Breaking: Top Trump Official Caught in Major Lie to Congress as Administration Folds

Summary

The Parnas Perspective – Episode Summary

Episode Title: Breaking: Top Trump Official Caught in Major Lie to Congress as Administration Folds
Host: Aaron Parnas
Date: February 4, 2026

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode covers two explosive developments:

1. The Trump administration’s sudden withdrawal of 700 ICE agents from Minnesota—an implicit acknowledgment of overreach or misconduct.
2. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant being caught in an alleged, clear-cut lie (potential perjury) before Congress about past comments on tariffs and inflation.

Host Aaron Parnas breaks down the political, legal, and social implications of these events, referencing major news sources, congressional testimony, and expert interviews—with a special segment on race and American progress, featuring Dr. Earl Lewis for Black History Month.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Trump Administration Withdraws ICE from Minnesota

• [00:58] Aaron Parnas breaks the news: the administration is “drawing back 700 ICE agents” from Minnesota.
• He frames this as an admission that the previous ICE deployment was inappropriate or unsustainable:

  “The Trump administration has folded... I’m pretty confident if a Democrat did this, they’d bring criminal charges.”

2. Scott Besant’s Congressional Testimony – Caught Lying

• [01:45-02:45] In a heated exchange before Congress, Rep. Maxine Waters presses Treasury Secretary Scott Besant about an investor letter in which he allegedly stated, “tariffs are inflationary.”
• Besant flatly denies it:
  • Waters: “Did you write a letter...writing that, quote, tariffs are inflationary? Did you say that at that time? Yes or no?” ([02:00])
  • Besant: “No.” ([02:01])
• Waters points out the inconsistency, referencing both his denial and a previous public stance that critics had “tariff derangement syndrome.”
• [02:48] Aaron presents the actual January 2024 letter, signed by Besant:

  “Tariffs are inflationary and would strengthen the dollar… Hardly a good starting point for a US industrial renaissance.”

• Aaron’s summary:

  “You heard him clearly say no... Well, we have the letter. This is the letter…” ([02:48-03:25])

3. ICE, Voter Intimidation, and Steve Bannon’s Comments

• [04:07-04:30] As ICE agents are withdrawn, Steve Bannon doubles down with incendiary rhetoric about ICE agents “surrounding the polls” in November:
  • Bannon:

    “Damn right. We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November... We will never again allow an election to be stolen.” ([04:30])

• Aaron interprets this as a targeted effort to intimidate Black and Brown voters:

  “He wants ICE agents patrolling polls in an effort to intimidate black and brown voters across America, to target American citizens, to force them to show...your papers.” ([04:48])

4. Special Feature: Interview with Dr. Earl Lewis – 70 Years Since Brown v. Board

To mark Black History Month, Aaron sits down with Dr. Earl Lewis (historian, University of Michigan) for a wide-ranging conversation on race, history, and hope.

Brown v. Board’s Legacy

• [06:10-07:15] Dr. Earl Lewis: On the transition after 1954’s Brown v. Board:

  “...The whole question of how we think about equal opportunity for all Americans, and particularly how we use...the question of race in American life really came to the fore. For some, that was a scary proposition... The Supreme Court in 54 actually upended that logic and that changed things.”

• Lingering resistance and delayed school integration—schools didn’t really desegregate until the 1970s.

Societal Pushback and the Long Arc of Change

• [07:35-09:41] Dr. Lewis:

  “The first phase of a pushback was almost immediate… That was the first phase. [Actual] integration didn’t happen until 1970, 15 years after...”

  “Desegregation says you eliminate barriers. Integration suggested something about sharing power. And then the courts began to pull back a little bit again with the Bakke decision by 78…”

Modern Parallels, Moments of Hope and Despair

• [09:51-12:14] Dr. Lewis discusses contemporary rollbacks (like affirmative action) and moments of reckoning (Barack Obama’s election, Black Lives Matter):

  “Those who have opposed Brown played the long game… But part of it is how you see the glass fully half full or half empty… There is this period where we’ve always been in some ways a conflict of visions over what version of America is going to play out. But that’s for me, the hopeful part, that there’s a conflict of visions rather than a single vision.”

Advice for Young People

• [12:36]

  “If you think there’s a dark moment and you want to bring light, then your job is to actually turn on the switch and bring that light. You can’t stand by the sidelines and believe someone else is going to do it.”

Lessons and Strategies for the Next 70 Years

• [13:48-16:17]

  “There’s a long arc here… don’t become overly optimistic or overly despairing about the moment… You get to actually rewrite the script… if you look at the last 70 years, people gave a lot, but they didn’t give up... Your job is actually to learn from those strategies and tactics, but also to improve upon them.”

