Buck Brief - Pete Hegseth's Impeachment Battle Could Explode

Buck Sexton (0:00)

So now they're coming for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. And this is going to get ugly. Let's take a look at what we know so far. So GOP Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who lost his primary, has introduced eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary or Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, as of today, forcing a privileged House vote within two legislative days. That could happen as early as Wednesday. Now as we know, the House majority in the current Congress, we know that last week was horrific for the GOP, and it's going to be a very, very tough, very Democrat, Democrat controlled House and Senate starting in January. But for now, we have a razor thin majority, 218 to 214 And we know Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat minority leader, is going to be a big time yes on impeaching Trump. And there are some people who say there are enough GOP defections for it to actually pass the House in the lame duck session. Now, the chances of this going to Senate conviction and removal, I think, are quite slim because Republicans still have 53 seats until the new Congress is sworn in. Only two cabinet officials have ever been impeached and neither was removed by the way.

And that then brings me to what is in the Massie filing for this impeachment. Waging and continuing the Iran war in violation of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 with no declaration of war, statutory authorization or imminent attack.

I think that's going to be well, that's a that's a clearly a political decision. I don't think that that's going to be something that really, really moves the needle much on the impeachment side of things. Presidents, we haven't declared war in a long time, really. Although the authorization for the use of military force in Iraq, Afghanistan, et cetera, was pretty broad and sweeping.

Another article in this is ignoring laws and procedures meant to minimize civilian casualties and it cites specifically the strike on an Iranian elementary school.

The extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Eastern Pacific, the boat strikes on alleged drug traffickers, claims 243 deaths, secondary strikes on survivors and no quarter. And then the kidnapping of a sovereign foreign leader, capture of Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Venezuela, suppressing free speech by retaliating against Mark Kelly, and then the unlawful war in Yemen. These are all the different orders. Now I got to tell you, I don't think any of those are going to have a whole lot of or make a whole lot of difference in this process. The one that I think is a problem for the purposes of Secretary Warhegseth in this process is going to be the quote extrajudicial killings, these targeted killings of drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific.

That is a problem. I thought this was a problem really all along. People have cheered it on the right, but here's the issue.

You can't kill drug dealers for having drugs, and that's really what we're doing. Saying it's a designated narco organization is fine, but and I think it's accurate, but you can't just blow these people up, I think. And we're going to have to reckon with this a little bit. Democrats are going to force people to.

And you know that I am very favorable toward both Secretary of War Hegseth and also this Pentagon in general for the overall approach to everything, what they're trying to do. This one they're going to make really tough. Here's the part of it that the public doesn't really know very well or hasn't spent much time thinking about. Those weren't fentanyl boats.

Almost exclusively the boats that were blown up in the in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific really just means off the west coast of Mexico or the west coast of Central America, Northwestern South America, that area. The boats that were blown up had cocaine on them. And you might say, well, how do I know that? First of all, there's been no evidence these were Venezuelan linked boats. There's been no evidence presented that there's a major fentanyl shipment ring, if you will. There's no major fentanyl shipments coming out of Venezuela for the Americas or anywhere else. Why is that? Well, they're being made in giant vats with precursors from China, by the way. China sends the precursor chemicals to Mexico. There's a reason why Colima in central Mexico is the most dangerous city in the world per capita. It's because the nearby port on the Pacific side is the entry port for all of the precursor drugs for all the fentanyl. So the Mexican cartels have a far easier time both making the fentanyl and transporting it. They don't have to take it over water, which is inherently more difficult, higher risk, all the rest of it. Fentanyl is coming from the Mexican drug cartels with the help of Chinese precursor chemicals. What's coming from Venezuela is something that you can't make in Mexico, really, or at least not in any large numbers. And that's cocaine. So those boats had cocaine on them, generally destined for the European market, not even for the American market. So we were blowing up cocaine boats.