Election loser Trump renews focus on loss to Biden: FBI… — Transcript

Fact number one.

Republicans fear that Donald Trump's obviously widely unpopular second term is dragging them down towards what could be a midterm loss or full-blown route.

Fact number two, President Trump's administration is now blatantly pushing these abuses of power, some of them unconstitutional, to change that trajectory, not by actually winning more votes, which is what everyone's encouraged to do in a democracy that uses the rule of law, but no, to change it through pressure, through government force, through possibly illegal prosecutions of their perceived foes, not by offering a popular agenda to win more votes.

And it is that very clear contrast between where our democracy could be headed and no one knows what will happen in the midterms. I'm just telling you what even the Republican Party chair said that they're bracing for a loss. That's what's happening in our actual lived democracy and the indicators we have, plus Republican losses in November, and then these efforts, some of them possibly on the line, possibly just sort of pushing and squeezing and testing, and some of them as we've told you because we'll always keep it real and factual with you, some of them obviously flatly unconstitutional on the other lane.

We're talking about attacks on US guard rails from elections to free speech, including what we have here tonight. This is the first time we're seeing through new body cam video, what was clearly a troubled and chaotic scene as Donald Trump's FBI agents went to seize ballots in Georgia.

We have the video from reporting by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The FBI approached in a way that clearly left the local officials concerned about not only the unusual federal raid for old ballots from a long resolved race, but also whether this legally required Trump FBI warrant was even valid.

So did anybody get a physical copy of the search warrant?

No.

When did they get here?

About 12:30.

Just unannounced.

Unannounced.

Then the FBI represented through these agents we have in the video.

They seem to admit the warrant was at least off.

I say that broadly because again, we're working off the video.

We don't have all the materials, but it was off enough that it required they admitted amending to even be valid.

The warrant will be amended slightly.

But for all intents and purposes, what they had is what it's going to look like.

We wanted to let her facilitate us moving through the building to unlock the gates so that we don't have to breach it because we got to play the other.

The records are coming with us today.

One way or the other, the records are coming with us.

Now, if you've ever wondered, if you've never dealt with an agent, whether it's federal or police coming in, that's how they are, that's how they talk.

There is a process for this, but they don't sound like they're negotiating.

It may be that there were not problems with the underlying warrant that would make it invalid.

That's something lawyers can litigate.

It may be slight amendments, which could be okay.

It may also be that this whole case blows up in Donald Trump's face in the long run because there isn't a lot of precedent for digging through six-year-old ballots from an election you lost where the only known convictions related to that election are from the loser of the election, Donald Trump and his team.

Indeed, his lawyers were sanctioned in Georgia and elsewhere.

But more clearly, what I want you to understand tonight is that video shows the power of your federal government, of armed federal agents seizing ballots from an election settled, as I mentioned, six long years ago.

Now, Donald Trump was the loser of that election in Georgia and of course, the entire election that year.

He lost to Joe Biden.

So, I say to you, as a news anchor following these stories and always trying to remain calm, what the heck are we doing six years later on this of all things?

Because you're allowed to debate and talk about whatever you want in America.

That's a great thing.

You are not allowed to use, abuse or misuse federal resources because you lost an election.

Indeed, while we don't know everything, and I've been careful to state that, in the long run, this is exactly the kind of case that may, like other revenge cases, go up in smoke.

But Trump is six years later directing his government to focus on this, his loss.

Why he was the loser in Georgia and the loser nationally, which of course snowballed into his efforts to join those later convicted thugs who attacked police on Jan 6, and then he pardoned them all.

This is all part of that.

The law breaking we know of is on his side, not the other.

And he's focused on this rather than say, fighting crime, or lowering prices, or any of the number of promises he vowed in his election to work on.

This is what he's focused on.

And quite personally, I don't say he like his administration and then we're kind of filling in all the gaps.

No, Donald Trump from new reporting personally involved in this, taking the step of talking to some of those agents.

We saw one of them on camera by speakerphone after the raid.

That's unusual.

We don't believe the president would usually have all the FBI agents numbers or place those calls.

There is a chain of command, but he did it through an intelligence official and questioned them and praised them and thanked them for working on this inquiry.

