Trump Hits New Low With Cash Plot Amid WH Destruction

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1:07This has only come out because of this New York Times bombshell report that basically the White House is, through Donald Trump, seeing if he can get away with this, seeing if he can pocket over 200 million taxpayer dollars by taking it from the DOJ. If that sounds like something odd that you've never heard about before in American history, that's because it's never happened. And I have more on that historical comparison tonight. But first, here is the pushback. Congressional Democrats launching an investigation into this, quote, shakedown of taxpayer dollars as a constitutional violation. And lawmakers in both parties are reacting to a scandal that is clearly rocking the Trump White House.

1:45Even some MAGA Republicans basically trying to duck this rather than face what is an obvious grift. How comfortable are you with the president apparently seeking$230 million from the Department of Justice? I don't know the details about that. That seems outrageous. The president is asking his own Justice Department to give the president money? Unless it's something that's done in the normal course of business, and I don't believe that it is. At the very least, it's horrible timing, given that we're in a shutdown. I didn't talk with him about that. I know that he believes he's owed that reimbursement.

2:23It seems a bit odd to me. Asking his Justice Department to find a settlement that will enrich the president. I've got a lot of optics concerns, and I just don't know if there's precedent for it. There is no precedent for it. You could probably tell who the Republicans were in that medley, but they didn't have any there defending this outright. No president has tried anything this brazen. trying to seize over$200 billion in taxpayer money is obviously unethical. It is an ethics violation to abuse government power to enrich yourself, full stop. It's also very likely unlawful. No president has tried, so we don't exactly have some clear court precedent on how much money you could just try to seize or take out of taxpayer grifting, but certainly not$230 million.

3:13And history is instructive. No one has come close to what Trump is trying. Richard Nixon famously faced blowback when he was the nominee for vice president. It was over about$18 ,000 in alleged gifts. He gave a national address over the scandal, and he famously tried to say that the problem alleged that he was taking, you know, 10 plus thousand dollars wasn't true, the very opposite of Trump today, and that the main gift he took was his dog named Checkers. I'm sure that you have read the charge and you've heard it. that I, Senator Nixon, took$18 ,000 from a group of my supporters. The question is, was it morally wrong?

3:53Not one cent of the$18 ,000 or any other money of that type ever went to me or my personal use. You see the denial. He was saying, hey, he didn't take any of the money, the$18 ,000. Trump is pursuing the opposite, trying to take it for himself, and it's$230 million. If you go back to the 1960s, there was a Supreme Court justice who was caught taking about a$20 ,000 retainer, and it was such a big scandal that you would have that much government power but still be trying to take outside money, he ultimately resigned over the obvious ethics violation. If you check the numbers, Trump isn't seeking 100 times that amount, or 500, but actually over 1 ,000 times that amount in these taxpayer funds, he's going to see if he can take, see if he can get away with taking your money.

4:48In 1981, a judge ultimately ordered Vice President Agnew to repay over$200 ,000 that he took in alleged bribes, which were determined to ultimately have belonged that money to the people of Maryland, much like the federal money belongs to the people of the United States, not to politicians who are temporarily in power. Now, you might have cynics who say, well, that was then. I guess things have changed. Things are different now. And Trump and his family make money off business while their father's in government. They make money off crypto and the hotels, so maybe they can start just taking it from the taxpayers, too.

5:28Maybe they want people to get that cynical, but it's also off base, even if some people want us to give up or go downhill, because I want to show you. In Donald Trump's first term, he ousted two cabinet officials over these types of money and ethics scandals. He, Donald Trump, whether it was the bad press or the optics or the ethics, but he ultimately said no to these officials who were caught with allegations about misusing about hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some of that, by the way, in fairness, was paid back, and we're not talking about$200 million. So few may remember the exact people involved, Price and Pruitt.

6:03Their Griff scandals were too much even for this same president, at least when it came to him getting in trouble or bad press for this type of enrichment. The recent talk that Trump may take these millions from taxpayers, but what if he didn't take them personally? What if he put it to a charity? That's one of the defenses now floating, which again is a sign that things still matter and maybe they don't want to go forward with the original enrichment plan, but that wouldn't address the ethics here at all. Because if he takes the taxpayer money, it's not his money, whether he uses it for a charity or something else.

6:39And I would remind you, in the past, he has taken these type of formats and used the money to enrich himself. So what he called a charity ultimately led to the shuttering of the Trump Foundation because of credible allegations about misuse, what the Times reported on as a pattern. of illegality. Congressional Democrats say their probe on this tonight is serious. If they win in the midterms, well, then this could be something that they probe with the full subpoena power of a majority in the House. Democrats and ethics experts view several of Trump's activities as impeachable offenses, things that he's tried to do in the past, doing now, or plotting to do.

