Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy warns of Trump’s ‘assault on the Constitution’
ABC News
In an interview on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday, Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy warned of an “assault on the Constitution” under President Donald Trump.
“I think this is the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced, certainly since Watergate,” Murphy said. “The president is attempting to seize control of power, and for corrupt purposes.”
Pointing to the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul the federal government, including by freezing foreign aid programs under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Murphy said the country is in the midst of a “red-alert moment” and argued that Trump is ushering in “the billionaire takeover of government.”
Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency, have called for a shuttering of USAID, with Trump posting on social media, “CLOSE IT DOWN!”
“The president wants to be able to decide how and where money is spent so that he can reward his political friends, he can punish his political enemies,” Murphy said. “That is the evisceration of democracy.”
“You stand that next to the wholesale endorsement of political violence with the pardons given to every single Jan. 6 rioter — including the most violent, who beat police officers over the head with baseball bats — and you can see what he’s trying to do here,” Murphy continued. “He is trying to crush his opposition by making them afraid of losing federal funding, by making them afraid of physical violence.”
Murphy accused Musk of being motivated to shutter USAID in order to promote his own business interests.
“It makes America much less safe around the world, but it helps China. USAID is a thorn in the side of the Chinese government,” Murphy said. “Elon Musk has many major business interests at stake inside Beijing, and so making Beijing happy is going to accrue to the financial benefit of Elon Musk and many billionaires who outsource work to China.”
Murphy said it amounted to an “assault on the Constitution in order to serve the billionaire class” that will require “full scale opposition.”
“You can’t just rely on the courts,” he said. “Ultimately, you’ve got to bring the American public into this conversation, because we need our Republican colleagues in the House and in the Senate, ultimately, to put a stop to this. You cannot just rely on the court system when the challenge to the Constitution and the billionaire takeover is so acute and so urgent.”
Murphy also pushed back against Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who said on the Puck podcast “Somebody’s Gotta Win” last week that Democrats need to tone down their rhetoric, saying Americans are “not going to pay attention” if Democrats “keep yelling” and using “the most severe kinds of language.”
“I don’t agree. I’m not going to calm down,” Murphy said. “This is a fundamental corruption, and democracies don’t last forever, and what those who are trying to destroy democracies want is for everyone to stay quiet, for everyone to believe that the moment isn’t urgent.”
(WASHINGTON) — As Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, appears Thursday for his Senate confirmation hearing, some of the rhetoric he has espoused for years to defend Trump and promote Trump’s reelection is sure to elicit sharp questions about whether he is fit to lead one of the nation’s premiere law enforcement agencies.
Patel has derided the FBI as the “Federal Bureau of Insanity.” He’s announced “a mission to annihilate the ‘Deep State'” — what he calls a “cabal of unelected tyrants” inside government, undermining Trump. He’s said the conspiracy theory QAnon, claiming a secret global plot to traffic children and take down Trump, is right in many ways and “should get credit for all the things” it has accomplished. And he once promised to “come after” and prosecute “the conspirators not just in government, but in the media” who “helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election.”
On a podcast two years ago, Trump adviser Roger Stone told Patel his critics are right about one thing: “You are a Trump loyalist.”
Patel chuckled and nodded affirmatively.
But that’s just what Democrats — and even some Republicans — on the Senate Judiciary Committee may wonder about most: If confirmed, is Patel so loyal to Trump that he would use the FBI to push Trump’s political agenda and target Trump’s perceived enemies?
‘An existential threat’
According to Patel, the FBI has already become a political weapon — especially with its multiple investigations of Trump, including the unprecedented search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 — and that’s what he wants to change.
“The rot at the core of the FBI isn’t just scandalous, it’s an existential threat to our republican form of government,” Patel wrote in his book, published two years ago, titled “Government Gangsters.”
Trump, on social media, called Patel’s book “the roadmap to end the Deep State’s reign” when it came out.
Many of Trump’s allies in Congress have lauded Patel’s nomination, touting him as the change agent needed at the top of an embattled agency. Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has called Patel’s career “a study in fighting for unpopular but righteous causes, exposing corruption, and putting America First.”
Democrats, however, not only point to what they see as Patel’s concerning rhetoric — but also what they’ve described as his relative lack of experience for such a significant position.
After meeting with Patel last week, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he has “grave concerns” about Patel’s nomination, declaring, “Mr. Patel has neither the experience, the temperament, nor the judgment to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
‘I just got to my breaking point’
Now in his mid-40s, Patel grew up on New York’s Long Island, ultimately deciding to attend law school after caddying for a group of criminal defense attorneys at the Garden City County Club. By his own account, in 2005, he graduated from Pace University Law school in the bottom third of his class — something he was “very proud of,” he once joked.