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Scott Besant’s Denial before Congress:

  • Maxine Waters: “Did you write a letter to investors raising concerns about the impact of tariffs, writing that, quote, tariffs are inflationary? Did you say that at that time? Yes or no?” ([02:00])
  • Besant: “No.” ([02:01])

• The Smoking Gun Letter:

  • Aaron: “We have the letter. This is the letter written... Take a look at this section... Tariffs are inflationary and would strengthen the dollar…” ([02:48])

• Steve Bannon’s Aggressive Poll Monitoring Statement:

  • Bannon: “Damn right. We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November... we will never again allow an election to be stolen.” ([04:30])

• Dr. Earl Lewis on Activism and Legacy:

  • “Your job is to actually turn on the switch and bring that light.” ([12:36])
  • “You get to actually rewrite the script... if you look at the last 70 years, people gave a lot, but they didn’t give up.” ([13:48-16:17])

---

Timestamps of Important Segments

• ICE Withdrawal Announcement: [00:58]
• Scott Besant Congressional Testimony: [01:45-03:41]
• Smoking Gun – The Letter: [02:48]
• Bannon on ICE at the Polls: [04:30]
• Dr. Earl Lewis Interview Begins: [05:49]
  • Brown v. Board’s historical context and resistance: [06:10-09:41]
  • Modern perspective & hope: [09:51-12:14]
  • Advice to young people: [12:36]
  • Lessons for the future: [13:48-16:17]

---

Conclusion

This episode illustrates two fronts in America’s ongoing struggle over truth, power, and justice:

• The immediate legal jeopardy for top Trump officials when caught lying,
• The larger, slower arc of social change after Brown v. Board—showing both backlash and resilience.

Dr. Earl Lewis’ perspective offers context and hope, reminding listeners: the country’s story is always being written, and each generation is responsible for “turning on the light” and contributing to the script.

Transcript

[A]

So when I ask, what is Odoo, what comes to mind? Well, Odoo is a bit of everything. Odoo is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth. But, you know, some people also say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable. But then again, you could look at Odoo in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks. I mean, whatever your business needs, manufacturing, accounting, HR programs, you can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company. So what is Odoo? Well, I guess Odoo is a bit of everything. Odoo is a fertilizer, magic beanstalk, building blocks for business. Yeah, that's it. Which means that Odoo is exactly what every business needs. Learn more and sign up [e-mail] that's.

[B]

Odoo.Com we have some major developments this afternoon. The Trump administration has folded when it comes to ICE presence in Minnesota, drawing back 700 ICE agents. And while at the same time, Scott Bess and Donald Trump's Treasury Secretary was just caught perjuring himself in front of Congress. I caught him perjuring himself in front of Congress. This is a significant development. And, well, if a Democrat did this, they bring criminal charges. I'm pretty confident about that. Make sure to, like, comment, share, and subscribe. The more you like, the more people see this and subscribe to my substack. Click the link below to support my work. Let's just jump right into it. Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, was testifying on Capitol Hill today, where he was asked by Maxine Waters whether or not he ever said tariffs were inflationary in a letter to investors. Take a listen to this about this.

[C]

But did you write a letter to investors raising concerns about the impact of tariffs, writing that, quote, tariffs are inflationary? Did you say that at that time? Yes or no?

[D]

No.

[C]

Okay, thank you. Okay. We have a New York Times article that you know.

[D]

New York Times.

[C]

Then last summer when you testified before a Senate committee, you said, and I quote, there is no inflation. Tariffs are not being passed on to consumers. You are quite. You were quite definitive and even claim that critics had, quote, tariff derangement syndrome. Well, those comments are at odds with the statement you made to investors that tariffs are inflationary. Again, I want to be clear. So just let me ask you, are tariffs inflationary? Yes or no?

[D]

According to the San Francisco Federal Reserve, with 150 years of data.

[C]

Yes or no?

[D]

Tariffs do not cause inflation. San Francisco.

[B]

Okay, so you heard him clearly say no. Never wrote this letter saying that tariffs are inflationary. Well, we have the letter. We have the letter. Let me show you the letter. This is the letter written to partners on January 31, 2024. Okay. I'm going to show you who signs it. Scott Besant and the Key Square Team. So we know it's Besant. Take a look at this section. Another differential view that we have is that Trump will pursue a weak dollar policy rather than implementing tariffs. Tariffs are inflationary and would strengthen the dollar. Hardly a good starting point for a US Industrial renaissance. Let's go back to his video. Take a listen about this.

[C]

But did you write a letter to investors raising concerns about the impact of tariffs, writing that, quote, tariffs are inflationary. Did you say that at that time? Yes or no?