7:22The DOJ plot here is not something he's yet pocketed the money. Now, Trump is the only twice impeached president in our history. And you remember it was for his alleged role in an insurrection that Republicans condemned at the time and a separate plot to get a foreign country to push a probe into his domestic rival. He wanted Ukraine, remember, to probe the Bidens. That's why he got impeached the first time. And what Trump could only try to get other countries to do in the first term has now become his domestic operating playbook. It is now at the same DOJ that he's shaking down for money And he's not just probing them He's indicting people who have crossed him On largely old fact patterns Incidents that were already reviewed or previously rejected by prosecutors The lawyers for some of these individuals say these are clearly vindictive prosecutions They will try to get them dismissed Trump is also stalking the DOJ With his past criminal defense and personal lawyers leadership that bend, apparently, to these recently requested indictments, and that now could imperil their own future careers if they okay Trump's demand to just seize hundreds of millions of dollars with the DOJ as his ATM, something that you just heard a Republican senator say does not look like the normal course.

8:41The guardrails are off. This is all happening in plain sight. The pushback, though, is also happening. And the reason it's all at the fulcrum of the DOJ is because over time, the president did figure out that the DOJ is a powerful and independent arm of the United States government, one that he has increasingly tried to control. So that which he used to try to get Ukraine or other countries to do in secret, he now might get his own DOJ to do in the open. I'm joined by Andrew Weissman, who is a top DOJ prosecutor, trusted by Robert Mueller to help run that independent special counsel probe, was also general counsel of the FBI, which is, of course, the law enforcement arm of the DOJ, general counsel being the role where you tell them what they can and can't do.

9:28Andrew, welcome back. It doesn't seem that people inside the DOJ under this administration are doing much of that, telling Trump what he can't do. your view of both the legality and the ethics of him trying to get this money out of DOJ? Well, the ethics are absolutely clear. You cannot do it. One, the president of the United States cannot be both the plaintiff and the judge and jury on his own case. And if you are a political appointee, you ethically should not be doing this, particularly if you're a political appointee who used to represent the president of the United States, and you still have an ethical obligation as a former client.

10:14If anything, let's assume that Donald Trump is a huge assumption. It's not hypothetical. Let's assume that he has an argument, that he has a meritorious claim, and that he was a victim of DOJ prosecutions under the Biden administration, and he could show the requisite legal factual standard was met in his case. Well, that means that a career person at the department should be handling it and should be making all the arguments, which they make all the time, as to why this should not go forward, why that plaintiff is not entitled to money. And if a judge overseeing it thinks that this is something that they are entitled to, let's go to a hearing on it where Donald Trump would have to show why he is legally and factually entitled to it.

11:10That's the last thing in God's green earth that he wants is a hearing where he would have to show that he in fact was innocent and that the of everything that DOJ has charged him with. So to me, this is something that is so akin to his just robbing the taxpayers of$230 million, as if he had just gone into Fort Knox and taken gold bullion. And the history shows far smaller sums were enough to derail careers. Our colleague, Rachel Maddow has done a lot about the Spiro Agnew case, and she was writing about this when Trump was coming back in the second term. Watch your wallet, she wrote in The New Yorker.

11:58If history is a guide, it might be worth remembering America's most accomplished demagogues have also all been crooks. Let's not be surprised about where this is heading. We'll shout down our own fear, yes, but we'll also expose and humiliate thieves. Your thoughts on that linkage, Andrew, and why, when it works, the Constitution tries to guard against those corruptive temptations. Well, so let's remember before this happened, we have examples that appear completely extortionate, whether it's ABC, CBS, law firms being, your phrase was, shaken down. You have universities being shaken down. Here, the difference is that he is on both sides of this, so that he is basically the plaintiff, and he's saying, oh, you know what?

12:52The fig leaf of this bogus claim is, you know, I'm going to say it's meritorious, and guess what? I get to judge it. So I'm going to be the plaintiff, and then I'm going to judge it. So he doesn't actually need to engage in the kind of extortion activity of the type that Rachel referred to the litany of things that we've seen with law firms and academic institutions and media organizations, because he can actually just order the Department of Justice to say, you know, just settle it, because guess what? I've determined I'm the plaintiff and I've determined I'm right. And so it is both obviously ethically wrong.

