During remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) spoke about a DOJ investigation into a climate fund created through the Inflation Reduction Act during the Biden Administration.
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NewsTranscript
00:00from Rhode Island. Thank you, Madam President. I'm here for the 35th time to call attention
00:12to the right-wing scheme to capture our courts and justice system,
00:20now out to target and persecute Trump political enemies and do Trump political favors.
00:30We have heard a lot about weaponization,
00:35weaponization of the justice system from Trump and his allies. That's for two reasons.
00:44One, it's a handy narrative for Trump and MAGA cronies to paint him as a victim,
00:52not a convicted criminal who only dodged proper sentencing and further criminal charges
01:01because of sweeping presidential immunity granted by a Supreme Court
01:06stacked with right-wing justices he appointed. Two, it's a tactic
01:15for would-be autocrats, accusation signal intentions. You accuse the other side
01:24of doing what you're plotting so that when you're caught doing it,
01:30you've set it up to look like offsetting penalties. Accusations signal intentions.
01:38Sure enough, now there's real weaponization of the justice system unfolding before our eyes.
01:49I'm going to take a minute and drill down into one episode. It begins with a climate fund,
01:58duly created and appropriated by Congress, maintained after the funds were disbursed
02:06at a private bank and overseen by EPA. But MAGA's dear leader claims falsely
02:20that climate change is a hoax. That's his catchphrase for the truest things he doesn't like.
02:28So this climate fund became a MAGA target. There is a problem, however. The Constitution
02:35limits the president's veto power over congressional spending, both with a time limit
02:43and the right of Congress to override. And the time limit to veto these funds
02:50funds had been over for years. The funds were properly appropriated back in August 2022,
03:00when President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act. The grants were awarded in April
03:062024, giving recipients legal rights to the funds. And then they were distributed to the bank
03:16as fiscal agent for the recipients, all in regular order.
03:25Enter Trump's corrupt Justice Department through two colossal Trump suck-ups.
03:35The acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bovey and Ed Martin, the interim United States Attorney
03:44for the District of Columbia. Martin is an activist MAGA type, a lawyer for January 6
03:51attackers, who had criticized this fund even before he was appointed interim.
03:59Bovey and Martin cooked up asking Martin's U.S. Attorney's Office to freeze the climate fund
04:09by opening a criminal investigation so they could assert that the ongoing investigation
04:18justified the freeze. Their problem? They couldn't point to a crime. Oops.
04:28Oops. The career criminal division chief, an experienced veteran prosecutor,
04:39at the U.S. Attorney's Office, pointed out that launching a criminal investigation without
04:46evidence of a crime, what prosecutors call predication, is a violation of prosecutorial
04:55ethics and Department of Justice policy. That warning from the career prosecutors to MAGA Martin,
05:08that's red flag one. But the MAGA U.S. Attorney didn't listen to that warning from his career
05:20staff. Instead, he demanded that the career criminal chief resign. He forced her out.
05:32Well, that's another big red flag. Red flag two. With the criminal division chief out of the way,
05:42Martin still couldn't find one staff prosecutor in his office to pursue the matter.
05:51Now, you remember in the Nixon Saturday Night Massacre, they had to fire all the way down to
05:56Robert Bork, who became notorious for ultimately doing the dirty deed for Nixon. But here, no Bork,
06:05no prosecutor would sign from this big federal prosecution office. That's red flag three.
06:13Martin then proceeded in his own name alone. That's red flag four. As a former U.S. attorney,
06:24I can assure you, there is almost always a career attorney's signature on every pleading filed.