[D]

No.

[B]

No. What's this? I don't know. I mean, that's him saying it. No. Well, at the same time that he got caught lying to Congress literally earlier today, because I think people need to see this. So get this out everywhere. Same time this happened, Tom Holland made a major announcement. Take a listen. And as a result of the need.

[D]

For less law enforcement officers to do this work in a safer environment.

[B]

I.

[D]

Have announced, effective immediately, we will draw down 700 people.

[B]

Effective today, 7, 700 agents. CBP agents will be drawn down in Minnesota. Trump administration is admitting that what it would. What it's been doing in Minnesota, not fully kosher. Well, it may not be the end, though, because take a listen to what Steve Bannon had to say today.

[E]

Damn right. We're going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We're not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can, you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.

[B]

We're going to have ICE agents around the poll. So, yeah, they're drawing down some agents in Minnesota, but what Steve Bannon wants is pretty clear. He wants ICE agents patrolling polls in an effort to intimidate black and brown voters across America, to target American citizens, to force them to show them your papers. Now, I do want to bring you a very important interview I did this month. In honor of Black History Month, we talk about how black and brown Americans are being harmed by this administration's policies almost every single day. And so I sat down with Dr. Earl Lewis, who is a historian, a professor at the University of Michigan, to talk about just where society has gone since the Brown v. Board decision in the 50s, the 70 years post Brown v. Board, and to look ahead into the next 70 years. It's a really important interview. It's an important interview to me. I want you to watch it fully and I hope you'll share it with your friends and family and let me know what you think. So, like comment, share and subscribe. Support my work by subscribing to my substack. Click the link below. Here's my interview with Dr. Lewis.

[F]

So excited to be having this conversation with you today. I want to take us back to 1954. Brown v. Board was just decided by the United States Supreme Court. Schools are desegregated, but what impacts did Brown v. Board have on American society other than just a general desegregation from the landmark decision?

[D]

So 1954 is the end of really one period in American life and the beginning of another, which is to say from 1896 to 1954, the idea of separate but equal was actually written into not only the Constitution as determined by the Supreme Court, but into day to day practices. I was born in 1955 in Virginia, and so I was often said, I was born just in time for the second Brown decision where the phrase all deliberate speed was introduced into the American vocabulary. But with that decision in 1954, the whole question of how we think about equal opportunity for all Americans, and particularly how we use and position the question of race in American life really came to the fore. And for some, that was a scary proposition because for at least two, if not three generations, there was an assumption that you could tell not only black from white, but you could separate black from white. The Supreme Court in 54 actually upended that logic and that changed things.

[F]

But as we know, just because it upended that logic with one decision doesn't mean it actually changed minds.

[B]

Right.

[F]

Because society is society still. And so in the years after 54, how did the pushback to Brown v. Board, to the major decision, impact the movement as a whole?

[D]

So I would say that if you think about the 54 decision saying that separate but equal is unconstitutional, the 55 decision, Brown 2, which said schools should desegregate with all deliberate speed, the first phase of a pushback was almost immediate. It was 1957 and 58 and 59, you began to see something called massive resistance across the south where legislatures from Virginia all the way down to Mississippi into Texas ended up writing and determining that, look, we can actually thwart this effort by essentially saying we're not going to observe the law. That was the first phase. And so if you think of it, schools in the south didn't actually really fully desegregate until 1970. It was actually 15 years after the Brown, the second Brown decision, that black and white students went to school on equal terms in much of the South. I know because I lived it. I was a part of what I refer to as a transitional generation. We were kids who actually came of age in the mid-1950s, but went to segregated schools until we were in the 9th or 10th grade. And so when we think what the impact was, there was immediate impact because schools were closed across the south. Rather than desegregate, there was violence. There were ways of actually pushing back. And then you get this period from about 1970 through 1976 where there was really frontal assault on trying to say, okay, if we're going to desegregate, let's do it. And maybe desegregation could lead to integration, where you actually share power. Desegregation says you eliminate barriers. Integration suggested something about sharing power. And then the courts began to pull back a little bit again with the Bakke decision by 78, and you began to say, okay, that. In an interesting kind of way of timeline. And then you get a whole nother chapter after 1978 as we move back and forth in the nation over how to really share all of the fruits of labor in the country.

[F]

Well, I guess shifting 70 years later, what impact does Brown v. Board have today and this entire movement? Because we're still, in a way, we're kind of seeing society move backwards now.

