Massachusetts AG Andrea Campbell Discusses Lawsuits Against Trump

0:00Ben Meiselas:I don't know what's worse, Maga Mike Johnson. Is it starving people to death by taking away their snap benefits, which is what you were doing? Was it taking away their snap benefits while at a great Gatsby themed party at Mar-a-Lago with half naked women in martini glasses while you're holding a Bible? I don't know, Maga Mike, what is it? Or is it doing all of that and then lying to the people you're starving and saying that we're the ones who have been fighting to secure your benefits while you and Donald Trump literally filed emergency briefs with the Supreme Court to block the food stamp snap payments and blocked it from happening when there were funds to allow people to eat?

0:45Ben Meiselas:What's worse, Magamike? But Magamike goes on TV and of course he gaslights like Magamike always does here at Play This Clip. We'll be talking with the team. The president, as you know, has bent over backwards through this entire ordeal. In the longest shutdown in U.S. history, he worked around the clock every day to mitigate the pain, to reduce the pain as much as possible for the people. They found creative ways to get the troops paid, to keep women, infants, and children nutrition programs going and all the rest. And so you'll see that same level of fervor. The entire cabinet, the entire administration is going to work around the clock to get the government open and operational again as quickly as possible.

1:20Ben Meiselas:They'll do that as fast as we can. And of course, we'll give them every aid and assistance that we can out of the House and the Senate. I really don't know how he does it. I mean, I truly mean it. Like, if I tell a small fib, it just crutches me. I don't know how just physically, like, how are you able to go there when everybody knows you're a liar and just do it like with a straight face like that. Does he take like acting classes? I truly, I just don't know how he physically is able to accomplish that. You know, and then you have Donald Trump just doesn't even give a crap. So then he's at the Oval Office say, you know, we all gave everybody snap and Democrats try to take it away.

1:58Ben Meiselas:Don't pay attention to the Supreme Court lawsuits we filed blocking snapper that we're not giving the benefits here. Play this clip. They caused 20 ,000 flights to be canceled or delayed they departed so many times so so late people were hurt so badly nobody's ever seen anything like this one this was a no-brainer this was an easy extension but they didn't want to do it the easy way they had to do it the hard way they look very bad the democrats do they deprived more than one million government workers from their paychecks and cut off food stamp benefits for millions and millions more Americans in need.

2:34Ben Meiselas:They caused tens of thousands of federal contractors and small businesses to go unpaid. And the total effect of the damage their antics cause will take weeks and probably months to really calculate accurately, including the serious harm that they did to our economy and to people and to families. So I just want to tell the American people you should not forget this when we come up to midterms. The arsonist with the blowtorch using it, burning down the country. Why are you making me do this? Why are you making me burn you down? Blame the people who live in the homes that I'm burning down. Blame them.

3:16Ben Meiselas:Blame the firefighters. It's just so utterly ridiculous. I want to bring in Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell. Attorney General Campbell, you were one of the leaders in the AG lawsuits to ensure that SNAP benefits would make their way to the people against the Trump regime's blocking of these SNAP benefits. And you've had to fight them as they've gone to the Supreme Court seeking emergency motions to block the funding that's literally right there for this purpose because they want to starve people. Where are we now? Just talk about the cruelty that they've inflicted and the lawsuit.

3:58Ben Meiselas:And when you see clips like that, how do you make sense of it all? Cruel, inhumane, unconscionable. And frankly, what you heard from the president and the speaker is total bullshit. And why I'm so angry is because I witnessed firsthand people, seniors on fixed income, who did not have enough resources to buy food. A mother who ate less here in Massachusetts because she wanted to make sure she had enough benefits to be able to feed her child. And these are benefits from October. Let's take a step back. Never in the history of this country during a war or an emergency shutdown has the federal government ever stopped funding SNAP benefits for our most vulnerable.

