← The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
Lawrence: With Trump's shutdown ending, Dems are closer than ever to forcing Epstein files release
00:43:39
Tonight on The Last Word: The Senate votes 60-40 on a bill to end the government shutdown. Also, Donald Trump pardons several people who tried to overturn the 2020 election. And states fight back and win against Trump’s cuts to SNAP. Rep. Jamie Raskin and Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell join Lawrence O’Donnell.
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C
Well, in his first term, Donald Trump created the longest government shutdown in history. And now in his second term, Donald Trump has set the record again for the new longest government shutdown in history. The end of the government shutdown was forged when five Senate Democrats and only five, changed their position in a compromise that forced every Senate Republican to change their positions, while it also forced Donald Trump to change his position and it has forced every Republican member of the House of Representatives to now change their positions. So this is five Democrats who changed their position and 53 Republican senators, 217 Republican House members, and one Republican president, a total of 271 Republicans who changed their positions and are now supporting a version of a budget bill that they said they would never support, and five Democrats who changed their position to vote for that same bill which was proposed by those five Democrats. So who caved here? What does caved mean? But this being Washington, the five changed votes on the Democratic side versus the 271 Republicans changing their position is being generally reported as the Democrats, meaning all of them. The Democrats abandoning their position, the Democrats caving, the Democrats losing the shutdown. So five Democrats change their position, 271 Republicans change their position to arrive at a compromised position, and it's reported as just the Democrats caving. Now, if we want to use the word cave in place of the word compromise. 271 Republicans, including Donald Trump, caved to just five Democrats. Not eight, just five because three Democrats were already voting with Republicans on this. 271 Republicans changed their position to accept the demands of five Democrats that created the 60 vote majority in the Senate to pass a bill. And what did those Democrats achieve? Well, those five Democrats forced Republicans, including Donald Trump, to agree to. First of all, they forced Donald Trump, who's been trying to stop funding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, to increase funding for food stamps. Increase it. That is not nothing. The five Democrats who changed their position managed to not just guarantee Supplemental Nutrition Assistance funding for almost a year, but they actually got it increased. And no Republican wanted to do that. Donald Trump didn't want to do that. No Republicans wanted that. So they caved, if that's the word we're going to use on that. The Republicans did. And all the Republicans are caving to that demand by those five Democrats for their votes. That's one of the things the five Democrats got for their votes. The five Democrats also obtained a guarantee to rehire every federal worker Donald Trump has fired during the government shutdown. Every one of them. 4,000 people will get their jobs back and they will get back pay because of this compromise that five Senate Democrats forced on 271 Republicans, including Donald Trump. The compromise also forces Donald Trump to deliver back pay to all federal workers, every one of them affected by the Trump shutdown, something Donald Trump was trying to avoid. Donald Trump was trying to become the first president in history to deny back pay to every government worker affected by the shutdown. And those five Democratic senators got that back pay guaranteed. That is not nothing. They got something. Something. They didn't get what they wanted. They didn't get everything. They didn't get the big thing. They got something. It should not be surprising that one of the five senators in this compromise is Tim Kaine of Virginia, where he represents one of the states with the most federal government workers per capita working in and around Washington, D.C. it should also not be surprising that both of the Democratic senators from Nevada joined the compromise that will avoid the airport nightmares that were looming in America for Thanksgiving and Christmas if the shutdown continues. Las Vegas, Nevada is completely dependent on reliable air traffic into Las Vegas to feed the local economy, the biggest economy in Nevada. Las Vegas, has other problems now with Canadians boycotting tourism in America. But the airport nightmare was something that Nevada's Democratic senators decided after 40 days they simply could not abide for people in government who care about how the government works and how the country runs, which does not include Donald Trump. People who care about that, including our air traffic control system. For them, government shutdowns are actually painful every day. They're not a stunt. They're not a tactic. They're not a strategic Tactic. They are painful. Government shutdowns are full of pressure every day for people who care about this government actually running and running well. And that pressure of a government shutdown gets greater every day. Some people who have never been in the room with a senator feeling that pressure seem to think that it's easy for senators from Nevada to do nothing to end the government shutdown that is ruining American air travel. People who have never seen or heard a majority or minority leader of the Senate actually try to persuade a senator on how to vote seem to think that it's easy. If you haven't worked in the Senate, you haven't actually seen it happen. It is not televised. It happens on the Senate floor when the senators are speaking privately and don't have microphones. It happens in the leader's office just off the Senate floor. And it happens in the Mansfield room and the LBJ room just off the Senate floor. Those rooms were named for previous Senate majority leaders who were thought to be masters of the Senate. Democratic senators meet in the LBJ room. The minority party meets in the LBJ room for their group lunches. The majority party meets meets in the Mansfield room for