“This is going to be really disastrous, a massive, self-inflicted wound on our economy from the president who campaigned on lowering prices but is in fact pushing them through the roof.”
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MSNBC’s Prime with Alicia Menendez to blast President Donald Trump’s latest tariffs, which will hurt hardworking California families and farmers, highlight his upcoming spotlight hearing to expose Trump’s attacks on the rule of law, and warn of the lasting impact of Signalgate on U.S. national security.
View the full interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On the harmful impacts of Trump’s tariffs on hard-working families and farmers:
[…] I may be liberated from anything in a 401k as millions of Americans will feel that impact and will be liberated from any chance of having lower prices for things. This is going to be a disaster for our economy. It’s going to be a disaster for hard-working families that are going to have to pay more for auto parts or getting their car fixed or buying groceries or anything else. These other countries, many of whom are our closest allies, are going to retaliate against us. It’s just simply going to escalate from here. I talked to farmers out in California who still haven’t recovered the market share they lost during the first Trump administration from the ill-fated tariffs then. So, this is going to be really disastrous, a massive, self-inflicted wound on our economy from the president who campaigned on lowering prices but is in fact pushing them through the roof.
On holding Trump accountable as he attacks the rule of law:
[…] Today, as you know, we saw the corruption case against the mayor of New York dismissed with prejudice. That means that case can never be brought again. It wasn’t dismissed because of a lack of evidence. It was dismissed because the administration tried to engage in a corrupt bargain with the mayor, in which it would make the charges go away, at least for a time, if he would do their bidding on unrelated policy matters. The only losers there are the American people. And in the Judiciary Committee, we’re not having hearings on any of this, any of these abuses of power. And what happened in New York is just one of many examples. So I’m teaming up with Jamie Raskin. We’re doing our own hearing to bring in some of the prosecutors who were fired or had to quit because of these corrupt acts. We’re also bringing in a young attorney who left one of the major law firms because the law firms are capitulating to the Trump administration and are also giving into this campaign of abuse of power and an attack on the rule of law.
[…]
We’re going to expose this corruption at the top of the Justice Department for the American people to see. And that’s one way also of putting pressure on this administration and pressure on our Republican colleagues to do something about the runaway corruption of this administration.
On the harmful, lasting impact of Signalgate on U.S. national security:
[…] It really is mind blowing that they were so reckless with our national security to engage in these kinds of conversations, many of them using, apparently, their personal phones. But regardless, using a commercial app, we have some very sophisticated adversaries. Probably no one as sophisticated in terms of hacking as China. It is hard for me to believe, given the breadth of people that were included just on that Houthi chat, that China hasn’t penetrated some of these phones, which means that whatever these conversations were that were going on, China may now be privy to.
We have to assume — and I say this is the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee — you have to assume that all of these conversations have been compromised. Now maybe some of them haven’t, but in order to protect sources and methods, you have to assume the worst. Which means that they’re going to have to now — if they’re doing their jobs — do the painstaking work of going through every source that might have been revealed from these reckless conversations on a commercial app.
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