4:41These are 42 million Americans across the country, 1.1 million Americans right here in Massachusetts, people with disabilities, seniors, children who have depended on these resources, never in the history of this country. And the president would blame Congress. I would say Congress, yes, at times it's absolutely ineffective. Put them to the side. He has had the very power from the very beginning of this shutdown and throughout to ensure that SNAP benefits flowed billions of dollars available to him and the administration to feed our people in Massachusetts and across this country. They chose not to.

5:19So what did we do? We filed a lawsuit. I led 25 AGs and three governors and co-led that with a couple other states to ensure that folks in this country have access to resources. Without a Democratic attorney general, people would be starving in this country. And every step of the way, they fought us. They appealed to the Supreme Court. They appealed at the local level. Every step of the way, our lawsuit actually is still technically going until we get assurances from them that they won't penalize the states for following a court order. and putting out full benefits for our people. So this is what we're up against, misinformation, total nonsense, but we won't be distracted as we do our jobs.

6:01And frankly, as I do my job of the great job I have, frankly, of being the Attorney General of Massachusetts.

6:07Ben Meiselas:You know, on the one hand, you'll have these press conferences where Donald Trump will say, we're so rich. We've brought in$23 trillion of investments and tariffs. We're making so much money. Then when it comes to Snap, he goes, you know, the real issue, this is like a typical con artist that I'm sure you deal with in other cases as the AG. You know, we're having liquidity issues. We don't have the money. There's nothing we can do here. Yeah, but you just said, We don't have the money when it comes to this. And there's, I think the American people know, there's literally an account, a contingency fund that is full and it has the money to pay for this.

6:53Ben Meiselas:And then separately, what the judge said in the Rhode Island case, and then in the Massachusetts, you know, all these cases and all the cases, your case, their case, was this is a benefit that people are entitled to. And even regardless of the contingency fund, these are funds that exist. They're in a bank account that the government has. You have access to it. Use it. Use it. And the Trump regime was first saying, our legal opinions say we can't. The judge said, no, no, no, no, you can't. It's not a liquidity issue. And then they still said, yeah, but we need to go to our friends at the Supreme Court and block this.

7:30Ben Meiselas:That's crazy to me. They were lying because at the outset, before we filed our lawsuit, why we didn't move quickly is because they told us, the USDA, including on their website, that they would fund SNAP, as has been done every single time during a government shutdown. They would fund it for the month of November. And then they made a policy choice at some random moment, only a week before November started, to say, no, we're not doing that. So we mobilized to file a lawsuit, a multi-state lawsuit quickly, to ensure that they would actually fund the SNAP program. They would not have done it without our lawsuit, even though they had the power to do it at the outset.

8:10And also because they had billions of dollars available to them, not just in the SNAP Reserve Fund, other resources too. If you can fund Argentina in the billions or renovate a part of the White House or find money for other purposes, you should be able to find money to feed Americans across this country, including veterans before Veterans Day, families before Thanksgiving. You should be able to find the billions to support our people right here at home. And sadly, they chose not to do that. That was intentional. That was squarely within the authority of the president and his agency.

8:47Ben Meiselas:I want to talk about more broadly the role of Democratic attorney generals fighting back against this Trump regime. It's a great example here when we talk about fighting to ensure that people in your state and others get SNAP benefits. But in the issues of immigration, clinical trials, public schools, climate resilience as it relates to construction project, wind and solar, Trump regime has launched a full-fledged assault on blue states. Frankly, the entire country, one of the reasons blue states are doing better than red states is a lot of these red states, AGs, just let it happen. All right, you want our solar?

9:27Ben Meiselas:Take it away. You want our wind? Take it away. You want to destroy it? Go for it. But in blue states, you and other AGs have been on the front lines in pushing back. And go through that with us, because I don't think people focus on governors and Congress members, but the AGs have been on the front lines of ensuring federalism has been the only thing that's really held, frankly, that these states can stay autonomous and be able to exist and not fully fall into this Trump dystopia. What we understand as Democratic AGs is that the number one issue right now is affordability, the cost of living crisis we are in.