their group lunches. No reporter, no pundit who claims expertise in this arena has ever been allowed in one of those rooms while those meetings were happening. No authors of books about political science have ever been allowed in those rooms. They have no idea what it's like for a Democratic leader of the Senate trying to guide every Democrat in the Senate in a room together at the same time time. Very few Senate staffers are ever allowed in that room. There are usually no more than two or three staffers in that room. I was in that room many times in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was president and a masterful Senate majority leader, George Mitchell of Maine, was running that room. There was a moment in those early Clinton years in that room when it seemed that the only reason two senators didn't start throwing punches is that they were seated too far apart from each other when they were yelling at each other. They were two men who fully respected each other, were very friendly with each other, usually voted the same way. But that day almost came to blows because that's how tense it can be in that room, and that is how important the work is. Those two senators had conflicting opinions that day, and both of them thought that what they wanted to do was the best thing for the country. That was not an egotistical shouting match. That was a shouting match about the future of this country. A shouting match about what this country needed at that moment. And luckily at that moment, the most tense moment I've ever seen in that room, in the Mansfield room. John Glenn was in the room. John Glenn was in the room that day. A veteran Navy combat pilot who was the first person to orbit the earth as an astronaut. He was a hero to everyone in that room long before any of us ever met him. And in a soft voice, he calmed the room and got everyone back on track, trying to figure out how to work together. The Senate is lucky when it has giants like John Glenn in the room. World class heroes who command everyone's admiration all the time. But Senator John Glenn was not a leader. He was never a leader. I never heard a Senator say, I'm voting for it because John Glenn is voting for it. There is no more difficult thing to try to do in the United States Senate than to lead. Very few Senators have ever been able to do it either at the committee level or at the majority minority leader level. The Republican leaders of the Senate during the Trump era have not commanded party discipline. Fear of Trump voters in their states is what has commanded party discipline by Republicans in the Senate. Every Republican Senator fears what will happen to them if they don't do what Donald Trump tells them, tells their voters in their states that they should do. The Democrats have never had an enforcer like that and never will. Chuck Schumer now has the impossible job of what the great George Mitchell and other majority leaders used to call herding cats. George Mitchell didn't mean that as an insult to Democratic senators. He meant that as a description of the degree of difficulty and complexity of trying to lead the United States Senate. It's like herding cats. Most outside observers have come to believe it seems, that it's easy, that Chuck Schumer has easy decisions to make. Clear, simple, easy, black and white. And that may be because Chuck Schumer made the job look too easy. As the Senate Majority Leader during the Biden presidency, Chuck Schumer pulled off the most significant string of 50 vote victories in the United States Senate that we have ever seen. Chuck Schumer did not have a majority of United States Senators. Chuck Schumer was the leader of a 5050 Senate for longer than any other leader in the history of the Senate. And Chuck Schumer could only get to 51 votes with Vice President Harris casting the tie breaking 51st vote. But his legislative accomplishments during the Biden presidency and President Biden's legislative accomplishments were greater, especially when you consider the degree of difficulty than any other president and any other Senate leader of our lifetime. When Lyndon Johnson was the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, no one at the time considered him a master of the Senate because LYNDON Johnson had 65 Democrats on his side of the Senate. The legendary Mike Mansfield, the longest serving majority leader, had 68 Democrats in the Senate. With Lyndon Johnson as President and Mike Mansfield as the Majority Leader, they passed the Civil Rights act in 1964 with 73 votes, with more than two dozen Republicans voting for the Civil Rights Act. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson as President and Mike Mansfield as Senate Majority Leader passed the Voting Rights act with 77 votes. And 30 of those votes were from Republicans. That was an easier job than any day of Chuck Schumer's job. Lyndon Johnson, the so called master of the Senate, had no idea what budget reconciliation was because it did not exist until a year after Lyndon Johnson died. The Senate became dramatically more complex procedurally in 1974, when the budget act was passed, that created the Senate Budget Committee and the House Budget Committee and the complex parliamentary rules of budgeting that have created the budget reconciliation process. A process that Lyndon Johnson would have found maddening. A process far more complex than the most difficult parliamentary challenges that ever faced Mike Mansfield or Lyndon Johnson when they served as Majority Leader. Chuck Schumer lives and breathes those complexities, and no one in the news media truly understands them. It is impossible to understand the workings of an institution when the most delicate operations of that institution are conducted behind closed doors in the Mansfield Room, the LBJ room, the Senate offices, the leader's office, never in front of cameras. Chuck Schumer voted against the compromise that five members of his party negotiated. The Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, is also against that compromise. Here is what Congressman Jeffries said about the job Chuck Schumer has been doing and has done during the government shutdown. Earlier, some Democrats in your own caucus are suggesting Schumer is ineffective and Senate Democratic leader and should be replaced. You, of course, are critical of this deal. Do you view him as effective and.
