Trump Undercuts AG on Ending Convict Fund

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0:30Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin? Or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber, and we are covering several big stories for you tonight. We begin with what has been clearly a type of confusion or double talk by the Trump administration over their controversial embattled, currently on pause, according to the courts,$1.8 billion fund for convicts and defendants.

1:11You may recall that the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, was on so much defense, including a real outcry in Congress with Republicans pushing back, that he said to Congress, which is about as real as it gets, that they simply would not be moving forward with this fund. In other words, no money taken by them from you, the taxpayer, to go out to Trump allies. That's where it stood for a little while until today the president saying this. So can you explain why you decided to drop the anti-weaponization fund? So I love it. I think it's so important. Is the$1.8 billion DOJ fund dead or is it on hold?

1:49It's I'd have to ask the lawyers. I don't know. I know one thing, the weaponization. Are you talking about the weaponization fund? Yeah, what's your decision? The weaponization fund, as far as I'm concerned, was a beautiful thing. He doesn't know. Ask the lawyers. It's a beautiful thing. So he's clearly continuing to try to give support to something that even Republicans say is wrong, that goes too far, that would potentially reward people who physically attacked police, who were convicted of various crimes if it goes to Jan 6 people. And again, different than what his attorney general claimed to Congress, which is kind of basically like an under oath scenario.

2:25It's obviously wrong and usually illegal to lie to Congress. Trump is sort of stepping up in a way that he didn't have to. So he's at least undercutting the attorney general's message. The whole thing is paused anyway under court order right now by by the courts when you look at the fund. Now, when you go over to where the money's coming from, the Treasury chief was asked about this and sounded more like what we've heard from the acting AG. Right. Chairman Crapo, ranking member. I'm unable to discuss most of this because of ongoing litigation. Yeah, I know you like, everybody likes to say that, but the constitutional.

3:00We like to follow the law, Senator. And the law is that the Congress has constitutional oversight functions. I suggest that you speak with the Treasury attorneys. Again, I'm not going to be able to comment on these matters.

3:16Mr. Chairman, this just makes no sense at all. Now, from here, you have questions about what people want to get out of this. You have January 6th convicts floating the idea that they could still get paid. You have Politico reporting that whatever Blanche, the acting AG, said, nothing stops payments from the Treasury for those who engaged in violence that day. In other words, there's no outer limit. Blanche has worked tirelessly on Trump's agenda. And all of this has been a big public audition. Trump now suggesting that he will promote him permanently into the role that he's currently the acting replacement in since Bondi was ousted.

3:53It's a pile of loyalists and a lot of confusion when it comes to the basic question of what this government is doing with, remember, your money. I want to bring in David Kelly, who served as the FCI chief, and I should note my former boss. When you look at this, David, obviously the messaging is all over the place. I don't call on you as the Washington interpreter. Anyone who follows the news can see that Trump thinks this very controversial bad thing is something he'd still like to happen. So he sort of floats the words that way. What does it tell you, though, that the acting attorney general, having floated this and tried to make it happen, was so quick yesterday to finally say we're done?

4:33Well, look, it certainly presents an abundance of legal issues, but also presents a bunch of political issues. And I think the attorney general probably gets the sense that he's running into strong headwinds on both fronts. And I think that once this is being challenged legally, which it is, and I, you know, the judge has reopened the matter, that presents a whole Pindor's box for the judge and that the Justice Department is going to have to deal with. And I think Todd Blanche is probably looking at this saying this is not a winning case for us. So from a legal perspective, we really need to drop this.

5:07From a political perspective, I think you see the president, well, I don't really want to drop this. So maybe maybe he can I can hedge a little bit. But I think they're going to have to see how it plays out in court. But even if you get past what the judge might do, it still presents a bunch of legal issues if it were ever approved. If is a big word because you have to get through Congress about whether or not they're going to let them have that money. But two, think about all the, you know, talk about the devil in the details. Who is against whom has this lawfare been weaponized? You know, what is the criteria?

5:48Who gets included? Who gets excluded? And when somebody gets excluded, what kind of rights do they have? What kind of action will they bring? There'll be lots of lawsuits saying, well, I should have gotten money too. Or that person got more money than they should have gotten. And I should have gotten some of that. So even if this fund was allowed to exist, the number of issues that are going to come flowing from that as a legal matter are crazy. Well, it's so strange and unprecedented. You know your way around a lot of cases. Have you ever seen a case like this where you effectively have a party suing the government he controls, settling to his own benefit, and then the benefit, among other things, because he wants immunity, but the money then goes to other people?