[D]

Yeah. I mean, but you realize that those who have opposed Brown played the long game. Right. They've actually been at this for 50, 60, 70. There were efforts in the 1970s in places like Boston and in my native home of Norfolk, Virginia, where there was a group called Save Our Neighborhood Schools means this idea that neighborhood school was the way about. And so people always had some consternation, if not indigestion, over what it meant, but to desegregate. But part of it is how you see the glass fully half full or half empty. And it really is this fascinating way of explaining American history and American life to say, yeah, from the vantage point of 2526, we can say things are tough. But if you're looking from 2010 to 2526, you can also see moments of hope, meaning in that period when Barack Obama gets elected, there's this moment of hope I can still see. And you may have seen the images. There's this picture of Jesse Jackson with a tear streaming down his cheek after Obama is standing there in a square in Chicago and he represents what it meant to have been in the civil rights movement and struggle and recognizing both his triumphs and failures as a leader. But here was a new generation who came to the forest. So starting in 2020, you sort of think about the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and others. It was a moment of reckoning and people across the country took to the streets and saying, this is not us. This is not who we want. It's not who we want to be. Now you juxtapose that to the march on the University of Virginia in Charlottesville or the shooting in a church in South Carolina or the massacre in the synagogue in Pittsburgh. I mean, there are moments when you say both of those things are who we are. There is this period where we've always been in some ways a conflict of visions over what version of America is going to play out. But that's for me, the hopeful part, that there's a conflict of visions rather than a single vision.

[F]

What do you say to someone my age, I'm 26 years old, growing up in this kind of new environment that we're living through, we just saw the Supreme Court roll back affirmative action almost completely. A lot of people say that we are entering a dark, dark time in our country. What do you say to the average 26 year old? Where can they find hope in this moment?

[D]

I would say, and I teach some of those 26 year olds still at the University of Michigan these days. And I say what you're reminded of by a particularly paying attention to American history is that individuals at individual times in the past have really come to believe they can be the architects of their own history. And so part of the challenge, if you think there's a dark moment and you want to bring light, then your job is to actually turn on the switch and bring that light. You can't stand by the sidelines and believe someone else is going to do it. So part of it is to remind yourself that, that when you read about these individuals in the history books, they were the ones who actually were turning on the switch to turn the light to actually create a better world. It's now your turn to turn, to deal with the light and the switch.

[F]

And now my final question for you is the 70 years since Brown v. Board. I want to take us to the next 70 years. What lessons should my generation learn in terms of community building in Terms of fighting racial inequities. What should we learn and what should we take away from the past 70 years moving forward?

[D]

There are three things I think that anyone should take from the last 70 years. One is that this is not just a series of moments. There's a long arc here. And that even as you can measure progress and you actually want to work toward progress, others are actually uncomfortable with that progress. And so they're going to be working in parallel to thwart some of the things that you are about. And so don't become overly optimistic or overly despairing about the moment, recognizing that what the last 70 years tells you is all work. And that as you look ahead, then part of what you have to look for is what are the strategies and what are the tactics that you need to do individually in individual groups, but also in broad, so cross sectional groups to actually create a really full democracy. I'm sitting here in a place like Boston, and you're reminded that the framers coming out of the American Revolution didn't know what this new republic would become, but they had a vision of what this republic could become, even though they were flawed in their own times. We get. And this is what we learned from the second part, from the last 17 years. You get to actually rewrite the script. And so part of trying to figure out how do you want to be an author of the rewriting of that script, and the last part of it is that you should be energized, because if you look at the last 70 years, people gave a lot, but they didn't give up. And I spent some time with a guy that you may read about in the history books, Bernard Lafayette. He was a close lieutenant of MLK Jr. And Bernard used to say to me, he says, earl, the historians get it all wrong all the time. And I go, what do you mean we get it all wrong, Bernard? He goes, you guys come in and you sort of see these flash moments. And we talk about Birmingham and we talk about Selma and we talk. He says, but we were strategists every day of the week, every month of the year, every year throughout. We were planning for a future. And we were strategists and we were tacticians. And so part of this third piece that I would say is that it requires you to remember that people in the past were strategists and tacticians. Your job is actually to learn from those strategies and tactics, but also to improve upon them.

[F]

Dr. Lewis, thank you so much.

[D]

Thank you. It's a pleasure.

[B]

Hey, folks, thanks so much. For watching. Feel free to add this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere you watch for the latest breaking news and daily hits throughout the day. Make sure to follow subscribe. See you soon for more.

[D]

I'm gonna pull over and ask that man for directions.

[C]

Hi there.

[D]

We're looking to get to the campground.

[G]

Well, you're gonna take a left at the old oak tree end of this here road. No, I'm just kidding.

[B]

I.

[G]

Let me get my phone out.

[D]

How are you getting a signal out here?

[G]

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[D]

Actually, can you point us in the direction of a T Mobile store?

[E]

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