13:30I should say, if you are Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, you know, they do have, there are bar associations that can get involved and can look at their conduct if they decide that they are going to handle this matter, in spite of the fact that there's an obvious conflict because it's the president who appointed them. It is the former client of theirs. So there really is good reason within the Department of Justice to make sure that career people are handling this. Because if career people handled this, they would be fighting it up one side and down the other, saying that his fig leaf is just a ruse to get this money.

14:14And they would make the arguments they make every day of the week when people similarly tried to get money, saying they really prevailed. And the government usually, except in the most extraordinary circumstances, says, no, you haven't prevailed. You're not entitled to this money. Here's what we heard from some other senators today. This is from both parties. I don't know what to make of that, what the procedure is. I've read the same thing you've read. I think it is absolutely mind-boggling, head-spinning. I'm not sure what the remedy is, but I'll let the Department of Justice sort that out. We ought to use the power of the purse, which is granted to us under the Constitution, to stop any payment by the United States Department of Justice.

15:04You've been around these issues and dealt with Congress over the years. What does it tell you that nobody on the Republican side wants to get anywhere near saying this is acceptable? So this is outside of my area of expertise, but I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist that you. I mean, I think you completely nailed this, which is you're not hearing anyone say this is good. You know, you're not hearing anybody on either side of the aisle saying that this is appropriate. But I just want to make sure people understand that this is just a natural outgrowth of the kind of extortionate activity that we have seen with respect to all of these other institutions.

15:47So that, you know, when my reaction was to the settling of what looked like frivolous lawsuits by, you know, paying, you know, tens of millions of dollars to, you know, a presidential library, you know, that is a shakedown. And here, the only reason it's like strikes people as even worse is because he gets to decide it, you know, on his own. And he's not actually just, you know, trying to, you know, twist the arms of Harvard University or Columbia or, you know, I could go on and on. So it really is a sort of capstone on the kind of grift that we have seen from day one being engaged in. It's just, it is really sort of, I hope it is sort of the straw that breaks the camel's back where they say, you know what, enough.

16:41When you go into public service, it is not to enrich yourself. That happens in banana republics. It's not supposed to be what happens in the United States of America. Yeah, and these are some expensive bananas for the public that might tune in and figure out where his priorities are. Andrew, I want to turn to those revenge prosecutions as well. You've been in the middle of all this. You just spoke with Jack Smith, the former special counsel. We're back with Andrew to continue this in 90 seconds.

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18:28We're back with Andrew Weissman. These so-called revenge prosecutions are grinding forward. James Comey's lawyers are arguing that the prosecutor who was infamously installed without much experience to replace another temporary prosecutor is actually not legally in that role. This is something that we first discussed in those early days, Andrew. You combine that with what Trump is clearly aware of, which is that there are only so many people willing to do some of this stuff because some of it's over the line. And so he's also trying to get more control over the process of who he puts in, political reporting that he now wants Republican senators to basically break something that they've held as a pattern for a long time in the Senate, where home state senators have a little more say over these prosecutors.

19:17He's digging into that. What do you think of the Comey motion here and this larger scuffle over prosecutors and independents? Sure. Well, one of the motions, because there were two that James Cooney has made, one of them is about vindictive and selective prosecution. In other words, where you're using the phrase sort of revenge prosecutions, that actually is a motion that is now before the district judge. And we will see what he does with that. He has sort of three options. He can just deny it outright. I think that's not likely. He could grant it outright. And there's lots of evidence that has been submitted.

20:02Of course, we haven't seen the government's response yet. And the other thing that he could do, which I think is probably the wisest course, is he could say that James Comey has done enough. He's substantiated his claim enough that he's entitled to discovery. He's entitled to get information about what was the White House communicating with the prosecutors. What were the career people and even the point person, the sort of U.S. attorney before Lindsey Halligan who resigned over this, what was he saying? So that discovery could be really embarrassing and damaging to the Department of Justice and to the White House.

20:41And then finally, the other motion is with respect to Lindsay Halligan. This is a kind of motion that's been made around the country, most famously Alina Hava, where the district judge there found that she is improperly appointed to be the attorney general. And so that's the same motion that's been made with respect to Lindsay Halligan. And, you know, we'll see what happens there. But it seems to be on pretty strong footing if the judge follows what other district judges have been doing around the country with respect to these appointments where he is. The basic argument is usurping the senatorial role that they have to put in place and confirm somebody and just saying, I can keep on rolling over interim people and I never have to worry about the Senate.

