Trump Staff Begins Mass Exodus as White House is in Turmoil!

Two days. Two days. That's how long it took for Donald Trump's administration to start cracking. His civil rights chief is gone. His secretary of state is reportedly weighing an exit. His defense secretary could be gone by the end of the week, based on what one congressman tells me today. And his own staff, they're lawyering up. They're listening to Congressman Robert Garcia, who told them, get ready, lawyer up. And I spoke with another congressman, Jamie Raskin, today, who outlines his priorities. Epstein investigations, Trump corruption investigations. He says, you can walk and chew gum at the same time, because fighting for affordability and fighting for accountability are one and the same. Not two separate issues, but rather one. And so at the same time, while Trump and his family and those inside the White House are lawyering up, other officials are on their way out. Right now, those inside the White House are, quote, terrified. If you can, make sure to hit that subscribe button. Support this work. Like, comment, share. Every investigation, every resignation, and every subpoena that comes out of this new Congress will be spun by the White House and buried by many outlets who don't want to get on Trump's bad side. That's why independent journalism matters in this moment. I don't answer it to anyone but you. So if you can, subscribe, support this work. And let's talk about the state of Washington, D.C. today. Because publicly, while the White House is projecting confidence, one official even warned that, quote, we still control the federal government and all of its powers. Behind the scenes, it's actually a very different story. The White House Counsel's Office is bulking up its staff, setting up protocols for democratic investigations. Current and former aides have hired their own lawyers. The Wall Street Journal says it goes from cabinet secretaries all the way to mid-level staff. Some are scrambling because law firms can't represent multiple people caught up in the same probe, conflict of interest concerns. Some former officials are even turning their heads to the White House because they don't want to get swept up in what's coming. Today, Harmeet Dhillon, who ran the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, resigned. Under her leadership, more than three quarters of the division's lawyers left. Congressman Jamie Raskin today told me that just because she's leaving doesn't mean she can avoid facing a subpoena, facing accountability. Meanwhile, Pete Hexeth is on his way out. Congressman Adam Smith told me that it could happen as soon as this weekend. Now, if it doesn't happen this weekend, what you're going to end up seeing is an impeachment vote on Pete Hexeth next week, and it will pass. Trump is still standing by him, calling him his, quote, best guy. But notice what's happening. Republicans are blaming Hexeth for a war Trump launched because it's easier than blaming Trump himself. And then there's Marco Rubio. Bloomberg and The Independent have reported that the Secretary of State is weighing whether to leave the administration and has already talked to White House officials about possibly stepping down to run for president in twenty twenty eight. So what exactly are Trump's people so afraid of? Well, they're the four targets laid out by oversight and judiciary are Trump family money making ventures, ICE abuses, corrupt corporations and Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged co-conspirators. And the way behind all of it is growing. Democrats are now expected to hold at least two hundred fifty seats. Their biggest majority in the House of Representatives since 2008. Scott Cologne is still leading in Mississippi. Trump's response today was to demand that votes for other candidates in Alaska simply be handed to the Republican senator. That's not how it works. For two years, the people around Donald Trump acted like there would never be consequences. But now the subpoenas are coming and they know it. They know it. I spoke with two significant members of Congress who are going to be leading these charges. First up, Congressman Jamie Raskin, who outlines the investigations upcoming. Great to be joined by Congressman Jamie Raskin, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. How does it feel to hear that? It feels great to hear that. I mean, it does seem a while off now because at least I'm trying to make it seem like it's a while off because we've got so much work to do over the next couple of months to get ready. You know, what's funny is the media, you know, everywhere I go, what are your top three priorities? What are you going to do the first week and so on? And we've just spent the last year out on the road campaigning, right? We're still just extricating from campaign mode. We are jubilant, of course, and celebrating this magnificent breakthrough for American democracy. And devastating refutation and repudiation of all the corruption and lawlessness. But we have a ton of work to do. And so it's a little daunting just because we're facing this mountain of corruption and all this criminality. But I'm very excited about it. And hey, I was an intern on the House Judiciary Committee my junior year of college. And so for somebody like me, I was a law professor, for 25 years. This is the first committee that I came to when I got to Congress, along with oversight. It's like a dream come true to be the chair of the Judiciary Committee. I want to talk about plans for day one a bit. I want to start with Elon Musk. Should Elon Musk expect to be investigated by your committee? Well, I don't want to get into which committee would do that because so many committees claim a very serious