Through as the Times puts it, this unusual call.

And that may involve another violation because the national intelligence director Gabbert was on site and facilitated that call.

It's not clear how her foreign intelligence authority would relate to meddling in a long finished domestic election where her boss lost.

She's also, we should note, facing a pending classified whistleblower complaint.

Now, just to put this in context, efforts by the president to abuse military or intelligence powers for domestic politics, that's not allowed.

That's part of what ended Nixon's presidency.

For those who are skeptical, you might say, well, in the beginning with Nixon, people said, well, I guess he's getting away with it.

And he was.

That's what happens when powerful people break rules.

In the end, he didn't.

In the end, many of his aides got in trouble, some went to prison.

Here we are at this moment with some of this stuff spilling out and the question again being, will there be accountability or not?

But Trump is more blatant than Nixon ever was about these violations.

He's also making an unconstitutional public demand to try to get the Feds to oversee elections in places where Republicans are losing.

Now, that is also a no-go.

And it's important in these times where people are trying to figure out where is the line and they're testing it.

The Republican Senate leader speaking out today, saying no, the president cannot do that.

For all the questions about when and how Republicans stand up, or will they just say the obvious?

Senator Thune did.

Because this isn't even allowed.

So he may be confident Trump won't do it, can't do it.

There aren't the mechanisms necessarily to do it.

But before I even show what Trump's saying and fact check it, I just want to give you the constitutional limits.

Because the Constitution gives states the power to decide the quote times, places and manner of holding elections and appointing electors for the presidential election.

After the states do that, they are in the lead.

Congress may alter some of the state rules.

The president cannot seize or nationalize anything.

The president does have a lot of power, and we've seen that in foreign policy if he wants to go use war powers against Venezuela in real time.

We don't see anything stopping him.

But the Constitution does stop him and give these other extraordinary powers to the states.

And you don't need to be a constitutional scholar to follow the logic.

The founders were worried about despots and kings.

They were not going to give the president, who is the more unitary officer, control over the elections when they were just standing up this new thing called elections that would try to remove people from power.

So they weren't kings.

So it's kind of like, duh, of course the president cannot and does not oversee his own election or powers.

Now, I'm going to show you, as promised, Donald Trump's unlawful claim in a recent podcast with a former FBI employee that didn't last that long in this administration with the facts in the Constitution.

The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least many 15 places.

The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.

We have states that are so crooked and they're counting votes.

We have states that I won that show I didn't win.

You're going to see something in Georgia.

And on he went.

The legal fact check is more important.

He's talking about something he cannot do.

And that Senate leader Thune agreed today he cannot do, but he will potentially try to see how far he can go.

He also lost Georgia.

Fact check, the president was false in that claim.

And we know that he knows because he was the one making calls furtively trying to get extra votes.

Why did he need extra votes?

Because he knew he didn't have them because he lost.

Constitution bars all of that.

Donald Trump doubled down on some of those remarks today as well when asked by reporters.

I'm not going to show you that because we've already fact checked it and that's enough in terms of our news standards.

These are Donald Trump's policies.

He is responsible for how his policies are turned into action.

The masks menacing, the rampant escalation in violence, the clearly avoidable killings.

And the agent looks back on it and says, blank happens.

But it doesn't just happen.

This is your government.

These are your tax dollars.

There is a big accountability mechanism above all others.

It is obviously elections.

And there are people who are concerned, understandably so, about the efforts I just detailed to try to undermine these elections.

And yet on the other hand, we do have some recent examples.

Donald Trump was president when he lost the election at the end of the first term.

It's the one he's still reinvestigating.

And we had elections in November, and they transpired.

And now the question is, heading in this November, towards this November, why is the President of the United States testing whether he can federalize or nationalize elections?

Why is he testing his powers to go seize ballots?

Once for the past, maybe next time for the present.

It is a very real stress test of our democracy.

The fact that it can be beat doesn't mean that there are losses along the way.

We just showed some of the testimony from human beings hurt or killed in ways that the vast majority of law enforcement experts say were at least avoidable, if not important to investigate as potentially crimes.

So that is the stakes of where we're at.