you know, concerned about anything that's going on. I don't care if it's immigration or Afghanistan, which was a debacle, and we had given them a clear way to solve that problem with Afghanistan. It wasn't. It wasn't a perfect plan, but it's a pretty good plan to get out of Afghanistan and not leave it the way it is right now. And I think all of these issues with the Biden administration is they're just ignoring them. It's almost ultimate, you know, let's just hope the American people are going to be more concerned about just playing football this weekend than actually what we're doing here. And I'm concerned not only with the President, you know, Matt in his cognitive ability, which I do have a concern about, but the other is his advisers. I have no idea who should be him or where he's getting his advice from. Jake Sullivan is clearly not coming online as his security adviser, Tony Blinken is giving some potentially really bad advice. Lloyd Austin, who I've known for years, I question right now what he's telling the president and because of that will be coming markedly weaker out there in the allies and these adversaries, it as well. And that's the reason they're pushing back. And I and my concern for the next couple of years is I don't see this changing at all because the president has a pattern, Joe Biden to set a pattern in the management, whatever you want to call it, from the past. And I think the takeaway is, look, this is the guy who when they were going to go after Osama bin Laden, the guy who killed the thousands on 9-11 in the Situation Room, he argued that we not go after Bin Laden. President Obama made that decision to go after them. This is the same guy that Secretary Gates, who is the director of the CIA and also the former secretary of defense, said Joe Biden has been wrong on nearly every national security decision in the last 40 years. And that pattern continues, and we all live by patterns. Everybody sets a pattern in life. You go to drive the same way to work , you go to the same grocery store. you go to a gas station, whatever is going to be the same on his decision making, and he's consistently bad on decision making. So that's the concern I've got is when somebody asked me a question recently, what's your biggest concern about national security? It's about the lack of will by the president, United States, his lack of decision making. And people forget that making no decisions is in the decision. And he's been doing that repeatedly, and I think it's something that should concern Americans.

Matt Whitaker [00:16:55] Yeah, General Kellogg, I really appreciate you joining us this morning, and you're so right on the challenges that China and Russia and Iran and all of these things that we face. And so, you know, I appreciate you being on with us. I'm looking forward to seeing you so I can have my copy of the book War by Other Means, signed by you. And I wish you all the best.

Keith Kellogg [00:17:18] Thank you. Thanks, man. I appreciate it.

Matt Whitaker [00:17:19] I want to thank my friend, General Keith Kellogg, retired lieutenant general from the U.S. Army and former national security adviser to President Trump. What a great interview. Insightful, and I encourage everyone listening to go out and get his book War by Other Means. I have a link in my show notes and you can get it on Amazon and any other place where you get good books. Again, that was General Keith Kellogg, former national security adviser for President Trump and his new book War by Other Means.

Announcer [00:17:57] Liberty and justice with Matt Whitaker.

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