“We have fools, cowards, and liars at the top of the Justice Department.”
View the full interview HERE.
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell to criticize the Trump administration’s postponing of a classified Senate briefing on President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s three nuclear facilities. Schiff also raised the alarm on Emil Bove, Trump’s nominee for a seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and his past misconduct, including suggesting he would violate court orders ahead of his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee today.
Key Excerpts:
On the Trump administration’s delayed intelligence briefing:
[…] Clearly, there is something either they don’t want to tell the Congress or they’re not eager to share with the Congress. Many of us requested a briefing before the president made the decision to bomb these nuclear sites in Iran. We wanted to get to the bottom of, frankly, this very public dispute between the intelligence community and the president over whether Iran had made a decision to pursue a bomb, whether it was building a mechanism of a bomb, or whether, as the Director of National Intelligence testified just three months ago, no, they hadn’t made that decision. And yes, they were enriching uranium, but they had not made the decision to build a bomb.
So, we already wanted a briefing to try to figure out, okay, where does the truth lie here when you’ve got this contradiction within the administration. Then post-strike, you now have the president and Hegseth saying it was a complete success, everything has been obliterated. But then you have other suggestions, and you have now public reporting that that may very well not be true. So, Congress needs to know. We should have been briefed, frankly, before these strikes. We should have been brought into this decision. Constitutionally, we should have either authorized it or not authorized it, refused to. But at a minimum, we absolutely should have a briefing ASAP and to put it off like this was such a lame excuse, [it] just doesn’t pass the smell test.
[…] I’m not particularly interested in hearing from Hegseth. I would rather hear from the professionals at DOD, the professionals within the intelligence community. They’re much more likely to be the source of fact than these spin artists.
On Emil Bove’s concerning experience and suggesting he would ignore court orders:
[…] One of the top concerns that we’ve had, and we’ve brought this out in our questioning of all of these nominees for different positions — not just judges — but nominees for high Justice Department positions, is will you obey the law? Will you adhere to court orders? This has been at the heart of our concern because we have been fearful that the Trump administration would continue to violate court orders and do so with greater and greater arrogance. And now you’ve got the perfect test case, because a number of my Republican Senate colleagues have likewise expressed, released rhetorically, their commitment to the rule of law and to the adherence to court orders.
And here you have someone, this whistleblower, a venerated veteran prosecutor in the Justice Department, someone promoted within the Trump administration, someone who’s given repeated accolades within the Justice Department, whether it was a Democratic or Republican attorney general at the time. You have the celebrated prosecutor fired because he won’t go along with violating court orders. And he alleges in his complaint that he was essentially instructed or higher ups like Bove and the department were willfully and knowingly violating court orders. They were making misrepresentations to the court, and they were withholding information from the court. That’s about as serious an allegation as you could get. And this guy was doing all that and overseeing all that they’re nominating to the Court of Appeals.
On the lack of moral and ethics in the Justice Department:
[…] It just shows you the top down morally bankrupt leadership from the president through the attorney general and then onto the street that we just saw. These two segments that you portrayed — this Justice Department lawyer, this whistleblower, talking about how he didn’t sign up to lie, being essentially ordered to lie or fired because he wouldn’t lie by the likes of Emil Bove. Someone who moved to dismiss the case against the mayor of New York — the corruption case — to which other prosecutors basically said they didn’t sign up for that. They refused to corruptly dismiss those charges against the mayor. And one of them said, “You might find some fool or some coward to do this for you. That was never going to be me.” But now at the top of the Justice Department this is what we have. We have fools, cowards, and liars at the top of the Justice Department. And you see it now percolate all the way down to the streets of Los Angeles, where they’re beating the father of three Marines, who is a landscaper with no criminal record. It is a betrayal, and it breaks your heart.
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