6:35I mean, have you ever seen a settlement like this? No, it's almost like a money laundering operation. Right. But no, it's just really crazy that you have that. It's just really kind of creating a vehicle to create a fund to do with it what you want. And you're not being extreme when you suggest there's a money laundering concern. The DOJ's guidance asserts that they are not responsible for any potential illegalities or any liability for what these people do with the money they get, which is our money. which makes sense because if you give money, for example, to someone convicted of sedition, who's a proud boy, who's promised to wage war against the United States government, they could do it again.

7:19Well, not only that, but I mean, consider also the track record with several of the people who have been given pardons from their January 6th criminal conduct for which they were convicted now have gone out and committed other crimes. So, you know, the type of folks that you're giving this money to, who knows where it's going to end up to what use it's going to be put. Yeah, the president also spoke today, as I mentioned, about whether this acting attorney general would become attorney general. Let me play that. Will he be attorney general or have you decided? I think he will. You haven't got someone else in mind?

7:53No. I wanted to see how he's received. You know, we put him as acting and he's done a very good job. You see that as a glide path to being attorney general. And how do you think Blanche is doing so far? Because even leaving aside cases you don't comment on, he's certainly been more aggressive than Bondi in rushing out revenge prosecutions. It may be a path. I don't see it's a glide path. OK, because where the president may be intent on nominating him because of his loyalty and the work that Todd has done, he's gotten great results for him. And when he was a personal lawyer, he's now delivering for him like the former attorney general did not.

8:36So he's got that behind him. But, you know, so he's got 210 days to serve as acting. So that concludes in October. Before that happens, the president has to nominate him. and then under the Appointments Act. So then he has to be confirmed by the Senate. So the question is whether or not, and particularly after the midterms, what the composition of the Senate will be and whether or not the Senate is going to confirm him. So it's really, when you say it certainly is a path, but I don't know if he gets to a home plate. And you're suggesting that if Trump wasn't so fixated on testing people's loyalty to get these outcomes, They could have put him in faster and tried to get a vote from a Republican Senate.

9:24I think that's a great point, because had he laid low, got rid of the former attorney general, nominated Todd instead of waiting for him to come up with a bunch of controversial decisions to place the president. The president might it might have been more like a glide path. I mean, look, you look at Todd Blanche's record. He's a very competent lawyer. He's he's done, you know, very successful as a lawyer. And, you know, the Senate might have had trouble not confirming him had he gone in. Yeah. But now from the Senate's perspective, I think he probably has more baggage to deal with at a confirmation hearing than he might have had they not put him to the, you know, have the president do his bidding on vindictive stuff for him.

10:10And that's sort of, that's the Trump way of doing business. I mentioned how I got to know you working for you and that you're rightfully proud of your government service, but I've always noticed you were especially proud of being a cop because you started as a cop, right? I wonder what you think now about how far we've gone through the looking glass to have a president who still says, well, maybe we'll pay some of these people who were convicted of attacking cops. In other words, we went through all the legalities. What about what we might call the ethics or even the patriotism of that, that he and Blanche for weeks have said that's on the table?

10:47In other words, they can't even just say whatever happens with this, obviously, we won't be helping people who attack police on Jan 6th. Well, I think they're going to be hard to do that if they have this fund. But I mean, use the word patriotism. I don't put the two together when you're talking about what they did to police officers on that day and patriots. That's just. No, I'm saying that. It's an oxymoron. Well, that's what I'm saying. The patriotism would be to stand with the police who defended democracy that day. Like, like, did you feel that because because in in January 7th, 21, Trump was saying, hey, I'm against that.

11:24And now we've gotten to a point where he admits he's for it. I mean, what could be more wrong than being for the people who attack the police? I hear you. And look, if you're a Capitol Police officer, this has to make you sick to your stomach. But not even a Capitol Police officer, anybody in law enforcement. Yeah. And look at what this fund would do and basically reward people for doing what they did. That's just beyond the pale. Yeah. And you talk to any of your old cop friends about it? No, but I can just imagine how they're all. You can channel it. Yeah. David, it's always good to see you, especially on more than one story here where you bring a lot of credibility and experience.

12:00Our thanks to David Kelly. There is an actual rolling MAGA crisis in 60 minutes. The venerated 30-year-plus veteran Scott Pelley is out because he stood up to executives. We have a special booking tonight. The renowned journalist Ken Aletta from The New Yorker and the author, he's here. As for the Republican-controlled House, I can tell you they just bucked Donald Trump on the war. This is another late-breaking story I told you we're covering a lot tonight. The Reverend Sharpton is here when we're back in 90 seconds.

