CNN Newsroom: Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) Is Interviewed Regarding Trump Legal Issues And Texas and Greg Abbott

Interview

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Well, I'm not surprised. I mean, after all these years, that's kind of Donald Trump's method of operation, is that he tries to intimidate people, he tries to bully people in his own way, threaten people. And I do think that it was a veiled threat and I'm glad that the prosecutors have asked for protective orders, because what you see Donald Trump do again and again is try to get his supporters or his followers to do his dirty work.

That's what the insurrection, the attempted coup was on January 6th, was Donald Trump riling up a bunch of people and letting them march onto the Capitol, break into the Capitol, while he sat back at the White House.

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Well, she can issue a warning. She can issue a warning for him not to make the threats that he's made, to not make comments about the case and so forth. Remember, they have now entered a judicial proceeding, a legal proceeding that's headed to trial eventually unless they make some other agreement before that. So, she has pretty wide latitude to stipulate what he can and can't do as a defendant who is in front of the court.

And she ought to take every opportunity where it's appropriate if he keeps popping off like this to do that because, you know, his words could very well lead to harm and danger to folks involved in the trial.

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I think he's conflating two things. He's conflating speech and action. It's true that Donald Trump or any other candidate who loses an election can go out there and say that I think everybody cheated me out of this election. I think I actually won this thing and so forth.

But when you as a president of the United States start to use the power of your office to bully people and intimidate people to find votes, for example, in Georgia, to change votes, to try to force Mike Pence with intimidation or through intimidation to not certify the election, then you've crossed over from words into using your official office for oppression. And that's what we saw from Donald Trump.

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You know, I saw that news and I really thought long and hard about it because you can really -- you could think about it and you could argue it both ways. You know, you could say, well, if you put those cameras in there, it's just going to turn into a big circus and it's really going to debase the legal proceedings and the judicial process.

But, you know, the other side of it is that the stakes are so high here. And if it's not covered, if people aren't able to see it for themselves, what happens is it gives Donald Trump and his team a chance to do what they've been doing for a long time, which is engage in this purposeful, directed misinformation and disinformation and lies about exactly what's going on.

And so, by televising it, you would actually allow people to see it in real time and people would be able to see with their own eyes what's going on. And that makes it less likely that when somebody comes, somebody like Donald Trump or his team come up with these conspiracy theories about what happened in the courtroom, people will be able to say, and we'll be able to go back and look at the tape and say, well, you know, that's not what happened. So, in the end, I think that it would probably be a good thing in this case.

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Well, to answer your last question, I certainly hope so because what Greg Abbott is doing is barbaric and inhumane. Even though migration has dropped substantially since the end of Title 42 a few months ago, even though the number of border crossings has dropped, Greg Abbott has gotten more extreme in how he's treating migrants and asylum seekers. So, he installed razor wire along the Rio Grande, even though he's a governor without any jurisdiction over an international body of water.

And then he put in these barrel traps that got razor wire below them or concertina wire below them so that people can get stuck on them, and people have gotten stuck on them. In fact, there was -- it was reported last week that among two dead bodies, there was -- in the river, there was one that was actually stuck to these buoys. One of those two bodies was a child from Honduras.

And so, as far as I'm concerned, Greg Abbott has blood on his hands. He has installed these things knowing that it's more -- they are more likely to force people to drown in that river. But also, what they've done is for the people that the asylum seekers that do make it over and present themselves for asylum, what the state is doing now is adopting a practice from Donald Trump's playbook.

They're separating families now at the border. So, they're traumatizing these young children by taking away their parents from them again at the border. When Donald Trump did this, there were literally thousands of kids that were left at least for a time without their parents. And there's still some families that have never been reunited to this day. Even as the Biden administration set up a commission to work on the reunification, there are some families that they've just not been able to reunite. So, Greg Abbott has gotten to a very barbaric place.

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Yeah, I mean, if the Biden administration is not careful, what they're going to allow is for the state to usurp the power of the federal government on immigration and border enforcement.

And remember, we're at a time now where even compared to 20 years ago, we have triple or quadrupled the number of border patrol agents than we did 20 years ago. We have drones on the border. We have anti-tunnel technology on the border. The state has a bunch of its own resources, putting aside the recent development of the razor wire and the buoys and so forth, they already had a lot of resources dedicated to the border.

And so, what's happening now is because of politics, Greg Abbott has decided that he's going to continue using the border as the number one boogeyman for his own political gain. And really, Jim, a big part of the reason for that is that he's got no solutions to a lot of the other problems that are facing Texans, on healthcare, on education, on job creation, all of these things, he really has nothing to offer.

And so, he continues to put the focus on the border by treating people more and more inhumanely. It's very pathetic, but that's the politics of Greg Abbott.

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Good to be with you.

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