Trump Wields Government Power to Target Foes, Pressure Dissent

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0:36Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melba reporting on President Trump continuing to demand these prosecutions of his own opponents. The DOJ on this blatant tear. New charges against the New York Attorney General, Letitia James, former Director Comey, and other moves against officials who have crossed Trump. News of the DOJ pushing a grand jury to indict Trump's own former aide. John Bolton was a big deal going into the weekend. Trump also now pushing for new charges against Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, calling on the, quote, authorities that he controls to investigate the senator. And this comes after Trump named Schiff, among two other people who have since been indicted.

1:11Schiff was an especially prominent leader of Trump's first impeachment, which is, of course, a lawful process where Congress can discuss or seek removal of a sitting president. But Trump's admitting in public to an unlawful plot to try to get Schiff indicted for that and regardless of evidence. Now, abusing powers to charge and jail individuals to threaten silence or kneecap opponents is much more associated with foreign autocrats than American government. Trump has blatantly admitted his goals to go get credits without even claiming to name reasons or specific crimes. Systems that punish or disappear opponents are not considered very democratic.

1:52And elections don't mean much if the top rivals to a potential autocrat are just stuck in jail. An election in that format doesn't work very well. And that's what we've seen in Putin's Russia. Donald Trump's moves don't come in isolation. they come as he tries to seize powers to keep troops and federal agents across U.S. streets, even as some judges are limiting those powers as we go. Now, this is serious. It is happening, and it is not popular. While Trump has been bluntly pushing hard because the DOJ wouldn't do any of these cases under the traditional rules, with many of the longstanding and nonpartisan staff, up until very recently, they weren't getting these charges, remember?

2:33But his own team knows that this is unpopular. And they are denying what is happening, partly, apparently, because to admit it would make it even worse. Take Vice President J.D. Vance. Remember, he's a Yale-educated lawyer who said in 2016 he worried Trump was either cynical like Nixon or worse, a, quote, morally reprehensible person who could be, Vance infamously said, quote, America's Hitler, unquote. Now, Vance reversed himself once Trump came to power. And unlike Donald Trump today, who admits these revenge goals are based on the people. Go get these people. He names them, not any type of evidence, not any type of legal process.

3:14But Vance now claims against the evidence that it's all just normal law and facts. Is the Department of Justice acting on orders from the president to prosecute his political opponents with the final 30 seconds we have left? No, we're driven by the law and the facts of the case. I think if you look at the case, the fact that a far left grand jury in a far left area indicted Letitia James and James Comey, if you look at the fact that James Comey obviously lied under oath, Letitia James obviously committed mortgage fraud. What we're doing is letting the law drive the prosecution decisions in the Department of Justice.

3:52You know who we haven't prosecuted? Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. The Trump-Vance DOJ, of course, is the source of contradicting Vance's claims. The law and the facts were what drove us up to this point and without any recent indictments. For several months, on these cases, I'm not talking in general, but on the Comey and James case, there was a process. and the law and the facts did not result in charges, even in a DOJ with a Trump attorney general and Pam Bondi's picks for who should be U.S. attorney. And so if you watch the news, you know what happened next and why Vance is wrong.

4:34The Trump DOJ swapped in this new, very inexperienced prosecutor who would do precisely what DOJ would not do before, what the facts and law had not seduced before. So Trump's mindset is clear. He's agitated to indict opponents since his first campaign. It has taken this long, however, to distort and sort of restaff the DOJ to find people willing to risk their law licenses and maybe more to do what he wanted. It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country. Yeah, because you'd be in jail. Trump admitted that on the campaign's biggest stage, the debate.

5:15That was 16, of course. And while he may want a Putin-like DOJ approach to any and all of his opponents, whether they're running directly against him or the Republicans next term or wherever it leads, judges are limiting some of the related efforts he's making, stationing troops all over the place, the new appeals court blocking that. Then there are the ICE agents, their tactics, drawing new scrutiny in Chicago. There's an outcry. Agents posted up outside a church during Sunday Mass, while other agents went right after a Marine's parents. Reports of federal agents near a Catholic church during Sunday services.

5:59The priest on video urging his parishioners to leave Mass with extreme caution. Churchgoers leery to leave their parish. The Catholic priest gave an unexpected warning to parishioners, urging them to leave cautiously because immigration officers were reportedly in the area. I think they've been casing the church. The parents of a U.S. Marine are being detained by immigration officials. Her family was coming to take her and her husband to breakfast on September 28th when they were stopped at the gate, and Steve says ICE arrived. Another weekend of federal law enforcement efforts with the government vowing there will be more.