10:07And so we're fighting every single day, fighting like hell to protect resources coming to our states. Here in Massachusetts, we have filed over 40 lawsuits against this administration that tried to take away$3.24 billion in Massachusetts investments. That's$210 million for our public schools, millions for public health, including clinical trials, jobs in the biomedical sector, which is important for Massachusetts. That's construction jobs. That's clearly SNAP and their efforts to try to take away food. And of that$3.24 billion they tried to take away, our 40-plus lawsuits have protected$3.02 billion.

10:51So the most effective individual right now is your Democratic AG. And I say Democrat because not one Republican AG has signed on to any of our lawsuits, not for clinical trials, not for SNAP benefits. Sadly, there are folks in red states, and I hate to even use the label, but in states that are Republican-led, where they didn't get their SNAP benefits because their people didn't exercise leadership to feed their children, feed their seniors, feed their veterans. And so the work we're doing as Democratic AGs is to deliver for real people, regardless of whatever letters by their name, because we understand our jobs.

11:30And most importantly, we love this country. We know what it's capable of. And we're not going to allow this president to stand in the way of what we do, but most importantly, to dismantle everything we stand for.

11:41Ben Meiselas:I got to ask you before we go, because this is timely and it's in the news and you understand as an AG the way grand juries work and the way they're not supposed to work. You know, there was this Lindsay Halligan, she's like a former insurance lawyer with no prosecutorial or trial experience who somehow became the top federal, but it's not somehow Trump put her as the top federal prosecutor in Virginia to prosecute his political opponents. She went into this grand jury room on the Comey and Letitia James case, at least we're hearing on the Comey case, because Judge Curry, the federal judge said, I need to look at the transcripts.

12:18Ben Meiselas:And there was no court reporter that was in there, apparently, or taking a transcription after around 4.50 p.m. Eastern time to the time the indictment was actually signed off by the grand jury. And the judge is like, what happened there? Where's the missing transcript? And you had Halligan there all alone, all by herself. And there's just so many question marks. I mean, you had the Republican United States attorney in that area leave and did a memo to file saying that we didn't have probable cause to even do these prosecutions. I just want to get your perspective as the top law enforcement officer in Massachusetts as the attorney general, as you reflect on what's happening at the AG level, at the federal level with Bondi, whether it's what's Halligan's doing, what they're doing with the Epstein files.

13:11Ben Meiselas:I mean, I just would be interested to hear your perspective on what you're seeing there. Because it's like, to me, as a lawyer, when I went to Georgetown Law, I graduated in 2010, I'm seeing this and I'm like, oh, it's just pain. It's painful to watch. It's painful and it's devastating because at the end of the day, how they're proceeding to bring about so-called justice and accountability is by shredding the constitution itself. And everyone should be concerned about that. The last I check, regardless of whoever the hell you are and your political affiliation, you should care about transparency, accountability, and due process.

13:47As I prosecute cases in Massachusetts, we have to to file a grand jury proceeding. It's secret, yet it has strict rules of engagement of how you do that, including a transcript, including information that can be shared at some later point if someone feels as though their rights are being violated. As these two defendants are saying in this case, in addition to that, transparency. How was this person appointed? Did they follow the law in appointing her? And I don't think they did. And they're trying to challenge that in court. And so if we have folks who are not lawfully appointed, not following grand jury procedure, and of course the indictment process, then you have no due process.

14:31You have a rogue justice system, and that means the average person should absolutely be concerned. We can just pull you over, pick you up, bring you somewhere and have you indicted and then put you in jail. If I were to do that using the limited resources, public resources I have, go after my enemies for every hateful thing they said against me, the Constitution wouldn't matter. And if you don't have a Constitution, you don't have a guarantee that this government owes you anything. We don't owe you SNAP benefits. We don't owe you accountability. We don't owe you due process. We don't owe you a Second Amendment, a First Amendment, a 14th.

15:06Pick whatever one you like. So that's what Democratic AGs are fighting for, the very principles and the very Constitution itself, to make sure this country continues, not just for ourselves, but for our children, my two boys, and every generation to follow.

15:21Ben Meiselas:We appreciate you joining us. Keep us posted on all of the cases that you're working on. We'd love to have you back. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, thanks so much. Thank you. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers.

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