Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) tore into President Donald Trump's latest claim that the California governor and Los Angeles mayor "paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists" to riot — one of the many pretexts he is using to send the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles to break up protests against his mass deportations.
"What's your response to that, Senator?" CNN's Kaitlan Collins asked him on Tuesday evening.
"Well, this is Donald Trump being Donald Trump, basically making statements out of whole cloth, making the craziest allegations, then trying to deny them," said Schiff. "You know, it's awful, frankly, to have a president that nobody can believe what he says from morning, noon or night. But it's also quite traditional Trump, and that is, he wants to justify the unjustifiable. He wants to create chaos. He wants to somehow pretend to be a president of law and order, when his first act in office was to pardon hundreds of people who attacked law enforcement officers. So, you know, we've got this president who no one can really have confidence or trust in, and he's displaying once again why there is so little trust in him."
"What is your response when the president says that L.A. would be 'burning to the ground right now' — that's a quote — if the president had not ordered the National Guard to go into Los Angeles?" asked Collins.
"Well, this is another perfect illustration of Trump's repeated false statements," replied Schiff. "I mean, he's kind of a firehose of falsehood. He made that claim that, you know, thanks to the Guard, things were settling down in Los Angeles before the Guard was even deployed or in position. So, you know, this is the president basically, I guess, speaking, whatever comes into his head, no matter how false, no matter how improper. He, at one point, said he supported the arrest of the governor. It's absurd nonsense."
"When he abuses the military this way, it erodes trust in the military," Schiff continued. "We in California, like in so many states, have a very close relationship with our National Guard. We revere our Guard. They're there to help us during fires and floods. They're there when we need them. And to misuse them in this way, and to misuse the Marine Corps that we also really value and idolize their service to the country, when there are some real threats facing the country from outside the country, to deploy them in American cities, to try to intimidate Americans — it's just such a terrible abuse. But one I really think we're likely to see replicated in other cities."
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