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Should he keep the job?
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D
Yes and yes.
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B
Throughout the shutdown, you've referred to your Senate colleagues as courageous for rejecting the 14 previous attempts to reopen the government without an extension to the affordable tax credits. Those eight Senate Democrats who voted to start the process of reopening the government, do you still include them in that characterization of courageous Democrats who have kept.
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C
The fight going throughout this shutdown?
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D
Well, I don't have much to say about those individuals, and they're going to have to explain themselves, to their constituents and to the American people. I certainly believe that Senate Democrats, the overwhelming majority of Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, have waged a valiant fight over the last seven weeks, defeating the partisan Republican spending bill 14 or 15 different times, week after week after week, and continue to oppose this effort of passing legislation that does not address the Republican health care crisis by extending the Affordable Care act tax credits. But the fight is getting ready to shift back to the House, where we're going to work hard, hold the Republicans accountable.
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C
It might be easy to criticize Chuck Schumer. It is easy to criticize Chuck Schumer. It's easy to make fun of him. You can wish he were smoother. You can wish he had all the smoothness of Barack Obama. It's easy to criticize him. But it is not easy to replace him. It might be easy to call for his resignation, but it is not easy to say who with a name could do a better job. Who in the United States Senate right now could have persuaded the senators from Nevada to worry less about the disruption in air traffic to Las Vegas? Every Democratic member of the Senate has had a chance to persuade every one of those five Democratic senators to not join this compromise. And not one Democratic member of the Senate has been able to persuade one of those five senators not to join the compromise. They all had a chance to do it. They all had a chance to be the leader. Every single one of them had a chance to lead those five senators away from the vote those five senators were planning to cast. And every single Democratic senator failed to lead them away from that vote. That's how hard leading is in the United States Senate. Those senators can make up their own minds, and they did. And there is nothing, nothing a leader can do about that. It always happens, has always happened throughout our history. Has always happened. When Lyndon Johnson was president of the United States, a former Senate majority leader, president of the United States, two people ran against him in the primary for his reelection. They were both Democratic United States senators who did that. That's how independent senators are and always have been until Donald Trump turned Republican senators into a cult. Just watch the Senate floor. Watch how much time every Democratic senator has on the Senate floor to approach any other senator to try to persuade that senator about anything. And no one could do it. None of them did it. Chuck Schumer did manage to hold on to the senators, who he surely knew wanted to reach a compromise until at least after last week's elections, which were devastating for Republicans because of the shutdown and Other factors. The Trump Republican government shutdown helped crush Republicans in last week's elections. Chuck Schumer was able to hold on to those five Democratic senators until November, which meant that the bills for shocking increases in health care premiums have already been received by many Americans who will have to deal with those bills. And those bills have become vivid to all of us thanks to the attention paid to those bills during the shutdown. The very same health insurance bills that caused Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Republican House representatives to publicly say that her party is wrong on that issue. No Democrat today said that the Democrats are wrong on that issue. But five Democrats decided to move into a compromise position. Chuck Schumer has always been easy to make fun of. The late night comedians love him for that. It would be great if he was somehow a smoother public speaker. But Lyndon Johnson was one of the worst public speakers of the television age and he got the job done as Senate Majority Leader. When the House, the Senate and the White House are all controlled by the same party, the minority party in the United States Senate has never gotten what they wanted in a government shutdown. The five senators who reached that compromise over Chuck Schumer's objection created a compromise that only funds the government until the end of January. It is the live to fight another day strategy. It's a very common strategy in