WASHINGTON–U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Sunday joined NBC News’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker to discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations. Murphy also discussed the path forward for the Democratic Party and the importance of shifting power away from billionaires and corporations and back to the American people.

On President-elect Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel to serve as Director of the FBI, Murphy said: “I will vote no, and I will organize not just my colleagues, but the American public to understand what's happening here. Donald Trump told the American public during the campaign that he was going to turn the Department of Justice into a political operation, an arm of the White House, to destroy his political opponents, right. He said that the greatest threat to America is the enemy within. And who he said was the enemy within was us – was journalists, were his political opponents. Kash Patel’s only qualification is [that] he agrees with Donald Trump that the Department of Justice should serve to punish, lock up, and intimidate Donald Trump's political opponents.

Murphy continued: “The cost to the American public is pretty simple. The Department of Justice and the FBI [are] supposed to be there to go after drug traffickers, gun smugglers, to go after corrupt Wall Street financiers. Instead, the Department of Justice is going to serve Donald Trump's political interests. That's what Kash Patel has said he thinks the Department of Justice and the FBI should do, and that's why Republicans and Democrats should be examining how damaging this nomination could be to American democracy.”

Murphy highlighted the fact that Trump is using his cabinet nominations to help enrich his billionaire friends: “What worries me about this cabinet is that it is essentially putting the billionaire class in charge of American government. The net worth of Donald Trump's nominees is greater than 169 countries. The folks that are being nominated to run the Department of Commerce, Treasury, Education, they don't understand what regular people are going through. All they see government as good for is enriching themselves and their billionaire friends, and so that is what the story of this cabinet is. It’s Donald Trump and the billionaire class taking over government to enrich themselves and screw everybody else in this country.”

On Donald Trump’s threats to levy tariffs against China and Canada: “What we know is that Donald Trump has no idea how to use tariffs in order to create American jobs. He did impose tariffs during his four years in office, and we lost manufacturing jobs. Joe Biden knew how to use tariffs in coordination with subsidies and incentives for domestic manufacturing, such that while he was president, we grew manufacturing jobs. The headline here is that Donald Trump's entire economic policy is going to be about a massive tax break for those billionaires that are in charge of his cabinet. The tariffs are a distraction from what the real agenda is going to be -  to be able to use government in order to dramatically increase the wealth of his Cabinet and the friends of that cabinet. Those tariffs, if they're not used properly, are just going to raise costs on ordinary Americans, while the billionaires get off scot-free.”

On a memo Murphy recently published calling on Democrats to embrace a more populist agenda, he said: “I think we have to talk about power – who has it and who doesn't have it. I think some of the most important things that Joe Biden did were taking on the big corporations, going after their monopoly power, helping consumers with some of the really egregious fees and gimmicks that those companies used to hurt us… I think Democrats need to be much more aggressive in making this case that that power has been concentrated, and it needs to be returned to regular Americans. And that we need to be able to invite a lot of different Americans into that conversation, regardless of whether they line up with Democrats on every single social and cultural issue. Let's build a bigger tent.”

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