Senator Schiff Responds to Trump’s Latest Threats

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1:19Ben Meiselas:New players get$30 coin packs for$10 at SpinQuest.com. SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino. Avoid where prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details. So we saw what happens when you appoint an Internet troll with no experience to become the director of the FBI. That was on full display when Kash Patel testified both before the United States Senate and the House. And while it was deeply humiliating for Kash Patel, it was really deeply humiliating for the United States of America. And I truly worry about the other threats that are out there right now that are not being investigated or protected.

1:57Ben Meiselas:And we just see how Patel's handling the Epstein files and and other things. This was Kash Patel, just the photo of him. K dollar sign H right there wearing the camouflage. He would sell this gear. He would post memes of himself, chop sawing or hack sawing off the face of Democratic politicians. I think I saw him do that with Senator Schiff and other people where he would do memes like like that, which is just horrific. Then Senator Schiff got the opportunity to cross examine Kash Patel. You know, it's kind of like watching kind of like no offense to like little babies, like petulant babies who are like arguing, but kind of like where they cover their ears.

2:35Ben Meiselas:I don't want to answer. I don't want to. It was really it was just it was it was I just am thinking what the career FBI agents who were there were doing while they watch this. Just take a look at Senator Schiff cross-examining just an unhinged Patel. Here, play this clip. You can take an Internet. Take it to the bank that the FBI is protecting this country and the state and citizens of California. We are seeing historic reform. internet point of order you're just trying to ask him a question like you said you were going to release the epstein files like why why aren't you releasing them why aren't you releasing them just doesn't make them public and i don't know i read all the federal orders all the court said they can release the files they don't need the grand jury testimony the court said doj go for it release the files here was another part where uh senator schiff was cross-examining patel let's plate.

3:26And let me follow up on Senator Kennedy's question, because he asked you, and I'll be very precise here.

3:39You've seen most of the files. Who, if anyone, did Epstein traffic these young women to besides himself? And you said himself, there's no credible information, none. If there were, I would bring the case yesterday that he trafficked to other individuals. And Kennedy, that the information we have again is limited and senator kennedy said the answer is no one and you said for the information we have so is it your testimony today that in all the epstein files that jeffrey epstein trafficked no one to anyone but himself is that your testify testimony i never said jeffrey epstein didn't traffic anyone else did he traffic any any young woman to someone other than himself that was mr kennedy's question

4:27Ben Meiselas:and i said the information that three administrations have had access to made determinations that there are no investigative leads that were credible to prosecute and investigate any others i'm specifically stating whether your testimony today you just read it and i said it 10 minutes ago so let the record reflect my testimony i just want of victims like Virginia Weaver who have testified otherwise, who have said otherwise. And you're telling the American people today that the Epstein list is a single name and it's Jeffrey Epstein. That's what we're to believe. That's not what I'm saying. That's what you're saying.

5:07Ben Meiselas:And you can say whatever you want. I don't even know what that was. Let's bring in California Senator Adam Schiff. Senator, you had the opportunity to cross-examine an internet troll posing as an FBI director, but unfortunately with the authorities of one, what do you make of it? Well, that claim that you just played was, I think, what was most astounding, which is the Epstein list, according to Kash Patel, has only one name on it, and that is Jeffrey Epstein. So he basically wants the American people now, after for years saying that there was this secret list of very high profile people that were the clients of Jeffrey Epstein.

5:47He wants suddenly the American people, including the MAGA base to believe, no, no, there was actually only one name. And that was Jeffrey Epstein. Not the least bit credible, but it wasn't the only thing he said that wasn't believable at all. What really set him off, what set off that tirade that he started with is I asked him who made the decision to transfer Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirator, Jelaine Maxwell, who made the decision to transfer her to this minimum security prison not fit for a sex offender? And his answer was the Bureau of Prisons. And I said, just them? Without any input from the administration or from Blanche or Bondi or anybody?

6:27They're just on their own, coincidentally, after this interview transferred her to this minimum security prison? Do you expect people to believe that? But he does expect people to believe that. And it all gets back to the point you started with, which is we have someone now who's wholly incompetent running the FBI, someone who is essentially a troll. and I think about the men and women at the Bureau who I worked with when I was an assistant U.S. attorney. They're the premier law enforcement agency in the country to have such terrible leadership. And the fact that Patel is firing these experienced agents because they worked on the Mar-a-Lago investigation.

7:12They worked on the January 6th investigation for no other reason. They're getting fired. So we're losing expertise and we're gaining incompetence. We're taking people off of important cases and we're making them essentially an immigration police force. This is a dangerous development for the country because it means really serious, violent criminal cases, terrorism cases, counterintelligence cases are not getting the staffing leadership they need right now.