the United States Senate. The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson's position was that the House of Representatives had already passed the budget bill and there was no reason for House members to even come to Washington because the next step was simply for the Senate to pass exactly what the House passed. That was it. That was Mike Johnson's position. Zero compromise. Nothing, not one sentence. So Mike Johnson, according to the cave theory of this story, Mike Johnson is a huge loser in this compromise because Mike Johnson's bill that he passed through the House of Representatives by five votes is not going to be signed into law. It's going to be ripped up. Mike Johnson has to bring all of his Republican House members back and all of them, all of them have to change their positions to agree with just five Senate Democrats who changed their positions. And when Mike Johnson does that, the Epstein files come back to life in the House of Representatives. Because when Mike Johnson convenes the House of Representatives, he will have to swear in the newest elected member of the House of Representatives, Adelita Grialva of Arizona. She will then immediately become the 218th signature on a discharge petition that will force a vote of the House of Representatives on releasing the Epstein files. A vote Mike Johnson fears more than any vote ever cast during his speakership. That is why Mike Johnson closed down the House of Representatives and gave every Republican in the House a paid vacation for the last seven weeks. Fear, abject fear of the Epstein files, where we know Donald Trump's name has to appear many times because, as Jeffrey Epstein said, Jeffrey Epstein was Donald Trump's closest friend for 10 years. The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin, has some questions for Donald Trump, which he put in writing and sent directly to Donald Trump at the White House. Congressman Raskin tells Donald Trump in writing, quote, you have adamantly refused to release the Epstein files despite campaigning on their release. You lied when you denied authoring a lewd and incriminating birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein and you ridiculously claim that your unmistakable signature on that note was not your signature. You shut down the Department of Justice's ongoing investigation into Epstein's co conspirators, and you expressly declined to rule out pardoning his main accomplice, convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. The House Committee on the Judiciary has now received whistleblower information indicating that this cover up goes even further into the Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons than was known before. Documents and information received over the last several days by this committee indicate that under Dr. Tanisha hall, the warden of Federal Prison Camp Bryan, the federal law enforcement staff working at the camp have been waiting on miss Maxwell hand and foot. This information also indicates that Ghislaine Maxwell is working on filing a communication, a commutation application with your administration demonstrating either that Ms. Maxwell is herself requesting you release her from her 20 year prison sentence for her role as a conspirator in Jeffrey Epstein's international child sex trafficking ring, or that this child sex predator now holds such tremendous sway in the second Trump administration that you and your Department of Justice will follow her clemency recommendations. Congressman Raskin demands that Donald Trump, quote, make your former personal attorney and now Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche available for a public hearing immediately with our committee. I am demanding answers to these three questions. First, have you discussed a potential commutation or any form of presidential clemency for Ms. Maxwell and with Mr. Blanche, his underlings, or anyone else in your administration? Second, have you directed Mr. Blanche or anyone else in your administration to provide Ms. Maxwell with the transfer to the prison camp, favorable and preferential treatment in prison, or special accommodations for her communications and interaction with her family and the outside world? Third, what has Ms. Maxwell, her attorneys, family or representatives promised you or your attorneys. Congressman Jamie Raskin will join us next.
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C
We are now getting much closer to the release of the Epstein files. Adelita Grialba will become the final signature on a discharge petition in the House of Representatives to force a vote on releasing the esteem files when she is sworn in this week, probably as Arizona's newest, newest Democratic member of the House. Joining us now is Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He's the top ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee with jurisdiction over these matters. Congressman Raskin, let me begin with your demand from Donald Trump and exactly what you want from him as a result of the whistleblower information that you've obtained.