12:30On this vote, the yeas are 215 and the nays are 208. The concurrent resolution is adopted. Breaking news late today, that is the House voting to rein in the Iran war. It is a huge rejection of Donald Trump's effort to keep this off the floor, and it took a break for Republicans breaking with Trump and joining Democrats to push this resolution just over the edge. This is one of those nail biters. Now, there's a long road from here to ending the war, but it shows you just how the opposition around the country is rising, and the war would be stopped if the entire Senate and Congress move forward on this with enough votes to trigger the full War Powers Act.

13:11So we're not there yet, but tonight we are watching a major rejection of Trump that included full Republicans, and as you see, many of the Democrats in the House. I'm joined by Reverend Al Sharpton, host of Politics Nation, of course, president of the National Action Network. Reverend Sharpton, this is a big rebuke of Trump's Iran war at a time when the country has clearly turned against it. What does a vote like this mean tonight? Vote means that you now have a break in the dam, in the Trump dam, that it doesn't mean that you're going to get a flood, but it means you at least have a leak. I think that this leak should be troubling to Trump because as we now go from primary season almost over to the general elections, a lot of Republicans, after seeing these four in the House, are going to have to rethink how do they stand with this Iran situation with gas prices still up and food and groceries still up.

14:11and we don't even see an end to the state of her moves being open. So this gives a lot of people things to think about. I don't think it's a slam dunk, but it starts the whole bargain. Yeah, and you rarely see this kind of War Powers Act resistance in Congress happen this fast. Trump had famously promised a quick end to the war, a very hard to predict war. He was wrong. We know why he was saying that because he knew already he was doing something risky and unpopular. So we've passed his timeline, busted through it. The public is very clear on this. I'll show the point to remind everyone this is much worse than the first week of the war.

14:46Now, 60 percent of Americans oppose the Iran war, a tiny slice, 28 percent supporting. You do the math on that, Rav, translation, a heck of a lot of Republican voters, people who voted for Trump at least once are against this thing, which means that this is a midterm issue that the party has to worry about. The party must worry about it. It is a midterm issue. When you see his endorsed candidate lose in Iowa, the handwriting is on the wall that they at least need to stop and look at what they're doing if they're not outright concerned. And clearly with the president going back and forward with the$1.8 billion sludge fund and this, that, and other, none of this is helping them.

15:30The war at a centerpiece of this because this is hitting people where they live. You can talk all of the ideology you want. You can talk all the politics you want. When a person pulls up to the gas station and it's$4.50 to$6 a gallon, that is not politics to them. That's real life. and that the president can't explain and has not explained. And the wider narrative has really shifted. You know, forever we heard Republicans will stand on him on everything. They won't break. This doesn't move him. That doesn't move him. What will move? That was sort of, we heard that endlessly. And there was a period of time when it felt like that.

16:08And now, you know, you really stitched together. You had pushback on tariffs. You had them overriding him with a veto-proof majority on Epstein. You have a lot of concern about the way he's picking candidates in the midterm. So the Senate Republicans were mad at what he did down in Texas. You had recently a vote that not everyone in the country was following, but a vote where he wanted to move forward on some of the immigration stuff. And over the fund you just mentioned, Republicans said no, and they didn't give him that vote. You have the ballroom pushback. And now today you have this. And you start to say, gosh, it's not that they never buck him.

16:41It's that on several big key things in the last months, they keep bucking him. Consistently bucking him. and it looks like small steps, but it starts adding up. One of the things I think that happens is it's very hard to say that I'm not going to be against somebody who seems to have no problem being against me. So when they see what he did in Texas with Corning and others, they say, well, wait a minute. There's no price for even trying to show belated loyalty to this guy. Corning voted with him most of the time, and he just tried to destroy him and did. So I think that at some point, your self-esteem kicks in saying, how am I going to be with a guy that will be disloyal to me if he decides in the middle of the night to just tweet something?

17:31So I better protect my own hide because he certainly is not. Yeah. And a lot of people might watch that and say, God, sure took the Republicans a long time to figure that out. I mean, we watched that with Michael Cohen and everyone else in the first term. But if they're finally figuring it out, plus, as you say, an election coming that might sharpen the mind. Well, there we are. Rev, always good to have you, sir. Good to be here. OK, coming up, a very rare public clash. CBS News in crisis as one of their most venerated longtime journalists. 60 Minutes and CBS anchor Scott Pelley speaks out, gets fired.