6:35The government vowing there'll be more. The president admitting it's about the people. not the evidence. And the troops out in the streets, in your churches, going after military families, going after basically people who are coming out to sometimes recognize their own rights to speak and dissent. And the chart I showed you shows who the president is going after. Any selective prosecution is wrong. Selective prosecution against so many people shows a pattern, not a one-off. Selective prosecution, allegedly, against the president's own former aide, John Bolton, with the grand jury now unpaneled, we're told, is a reminder to any Republican, Wall Street exec, or other self-identified elite who thinks, contrary to all history, that it'll stop here and they won't come for you.

7:27Donald Trump is very clear. He has admitted what is doing, even if J.D. Vance and others understand that long term, if enough people find out and see the risk, there may be very well a larger revolt than they can handle. But this is what's happening. And there is a growing opposition to this, even though, remember, we are in a time in America, not unlike the McCarthy era, where some of the opposition is even more muted than it would normally be because some people are understandably afraid or getting more quiet or just avoid politics at church and at work. And I'm not here to lecture you about who can do what when.

8:04People make up their own minds in a democracy, kind of the whole point, about how to involve themselves, when and how to stand up if they choose to. But even against that effort at muting, at censorship, at the FCC late night agenda, even against all that, we see a wider group of people from conservative podcaster Joe Rogan to MTG recently calling out ICE. I'll show you that later tonight. to President Obama, who is careful not to speak out all the time. He's not running a daily politics podcast, but has chosen again this inflection point. He's speaking out again about these problems, what Trump does and what he views as the bias and how it's all covered.

8:44If I had sent in the National Guard into Texas and just said, you know what, a lot of problems in Dallas, a lot of crime there. And I don't care what Governor Abbott says. I'm going to kind of take over law enforcement because I think things are out of control. It is mind boggling to me how Fox News would have responded. Mind boggling and the president, the former president there speaking in his characteristic calm. But this is a time to, yes, keep your head on straight, to be calm about the facts, but to be serious about understanding what we're facing. this is the crackdown and it goes from the selective prosecutions to the ICE tactics to a president who in year one is testing how far he can get away with having troops and agents out on a regular basis all over the country in year one but what do you think he'll do if he gets away with it going into year two the midterms let alone year four whether we ever have peaceful transfers of power in this country.

9:54I'm joined by civil rights leader Maya Wiley and Molly Jong-Fass, New York Times writer, and both MSNBC analysts. Welcome back. Maya, it seems to be a pattern that you can't separate the troops from the selective prosecutions. I don't even know where to begin on this, but I just have to go back to J.D. Vance's lie. Because what he said was an out-and-out lie. And you called it, Ari, and I'm just being plain about it because we have to start being plain. He knows good and well that the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia that is a Republican that was sitting in that seat because of Donald Trump, who refused to bring indictments against James Comey and Attorney General Letitia James because he found insufficient evidence and essentially stepped down.

10:56You can't be any clearer than that, than that this is not an administration that is following facts, especially given the public reporting about Donald Trump pushing Pam Bondi, pushing her to get a prosecution, and then putting an insurance agent, someone who's insurance law, who has to personally hand walk in that indictment herself to get it because there's so many career prosecutors who clearly don't want their name on the dotted line. So that is just that that is a matter of public record, which means J.D. Vance, J.D. Vance knows it's a matter of public record. But let's go back to the National Guard issue, because the other thing we know is that there was One example, just one example.

11:45Marimar Martinez says she was hit by an ICE car and then shot multiple times. ICE says no, she needs to be prosecuted because she was the one who rammed their car. There apparently is body cam footage that her lawyer says shows that she is telling the truth. They are not. And I'm only saying that because we have footage of a Presbyterian pastor, David Black, whose arms are outstretched. And anybody who goes to church, which I'm telling y 'all I do, this, holding your hands out like this, is not an act of attack. And he was not moving towards an ICE agent, and he gets a pepper bullet in the head.

12:34This is what's happening in this country, and that is not about public safety. And when we talk about these issues and we talk about tyranny, we are actually seeing it in real time and being told not to believe our lying eyes and to listen to lies over facts. Right. And that brings us exactly to the backlash I mentioned, because these things happen in their own way. It can be organic. And Molly, there are people who say, well, if they saw something and no one else agreed with them, they want to say, I told you so forever. Yeah. But, you know, Martin Luther King didn't live a lot in the I told you.

