“You give a convicted felon like Donald Trump immunity, and you make him President of the United States and he’s going to act like a crook with immunity, which is what he’s doing.”
View the full interview here. Watch on Substack here.
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined reporter Jim Acosta, host of The Jim Acosta Show on Substack, for a wide-ranging discussion on the corruption of the Trump administration, including President Donald Trump’s acceptance of a $400 million Qatari plane, his meme coin, his open defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the unlawful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the harmful implications of the presidential immunity case.
Key Excerpts:
On the legality and national security concerns of Trump accepting a $400 million Qatari plane:
[…] They’ve already acknowledged that when they did their legal analysis, and of course here we’re relying on the incredibly independent objective analysis of Pam Bondi, but they’ve even acknowledged that it would be unlawful, unconstitutional for them to accept this aircraft, this $400 million gift from the Qataris if it went directly to the Trump foundation. So, they want to launder it through the Defense Department, which doesn’t make it any more legal. It just pulls the Defense Department into this scheme to enrich the president. And so what I want to know from the Defense Department is a number of things. First of all, what is this going to cost taxpayers if they have to somehow retrofit this aircraft, if they’ve got to go through and extensively debug it, make sure that there’s no electronic surveillance, that they’ve got to bring it up to the standards of an Air Force One and all the rest of that. What’s it going to cost the taxpayer? How long is it going to take?
If this isn’t going to be ready for a couple of years, it means that basically Trump is going to get this aircraft on his way out the door. And it’s really about just the private use of this plane by the president. But also, what is the DOD doing to protect themselves from being a party willing or unwilling to this graft, this scheme. What does it mean also for our national security? Because the Qataris aren’t stupid. They want something for their $400 million investment. If it were just a nice gesture, Jim, as the president likes to claim, they would have given you the plane or maybe given someone off the street the plane. No, they gave it to the president for a reason.
On Trump’s immigration policy directly violating the Court:
[…] They want to do more and more extreme things, arrest judges, call out the National Guard, send people to maximum security prisons outside the country, violate court orders. It still takes my breath away that the Supreme Court of the United States, this right-wing court, essentially orders the president to facilitate the return of someone who it was a clear violation of the law to deport or render.
The president is meeting with the president of El Salvador. He could ask for the return. He refuses to do so. He acknowledges he could just pick up the phone. He’s openly contemptuous of both the Supreme Court and the lower court. That is really unprecedented. And for people who might be tempted to think, “Well, I’m not a suspected gang member. Why should I care about that?”
If they can grab anyone off the street and give them a label or violate a court order and send you overseas or make the argument that as long as they send you overseas before the court can intervene, there’s nothing the courts can do, then really no one is safe.
On the Supreme Court aiding the Trump administration’s corruption scheme:
[…] Everybody’s cashing in. Pam Bondi’s cashing in, Kristi Noem wants to cash in. And you know who we have largely to thank for this? A guy named John Roberts, who just happened to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who gave Donald Trump immunity. You give a convicted felon like Donald Trump immunity, and you make him President of the United States and he’s going to act like a crook with immunity, which is what he’s doing. And the people around him, they know they’re getting a pardon on the way out the door. So, they’re acting just as crooked as he is.
[…] It’s difficult to extrapolate sometimes from the justices’ arguments of whether they’re playing devil’s advocate or whether they’re really the devil. But what I’m taking away from the coverage I’ve seen so far is a recognition that birthright citizenship is very clear from the Constitution. The Trump administration is not going to win on the merits. And so they’re shifting to a different objective in that case. And the different objective is to try to strike down the use of nationwide injunctions. And, of course, what that refers to is when something unconstitutional like an attack on birthright citizenship takes place and you go to a court for relief, that court has the power to issue an injunction against deporting, for example, people born in the United States because they’re citizens and have that injunction apply nationwide. And what the Trump administration wants to do is they want to stop judges from being able to issue injunctions nationwide, even though they were thrilled to do it when Biden was president.
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