After law school, he spent nine years as a public defender, and in late 2013 he moved to Washington, D.C., to join the Justice Department’s National Security Division as a terrorism prosecutor, helping U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country prosecute their cases.
He was involved in Justice Department cases all over the world, including ones stemming from the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi and the 2010 World Cup bombings in Uganda.
But in his book and in media interviews, he said he grew frustrated with his time at the Justice Department, especially after a dust-up with a federal judge that made national headlines.
In early 2016, while Patel was in Tajikistan for work, the judge presiding over one of his cases in Texas called for an in-person hearing back in the United States. Patel didn’t have a suit or tie with him in Tajikistan, and after racing halfway around the world to make the hearing, the judge badgered him to “dress like a lawyer” and “act like a lawyer,” according to a transcript of the exchange.
“You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” the judge added.
As Patel recounted in his book, his bosses at the Justice Department privately expressed support for him, but when the Washington Post wrote a story about it two weeks later, the Justice Department, in Patel’s telling, refused to defend him publicly, so the newspaper “dragged my name through the mud.”
Patel has also described how he grew upset over the Justice Department’s handling of the Benghazi case following the 2012 attack by Islamic militants, believing that “terrorists went free” despite his disputed assertion that the Obama administration had enough evidence to charge even more people for the attack.
“I just got to my breaking point,” Patel once recalled. So in 2017, he left the Justice Department to become a senior investigator on Capitol Hill, where he helped lead the House Republicans’ probe of “Russiagate” — which, as he describes it, exposed FBI wrongdoing in its 2016 investigation of alleged ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.
‘Not a credible witness’
Patel’s work on the Russia probe led to him joining the Trump administration in 2019, and in the final year of Trump’s presidency he was appointed acting deputy director of national intelligence — the second-in-command of the entire U.S. intelligence community — and then chief of staff to the acting U.S. defense secretary, a position that critics claimed he was unqualified to hold even for just the 10 weeks he was there.
After Trump’s first administration ended, Patel regularly appeared on conservative media outlets, frequently praising Trump and criticizing the Justice Department for investigating and then prosecuting Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office and his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Patel has claimed — despite the Justice Department’s inspector general finding otherwise — that the FBI played a part in pushing pro-Trump protesters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And he has claimed in media interviews and court testimony that Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deserve blame for the attack — not Trump — because, Patel insists, Trump days earlier had authorized up to 20,000 National Guard to secure the Capitol.
The judge who listened to his court testimony in a case about Trump’s eligibility to be on Colorado’s ballot in the November election ruled that Patel “was not a credible witness,” saying his testimony was “not only illogical” but “completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”
After Trump left office, Patel launched a tax-exempt charity, now known as the Kash Foundation, which made national headlines in 2023 with revelations that it provided thousands of dollars to at least two so-called “FBI whistleblowers” who helped House Republicans push disputed claims of corruption inside the Justice Department.
Patel has said his charity helps fund defamation lawsuits, supports whistleblowers, buys meals for families in need over Christmas, supports Jan. 6 families, and more recently funds “rescue operations” out of Israel.
But he has refused to offer specifics about who is benefiting from his charity, and, as ABC News previously reported, experts have questioned whether it was following the law. At the time, Patel declined to speak with ABC News about its reporting.
After Trump announced his latest presidential campaign, Patel traveled the country to promote Trump’s reelection, saying that Trump would fire “thousands and thousands and thousands” of government employees to root out the “Deep State.”
Three weeks after Trump was reelected president, he named Patel as his pick to lead the FBI.
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., said negotiations for a deal to free the hostages in the Hamas-Israel war “are literally happening as we speak.”
“Let’s allow our hostages to be set free. I want to see them walking across the tarmac, or at a minimum, some type of agreement before inauguration because President Trump is serious,” Waltz told ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl on Sunday. “Any deal will only get worse for Hamas, and there will be all hell to pay in the Middle East if we continue to have this kind of hostage diplomacy.”
Officials close to ceasefire negotiations told ABC News on Sunday that a high-level Israeli delegation led by the head of the Mossad has already arrived in Doha for a critical round of talks. Egyptian and U.S. officials are participating in the conversations, including Trump’s incoming Middle East adviser Steven Witkoff and President Joe Biden’s outgoing adviser Brett McGurk.
On U.S. relations with Russia, Karl asked Waltz about plans for Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet.
Last week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Putin would welcome a meeting with Trump, but that it would most likely happen after he takes office. When asked about a potential meeting with the Russian president while attending a dinner with Republican governors, Trump said, “He wants to meet, and we’re going to, we’re setting it up.”
