Bulwark Takes - Tim and Sarah React To Disturbing Video Of Sen. Padilla

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller join Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC's Deadline: White House to break down the disturbing footage of U.S. Senator Alex Padilla being forcibly removed, handcuffed, and thrown to the ground at a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Hey guys, Sarah Longwell here, publisher of The Bullwork. Don't forget to subscribe to all our stuff. Right before I was about to go on Nicole, the story broke about Senator Alex Padilla getting, you know, grabbed, handcuffed, manhandled, put on the ground for, I guess, disrupting, asking a question of Kristi Noem at her press conference. It is a wild and very disturbing video. Both Tim and I were on with Nicole and so we were kind of reacting in real time. But I hope you enjoy it. Go check it out. A sitting senator, California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, was treated in a manner you don't see every day in the United States of America or in any democracy for that matter. Today he was forcibly removed from a

press conference that was being held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The sitting senator was then handcuffed and his body was placed on the ground. The video released by Senator Padilla's office shows what I just described. violent criminals that you're rotating on your on your I also want to hand off many of our ice pickings have been docked on the ground on the ground hands on your back hands on your back alright alright alright cool hand lay flat lay flat other hand sir other hand All right. All right. All right. Hey, move your hand. Lay flat. Lay flat.

Other hand, sir. Other hand. There's no recording loud out here. I did not know there was no recording loud out here. The United States Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, went on Fox News at 3 p.m. and told this lie, quote, he didn't ID himself. Padilla did, so there's that.

But he also tried to say before he was manhandled that he was there with questions for the secretary at her press conference. Here's how he described it after a few months ago. Since the beginning of the year, but especially over the course of the last, over the course of recent weeks, I, several of my colleagues have been asking the Department of Homeland Security for more information and more answers in their increasingly extreme immigration enforcement actions. And we've gotten little to no information in response to our inquiries.

And so I came to the press conference to hear what she had to say to see if I could learn any new additional information. And at one point, I had a question. And let me emphasize, just as we've emphasized the right for people to peacefully protest and to stand up for their First Amendment rights, for our fundamental rights. I was there peacefully. At one point, I had a question. And so I began to ask a question.

I was almost immediately forcibly removed from the room. I was forced to the ground and I was handcuffed. I will say this. If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question. If this is how the Department of Homeland Security responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they're doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California and throughout the country. We will hold this administration accountable.

If this is how they treat a senator with a question, imagine what they're doing to others. That's the question for all of us right now, today. Joining me, MSNBC political analyst, host of the Bullwork podcast, Tim Miller's here. Also joining us, the publisher of the Bullwork and host of the Focus Group podcast, Sarah Longwell is here. Let me play for all of you, Senator Chris Murphy, reacting on the Senate floor.

the Senate floor. Speaking for myself, I don't ask law enforcement to throw my constituents to the ground and violently handcuff them because they have a different opinion from me. You know why I don't do that? Because we don't do that in a democracy. We don't do that against ordinary citizens, and we certainly don't allow the administration and the law enforcement that works for the administration to do that to a United States senator. This kind of violence simply because the White House doesn't agree with people who dissent. If this is how a United States Senator can be treated, then none of us ultimately are immune. If this is how a United States Senator can be treated, none of our constituents are safe.

This is a test for the country, but this is a test for the United States Senate as well. Sarah Longwell, your thoughts? Okay, so first of all, I just, I want to pick apart something that's happening in the room, which is, at the second he said, I'm Alex Padilla,

I'm a United States Senator, the fact that Kristi Noem didn't call people off, right? I mean, you just think about all the times in this country, I just most recently, take Joe Biden's State of the Union, when Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Green started screaming at him during his speech, nobody came in and dragged them out and threw them to the ground. This is not, it is not uncommon for elected officials to sort of confront each other in this way at a moment when people are paying attention.

