US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reportedly told members of Congress that unless they approve more funding to Ukraine, Americans will be sent to fight Russia directly, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on Thursday.
According to Carlson, Austin spoke at a classified briefing for members of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, and at one point told them that “we’ll send your uncles, cousins and sons to fight Russia” unless Kiev gets the $60 billion in aid requested by the White House.
“The Biden administration is openly threatening Americans over Ukraine,” Carlson said on X (formerly Twitter), summarizing Austin’s message as “Pay the oligarchs or we’ll kill your kids.”
“He really said this?” X owner Elon Musk asked.
“He really did. Confirmed,” Carlson replied.
Carlson once hosted the most popular evening talk show on cable TV when Fox News mysteriously chose to part ways with him in April. He has since speculated that its corporate owners “really didn’t like” some of his coverage that challenged official narratives. In May, he launched his own show on Musk’s platform in a format similar to his long-form interviews for Fox.
On Tuesday, his guest was Congressman Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican opposed to sending any more money to Ukraine – on account of the US being too heavily in debt.
“How could Washington possibly send tens of billions more to sleazy oligarchs in Ukraine now that the whole enterprise has been revealed as a fruitless, corrupt and incredibly destructive disaster?” Carlson wondered in the introduction to the interview.
The US Congress has approved over $120 billion worth of aid to Kiev since the conflict with Russia escalated in February 2022, in the form of weapons and ammunition coming from the Pentagon’s stockpiles as well as cash payments to the Ukrainian government.
That money has mostly run out at this point, and the White House has asked for $60 billion more – choosing to bundle it with aid for Israel, weapons for Taiwan and “border security.” Some Republicans in both the House and the Senate have refused to go along, however. GOP senators stormed out of their briefing on Wednesday and later voted against advancing the aid package.
Meanwhile, Republican chairs of the Foreign Affairs, Armed Services, and Intelligence Committees in the House of Representatives have embraced the White House talking points in a memo aiming to persuade their party members to back the Ukraine funding bill, according to Axios.