Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said if Republicans allow President Donald Trump to continue using the DOJ to “go after his political enemies,” there will be nothing left of our democracy.
Host Kristen Welker said, “Given how quickly the Justice Department moved to press criminal charges against James Comey, are you concerned, Senator, that you will be next?”
Schiff said, “First of all, the Republican U.S. Attorney in Virginia refused to go forward with this prosecution of James Comey, because he thought it lacked evidence. They fired him. They fired him and replaced him with a personal lawyer of the president’s, an insurance lawyer, to seek these charges. That is unheard of. I almost spent almost six years in the Justice Department. I never saw anything remotely like this. And for the president to on social media badger his attorney general to go after people, you know, let me just say this, it’s corrected to your previous question about the enemy within. He’s described me as the enemy within. He’s described other elected Democratic officials as the enemy within.”
He added, “He is using the Justice Department to go after his political enemies and using the Justice Department to protect his political friends, like Tom Homan, the border czar, who reportedly took 50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents and made the case go away. This should concern every American. Not just those he’s tweeting about, like myself, but anyone who cares about whether the Justice Department can be used against people for expressing their views, doing their job, or holding the president accountable. Anyone who cares about whether the administration can go after late-night comedians or tell corporations who they can hire or tell law firms who they can represent. It is all part of the same attack on our democracy. And I’ll say, if this goes on, if Republicans allow this to go on for four years, there will be nothing left of our democracy. We have an opportunity to stop this. It would require just a handful of Republicans of conscience to oppose these lawless actions, this abuse of the Justice Department.”
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