Richard Grenell says Democrats are openly recruiting bureaucrats willing to defy President Trump, calling it a coordinated push to undermine democracy from inside the intelligence community.
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This clip aired on WarRoom’s morning show on November 25, 2025. Transcript begins below (lightly edited for clarity; may contain minor errors).
The ‘Seditious Six’: A Brazen Call To Defy The President
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Ambassador, talking weaponization and punching back in impeaching of Boasberg, all of it. I noticed that you were doing the weekend shows, and you were particularly incensed about the situation with the Seditious Six and issues of getting in the way of the chain of command, particularly when they admit that President Trump has not done anything wrong and the court upheld all the orders President Trump has given. Do you think we need to press this harder than it’s being pressed right now.
I’m quite concerned as a former naval officer. Mo’s on the board of West Point now, served in Iraq, is she graduated. A confusion, particularly when you’re negotiating the volatile situation in Ukraine, which could be our Vietnam if things go sideways. This situation in the Middle East, Israel is in, in Syria, in Lebanon. That thing is Hamas, not weapons. And you’ve got fourteen thousand sailors and Marines off the coast of Venezuela. We have the Chinese Communist Party. President Trump talks yesterday. It’s heating up there. Big situation with China and Japan. I’m more concerned than ever about causing confusion in the chain of command when we’re in the kinetic part of the Third World War. Ambassador Grenell, your thoughts.
RICHARD GRENELL (GUEST): Look, we’ve just spent years hearing from the Democrats talking about undermining democracy. That’s all we heard. That was their campaign slogans for the 2020 and 2022 campaigns. Undermining democracy. They were trying to say Republicans were undermining democracy. That video that they did, the Seditious 6, this is a call to arms to undermine the democracies. This is a call to arms, a fire in the hole, looking for people who will undermine our democracy for political gain, for their political gain. This is very clear what they’re doing. They’re literally trolling the bureaucracy and the intelligence community for people who will say anything to undermine Donald Trump, undermine the duly elected leader, undermine our democracy simply for their little political gain in the midterms. This is outrageous. This is an insurrection to have people go out and say, you don’t need to follow illegal orders. What people hear in the intelligence community and in the bureaucracy is the Democrats will protect me if I just say no to the Commander in Chief, if I don’t do what I’m ordered to do, and then we somehow pretend like it’s illegal, or we throw it to the Ninth Circuit, which always says the Republicans are wrong, Trump is wrong.
This is a teetering system, and what I think Elissa Slotkin and Michiganders need to understand is, they were duped by this woman. She spent a year and a half saying, I’m an intelligence officer, I’m a former CIA official, I care about the middle ground, I’m someone who’s thoughtful, I’m in the middle, I’m not political, I’m a moderate. She duped people. And what we now know is Elissa Slotkin is one of the most left wing leaders and is literally undermining our democracy. We should say it very clearly. We should hit this extremely hard. You can’t have a sanctuary city and pretend like you’re not undermining democracy. You can’t have your own ways of doing things and encouraging people to go against the duly elected president and then pretend like you’re not mounting an insurrection or attacking our democracy. These people are hypocrites. We need to call it out. And don’t wait for the media to do it because they’re in bed with these people. They want this to happen. They want to undermine the president because they like the debate. They like the cliques. They’re all in the media for money. And so we need to be very clear about this and call them out and make sure that they understand that they don’t get to undermine the duly elected president, President Trump, or mount an insurrection or do something that undermines our democracy without getting called out for it. They’re hypocrites.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): One of the reasons you’re one of the closest advisor to the president, Ambassador, is that you’re not a theoretician. You’re a man of action. What action. Do you support Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, recalling Senator Mark Kelly, Navy Captain, to active duty and court martialing under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, sir.
RICHARD GRENELL (GUEST): Look, because he’s a U S Senator, we’ve got to be very careful here, but there’s no question that what Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin are leading is undermining our democracy. They’re doing it in an acute political way. They’re pretending like, oh, it’s only if he does the illegal actions. That’s not what we heard. That’s not what the video is about, and that’s certainly not what intelligence officers are going to hear. And let’s remember one thing, Steve, this entire Russia collusion hoax, which started right after, right before the election of 2016 when President Trump won. And then it really mounted right after. And then you lived through it at the White House in 2017. This Russian collusion hoax is exactly what they’re trying to do now. Because if you remember, they got the intelligence community to undermine the president and to turn on common sense and to do things that were illegal. We now know that. The FBI was helping.
So you have the bureaucracy and the intelligence community that are literally going after President Trump, leaking against him half truths, undermining him, taking him to courts to make sure that they’re mounting this insurrection against him. They’re doing it all from the comfort of a federal job. And so my warning was to John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, who are doing great jobs. They need to dig deep and understand that these rotten apples within the bureaucracy who are leaking political information for political gain are the ones who need to get ousted. I’d fire them immediately. I’d find them and fire them. And of course you’re going to be challenged in court over it. So what. Go to court and fight it.
But when you find people who sit in a federal job and decide that they get to bring in their own political views, even though they didn’t campaign in Iowa, in New Hampshire, and South Carolina, they didn’t raise money. They didn’t do any of the work that our founding fathers described that you need to do in order to win the presidency. They don’t have the right to do that. I think that we’re in this state of Washington, DC, trying to control the rest of America. We have to control Washington, DC. They work for the federal government, which is headed by Donald Trump, who is the duly elected president. He should be able to fire whoever he wants, and every single person who works in the federal bureaucracy should be implementing the vision that he gave to the American people over the last two years, and they validated and said, that’s the one that we want. That’s the vision. That’s the path that we want. Anyone who stands in the way should resign or be fired, and we shouldn’t even think twice about it.
Follow Ric Grenell on X @RichardGrenell