06:34And bear in mind that Martin is not some rare legal whiz. He'd never spent a single day
06:44as a federal prosecutor before he got this gig. And here he was, fumbling around by his lone
06:53MAGA self. So no surprise, when Martin presented his request to the federal magistrate judge,
07:03the judge denied the petition. That's red flag five. And it's a massive,
07:11flapping red flag to anyone who has served in a U.S. attorney's office. Federal prosecutors never
07:20want this to happen. So they triple check and backstop every application to ensure that they
07:28are ironclad. In my U.S. attorney's office, a federal judge shooting down one of our warrant
07:37applications would have set off internal reviews. That should be what's known in the medical field
07:45as a never event. It's a shocker, particularly with the U.S. attorney presenting the petition
07:55in person. Even that series of disasters didn't stop this scheme. Somebody started shopping the
08:05case to other U.S. attorney's offices, hoping that some other office would try again in a
08:15different district. Well, shopping a case around U.S. attorney's offices after the matter has been
08:23shot down in court, that's red flag six. It seems that no other U.S. attorney's office has been
08:34willing to go before any court with this hot mess. But somehow, a federal prosecutor down in
08:44Florida, Florida, ordered Washington-based FBI agents to start questioning EPA employees
08:57about the grant program. Well, we're going to find out more about that.
09:06But meanwhile, in a related case, a different federal judge blew up the EPA administrator's
09:19administrative effort under Trump's executive orders to freeze these funds.
09:29And they defended the freeze with the same pretext that there was fraud that needed to be prevented.
09:39Well, the judge asked, tell me about the fraud. Show me some evidence.
09:45There was none. The judge noted in her decision that for all the big talk,
09:53the administration could produce, her words, no evidence to support that claim.
10:03So a second federal judge shoots down the scheme. We're up to red flag seven.
10:10Compounding this prosecutive fiasco, both Martin and EPA administrator Zeldin
10:20unleashed a barrage of public comments flooding the information zone with public accusations of
10:30fraud. The same accusations of fraud that the career U.S. attorney staff rejected and the
10:39magistrate judge determined to be unfounded. And the judge said DOJ and EPA had offered
10:46no evidence to support. Well, that's a problem.
10:52Unfounded accusations of fraud are what lawyers call defamatory per se.
11:02And derogatory public comments about the subject of an investigation is trouble
11:13under multiple Department of Justice policies. The administration's
11:21the administration officials' public comments were out of bounds.
11:28I've been a U.S. attorney. You don't get to do that.
11:34Discovery in civil litigation will likely ultimately reveal the depths of the misconduct.
11:43The potentially unlawful motive and their potential liability for their misconduct.
11:58We are not at the end of this yet.
12:00At the end of this yet.
12:04But what we see is real weaponization, not MAGA phony claims of weaponization,
12:14part of a political propaganda campaign to excuse the criminality of the dear leader.
12:22Here, all these red flags of actual weaponization are flying.
12:30Internal warnings that the case had no merit. Removing officials for disagreement.
12:37Proceeding without a career attorney. Getting shot down by a magistrate judge.
12:44Case shopping after the disaster. Hunting for FBI agents to harass
12:50career civil servants for managing properly congressionally appropriated funding.
12:56Making derogatory public comments and all without evidence.
13:04Compare that to the federal criminal cases against Trump.
13:11There's no record of internal warnings being ignored that the cases had no merit.
13:18There's no removing of officials for disagreeing with the case.
13:23No pleading was ever filed without a career attorney signing.
13:30Just signed by a politico. No application was ever shot down by a judge.
13:37Indeed, the Mar-a-Lago warrants were judicially approved.
13:43Despite very aggressive lawyering for Trump, no finding of a prosecutor's violation of department
13:51policy was turned up. No matter had to be case shopped to other districts after falling apart
13:59in one district. No harassment by FBI agents with no court pleading to back them up.
14:09And no derogatory public comments ever made outside the pleadings the government filed.
14:16The red flag count in the Trump cases? Zero.
14:23Red flag count in this sorry episode? Seven.
14:28If Trump's corrupt DOJ will go through all of this just to grab properly appropriated climate funds,
14:43imagine what they're capable of with really bad stuff.
14:50We are in store for lots more actual weaponization
14:58in the coming months and years under this corrupt administration.
15:05So easy for me to say that this will be continued.