interest in different aspects of the Elon Musk story. But on Doge, it is just inconceivable to me that he will not be called forth to talk about Doge, this savage assault on the federal workforce and on federal values and priorities, things that have been legislated by Congress that the federal government is supposed to be implementing, which were torn down. And I have tens of thousands of federal workers in my congressional district whose lives were turned upside down. And much more importantly, whose work was turned upside down. I mean, take the people who are working at USAID. America has been responsible for preventing millions and millions of deaths because of our anti-malaria campaigns, our anti- influenza campaigns, our anti-hunger campaigns. And all of that was wrecked and destroyed by a bunch of just roving post-adolescent Silicon Valley libertarian techno-fascists who interned for Elon Musk. And they ripped apart a federal agency. And they did the same thing with the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I mean, different parts of different agencies and departments have survived. But all of them have been the victims of the wreckage left by Doge. So yeah, we're going to have to investigate that. All of our projects have been destroyed. We're going to have to investigate private information. Every American citizen's private information has been compromised by Doge trying to vacuum up everybody's personal data through the raid on the department databases. What about on the Epstein? Your committee right before the election released a pretty significant report outlining the president's assistance or facilitation of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse over the years, including significant allegations against the president himself. Do you anticipate having. Public hearings on this report and the allegations within? That is certainly within the realm of possibility. I mean, I'm glad you read the report because I think that our staff and our members, we did an astonishingly good job at summarizing everything we know about the relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and everything we know about Trump's own direct involvement in it. And the purpose of this report was to interrogate and then debunk the lie that there was no evidence anywhere in these millions and millions of documents that would support even an investigation into whether there were co-conspirators, whether there were accomplices, whether there were other crimes committed. Todd Blanchett of the Department of Justice wants to invite America to believe that in this billion dollar international human trafficking conspiracy that went on for nearly a decade, that there were only two people who committed crimes. One of them is dead, Jeffrey Epstein, and the other, Ghislaine Maxwell, is in prison, carefully being controlled by Todd Blanchett, who arranged for a very cushy transfer for her into a club fed prison in Texas, where she gets room service, a therapy puppy, special administrative and secretarial privileges and everything else, all because she told Todd Blanchett exactly what he wanted to hear. Nothing untoward about Donald Trump. That's all he cared about. He'd already declared that there were no grounds for any investigation anywhere in America. But when she was subpoenaed to come before the House Oversight Committee, what do you know? He leapt into action, flew down to Florida and interviewed her. About what? He said there were no other leads, there were no other conspiracies, no other co-conspirators. Suddenly, he wanted to go and interview her. And he did. And he did. And he were. It's obvious what he was doing there. And you can read about what he asked about. And the minute she began to mention any witnesses who would be potentially threatening and damaging to Donald Trump, he immediately steered her away from discussion of that in the conversation. So look, the Oversight Committee has taken the lead. And I was the ranking member on oversight before I came over to Judiciary. But the Oversight Committee under Robert Garcia has taken the lead on the complete Epstein investigation, our interest is in the corruption of the Department of Justice and its instrumental role in covering this up, in not complying with the real terms of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. They're withholding more than a million documents now without any statutory basis for doing so. They're just hiding things away that they don't want people to see about Donald Trump and others who were involved. It's an absolute scandal. And we're seeing the cover up in real time. You mentioned the Justice Department and your oversight of the Justice Department today. Harmeet Dhillon resigned. There have been rumblings over the past couple of weeks that Trump officials would rather resign than potentially face congressional oversight. Does her resignation mean that she is free from potential oversight? No. We have the authority to subpoena any American citizen. All of us owe the sovereign, whether in the form of a court or in the form of Congress, our own. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld Congress's oversight powers because we need to get information about what's actually going on in government and what's going on in society and the economy in order to pass the laws that we need. And that is a very broad grant of power to the Congress. So should we expect oversight of Todd Blanch? Well, certainly, not only can you expect, the citizenry should demand close oversight of them. Now, Todd Blanch has to come before the Department. I'm sorry, Todd Blanch, as the Attorney General and the head of the Department of Justice, has to come before the Judiciary Committee anyway. That is routine that he would make an annual visit. But if we need him to come back for other purposes, we will absolutely call him in. What about the Trump family? We started with the Trump family corruption. Is anyone with the last name Trump potentially excused from oversight? The kids? Any other family members? No. No. No one is. And we have Trump family members like Donald Trump Jr. who are clearly trading on the Trump family name in order to make a lot of money. You know, his private investment firm has the staggering return of more than 1,000% because of his apparently clairvoyant ability to see into the future and to guess which private companies are going to get government contracts. And he's so unerring in this interesting form of precognition that he was able to earn 1,000% for his investors. You know, Wall Street exalts if they can get returns of more than 15% or 20%. I mean, that's cause for celebration there. He got it more than 1,000%. I mean, the whole thing is a money making operation. It is a rip off. It's a con game. And Donald Trump has pardoned dozens of white collar fraudsters for engaging in insider trading, embezzlement, stock swindles, ripping off investors, workers, consumers, you name it. That's the world that they travel in. He's cheated the victims of all those crimes out of more than $1.7 billion they were owed in restitution from their criminals, because Donald Trump relieved the criminals, we're talking about convicted felons here, of their duty to pay, of their legal responsibility to pay their victims. That's what's going on in this government. People say, well, are we interested in accountability and are we interested in honesty in government? Or are we interested in how much it costs to live these days and about affordability? It's the same thing. Corrupt government is government that serves a tiny, tiny percentage of the people who seized the power of government and taken political control and democracy and the rule of law are there to serve everybody. And so you're talking about two completely different forms of government. When Marie Antoinette, said, let them eat cake. Okay. Was that a problem of accountability? Was that a problem of affordability? And you see the false dichotomy there. It's the exact same thing. If you've got monarchical, dictatorial, repressive, oligarchical government, that's extremely expensive for the common people. And the most daring and the most honest thing that Donald Trump has said during the last two years was that he didn't care when he was asked about the cost of everything and the prices going up because of the Iran war. And he said, I don't care about that. I don't think about it for one minute. He said, he doesn't care about it. Doesn't affect him. Doesn't touch him. What does he think about every day? Making as much money as possible for his family, for his sons, for Jared Kushner, for their businesses. That's the reality we're living through right now. Congressman, thank you so much for the time. Thanks for having me, Aaron. And then I spoke with Congressman Adam Smith, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, who told me, I'm about to show you, told me that Pete Hex at the time in the United States government could be coming to an end as soon as this weekend. So before I get there, a quick word from our sponsor. Quick interruption because this episode is sponsored by Chapter. I've worked with Chapter for a long time. It's a great company. Right now, prices are too damn high for a lot of Americans. And where prices are really high? Health care. Health care prices are high because people aren't on the right Medicare plan. Well, Chapter compares every Medicare plan nationwide for free to recommend coverage based on your doctor's prescriptions and budget. Call 212-200-3531, 212-200-3531 or visit chapter.com/parnas and take a look. And if you're on the right plan, they'll keep you on the right plan. If you're not on the right plan, they'll help save on average up to $1,100 and switch you onto the right Medicare plan. So take a look. I highly recommend. Now, my conversation with Congressman Smith. Great to be joined today by Congressman Adam Smith. Congressman, I got to jump right in because you are likely going to be the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Right now, there's a lot of conversation about the war in Iran, and a lot of people are worried about possible re-escalation. What can House Democrats do? What can you do when you take the majority in January to end this war? We could put pressure on Trump to stop it, but I think we also have to be honest about the executive power and how Trump has used and abused it and how the Supreme Court has allowed him to do that. We cannot simply force him to stop the war. We can take votes. We can vote to cut off funding. He can veto that. I guess we can vote to not fund the Defense Department at all, but who wants a 21-year-old private to not be getting paid? It's extraordinarily difficult given how Trump has approached it. I think the other thing that we really need to do is put pressure on Republicans to join us. If we can get a veto-proof majority to cut off funding, look, Republicans shouldn't have supported this war in the first place. The Republicans should have supported this war in the first place. The reason they supported it is because of the Trump cult. Trump says jump, they say how high. That's, by the way, been an underreported aspect of this epic disaster for the Republican Party. The real problem is it was a cult. I'm sorry, I'm at a loss for a specific example, but whatever crazy thing Trump said, they said, "Yes, sir." Then he could say the exact opposite thing an hour later, and they would agree with that. They turned their