7:41Ben Meiselas:You know, is Donald Trump intentionally trolling the FBI by picking the worst people to run it right now? Now, he said he wanted retaliation and retribution. And what better way to do that than literally pick Kash Patel, who's written books and has posted about his distaste and hatred for the FBI? And also, if I was a career guy at the FBI and I found out that a 22-year-old kid, Thomas Fugate III, who was an intern and a gardener with no experience, was now getting one of those senior positions. And I had a report to a former intern who's now, what's Fugate running, like counterterrorism? He's doing like domestic counterterrorism.

8:23Ben Meiselas:I mean, I don't even know how the morale exists at all in the FBI. And then I read that lawsuit that was filed last week by Driscoll and Evans and all those other top leaders who were saying all that Patel and Bongino cared about was social media likes and reposts over investigatory work. So I don't know, it feels like he wants to destroy the FBI by doing it. So we're the victims. I think that's right. I think that's right. And, you know, to put that kind of incompetence in charge of the FBI really helps to kind of hollow it out. And people are leaving the FBI in droves or losing this expertise.

9:07And what's more, around the country, as FBI agents show up as witnesses in important cases, juries are not believing them because they think the FBI now is just essentially a political tool of the president. And that's terrible. In those pleadings that you were talking about, this lawsuit that was filed by three well-respected senior FBI agents. And they basically said in the complaint, Patel told them that if they worked on an investigation of Donald Trump, that they were going to get fired. And he said, that is possibly illegal, but we're going to do it anyway. And there's nothing you can do about it.

9:47That's basically now our FBI leadership. And you're right. You put someone like that in charge. People are going to flee the agency. It's going to degrade. And I guess that's what the president wants. It's part of his retribution campaign.

10:01Ben Meiselas:You know, it's a great point. I never even thought of it. So I want to highlight it here that there are thousands of cases taking place or more across the country where FBI agents have investigated something. They've then turned over the file, working in concert with the United States Attorney's Office. An indictment is brought eventually if the case goes to trial that FBI agent has to testify and if you're the criminal defense attorney you're out there and I this is probably going on now across the country you're taking all of these posts and the trolling and all the things that Patel and Bongino and their concealment and you're going to cross-examine the FBI agent who's going to have and the case may not even be about any Trump relay.

10:50Ben Meiselas:It may be about drugs. It may be about counterterrorism, right? But you're going to start showing, wait a minute, this is what they're doing with fishing boats in Venezuela without giving evidence. This is what they're doing with immigrants. I'm supposed to trust you. And you look at a jury that represents a cross-section and all you need is one to hang that. And you could probably pick them out easily right now in these very serious cases. I think that is absolutely the case. I talked to assistant U.S. attorneys when Trump was president the first time and it was nowhere near as bad then. And they were telling me, yes, defense counsel are making the arguments in court that the president's people are coming after me for X, Y or Z reasons.

11:32And it's already affecting their ability to prosecute cases. Now you have an addition to, you know, this troll as FBI director, you have some of these real rabid partisans being appointed as U.S. attorneys. And you have people leaving those offices, too. It's just really decimating the whole Department of Justice. And meanwhile, it's not like the threats have gone away from around the world or domestically. but nevertheless this premier agency is just being crippled you know i want to talk about

12:07Ben Meiselas:the economy quickly um although it doesn't have to be quickly it's just we can't do the interview all day obviously your time is precious you've got the fox uh poll showing that uh 52 percent of americans right now view the economy right now as worse under trump than it was under biden And the entire MAGA Republican campaign was to basically vilify the other administration's economy and say they were going to make things more affordable and make housing more accessible and all of these things. But it seems all they're interested in doing is chopping down the trees around the White House to build the 90 ,000 square foot ballroom or to change the Rose Garden to Club Rose Garden or Donald Trump gallivanting in the UK as they put on the kind of Disney princess version at Windsor Castle for him, you know, to try to appeal to his ego.

13:01Ben Meiselas:And Americans are suffering while to me, you have all this, these symbols of Trump kind of flaunting his wealth now that he's achieved with the quid pro quos and just rubbing it in our faces. It feels like. Oh, for sure. For sure. I, you know, just the other day, Forbes came out with their, you know, I don't know, thousand richest people and Trump had moved up by, you know, over a hundred spaces. He's already made billions of dollars in the first eight months of this administration. He's made more money in eight months than he made in his entire life before that. And it's just graft. It's just using the instruments of his office to grab money.

