Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) warned President Donald Trump’s new White House Chief of Staff to “lawyer up” — but he could not name a single crime that might make that necessary.
Garcia aimed that warning at Stephen Miller, the long-time Trump adviser who was promoted to replace outgoing Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — but when CNN anchor Dana Bash asked what crime he believed Miller may have committed, Garcia could only name policies with which he disagreed.
The California congressman — who is poised to chair the powerful House Oversight Committee when Democrats take control of the chamber in January — sat down with Bash for Sunday’s broadcast of “State of the Union to discuss his party’s sweep of the midterm elections on Tuesday and what was likely to come in the next congress.
Garcia told Bash that President Trump’s DOJ had already threatened an investigation into him over comments he’d made in the past about bringing “weapons” to the “fight for democracy” — and complained that people within the administration had “thin skin.” He went on to say that Democrats had “a job to do,” and would do it whether the DOJ investigated them or not.
“Let me ask you about the job that you said you had to do,” Bash prompted. “You did say that Stephen Miller needs to ‘lawyer up.’ Why are you going to investigate him? Do you think that he committed a crime?”
“What we think is that Stephen Miller is the architect of this horrific unjust policy happening across the country and the way that we are treating folks — look, Stephen Miller called Alex Pretti, as we know, an assassin,” Garcia began, and he laid out a laundry list of personal and political complaints about Miller — none of which appeared at face value to be criminal.
“The way that he is going around creating immigration policy that separates families, that is causing people harm, that’s creating a detention process where a few large companies are profiting, the unconstitutional detention of people,” Garcia continued. “The way that folks are losing their due process rights, that has to be investigated, and we know that Stephen Miller has been an architect of that.”
“So what’s happening there, what’s happening in Iran, Stephen Miller is at the center of the major policy decisions that are happening in the administration, so it does deserve oversight and investigation,” Garcia concluded.
“Oversight and investigation,” Bash repeated, asking again, “Do you think that anything he did was criminal?”
“That — look — what’s important is, we believe that he’s been at the center of actions that are unconstitutional, unjust, and possibly illegal,” Garcia insisted, but still was unable to point to any specific crime for which Miller might actually need to “lawyer up.”
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