13:11We're talking about church and church activism. He lived a lot in the well, I'm glad you're here today. Join us and let's go forward. And when you're the minority or a small minority, you really have to do that. And so whatever people may think of Joe Rogan, he has a big platform and he's saying out loud, he believed Trump. Now, you might watch and say, first mistake. But he believed Trump that the plan was to go after the hardcore criminals who immigrated to this country. And to him, that sounded OK. And he's now saying he's paying attention. I mentioned some people tune out. He hasn't tuned out.

13:44He's looking at what they're doing. And he says it's wrong and it's not at all just going after foreign immigrant criminals. Take a look. let's just talk about the the immigration thing the way it looks is horrific it looks it when you're just arresting people in front of their kids and just normal regular people that have been here for 20 years that everybody who has a heart can't get along with that let's find a way if they've been productive members of society for 20 years no criminal record they They worked the entire time. They paid taxes. Find them a pathway to citizenship. I really thought they were just going to go after the criminals.

14:26Right. No, look, that is a real phenomenon. And we're seeing that. And that's there's a reason that polling it for immigration, for a natural, you know, for some path to immigration is higher than it's ever been because people are watching this and thinking exactly what Joe Rogan is saying. So and look, there's a sort of 70 percent in the middle that's not super politically active and they respond to this. And I want to go back to what you said about McCarthy, because I think that's really important. And I always think about that because my grandfather jailed by McCarthy, Howard Fast. There was a moment when McCarthy overplayed his hand, right, when he went after the army.

15:05And that was the moment the public sentiment changed. And you couldn't have predicted that that was going to be the moment. But that was the moment that unraveled the whole thing. And so when I think about American history, and I'm really glad you brought Martin Luther King, and how we have done this before. This is exactly who we are in America. This is a we are a country that has had these missteps before. Right. It's like a it's like a virus that can come back at you. Exactly. And so I think and we've seen again that the American people have turned on this. And I think and I and I hope we'll see that again.

15:40Yeah. And you mentioned the the famous Army McCarthy hearings at long last, sir. Have you no decency? Yeah. It's not all lyrics, Maya. Are you sure? Sometimes we quote the congressional record. I think I think I think it's mostly lyrics. It is mostly. All right. Fact check. It is mostly lyrics, but that wasn't one. Have you no decency? And as you say, that resonated at that time. And it doesn't matter who you go up against. I want to play MTG, Maya, joining the chorus of people who, looking at this type of immigration, are coming back. They're coming back from the get everybody, whatever that means, especially with these tactics, and saying what others used to say.

16:22Maybe you need a balanced immigration policy, certainly one that has a reality about who people are, who's an actual threat, and how our labor market works. Take a look. As a realist, I can say we have to do something about labor, and that needs to be a smarter plan than just rounding up every single person and deporting them just like that. Oh, and I'm going to get pushback on that, but I'm just living in reality from here on out. Well, first of all, she has a rural district. She's in a rural district. We've known all along that these mass deportations were going to hurt farmers and others in rural communities that have been relying on people who come to this country to work.

17:10But we should also add that it's in a lot of these communities that we are seeing people in uniform in food bank lines, that as we're looking at this shutdown, you know, what is the scramble from the Trump administration right now? It's trying to make sure that troops get paid. So the impacts of their decisions, whether it's on access to health care, which is going to hurt a lot of families, it's going to hurt a lot of families in rural areas, tariffs, which are hurting a lot of farmers. And even this, even what we're seeing right now in the refusal of this administration to continue to fund high quality food that food banks are getting.

17:54We even see people talking about not just that the lines are longer in communities and rural communities, but that they are not seeing protein in their bags. They've actually had a significant reduction in what they're even seeing. So I'm saying all this because in this kind of universe of attacking rights, attacking freedoms and dismantling government in order to abuse power, there is a lot of daily life harm done to real people from everything from health care to food and to just being able to ensure that they can run their businesses and survive. And that is going to be a critical part of this turning point as well.

18:33Yeah, really important point. And you're kind of widening it to what the temperature is in these places and reminding people what everyone thinks MTG, what what her district is like. Molly, the last thing I want to show you is we try to get people in here from every perspective. And sometimes they say things and people have a big old debate. And other times you say, oh, they've moved. That has been the organic theme of this segment for whatever reason, because Ty Cobb defended the President Trump White House as a government lawyer during the early Mueller days. You remember him. I certainly do.