entire party, their entire ideology, all of their policy over to a guy who's got the attention span of a gnat who would move from one thing to the next. I mean, Trump promised not to get us into this war in the first place. I think we need, now that the Republicans have been completely wiped out by Trump, we have to really work hard to get a veto-proof majority to cut off the money for this war. Have you heard at all from colleagues on the Republican side in the past 48 hours that they'd be willing to at least come out publicly more against Donald Trump in the next two years or not yet? I have not, unfortunately. Yes. I do got to ask you, next week, potentially, you guys are coming back into session, and there will be a vote to possibly impeach Pete Hexeth as soon as next week. Is that something you support? Yes. Do you expect that vote to pass? I do. I think there'll be enough Republicans who want him gone. Do you think, and I'm asking you to predict the future a bit, do you feel as though he will be secretary of defense when Democrats take over in January? I do not. I think it's possible he might not be secretary of defense through the weekend. Really? Not likely, but possible. What makes you say that? Well, there's been all kinds of stories that the Republican, you know, Trump's looking for a scapegoat on Iran, A. B. If we impeach him, that means the Senate will be tied up in an impeachment trial for the rest of the year. There's a lot of reasons for the republicans to want him gone for trump to want him gone but we'll see i mean look he has run the department in a horrible horrible way he has politicized it to the maximum degree you know his firings based on loyalty have gutted you know senior leadership at the pentagon made it a shell of its former self i mean his decision to try and prosecute mark kelly and the five other members of congress who simply spoke the truth um you know and of course the illegal war in iran and the illegal boat strikes in latin america not to mention his you know signal gate um you know revealing the you know the critical details of a mission over a signal chat with a reporter on it there's plenty to impeach and remove pete hexeth from office do you anticipate assuming hexeth leaves uh by the end of the year or even sometime next year would that preclude him from being subpoenaed by your committee um no um you know i think we could all guess how that would play out we've seen it enough in the last you know gosh almost decade now um of back and forth on that you know people ignore subpoenas they're held in contempt and you know rinse and repeat so look a lot of what we need to do what we are figuring out now this is not easy this is a really complicated set of issues because for all of this you know this american people want us to deal with the economic challenges that they're facing and you know that's bringing down gas prices that's bringing down food prices bringing down housing prices um so we have to stay focused on that agenda as well because i think that was one of the driving forces behind this election that the fact that donald trump just proved himself to be in a position to do what he wanted to do and that was to do what he wanted to do and he has to do it and he has to do what he wants to do and he has to do it and he has to do it and he has to do it and he has to do it and he has to do it and he has to do it and he has to do it and he has to do it and he's running our country i mean you listen to one of those two hour long rambling speeches any evidence in there that he cares what happens to the people of america or is he just riffing on a whole bunch of different things that come to his mind and that's really dangerous do you anticipate i mean i think the affordability part is important i think a lot of folks also want the accountability part is that something you guys can do at the same time can you walk and chew gum at the same time here if we do it right and that is going to be a major challenge if we appear to simply be engaged in a game of partisan insults and getting even for the sake of getting even um that i think will be a problem but if we are dignified respectful and intelligent about how we approach it yeah because look the corruption of the trump administration is epic in its proportions i mean he's raffling off pardons he's getting rich off of crypto he's taking money and gifts from foreign governments um his family is doing the same i think that has to be investigated and it has to be held to account um you know so i yes i think we can do both something that i would love to see happen as i've reported on before is uh it kind of exposing more to the public about the treatment of our service members overseas during this war now the war may very well come to a close at some point in the next couple months or next couple years but those are stories that haven't necessarily been told is that something you guys are going to be looking into yeah and we are laying out a list of excuse me what you know what are the top priorities to investigate and that's certainly one of them they have not been transparent about the situations for our service members even on casualty numbers they haven't been transparent on the damage to our bases on what was or was not done to protect them all of that stuff um yes we want to get a full explanation from day one of this war what has happened and how has it impacted our service members congressman i appreciate the time thank you all right thank you they're surging right now and thanks to you thank you for watching this video thank you for sharing our content make sure to hit that subscribe button we're on the road to a million subscribers like comment share get the word out thank you so much again