18:04We have Ken Oletta, one of the best guests you could ask for in the country on this big, big clash. Pelly out at 60 Minutes. I'm Scott Pelly. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

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19:24I don't know where Scott Pelley will land. Frankly, I hope he lands right here. Yeah. I hope he stays on. I hope he's on TV tomorrow. Right. And I hope that everybody in journalism and everybody who values a free press figures out ways to outmaneuver the people who are trying to take the free press from us. Our colleague Rachel Maddow speaking, frankly, for many in her reaction to what was breaking news last night, a longtime 30-plus-year veteran of CBS News in 60 Minutes and the anchor chair, Scott Pelley, out, CBS firing him over what he says was standing up for journalism against bias and politicizing their work.

20:01What 60 Minutes becomes is in a sense a question tonight. There's a question about whether the owners of this new CBS company, which is making larger mergers, are allied with MAGA and putting a thumb on the scale, or whether this is also part of a larger effort to curry favor with the Trump administration, which oversees the big business tech merger. Pelley, who is as credible as they come when you look at his long tenure of independent reporting, including from war zones and multiple administrations, says CBS News management instructed him to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.

20:37He calls out what he views as incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management that wreaked havoc, describing scenarios that were completely avoidable, according to him, that put stories in danger going up to airtime. He has a lot of experience here to launch these critiques, and he says it's all to curry favor with the Trump administration. MSNOW has requested CBS comment on those accusations. We haven't specifically heard back, although some of their officials have spoken out publicly, and there's been a war of words in the press over what is a big and rare inflection point in already a long-running battle over CBS News independence and whether freedom of speech or Colbert style criticism of the current government would be allowed for long on that platform.

21:23Pelley also criticized the CBS News boss, Barry Weiss. There was a staff meeting where Pelley confronted the new executive producer about Weiss. This is something that broke in the New York Times yesterday. There was a reportedly a recording that the Times says they have of this unusually tense meeting where he said that she was trying to murder 60 Minutes. She does not love this place, he said. That was in response to a back and forth. She was brought in to kill it, and she's been doing exactly that. Now, there are reports that Weiss was telling staff that Pelley was violating trust and mutual respect, and for her part, she and others say that they tried to reach out to him, including before that tense meeting I just mentioned, for a one-on-one discussion, that there was a back and forth, and clearly a breakdown of an ability to get through issues that Peli thinks go beyond communication and to the heart of how that news division is being gutted.

22:19I don't have to tell you, if you're watching this news channel, you've probably seen news over the past decades. Peli is someone who reported from war zones, who faced politicians and presidents who cover the White House, and most recently as well, the war in Ukraine. How would you say your mental focus is? Oh, it's focused. I think it's, I haven't, look, behind me you can see what's left of one of the 110-story twin towers. How do you dig this up? Piece by piece, man by man. Tonight, we have details of a classified U.S. intelligence mission that has obtained a previously unknown weapon. Everything America is trying to accomplish in Afghanistan is represented in these four tents.

23:07How do you measure success? We sat down with Zelensky in his hometown. It had been a week since Russia killed nine children on a playground. As a viewer, I've never spent any time with Scott Pelley. I've watched him as a journalist. I can echo what Rachel and plenty of other journalists have said, which is this is really one of the long-term gold standards of what a TV journalist can be. And that independence, whether you saw him there pressing then-President Biden on one of his perceived vulnerabilities, or going to war zones, as I mentioned, or just calling it free and fair. And 60 Minutes relied on Pelley.

23:46Over the years, they've had different stars, but he was currently one of their most prominent. So it means something when he says, after trying to work with this new management for months, that it has become untenable and that he has specific concerns. concerns, examples of what he calls their bias and effort to promote falsehoods at that institution. Now, there is another version of this story you'll hear, which is that some of the broadcast media has fallen behind, has lost a step, and needs to be modernized, and that that itself is not illicit. Well, that's true as far as it goes. If you watch this program, we've reported on the shifts in digital media a ton, but 60 Minutes didn't need some sudden overhaul to reach the public.

24:25it was a commercial success. Indeed, Paramount, which is the parent company, recently noted how 60 Minutes made history by marking 52 straight seasons as America's number one news program, with as many as 10 million people watching, Variety reports. When you look at those Nielsen ratings, there were weeks where the top thing watched in all categories would be football in 60 Minutes. It was number one in news and rivaled some of the other most profitable things on the air. And yet lately, these accusations of bias were mounting. One correspondent said there was a, quote, political discussion by the bosses to try to shape and delay an immigration report that might have upset Trump officials.

25:06Another 60 Minutes correspondent said, quote, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. CBS has repeatedly denied those accusations during this period. The wider context is David Ellison, who is part of that Ellison family that we've mentioned that has been buying up media. Paramount is the company involved here. And the wider thing that goes beyond just news is that they need the Trump administration's approval for that huge Warner merger with so much money on the line. Broader than CBS News, you have a Trump administration that has gone farther than any other U.S.