21:36Yeah, really striking. Andrew Weissman, thank you for the primer on more than one issue. We appreciate it. Coming up tonight, there are news measures of how the public views this administration and why the protests are feeding a larger disapproval than has Trump slumping. I also have a special guest as we look around the world for lessons on how democracies decay and what dissidents and protesters can do. There is also heat over a pretty strange development, the president doing this East Wing demolition with secrecy, and some saying it's a larger metaphor. Donald Trump is literally destroying the people's house because apparently he thinks it's his house and not ours, and I'm guessing he has no intention of moving out of it ever.

22:30The Republicans, led by Donald Trump, control the White House and Congress. The government is still shut down because they haven't been able to use the powers they have or negotiate with the Democrats to open it. And so that is going to continue to affect a lot of people's lives, including the many people who serve often at pretty basic salaries to try to do the public's work. And so amidst this shutdown, we should note that Donald Trump is demolishing a very treasured visible sign of American democracy, a big piece here of the White House. In fact, what I'm showing you to make the point here are live pictures.

23:06So this is literally what they're doing in the evening in the people's house. Tearing down the East Wing for plans to spend$250 million on a ballroom that this politician, this president has chosen. No sign that they are doing any of the austerity they're asking public employees and others to do during the shutdown that they have ordered. The facade is a pile of rubble. The entire wing is set to be demolished within days. Trump had claimed that the historic structure would not have met this fate. He literally said that what you see on your screen wasn't going to happen. It won't interfere with the current building.

23:46It won't be near it, but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building, which I'm the biggest fan of. It's my favorite place. I love it. False. It is, as you see, affecting the existing building. Trump brandished plans moments ago in the Oval Office for this ballroom. He's also said, and keep in mind, during the shutdown, he's trying to take money for himself from the DOJ. He's got his plans here. But he says somehow there'll be no cost. Project's funding, he says, will be completely absorbed by private companies and donors. One problem, though, about how you calculate costs, those are individuals who might be doing this to get favorable treatment by or leverage over Trump.

24:33CBS reports those donors could have their names etched inside the public White House building or on a website. No final decisions on that. Also unclear whether this is ultimately good for the taxpayer or America if these people are using money this way. Now, that donor list includes many different corporations, including the parent company of MSNBC, a note we wanted to include. But there's also other secrecy of things we don't know about. The White House says the building plans will be submitted for some kind of review soon. Okay, but as we showed you, they're already demolishing things. So whatever review that is doesn't involve a lot of oversight.

25:14He's already broken one public vow about this, which suggests that maybe Donald Trump, who doesn't like oversight and thinks his ideas are great, had some inkling that interfering with what the White House has long looked like for the public, for tourists, for Americans, wouldn't be a good look for him. As Rachel has said, this also serves up a metaphor. Trump literally today sent a rental backhoe to physically rip down the east wing of the White House. Donald Trump is literally destroying the people's house because apparently he thinks it's his house and not ours. And I'm guessing he has no intention of moving out of it ever.

25:59The point is literal. It is a residence for the temporary official elected by the people. But decisions about it, of course, should involve the public and the Congress because it ain't your house. Now, there are some more temporary revisions that you can just debate as a matter of style. This president has made the Oval Office a little more gold. And that's well within his rights because it's not some demolition. Someone else can come in and redecorate. He's also already paved over the Rose Garden. giving it that look. And he's made it more of a social club, that garden area, fitting sort of his club style.

26:40We're not talking about gold drapes right now. We're talking about semi-permanent or permanent changes to the White House, which again is nobody's property, but the public. Last week, there were plans discussed to erect a big monument of Donald Trump himself. Thanks, guys.

27:12You can see a bit of the tension there while Donald Trump wants to talk about the beautiful monument that he's planning. And the press staff, who might know something about how this plays, are trying to get everybody out of the room. Let's not talk about it. we're talking about the physical infrastructure of things that are clearly at odds with democracy as a project where no person is permanent, not in terms of power or their stamp on what we understand to be our democratic institutions and yes, our even buildings that house them from the Capitol to the White House. We have two special guests on all of this when we return.

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29:19Download it today. Wireless plans require the purchase of a SIM card. Visit textnow.com for terms and conditions. President Trump's second term is drawing alarm from protests to experts over this drift away from democracy and towards an autocratic slide that can be understood sometimes not so much by looking to our own history, but those of other countries. from Turkey to Hungary, where systems that once used elections and law as a baseline began to bend to autocrats, where scenes of troops abroad resonate differently now for many in America as Trump repeatedly deploys soldiers inside our country to U.S.