13:43He's getting 16 million from CBS over a bogus lawsuit. He's getting 12 million from ABC over another bogus lawsuit. He's getting another third Air Force One from the gutteries. So while people on the ground are still trying to pay their rent and figure out how they're going to pay for those ever more expensive groceries, I guess the president would say they should take solace in the fact that he now is a third Air Force One. He has a palace in the sky courtesy of gutter. That's not helping anyone. People's personal economies are really suffering right now. Donald Trump's personal economy is the only one that is doing well.

14:25And I think this is why people are really souring on him as we see these prices continue to climb. He had promised, as you pointed out, that on day one he was going to bring prices down. But his tariff policies are driving them up. Everything else he's doing is driving those policies up. And it's just making life even more difficult for average families.

14:49Ben Meiselas:And finally, I want to get your take on Brendan Carr, FCC commissioner, wrote Project 2025 roadmap on this. He's like posting memes of like the office, like raising the roof or Jack Nicholson, like laughing and mocking. Like he's like actually playing like a villain. It's just weird to see this behavior from any human being, yet alone the leader of the FCC commissioner, gloating about getting a talk show host or a late night talk show host like Jimmy Kimmel kicked off the air and the chilling effect that that has. And then you have, obviously, you have Nexstar wanting to do their big merger where they need FCC approval to clear that 39 % ownership cap.

15:37Ben Meiselas:You've got Sinclair saying that Kimmel needs to issue an apology and donate money to the Kirk family. I went back and watched. I'm like, what are we doing here? Obviously, we condemned what happened in the most serious of terms, but to use that as a pretext to violate everybody's First Amendment rights, it just seems that's what they want to do more than anything. So true. Brennan Carr is now just another kind of anti-free speech pro-MAGA voice that happens to be chairing this important commission that gets to decide whether a news organization gets a license to broadcast. and for someone in that role to be such an overt partisan, to try to be censoring speech the president doesn't like.

16:26And it comes, you know, after a long series of similar attacks on the First Amendment. So you have the FCC threatening to withhold the ability of Paramount to merge with Skydance unless CBS pays off the president. So CBS pays off the president. $16 million to supposedly settle that litigation, that frivolous litigation that the president brought against CBS. So the merger can go through. And then you have that same guy who was holding up that merger, potentially holding up the acquisitions of these local stations, Nexstar and Sinclair, who both want to acquire other media companies. But no, they're not going to get approval from the FCC unless they can do something to show their endearment to the president.

17:18And what better way than trying to pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air? So you have Stephen Colbert off the air. You have Kimmel off the air. Immediately, Colbert off the air. Next year, you have this suppression of free speech. And they're just getting started. They're going to go after nonprofit organizations. They're going to threaten those organizations' tax-exempt status. Trump is already taking aim now at NBC, threatening NBC. Of course, he sued the New York Times, which just got thrown out. The judge there at powerful terms said, this is not a complaint. This is a propaganda filing masquerading as some kind of a civil complaint.

18:04But it does show, I think, cumulatively, the First Amendment has never been more at risk in this country than it is today.

18:12Ben Meiselas:Before we go, Senator, you know, I see signs of hope out there, whether it is peaceful protests, whether it's the fact that people don't like this, Trump's approval is plummeting right now. It's not that this is being embraced and he's being viewed as this is what we've always wanted. But from your vantage point, what you're seeing, reasons for hope, you see Democrats fighting back, coming back from the summer with some fight in spirit? What do you see? You know, there's a lot of reasons for hope in what we're seeing. I mean, just today, the fact that the court threw out this phony baloney propaganda lawsuit by the president against the New York Times, and not just threw it out, but castigated it, shows, okay, at the district level, there's still some independence.

19:01There's still a check and balance. That's working. Seeing people take to the streets to protest the militarization of Washington, D.C., thousands of people taking the streets or millions of people taking the streets on No King's Day to show, no, no, we're not going back to the days when we answered to a king. Those kind of actions give me optimism. Seeing prosecutors resign rather than doing things that are unethical, seeing a CDC director who's been fired willing to come before Congress and tell the American people what they're doing is dangerous to your health. What they asked me to do before they fired me because I refused would have been dangerous to your health.

19:44That is to make decisions about vaccines, not based on science, but based on their anti-vax conspiracy theories. So there are lots of heroes who are coming out every day. And the American people, I think, are standing up every day. In Chicago, there are plans to make sure that kids can get to school from immigrant families so other parents are taking them to school so that their parents don't get arrested bringing their kids to school. And they're making food deliveries to folks rather than have them risk going out shopping and getting arrested. So lots of people stepping up right now. Each of us needs to step up in our own way to mitigate the harms that are going on until we can put an end to them.

20:28Ben Meiselas:Senator Adam Schiff, thanks for joining us as always. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers this month.

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