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B
We basically want to know what is the quid pro quo. She obviously uttered a series of statements to Todd Blanche, Donald Trump's personal lawyer, now the number two at doj, which he found satisfactory. Essentially, she's saying neither Jeffrey Epstein nor Donald Trump had anything to do with sex with underage girls, anything to do with sex trafficking. And so they pronounced themselves satisfied with what she is going to testify, apparently, to the Oversight Committee. What did she get exactly for that? Now, some of it we've very clearly been able to piece together. She got an immediate, utterly unprecedented transfer to a minimum security prison camp in Texas, which never even had allowed sex offenders to go in there before. And she was transferred there pretty much overnight, short circuiting all of the procedural steps and obstacles that most people confront when they try to leave a tougher, higher security prison for a lesser one. You've got to show some compelling reason for doing it. It takes months and months to happen. She was just sent there. And now we have a whistleblower who's come forward to the Judiciary Committee to tell us about what it's like in there. And essentially, she gets first class Trump Hotel concierge type service. She's getting room service behind bars. She gets to play with puppies when she wants to. She gets to go to the gym whenever she wants to. She has shower privileges that no other prisoners have. And then anybody, any of the other inmates who register or protest or even speak to anybody about what's taking place are punished and are facing all kinds of adverse discipline. One of them was actually transferred out of that prison camp to a much tougher prison because she had objected to all of these extraordinary special privileges that were being given to Ghislaine Maxwell. Then we also learned, Lawrence, that she is in the process of sending a commutation petition to President Trump. So is that part of the agreement that she would get pardon from this as well? We want to know exactly what was the deal. But at this point, you know, unlike these 77 pardons that were just handed down yesterday to all of the January 6th co conspirators and supporters, this is one we know about in advance. And I would like my colleagues on a bipartisan basis to take a strong stand against pardoning this child sex trafficking criminal, you know, this sex offender, convicted and unrepentant sex offender. And we should go on record now before it happens that we oppose his use of the pardon power in that way. And of course, he can pardon people as he sees fit, which is what people always say. But we can also speak out about what we think as the House of Representatives and as the U.S. senate, and we should object to that in advance.
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C
How will the discharge petition in the House of Representatives change the dynamic?
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B
Well, we've got with Adelita Grijova's belated arrival or belated swearing in, we are going to have the 218th signature. We need to discharge the legislation ordering the release of the entire Epstein file. Of course, that's got to go to the Senate too, and we don't know what's going to happen over there. The Trump administration is saying, oh, it's okay. The Oversight Committee is releasing all of the documentation anyway. No, nonsense. They're releasing exactly what they want us to see. We want the administration to release what they don't want us to see. We want to see the whole thing. Exactly what Cash Patel was demanding, what Pam Bondi was demanding before they got into office, before they sent more than a thousand FBI agents to work, 247 to look for Donald Trump's name in every email, in every text, in every, every photograph, for his image and every video and so on. We just want the entire file. And they know exactly what that means because that's what they were demanding up until they did their own vetting of it, and now they don't want anybody to see any of it.
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C
To go back to the whistleblower information, which is new, that you're bringing to us tonight, is there a possibility that the whistleblower that you've been dealing with at the committee will go public and will testify publicly?
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B
I'm not certain about that. The whistleblower has wanted us to know that basically there's been this essential corruption of the Bureau of Prisons and the criminal justice process. And of course, that's not that much of a surprise because we've seen it in the Department of Justice when, you know, they started out by offering pardons to all of these felons, regardless of what other offenses they had engaged in, including being child predators, including armed robbers and so on. But, you know, this is a brave, tough whistleblower who says that they don't want to see this kind of prostitution and corruption of the Department of Justice and of the Bureau of Prisons. It's a situation where you have staff who feels like they've been put to go to work for Ghislaine Maxwell and this decades old conspiracy to cover up an international child sex trafficking ring that is doing at least a billion and a half dollars worth of business, because that's what the banks belatedly came forward to say with these SARS statements, you know, the suspicious activity reports. So there's this massive cover up going on. And if actually what we're seeing it happen in real time, and if Donald Trump goes forward and offers commutation and a pardon to Ghislaine Maxwell, that will be the final act in this cover up and they'll put her out, they'll trot her out there to say she saw nothing wrong, nobody did anything wrong, much ado about nothing, she'll get her pardoned, and they think they'll put it to rest. But the difference here, I believe, is that we have a massive bipartisan opposition to a cover up here. And people are demanding to know what exactly took place with this child sex trafficking ring, with all of these very influential and powerful men all over the world. And also Ghislaine Maxwell, who herself was convicted of participating as a child sex predator, as well as a groomer and a trafficker.
