At his press briefing last night, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was asked if he cut a side deal with President Biden on Ukraine funding.
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00:00 - Mr. Secretary, did you make a side deal
00:03 with the White House on Ukraine?
00:04 - No, no.
00:05 - Unequivocally no?
00:06 - Unequivocally no.
00:08 Oh, well, if you want to categorize this,
00:10 let me see, 'cause people think it's a big side deal.
00:12 I did tell when we were doing the stopgap measure,
00:17 there was a concern in there,
00:20 does it have transferability on money?
00:23 I believed, and my staff believed it did,
00:26 but what I did say to the White House, if it does not,
00:30 if you think some way it doesn't do it the way,
00:32 I will fix that.
00:33 I did say that, and I did say I'd do it.
00:35 Look, I support arming Ukraine.
00:38 That doesn't mean sending them cash, but arming Ukraine.
00:40 But I have been on the White House,
00:42 even before they sent this supplemental,
00:44 I said, you guys are doing it all wrong
00:45 by just sending us a supplemental.
00:48 And I think the President is failing here,
00:51 because he's not telling the American public
00:54 what is the mission.
00:56 We have a lot of members who are Navy SEALs
00:59 who've been in theater, and F-18 pilots,
01:02 and they're frustrated.
01:04 They want to support, but they don't want to support
01:06 an ever-ending war.
01:07 They want to see what's going on here.
01:09 And I've really been on the White House.
01:10 You've got to come down and talk to everybody,
01:12 but you should listen to them and the prospects.
01:14 I'm really concerned, though, long-term.
01:18 What's happening around looks a lot like the 1930s.
01:22 A lot of actions that Putin takes
01:25 are very similar to Hitler.
01:27 If you are history buffs, you'll know,
01:30 Hitler served in the World War I Army, right?
01:35 He hated that his country collapsed,
01:38 and they signed the Treaty of Versailles.
01:42 And what did he do?
01:43 He ran and created a new party, and ran in democracy,
01:47 again, and again, and again, until he won.
01:51 And when he won, what did he do?
01:52 He took the freedoms away.
01:54 Then he rebuilt his military,
01:57 and even though it went against the Treaty of Versailles,
01:59 the world power said nothing.
02:02 And then what did he do?
02:04 He took part of Czechoslovakia.
02:07 He took Austria.
02:08 And then he told the entire world
02:10 he was going to take the rest of it on a given day.
02:12 So now the world power could not sit back,
02:14 so in come Neville Chamberlain.
02:17 But what had happened?
02:19 Well, Hitler loved it, because he was equal now
02:22 to the world power, but he saw weakness.
02:25 Neville Chamberlain made him sign a piece of paper
02:26 and told us, "Peace for our time."
02:29 And then he invaded Poland the next year,
02:31 and World War II began.
02:33 If you study Putin, Putin didn't serve
02:36 in the Soviet Union Army, but he served in the KGB.
02:39 He hated that his country collapsed to the west.
02:44 He hated it so much, when Gorbachev died,
02:46 he still didn't attend the funeral.
02:48 What did he do?
02:49 He rebuilt his military.
02:52 But he learned something.
02:53 A military makes you strong, but dependency makes you weak.
02:57 He rebuilt it by selling his natural gas to Europe.
03:01 But when his pipeline that went through Ukraine,
03:07 when they changed power, he didn't want to pay,
03:09 so he proposed a new pipeline, Nord Stream 2.
03:12 Everybody loved it.
03:13 America at least sanctioned it.
03:15 Merkel said, "Great."
03:16 But what did he do when he rebuilt his military?
03:19 Invaded Georgia, took part of the Donbass, took Crimea.
03:22 And the world powers really didn't say much.
03:25 But then when he parked 100,000 troops
03:27 on the border of Ukraine,
03:28 and after he watched Afghanistan collapse,
03:33 that's gonna give us challenges for the next two decades.
03:37 He got his meeting with the world power.
03:40 So in comes Biden.
03:41 And what does Biden do?
03:44 He lifts the sanctions off Nord Stream 2,
03:47 but asks nothing for it.
03:49 Putin misreads that and invades Ukraine,
03:53 thinking it would collapse in two weeks
03:55 based upon Afghanistan.
03:58 But now we have something even worse
04:00 that's happened in the 1930s.
04:02 Before Hitler moved, he created an axis of power, right?
04:08 With Italy and Japan, all countries
04:11 who wanted to expand their sphere of influence.
04:13 Before Putin invaded Afghanistan, what did he do?
04:17 Create an axis of power with China, North Korea, and Iran.
04:22 All countries who wanna expand their sphere of influence.
04:25 So what we do here is very important.
04:27 We can't sit there and just collapse it,
04:33 'cause it'll look from Afghanistan.
04:35 We can't just throw money at it.
04:37 If we provide the weapons to be successful,
04:40 but why it's so much personal to me,
04:44 in 20, was it 2014 or 2015,
04:47 when Putin invaded the first time, I went to Ukraine.
04:51 And then I came back.
04:53 And I took a bipartisan group,
04:55 and we went to the White House.
04:56 And we sat in the Situation Room
04:58 with then the Vice President,
05:00 who was in charge of Ukraine, Joe Biden.
05:02 And we advocated, let's sell them javelins
05:06 so they can stop tanks, so they wouldn't invade.
05:10 He said no, and he said, Europeans wouldn't want it.
05:13 I said, well, why don't we sell them to him now,
05:16 and keep them in Poland then?
05:18 Didn't think that was right.
05:20 And I fear of making the same mistake twice,
05:24 and sending the wrong messages.
05:27 But the thing I would tell everybody is,
05:30 more Americans are dying on the southern border
05:32 than are dying in Ukraine.
05:33 Each and every day, a plane of Americans crash from Fentanyl.
05:41 And I don't understand how the White House
05:44 continues to ignore it.
05:45 My whole plan, and I've been up front
05:47 from the very beginning what I would say,
05:49 if you want anything on Ukraine,
05:51 we gotta do something with the border.