“None of the calculation involved national security, none of the calculation involved any real accountability. For him, it was delaying to avoid embarrassment.”
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 call out the incompetence and unfitness of Mike Waltz, President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser, and Ed Martin, January 6th sympathizer and Trump’s nominee for U.S. District Attorney of the District of Columbia.
Key Excerpts:
On Trump’s removal of Mike Waltz as National Security Adviser:
[…] What really stands out to me about Mike Waltz’s firing is, first of all, how long it took. It’s been over a month since the whole Signalgate story broke. No one was held accountable for the longest time. And the reason no one was held accountable is Donald Trump didn’t want the embarrassment of acknowledging that something really wrong took place that endangered our national security. Didn’t want to reward, in his view, journalists who brought this to light, including Jeffrey Goldberg. None of the calculation involved national security, none of the calculation involved any real accountability. For him, it was delaying to avoid embarrassment.
And similarly, the decision to exile Waltz to be the ambassador of the U.N., says a couple of things about the president as well. One is, “Hey, this was another way of, kind of changing the story line. We’re not getting rid of him. He’s not being punished. We’re just giving him this new responsibility.” But it also says how little the president respects the office of ambassador to the United Nations, how little he values our diplomacy or that body. Basically, this is a way to get him out of the president’s sight and do so in a way that minimizes the president’s embarrassment. Again, our diplomatic needs, could [not] care less. The national security imperative and risks not really the issue here. It’s all about avoiding embarrassment for the president.
On the need for a Judiciary Committee hearing on Ed Martin:
[…] In the questions that we posed to him in writing, he really tried to deny the closeness of his relationship with Cusanelli in other interviews. And very much after the fact, he has tried to distance himself and say that “I wasn’t aware of that photograph. I wasn’t aware of the things that he had said.” But we have these podcasts now that he did with Cusanelli, where he talks about the closeness of his relationship, where he acknowledges the photo and that he’s aware of the photo. So, we would be able to question him about all of these contradictions, which are statements he has made now under oath.
But more than that, the fondness for this Hitler admirer is only one of the indictments against Ed Martin. You also have the fact that he has no prosecutorial experience. His only real relevant experience is being a “stop the steal” lawyer. He has said, in connection with January 6, that we should go easier on people who beat cops. He has called for reparations to be paid — not to the victims — but to the perpetrators. That the people that were convicted of January 6 crimes deserve not just restitution, but reparations. He has moved to dismiss cases against January 6 defendants as the acting U.S. Attorney who remained his clients. So, he was on both sides of that prosecution. The list goes on and on and on. It includes his failure to disclose hundreds of appearances on Russian propaganda, RT and Sputnik.
So, that’s what a hearing would look like. It would confront him with all of his false answers under oath. It would walk through all of the outrageous statements he’s made about law enforcement and January 6. And it would hold him accountable for propping up, lifting up this avowed antisemite.
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