Waltz told Karl that “preparations are underway” for that meeting and that from Trump’s perspective, “you can’t enter a deal if you don’t have some type of relationship and dialogue with the other side, and we will absolutely establish that in the coming months.”
Concerning Ukraine, Waltz said the Trump administration will be asking about its military manpower, noting that it “could generate hundreds of thousands of new soldiers” if it lowered its draft age.
“They certainly have taken a very noble and tough stand, but we need to see those manpower shortages addressed,” Waltz said. “This isn’t just about munitions, ammunition or writing more checks. It’s about seeing the front lines stabilized so that we can enter into some type of deal.”
Trump has also repeatedly expressed interest in acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, even not ruling out using the U.S. military to do so if he saw fit.
Asked if Trump was serious about using military power, Waltz said, “What he’s very serious about is the threats that we’re facing in the Arctic — the threats that we’re facing in the Western Hemisphere.”
“Enough is enough for having our adversaries coming into our Western Hemisphere threaten our, you know, our national security and President Trump is ready to take big, bold steps to ensure the United States is well-defended,” he said.
Further pressed by Karl on whether Trump would use military force to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, Waltz said the president-elect “is never going to take an option off the table, unlike, frankly, his predecessor, so when it comes to our national defense, that is paramount to the commander in chief.”
ABC News’ Jordana Miller contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — With the Virginia gubernatorial election a little more than eight months away, Democrats in the state have said they believe the federal job cuts under President Donald Trump’s administration will have a ripple effect that could sway voters to flip the governor seat from a Republican to a Democrat.
The Virginia gubernatorial election, which is held in an off-year cycle, is often seen as an indicator of where the political climate stands in the country. The election comes after federal job cuts carried out by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency with a goal of slimming down a bloated federal government and reducing its jobs — many of which are stationed in Washington, D.C.’s suburbs of Virginia.
The 2021 governor race demonstrated how education, parental rights and the culture war motivated voters and contributed to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin winning the election and flipping the governor seat after Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s time in the governors mansion. Youngkin defeated his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, by just over 63,000 votes.
Youngkin’s success in amplifying important voter issues was then mimicked by other state leaders and candidates running during the 2022 midterm elections.
Virginia has just under 145,000 federal workers, according to the Office of Personnel Management — making it one of the states with the most federal employees. It’s still unclear how many total jobs have been cut at the federal level — though it’s estimated to be in the thousands across the country.
Former Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who is running for governor in Virginia, told ABC News in a phone interview that the job cuts on the federal level are becoming a constant presence on the campaign trail.
“I hear about it from the people who are impacted, from people who are impacted because they’re federal employees and they have a friend who’s already been fired or they’re worried about their job,” Spanberger told ABC News.
Spanberger said that the impact these job cuts have on the commonwealth will be “dire.”
ABC News reached out to Virginia’s Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who is running against Spanberger for governor, about the federal job cuts in Virginia and its effect on the race, but did not hear back by the time of publication.
In response to the federal layoffs and the impact on Virginia workers, Youngkin announced a new state website to help people find jobs in the commonwealth, including those impacted by the Trump administration’s federal cuts.
The new website, called virginiahasjobs.com, displays 250,000 jobs available across the state.
Although Youngkin said he has empathy for those who have lost their jobs through the Trump administration’s slashing of federal jobs, the Virginia governor — a Trump ally — said he supports the idea of trying to cut out waste and fraud from government.
“Listen, we have a federal government that is inefficient, and we have an administration that is taking on that challenge of rooting out waste, fraud and abuse and driving efficiency in our federal government. It needs to happen,” Youngkin said.
Earle-Sears, whom Youngkin recently endorsed, amplified the resources announced by the Virginia governor through releases, campaign messaging and social media posts.
But some say it’s too early to tell if these cuts could impact the upcoming elections in Virginia.
Zack Roday, a Virginia-based GOP consultant and a former adviser for Youngkin’s 2021 gubernatorial campaign, told ABC News that Democrats seizing on the cuts of the federal government means they’re looking for a message to carry them through this cycle.
“Democrats are in search of a message, so they’re going to try this,” Roday told ABC News. “That is logical. I understand it from a tactic. If it’s effective, we won’t know quite yet.”
“They have to pin their campaign on something because they don’t have much, much of a message because Gov. Youngkin’s record, his approval is popular, both with the electorate writ large and certainly the important independents that have a big role in determining who’s the next governor,” Roday continued.
Roday also added that there are people in Virginia who support the Trump administration’s cuts.
“There’s a whole lot of Virginians that live outside of Richmond and Northern Virginia, and have a lot of people that look at what Donald Trump is doing and are saying about time, thank you,” Roday said.
