Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MS NOW’s All In with Chris Hayes to react to President Donald Trump signing the bill to release the Epstein files and raise concerns about the administration’s continued efforts to stall and stonewall on their release.
He also discussed the actions of Lindsey Halligan, President Donald Trump’s handpicked U.S. attorney to bring the case against former FBI Director James Comey, underscoring how her missteps in the case showcase the true vindictive motivations of the Justice Department acting on Trump’s orders.
View the full interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On whether the Trump administration will commit to releasing the full Epstein files:
I’m not at all confident. I think if past is prelude, what we can expect is more stonewalling, more cover up, more inartful ways of explaining why they’re covering up. I think when this chapter of history is written, it will be a test case in how not to handle a crisis. This has already been dragged out for almost a year. I think, by drip, drip, drip of new documents they put out and more that they withhold it will continue to only feed the appetite of the public to know the full truth. And the interesting irony here is that by announcing investigations into Democrats in the Epstein files and saying the president is not under investigation, well, presumably that means that any documents that mention the president can be released because he’s not part of an investigation — it’s only Democrats that were named by Epstein that would be withheld.
So that’s a strange irony they’ll have to try to grapple with. But I think we can fully expect that they will stonewall, and they will, I think, incur the wrath of their base when they do. And the final point on this is to bring it back to what really should matter here, and that is the victims deserve this accountability. I think it is what drove such a strong bipartisan vote. They deserve to know the truth. They deserve to have these files released, whoever they implicate, and hopefully that day will come.
On Trump’s hand-picked attorney admitting the grand jury never saw final Comey indictment:
It’s astonishing that the indictment that was ultimately presented to a judge was never seen by the entire grand jury. So, they bring one indictment in. It is three counts. The grand jury refuses to indict on one of those counts. They should have brought a new indictment before the grand jury and presented that. They didn’t. And it still seems that maybe part of the answer is this strange practice of bringing in an indictment that the grand jury hasn’t seen. But there’s also allegations of missing pages of a grand jury transcript. There are also allegations that this insurance lawyer turned prosecutor may have erroneously instructed the grand jury as to the law. Another really serious problem. You have the problem of her appointment itself, which may have been unlawful. And considering that she’s the only one who signed that indictment that could also get this case thrown out.
And then you have, I think, what was really the gravamen of the hearing today, before it was acknowledged that the indictment, the new indictment, was never shown to the full grand jury. And that is the retribution here, the retaliation here. The evidence of that is so strong, where you have Trump telling Bondi, “You got to go forward with these prosecutions.” You’ve got the firing of a Republican U.S. Attorney who wouldn’t do it because there wasn’t evidence. You’ve got firing of other top people. You have this personal lawyer thrown in. It is so plainly, palpably vindictive that I can’t imagine facts more compelling than the ones we’re seeing to have it thrown out on that basis alone.
On Trump’s Justice Department putting the president’s interests before the rule of law:
[…] We’re seeing the same problem at multiple layers in the Justice Department. So, you force out the career professionals. You bring in this insurance lawyer. She goes alone into the grand jury or doesn’t apparently have very good advice with her. And you have all these problems in the grand jury. It’s one thing when you have an enabler at the Justice Department, it’s another when you have one who is not particularly competent. But then you have the kind of demonstration that you played earlier of Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, saying, “We’re opening this investigation of Democrats in the Epstein files because of new evidence. Is that right? Did I say new evidence? Do we have new evidence? It’s whatever Todd Blanche said it was in his tweet.”
This is the problem when people at the Justice Department at various layers view their responsibility not to the law, not to the rules of ethics, but to the president. And given that they’ve taken the position also that the president, under their unitary executive thinking, is also empowered to command prosecutions they can’t really claim — as they tried in court today — that, well, this prosecutor wasn’t vindictive herself, and therefore it’s not a vindictive prosecution when it was ordered by the vindictive commander in chief.
[…]
These political prosecutions are not different in kind than the administration’s efforts to silence critics at the universities, silence critics at law firms, silence critics in the media. It is part of a broad effort to intimidate and coerce people into silence. And I think we need to see it as that kind of systemic attack on our democratic society and our First Amendment.
###