Schumer: The Republican Destruction Of Norms Is So Angering, You Just Want To Say “God Damn Them”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today joined MS Now’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki to discuss the Trump administration’s handling of its military operation in Venezuela and the shooting of a U.S. citizen by an ICE agent in Minnesota.
JEN PSAKI, MS NOW HOST: Leader Schumer, thank you for being here with me on a very, very busy news day. There’s a lot to get to. I just wanted to start, though, of course, with the horrific shooting we saw in Minneapolis this morning, I think we have all watched that video really with horror so many times. I know you have seen it. Just I just want to start by getting your reaction to what you were thinking about when you watched that video. SENATE MINORITY LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): It’s horrific. And when you hear the lady screaming saying, what the F are you doing?, and you see what happened, you feel like a punch in the stomach. What the hell is going on here? And the bottom line is very simple, Jen. We should not have ICE agents patrolling our streets. They’re not needed. They create chaos, and they even create deaths. The mayor of Minneapolis didn’t want them. So many other cities didn’t. This is sort of Trump strutting around, but they don’t belong in our cities, plain and simple. We need a full investigation here as to what happened. PSAKI: Others have called for that. Of course, that makes sense. Anyone who has watched that video wants that to happen. We also saw today the Department of Homeland Security lie about what happened. We saw the President of the United States lie about what happened. This is so different from what we have seen from presidents of both parties for so many decades. And I can’t believe we have to ask this question, but do you trust that the FBI, do you trust them to handle over the oversight of this investigation? SCHUMER: No. You know, there are a lot of good people in the FBI who have been there for years and are, in a sense, civil servants. They’re nonpolitical. Trump has changed the FBI and many of our other judicial agencies into attack dogs for him. No one has any faith in them. No one has any trust in them. And this is, you know, one of the, there are so many horrible things happening in America, Jen, but we always had norms in this country. As you mentioned, previous presidents, Democrat, Republican would not come to this kind of lying to protect themselves. And when you destroy those norms, you really destroy what the essence of America has always been. And it is just angering, perturbing, confounding. You just want to say, God damn them.
