During Monday’s Congressional Democrats’s briefing, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) discussed Trump's claims of court weaponization compared to Whitehouse's claims of the current weaponization by the second Trump Administration.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Mr. Whitehouse, you are recognized.
00:03If you read the appellate court decision regarding the stay,
00:14one of the things I think you'll note is the power of the language that was used by those judges.
00:22So I'm disappointed, I guess, yet again in Chief Justice Roberts' decision.
00:31I think we often read decisions which say the decision was misguided, the decision was erroneous,
00:38the decision was clearly erroneous, the decision was wrong, the decision stood on inadequate facts.
00:44In this case, the appellate court said the decision was unconscionable.
00:49You don't see that very much.
00:50So my questions will be to you, Mr. Crosswell.
00:54I think you're the most experienced criminal prosecutor in the panel.
00:58And one of the things that we've seen has been the Trump MAGA crowd parroting the notion that
01:07there was weaponization of the Department of Justice against Mr. Trump,
01:12which is obviously a narrative that you would like to deploy if your leader is in fact a criminal.
01:20was convicted in certain places, was indicted in others,
01:25and had the prosecutive team say, hey, we had a good case here when it was closed down.
01:33So faced with all that evidence, obviously the thing you want to say is weaponization, fake news,
01:37all the usual denials.
01:39So I want to take a minute and compare what happened in a recent case,
01:44the one that was referred to about the unlawful effort to try to seize climate funds.
01:53And because the veto period had passed by about two years,
01:58the cook-up analysis that would have allowed them to seize the funds had to cook up a crime
02:04that would give them the ability to say, well, you know, while we're investigating this crime,
02:10we need to seize the funds.
02:11So that's the backdrop.
02:13And in the course of that, the first thing that happened is that the political appointee
02:19was told by his career staff that there was no evidence of any crime and they couldn't proceed.
02:26Do you recall any time in any of the Trump federal cases where a political appointee was told by the career staff
02:34that they had no case?
02:38Senator, I've been doing the job for 10 years,
02:41and I can tell you that I have never, ever seen anyone, myself or anyone else,
02:48be directed to prosecute or drop a case based on politics.
02:53It just does not figure it out.
02:55In this case, the woman who was at the head of the office who told the political appointee that he had no case
03:01was forced to resign as her penalty for not going forward.
03:05Nothing like that ever happened in any of the Trump investigations that I can recall.
03:09Do you have any recollection of any career folks being fired for refusing to go forward with a case that had no merit?
03:19Senator, my supervisors have always expected me to do the right thing.
03:24I think something people need to understand about prosecutors is we're unique in the sense that we,
03:31our job is not to win our case, it's to do justice.
03:33And so every supervisor I've ever had would demand nothing less than me to do the right thing for justice.
03:40And if that means dismissing a case, that's what you would do.
03:43So then let me just go forward a little bit more because after that what happened is that the political appointee went forward with a pleading that no career
03:53attorney would sign.
03:56The only signature on it was the political appointee.
03:59Did you recall that ever happening in any of the Trump cases?
04:01In my personal experience, I've never had a situation where I was asked to do something that, well, except for the Eric Adams case,
04:13that was the first time I was asked to sign something that.
04:18Unusual to go forward with a pleading where no career attorney will sign for the Department of Justice, correct?
04:23Only with a political appointee signature.
04:25Yes, Senator.
04:26Yes, it is.
04:28And then in the Trump cases, I don't recall anyone ever getting shot down, any of the prosecutive team, when they went for an order.
04:39And in this case, when the political appointee went for the order and went to the magistrate judge, he got shut down.
04:45When I was a U.S. attorney, if we got shot down for an order by one of our district judges,
04:52that would have been like, stop, figure out what went wrong.
04:55This is a never event.
04:57Let's figure this out so it doesn't happen.
05:00Do you recall that any of the Trump orders were ever shot down by a judge or every time that prosecution team went to a court for an order,
05:10they were successful?
05:11Senator, not sure about which order I would say that it would be if I went to a court and shot down for probable cause.
05:20That's happened.
05:21But you try to avoid that.
05:23Yeah, you try very hard to avoid it.
05:25And after that's happened, do you ever go to another district to try to shop the same case where the judge had found that there was no basis to proceed?
05:37It's never come up in my career, Senator.
05:39If I did, I would certainly tell the next judge that the last one found no probable cause, and that probably would not bode well.
05:47And then I don't believe in the Trump cases any prosecutor ever made public statements outside of the pleadings about the culpability or wrong of the subject of the investigation.
06:00And yet, in this case, both the political appointee and the agency chief who was engaged made public derogatory comments, false allegations, it seems, of fraud, defamatory per se.
06:14What are the concerns of the Department of Justice when political appointees make statements about the potential guilt or culpability of an uncharged person?
06:26Senator, as you're aware, we conduct grand jury investigations in secret for a reason, because if we can't substantiate the case against someone, we close it without the public ever knowing, and that's to protect the American people.
06:38And in this matter, the last thing that happened was that the agency had been going forward with its own case under the president's executive order, shifted to the fraud argument to try to improve its argument before the federal judge, not a magistrate judge, the U.S. district court judge, and the U.S. district court judge said, guys, there's no evidence here.
07:02You've shown me no evidence to support this claim that there's fraud or misconduct here, and yet they continue.
07:11And I can pretty well bet that in none of the so-called weaponized Trump cases was there a moment when a federal judge said, there is no evidence here, and yet the department continued it.
07:26So I guess the conclusion I draw from this is that there is fake weaponization, which is what you say when you're following somebody who has serious criminal liability, has been indicted, has been convicted, and you want to make all that go away with the narrative about, oh, that's just weaponization.
07:44And then you put your people in power, and what happens?
07:48The actual weaponization begins.
07:51And this counts, by my count, seven red flags, any one of it which would have called a check to a case in the normal Department of Justice.
08:01So thank you, Adam.
08:02Thank you, Jamie.
08:04Thank you, Senator Whitehouse.
08:05Thank you, Senator Whitehouse.