19:05And there was back and forth then. And who knew you would long for those old, innocent days? But Mr. Cobb, who is a former prosecutor and brings, I think, that view to this, certainly since Jan 6 and now, is very concerned and warning about what Donald Trump's doing. And he says it's bad and take him seriously on abusing the military. Here's what he told us. The White House is very serious about using any lever of government that inflates Trump's sense of his power. It will be difficult to stop his occupation of America. It may go toward his ultimate desire, perhaps not in 2026, but in 2028, to ensure that power passes to his chosen successor as opposed to the free and fair elections.

19:55Yeah. And that's why people like Liz Cheney and George Conway are so important, because they don't necessarily ideologically line up with the left, but they do, in fact, believe in the tenets of small-D democracy. And I think this is this is what we're seeing here is like these people are speaking out. And there's a reason that only Lindsey Halligan would sign those indictments. Right. There's a reason that you don't see Todd Blanche on there or any of the other career people. And even on the right is because they know that this is not how we do it in this country. Yeah. Really important points.

20:29I appreciate both of you kicking us off here, Molly and Maya. Let me tell folks what's coming up. We have a Google Insider on how we should actually think about tech. and what the movies get right and wrong. I think that could be interesting. That's by the end of the hour. Wall Street vets are using that line again. They say Trump always chickens out, and he did it again after this kerfuffle on China going into the weekend. But first, the Epstein co-conspirator coddling. Donald Trump's Epstein nightmare won't go away, partly because they're taking especially good care of the convict you see on your screen, and more Republicans are calling for transparency.

21:07I'm going to give you that special report and upcoming a special guest next in 90 seconds.

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22:32Starting a new week and its new problems in Donald Trump's Jeffrey Epstein scandal. And while some could look up and say, gosh, is this because of politics or the media? Is the media obsessed with this? In fact, it's because the Trump administration cannot seem to find a way to stop helping the Epstein co-conspirator convict, Ghislaine Maxwell. This is their doing. And this is how her life in prison is apparently improved under the Trump administration, which, just to remind you, had famously promised they would be tough on this issue against convicted pedophile trafficking and releasing new important details about the Epstein case.

23:11Well, they keep failing on each of those accounts. As for whether the media is obsessed, well, this reporting comes from the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which has been digging through the facts about the unusual transfer of Maxwell to this better Texas prison. Her entire presence there deemed unusual. She was convicted on sex trafficking and then transferred. We showed you this timeline. She originally was in the prison that you're supposed to be in for that type of offense. And it's not the heaviest prison in the world, but it is heavier than the one the Trump folks have now given her.

23:44Because current and former inmates, Sel Maxwell, appeared to receive, quote, unusually favorable treatment, which sparks resentment. That stuff gets noticed in a prison. And then her unexpected arrival led to more frequent lockdowns, the addition of armed guards. Other inmates were confined to their dormitories. Remember, this is still prison. Maxwell got to meet with, quote, several visitors in the federal prison camp's chapel. Now, we don't yet know from this type of reporting who those visitors are, but remember, the Trump administration had vowed so much transparency. They have access to that information.

24:18They're in charge of the Bureau of Prisons. And the timing is suspicious. Maxwell transferred a week after meeting with an individual who, number one, used to be Donald Trump's personal criminal defense attorney, and number two was apparently rewarded with a top job, the number two job, at DOJ, and went for this unusual prison interview where we got to learn about how much Maxwell apparently wants to say things that benefit Donald Trump. Did you ever hear Mr. Epstein or anybody say that President Trump had done anything inappropriate with masseuses or with anybody in your world? Absolutely never.

25:00in any context. Did you ever observe President Trump receiving a massage? Never. That's her statement. The United States has not ever deemed her credible. She's a convicted sex offender and she was appealing her case, meaning she still has to stick to a certain story if she's hoping at that time to get anywhere. By the way, her case has not been appealed favorably. But more importantly, when you look at her saying that, you have to stack it against other information. I can't tell you whether that statement by her is provably false or not. I can play for you what she claimed. But I can report for you that the Murdoch-owned journal has reported that Trump is listed, named in the Epstein files in some capacity, and we've also seen the birthday card and other evidence that he was close with Epstein.

25:47So there's countervailing evidence, the idea that he was not involved in any way. And again, if they release the files, we can all look ourselves and find out how he's mentioned. Meanwhile, survivors and lawmakers are still pushing for transparency. The story remains alive because the Trump administration can't seem to help itself. It continues to help one of the most notorious Epstein-related sex traffickers alive in the federal prison system. So what comes next? We have a Democratic lawmaker when we return.

26:22Avoiding 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. She loves it freezing. She loves it hot. The pod by 8sleep ends the argument for good with independent temperature zones that keep both of you sleeping deeper. Try it at 8sleep.com. Hi, it's Sierra Miller.