AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
With a looming government shutdown, top congressional Democrats have requested a meeting with President Trump because they say Republican leaders are refusing to engage in bipartisan negotiations. We're joined now by NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning.
RASCOE: So it looks like Senate Democrats and Republicans can't even agree on a short-term spending bill. So where does that leave us?
LIASSON: It leaves us looking at a looming - at a possible government shutdown because it doesn't look like the Senate has come to any agreement. They can't pass a spending bill without Democratic votes, and Democrats say they won't agree to a bill that doesn't include an extension of Obamacare subsidies and a rollback of some of those Medicaid cuts that were in the One Big Beautiful Bill. The president has said he - originally that he didn't want to negotiate with Democrats, but now he says he'd love to meet with them, but he doesn't think it will come to much.
RASCOE: Well, on Friday, U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert of the Eastern District of Virginia resigned. He didn't say why he stepped down, but President Trump wanted him out, right?
LIASSON: That's right. President Trump wanted him out because he had asked - wanted Siebert to go after New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud. Letitia James successfully prosecuted Trump in New York. But Siebert's office, after months of investigation, didn't find enough evidence to file charges. So he was pressured to resign. Trump actually said, he didn't resign. I fired him.
But now, in an extraordinary post on Truth Social, Donald Trump has ordered Pam Bondi, his attorney general, to prosecute his political opponents, including James, but also former FBI Director James Comey and California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff. Trump claims they are all, quote, "guilty as hell."
And this is an escalation of Trump's decision to use the Department of Justice as the instrument about - of his campaign of revenge and retaliation. He promised he'd do this. He campaigned on this. And he has overturned a long-standing norm that presidents shouldn't interfere in law enforcement investigations. His critics say this is an attack on the rule of law.
RASCOE: That is extraordinary. We have to say that. FBI Director Kash Patel faced questions from the House Judiciary Committee on things like the firing of dozens of FBI agents and the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Specifically, Democratic lawmakers kept reminding Patel of all the times he said the FBI should release all of the files. But now that he's FBI director, he's not doing that, right?
LIASSON: No, he's not doing that, and there have been a lot of top officials like Kash Patel or Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who have been called on the carpet to various degrees by Congress in hearings like this. But I don't think it matters much as long as Trump has their back.
And the big question for me that came out of the Kash Patel hearings is - beyond Kash Patel's future, is the future of the Epstein story and how much staying power it has, and whether now with everything else that's going on, it will be pushed out of people's attention span.
RASCOE: Well, I mean, it has some staying power in the U.K. That - activists were projecting images and news clips linking Trump to Epstein onto Windsor Castle during Trump's visit there last week. But while the president can't control criticism of him overseas, he is trying to do that here in the U.S., isn't he?
LIASSON: He certainly is. He's using every power at his disposal and some powers that experts say the Constitution does not put at his disposal to dominate or destroy institutions he feels are his opponents, whether they're law firms or universities. This week, it was the media. On Air Force One, he told reporters that the television networks, quote, "only give me bad publicity. I think maybe their licenses should be taken away." We saw Jimmy Kimmel's late-night comedy show get pulled hours after FCC chair Brendan Carr suggested that if ABC's affiliates didn't drop the show, they might lose their licenses.
We also see the Pentagon 2now prohibiting reporters from obtaining any information, including unclassified information, without prior Pentagon approval, or they'll lose their press credentials. So this kind of crackdown is getting criticism from Trump's own supporters like Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz, who say it's an attack on the First Amendment that could backfire on Trump.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Mara Liasson. Thank you so much, Mara.
LIASSON: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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