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C
So Donald Trump issued this very large, Sweeping pardon involving January 6th activity and election lies told by Rudy Giuliani and others. And it's an interesting pardon because it's directed at people who are not charged with any federal crimes. Therefore, it's functioning as some kind of public admission that Donald Trump, I guess, knows they did commit federal crimes and they know they committed federal crimes. Might that be what's behind it all? But isn't it also just part of the Trump fog of pardons that he's putting out there that will then be followed at some point by the Ghislaine Maxwell pardon?
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B
Yeah, I think there are two things that are going on. I mean, one is this massive act of historical revisionism that they've been engaged in from the beginning about the 2020 election. They want people to believe that Donald Trump actually won an election. He lost by more than 7 million votes, 306 to 232 in the electoral College. They want people to believe that there was fraud and corruption when 60 different federal and state courts ruled against Trump, saying that there was no electoral fraud, no electoral corruption. In many cases, sanctioning the lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani, who brought the nonsense forward and uttered all of these lies without any evidence at all. But see the other thing that's going on here? So one is kind of that whitewash. But two, as you're suggesting, is creating a fog of pardons, trying to essentially lose people like Ghislaine Maxwell in a crowd. Suddenly, you know, she just sneaks through in this massive crowd of January six co conspirators and enthusiasts. This is a very big deal because she obviously knew what was taking place with the Epstein conspiracy. She was a central actor in it. She knows about the money dimension. She knows about how they recruited and tricked and deceived all of these girls. She knew about how they used money to build a barrier around themselves, how they corrupted courts, how they corrupted lawyers, how they recruited different people to participate in it. And either you want to participate in that cover up or you want the truth to come out. Now, some people have said to the Democrats, well, wait, there might be Democrats in there. Are you sure you want to participate in blowing up their cover up and their conspiracy? Yes, we do. We think anybody who's implicated should be known. And if there are Republicans who feel differently, and obviously Donald Trump feels differently, well, that's on them. But the American people really want to know because child sex trafficking is a serious crime. And, you know, you got to go back and look at what we do know from that period to understand what a vicious and brutal operation that was. And we can't cover up for it. It's like what they're doing with January 6th. If we allow them to whitewash it and to send the truth down an Orwellian memory hole. It's setting us up for political coups and violent insurrections in the future and perhaps in the very near future. So we've got to insist upon the truth. That's something that Alexei Navalny says in his wonderful book that he wrote in one of Putin's filthy prisons. Patriot, he says everybody must do what the tyrants fear the most, which is to tell the truth. And that's what this whole thing is about.
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C
Congressman Jamie Raskin, thank you very much for joining us today.
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B
Thank you, Lawrence.
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C
And coming up, Massachusetts led the way for 25 states who took on Donald Trump and won after Donald Trump tried to cut funding to help feed hungry American families during the government shut down. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell will join us next.
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C
As Donald Trump has been Trying to End Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits during the government shutdown, the Attorney General of Massachusetts led the legal fight in federal court to force Donald Trump to fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, the New York Times reports. The Trump administration on Monday said that it would return to the Supreme Court in yet another attempt to halt full federal funding for food stamps, signifying the latest twist in a winding saga that has imperiled the nation's largest anti hunger program. The administration revealed its intentions just hours after an appeals court refused to block the decision of a lower court judge who had previously ordered the government to finance benefits completely this month for the roughly 42 million people who receive aid to buy groceries. Joining us now is Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell. Thank you very much for joining us tonight. It has been a busy weekend for you. You filed this case in federal court in Boston. You have been back and forth from the district level to the appeals court. Donald Trump wanting to take it to the Supreme Court. Given that we probably by this next week may be through the government shutdown, what have we learned in this and what do we need to know about the possibilities of this kind of assistance being stopped by Donald Trump in these situations?
