WATCH: On MSNBC, Sen. Schiff Calls Out Trump Administration’s Continued Denials in Epstein Scandals, Talks Trump’s Retribution Campaign

Washington, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MSNBC's The Briefing with Jen Psaki to react to the most recent documents released to Congress from Jeffrey Epstein's estate and the White House's recent statements denying President Trump's signature in the Epstein birthday letter.

Schiff also discussed President Trump's pattern of weaponizing the government, including the Federal Housing Finance Agency under Administrator Bill Pulte, emphasizing the administration's campaign of political retribution is the motivation behind investigations launched against perceived political enemies.

View the full interview here.

Key Excerpts:

On the White House's continued denial of Trump's signature on Epstein letter:

I think all of the analyses that have come out that compares his signature - which looks virtually identical to his signature on other things - that compare his sketches with other sketches, that compare his language to the same phrases he has used just shows this is another lie by Donald Trump. This is another illustration of his Roy Cohn philosophy of deny, deny, deny. I guess it's not surprising that he would deny it, but it's such a bold-faced lie to say that he never signed, that this wasn't him, it was somebody else. But it is, sadly what we've come to expect.

On Trump's weaponization of the Justice Department:

[…] I think that it's pretty clear that Pulte is requesting records about the president's enemies to try to weaponize in a public way with false allegations of fraud. And what Pulte may or may not understand is, should they pursue this stuff, he's going to be under a microscope. Should people at Freddie or Fannie or wherever have been participating in his campaign of retribution, all of this is going to come out. And so Pulte is already having problems now because his own family had more than one primary residence. Three of Trump's Cabinet members had more than one primary residence. And I'm not suggesting they did anything wrong, but it makes it so clear that this is all retribution. It's all a political attack on his enemies.

And from my point of view, what people should be concerned about is not whether he's going after me or Letitia James or Lisa Cook per se, but rather that they're going to use the Department of Justice to try to silence their critics, to intimidate their critics. In the same way they're trying to silence media organizations and silence universities and stifle law firms from representing unpopular clients, they want to cultivate this climate of fear. And in that context, I think for me and other elected officials, we need to do what we're urging universities and law firms and the media to do, which is to stand up to this bully and fight back.

On demanding accountability for those engaged in the abuse of government power:

I don't have much hope, at the moment, that the Department of Justice will investigate Pulte or the Inspector General's office since they have decapitated all the leadership of any independents in the Inspector General's Offices around the federal government. But I think it is important that a marker be put down, that those that are engaged in the abuse of government power understand that they will be held to account. And I was pleased to see, for example, the House [Judiciary] Committee Democrats say they're investigating Pulte. They're demanding records from Pulte. And people at those agencies, should they try to destroy those records, are going to be held accountable, if not in this administration, then the next. So it is, I think, important to make the record, to demand the information, and to let people know that they will be held accountable.

###