WATCH: ‘There is No Ceasefire’ – Sen. Schiff Calls Out Trump’s ‘Absurd’ Iran Argument, Slams Bill Essayli’s Abuse of U.S. Attorney’s Office on MS NOW

Washington, D.C. - Last night, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MS NOW's All In with Chris Hayes to call out the Trump administration's illegitimate justification for its war with Iran and condemn Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli's attempts to promote claims of election fraud in California to validate Trump's election lies.

Schiff emphasized the need for the administration to share its legal justification for the war, highlighting his effort earlier this week leading 37 Senate Democrats in demanding the Trump administration release its legal opinion supporting the claim that hostilities in Iran have "terminated."

The Senator also called for the Senate to continue advancing the War Powers Resolution he co-led which would direct Trump to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iran. A vote to move forward on the resolution is expected to occur in the coming weeks.

View the full interview here.

Key Excerpts:

On pressing the Trump administration to justify the legality of the Iran war:

The ceasefire argument that the administration making is just patently absurd. First of all, the ceasefire is mostly observed in the breach. Iran shot down one of our helicopters. We are attacking sites in Iran. Some may be legitimate, others may be completely illegitimate and violations of the laws of war, but there is no ceasefire.

[…] We've asked for the legal opinion justifying all this. What are the arguments that they're using? What are the targets that they think are legitimate? And this is the first opinion they're withholding, not just from the public, but from the Congress itself. We can't even see it in closed classified session. I'm demanding that that be released and joined by a great many of my Democratic colleagues. We obviously want to see what their arguments are, but the ones they're making in public are palpably inadequate.

On Bill Essayli's efforts to drum up election fraud charges in California to back Trump's election lies:

[…] Bill Essayli has gone into the grand jury with similar immigration cases and been refused by grand juries so often that behind his back in the office they call him 'no-Bill Essayli' because he's turned down so often. The tragedy is, it's driven about a quarter to a third of the prosecutors to leave the office. There's been a terrible drain of experienced prosecutors. Now you have the specter of, not the U.S. Attorney, because he couldn't get confirmed, but the first assistant, because the top two positions are unfilled - basically making a plea to the public: "Please send me evidence. I'm asserting there's fraud. We don't have evidence of it, but please send me something. I need to make the boss happy."

On Trump's nomination of Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence:

[…] He wants Pulte to do the same thing that Tulsi Gabbard was doing - go on raids of ballot boxes in Georgia, or tell intelligence agencies to rewrite their conclusions to suit the president's objectives, or to misuse secret government data to weaponize it against the president's enemies. Those are his only qualifications, which obviously are no qualifications at all.

###