Washington, D.C. — Last night, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joinedMS NOW’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki to discuss his new effort to compel an independent audit of the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein Files to ensure public trust and transparency ahead of their legally-required release next week.
Schiff also condemned President Trump’s continued campaign of political retribution through repeated failed attempts to re-indict New York Attorney General Letitia James.
View the full interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On the need to ensure the Epstein Files have not been tampered with or concealed:
I’m not sure that you could be fully confident of anything in this administration, including the Inspector Generals — most of which were fired in the early days of the Trump administration — and whether they’ve been replaced by anyone of any independence is very much an open question. But I have more confidence generally in the offices of Inspector General than I do in the top leadership of the Justice Department.
There have been reports that the FBI devoted 1,000 agents to going through, combing through these files, flagging wherever Trump’s name appeared. And there’s good reason to be suspicious of whether any documents that might be incriminating the president will see the public light. So, one way of trying to make sure that the disclosures are fulsome, as required by the law that was passed on a bipartisan basis, is to get the Inspector General to review the custody of these documents to determine whether any are missing. And the administration is supposed to give us a log of anything they are withholding to determine whether that log is complete or whether the thing is missing from there too.
On raising concerns on the administration tampering with the files:
I guess my expectation is that they will produce something. And now that something that they produce may be heavily redacted, and they may claim that those redactions are merely to protect the privacy of the victims, and if they are redactions for that purpose, they would be completely legitimate. We want their privacy respected.
But do we trust the administration to make those redactions only for that purpose, or to over redact in a way to protect or avoid anything incriminating or embarrassing of the president or any of his allies, I don’t think we can have that confidence. I would feel much better if I had a neutral party like an Inspector General making those determinations. And in the log that they provide, it could say just very generically, this category of documents has been withheld. Those documents going to an ongoing investigation, again, that is not going to, I think, satisfy anyone. So, we’ll see how fulsome the production is and how much we’re going to have to fight to really see what they’re holding.
On Trump’s selective and vindictive prosecutions:
It is really shocking, because, of course, the bar in the grand jury is so low. You don’t have to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s merely showing probable cause. And the prosecutor goes into that grand jury decides what that grand jury sees, and if they’re not ethical, they don’t show them anything that would be exculpatory. They only show them what they want to help convince that grand jury to indict. So, for now, repeated grand juries in different venues to say, “You don’t even have probable cause,” that is really shocking at one level, because it just doesn’t happen very often. At another level, it is frankly, all too understandable, given that the administration and the leadership at the Justice Department is just determined to go after the president’s enemies. They’re following his orders. It is vindictive, it is selective, and they seem quite determined to keep trying and keep failing.
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