“These White House officials have not been posting their stock transactions. They have not been following the required disclosures. And right now, there’s no one to oversee what they’re doing in the administration.”
View the full interview here.
Washington, D.C. – Last night, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined CNN’s OutFront with Erin Burnett to call for answers from the Trump administration on White House officials’ prior knowledge of President Donald Trump’s changes to tariff policy and urge the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported to an El Salvador prison, following the Supreme Court’s decision ordering the Trump administration to facilitate his return.
Key Excerpts:
On the importance of uncovering insider trading in the White House:
[…] There should be public reporting of people within the administration who bought stock and when they bought it. And when those reports are made public, we ought to demand some answers. But the problem is, these White House officials have not been posting their stock transactions. They have not been following the required disclosures. And right now, there’s no one to oversee what they’re doing in the administration. And apart from my colleague on the House side that you just played a clip of; most Republicans have been utterly silent on this.
[…] What we found during the first Trump administration is even in the minority, we can hold shadow hearings, as we did and as I did just earlier this week with witnesses who come forward. Sometimes they’re whistleblowers, and other times they’re people just willing to speak out when they see acts of corruption. So, we may have whistleblowers who come forward. We may have others that are aware of potential stock transactions that give information that we can follow up on. Eventually, the truth is going to come out. You just can’t hide something like this. Obviously, the press plays a vital role also in uncovering wrongdoing, but we will get to the bottom of this one way or another. I’m confident we’ll get answers. But right now, there’s such a sense of impunity in the White House that if it’s not the president trading in his own meme coin, or the president’s kids with their cryptocurrency, or this reckless handling of the tariffs, it is an environment in which you have to expect that corruption is likely.
On the Trump administration needing to comply with the Supreme Court decision:
[…] I hope and expect that they will have to comply with it. But up until now, what they’ve done has been extraordinary. They plucked this man off the street. They deported him in violation of a court’s order. They acknowledged they did it in error. They refused to lift a finger to bring him back. They taunted the judge, essentially saying, “It’s your court order, let’s see you enforce it.” It was a mocking tone by the administration. They never offered to try to remedy their mistake.
Now, they’re being told by the Supreme Court that they’re going to have to remedy this. Will they pick up the phone, as we know the president could do, and call the president of El Salvador — with whom he is very close — and say, “Hey, we made a mistake. Send this guy back.” They’re going to obviously be most concerned with what they’re always concerned with, which is saving face. So, that doesn’t give me a whole lot of confidence. But if they ignore this instruction by the Supreme Court and the fault by the district court, then we are really in that uncharted territory we have feared, where they’re simply flouting even a court order.
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