- [42:47]
G
While of course residents may continue to be frustrated that our government is shut down for the longest time in history and frustrated with Congress, I want to remind them that there are a group of elected that have been fighting from the very beginning to hold this administration accountable. And that's Democratic ags. I was really proud to co lead a group of 25 states and three governors to make it so that the Trump administration and the USDA would give 42 million Americans across the country, including 1.1 million Americans here in Massachusetts, the SNAP benefits they are entitled to. Never in the history of our country during a war or even a government shutdown, has SNAP recipients not received the benefits that they were due to. So we went to court. We got a court order requiring them to turn on benefits for the month of November. And every step of the way, they have been fighting back against that. And their most recent action would require states to claw back, essentially take the money back from the residents that we have given benefits to. And so we went into court late last night and again this morning, or filed the paperwork late last night, went into court this afternoon, and the judge has stayed that directive from the USDA so that benefits would continue to flow to our residents across the country.
- [44:05]
C
And so assuming there is a house vote later this week and the government shutdown is ended, in their court filings, Donald Trump's lawyers say, oh, we very much want to fully fund this program. It's just that because of the shutdown, we can't. When this shutdown is lifted, we're going to quickly find out the truth about that.
- [44:31]
G
It's total nonsense and has been from the very beginning. And the chaos and confusion they have created is by their own incompetence. And I can't mince my words here because we're talking about seniors on fixed income, children that are going without food. Our most vulnerable depend on SNAP resources. I was on food assistance as a kid. These aren't folks just sitting on a couch taking advantage of government. No, they're working during a cost of living crisis and trying to feed their families, trying to get ahead. And government should help and not harm. And they have had access to billions of dollars from the very beginning to fund this program. We should never have even had to go to court to get them to do their jobs. But because they were unwilling, even though at first they said they would, and then the week before November started, they changed their mind. We ran to court and proud, frankly, that this coalition stood up to ensure that benef flow to our residents and of course, sustain our economy. And the grocers and the merchants that also depend on these resources too.
- [45:33]
C
What did it mean to you as a former recipient of this Benefit, supplemental nutrition. To actually be the person who's able to go into court and fight for it.
- [45:46]
G
Oh, it's significant. You know, I do this work of being the Attorney General of Massachusetts, not because I feel as though I have a professional calling to serve other people and to do something that's bigger than me, but it is personal. I'm always bringing in my personal narrative. And I think about my father that you knew when he got out of prison, he worked, but he still needed some help to get back on his feet. My grandmother, who struggled at times, who was working but needed some help. Food assistance was there. It was temporary to allow me to then become the first black AG of Massachusetts. This is what every family wants. They want the next generation to do better, and they need government to help them access opportunity. And it's been tragic and horrific to watch this administration step sort of work against us and absolutely unconscionable.
- [46:34]
C
You joined us early in this administration to talk about how what state attorney generals might be able to do to counter Donald Trump. The government shutdown was probably not on your list of things to anticipate. This way. This is the kind of litigation where you have to really make it up as you go along. No one's ever had to do this one before.
- [46:56]
G
For I think people want to compare Trump 2.0 with Trump 1.0. It's very different. The blatant and persistent unlawful actions by this administration, the chaos and confusion. I tell folks everyone should be alarmed and why it's not personal. This president was Democratic and doing the same thing. Well, we would hold him accountable or her accountable to. At the end of the day, what we're seeing is a president that is set on working against us States who are trying to address the issue of a affordability in our lawsuits. Right here in Massachusetts, we're now over 41 lawsuits protecting access to billions of dollars of Massachusetts investments. They tried to come for $3.24 billion in Massachusetts investments. Our 40 plus lawsuits have protected $3.02 billion. So lawsuits are working, AGs are working, but it's only Democratic AGs, not one Republican AG to be found. And I hope that gives some folks in this country hope and inspiration that there are folks out here who will continue to fight for them.
- [48:02]
C
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, thank you very much for joining us tonight.
- [48:06]
G
Thank you for having me.
- [48:07]
C
Thank you. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell gets tonight's last word.
- [48:14]
E
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