Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Weeknight” that President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice was not behaving like “grown-ups.”
Co-host Alicia Menendez said, “In Jack Smith’s letter he says the House or the Senate should have this public hearing almost challenging them, pitting them against each other. Which institution do you think moves first?”
Whitehouse said, “Well, I hope the Senate does, because I think there’s bipartisan interest in getting this done. And I think it’s going to be a very useful hearing. I particularly like that he mentioned volume two of the special counsel report, because, frankly, if we are going to ask him about matters that relate to that previously undisclosed volume of the report, we should have that. So it could be a really interesting hearing once that report is released for it. And then, of course, the other thing that’s at the center of all of this is how often the Republicans have misrepresented what he did, and to see them against a real lawyer and a real prosecutor, explaining to them the difference between a trap and trace pen register and a wiretap, particularly people who were attorneys general and are on the Senate Judiciary Committee and should know better.”
He added, “This was never a wiretap, right? Nothing got overheard. This was what, in the old days, you’d call a pen register or trap and trace now it’s a toll record. Grand jury subpoena, the guy went through the grand jury, which is where you go to get to the subpoena. So it creates a really interesting contrast between the way proper legal and prosecutorial grown-ups behave and the way the current Trump Department of Justice, the MAGA DOJ is behaving And I don’t think there’s much of a better expositor for that differentiation than this, than Jack Smith, who’s a very sober, serious guy.”
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