On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said that big city police departments in cities with Democratic mayors “could probably use some support” from the National Guard, but President Donald Trump is just engaging in “more diversion.”
Host Lawrence O’Donnell said, “Senator, it looks like Democratic big city mayors better be ready for National Guard troops entering their cities in September, especially September 3, when there is a press conference that is going to be scheduled with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell victims, that press conference, probably, in Washington, D.C., joined by members of Congress.”
Whitehouse responded, “Yeah, well, I think these police departments could probably use some support. I think most police departments, particularly big urban police departments, are customarily very busy. And to have a couple of hundred extra bodies to file papers and do typing and run errands and do the administrative stuff that the National Guard is qualified to do in an American city, can take the load off the real police so that they can spend more time dedicated to law enforcement functions. And so, I think the sensible thing for a big city mayor to do is to make sure that they’re well coordinated, they take advantage of these extra bodies, and they don’t let them anywhere near powers of arrest or the core law enforcement functions of filing arrest reports, assisting with presentations to grand juries, testifying as law enforcement witnesses in court, all of those sorts of things, because they simply aren’t qualified for that, aren’t trained for that, and it wouldn’t be legal for them to do that.”
O’Donnell then stated, “Washington’s mayor and officials in the city seem to be taking it in stride and giving Donald Trump none of the outrage he was probably hoping for to add to his diversion.”
Whitehouse responded, “Yeah. Sure, you want to give me 200 bodies to help do stuff, drive cars here and there, deliver packages, there’s lots of stuff that can be done to help a working police department work. The notion that they’re going to be out on the streets actually enforcing the law is simply not what is going to happen. … This is just a photo op. … more diversion.”
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