I mean, Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary, when the Democrats were out in front of the Department of Education, they invited her to the podium. She came out to sort of, you know, get into it with them, and they invited her to the podium. She came out to sort of, you know, get into it with them, and they invited her to the podium and let her talk. There is a way in which Kristi Noem should have immediately identified him as a colleague, not as an enemy, right? And that's an important distinction. It's a way that it is something deep we're losing in politics, that she should not have intervened or that other people shouldn't have stood up and said, this is not how we treat a US Senator, we can't do this.

I mean, that is her responsibility. And so the fact that she let it happen, and I'll tell you something, it's telling she had this sort of 15 minute conversation with him afterwards, it's because once they realized that it was on tape, that somebody had it, right? They knew this was bad, because this doesn't happen.

I've never seen anything like it. You see plenty of interactions with elected officials getting into it with each other. You do not see the FBI or Secret Service dragging their colleagues to the floor and cuffing them. It is not something that happens. And so the fact that she wasn't there to say, don't do this, that's sort of the scary part that they're just letting it happen. And it's because it is the ethos of this administration

to treat people not as colleagues, but as enemies. Tim Miller, your thoughts. Yeah, just one thing going off what Sarah was just saying about press conferences. This is one area where Nicole, maybe you and I both have some expertise on this. I've, well maybe me especially, because I've both been a press flack who has been trying to manage a press conference when other people have disrupted it.

And I've been a disruptor of press conferences, believe it or not. And in none of those occasions where anybody touched, you know, nobody was, certainly nobody is thrown to the ground. Like this is just the nature of how politics work and I do think that's an important thing to say because some folks who are watching this might think that he was acting inappropriately or whatever. This happens in politics and particularly at a moment like this where there's all these extreme things that are happening in California targeting Senator Padilla's

Constituents it is almost called for and makes sense for him to take this opportunity She and the Kristi no was in his state You know the the the MAGA folks like to a big talking point right now is that people voted for this? Well, the people of California didn't vote for this They voted for Alex Padilla and the end and so he has a right to represent his constituents Alex Padilla. And so he has a right to represent his constituents, just as much as Donald Trump has a right to try to enact the policies that he thinks that he was elected on. So I just think that's one element about the press conference side of this. The other thing about DHS, and you played that from Chris Murphy, it was about a month ago that Chris Murphy was asking Kristi Noem in a hearing about DHS. And he was listing

about how this agency is out of control and how it's a lawless agency. And he listed a handful of things, you know, among them, the fact that they're spending way more money than they have been allotted by Congress. Like she is illegally spending money that they don't have on immigration enforcement and on ICE officials. That's one element. Talked about the way that they're doing immigration enforcement. I mean, we've talked a lot about the Venezuelans, that they snatched off the street and then

kidnapped and sent to El Salvador, or what we've seen with, you know, Mahmoud Khalil or other ways where they've been going around the law to do immigration enforcement. And that is happening right now in LA, too, as we speak. They are racially targeting, to Ben Rhodes's point, They are racially targeting, to Ben Rhodes's point, companies where a lot of Hispanic folks work. They're going in there without deportation notices. They're just doing random sweeps, racially targeted. They're harassing people that are legal residents that don't have their papers or whatever.

Maybe in some cases they do have their papers, but they don't believe them because they're speaking, because their English is not good enough for the officers, like across all these things. So the DHS is acting lawlessly. This is not a one-off thing where there are three random cops who roughed up Padilla and maybe they were acting inappropriately.

This is DHS's Emma. Sarah, let me ask you to pick up on the point you were making before the break about Kristi Noem. She rose, you know, like a firework, if you will, and VP stakes, and then seemed to sabotage her own chances when she wrote in her own words, her own telling of her experience murdering her own dog by shooting her own description

of frisky puppy in the face. This is someone for whom sadistic conduct toward animals, at least, was part of her brand. How do you think she's writing this out in terms of the manner in which she went on Fox News, seeming confident that no one would check her facts? Yeah, well, what's interesting is her accusing somebody else of performative theater,

because nobody has done more cosplaying. She's constantly dressing herself up like federal agents. She's constantly putting detainees behind her for photo ops, which is some of the grossest behavior behavior I've ever seen out of a public official. But Nicole, I also want to pick up on something that you're talking about, which is the lies that Republicans are telling. So one thing that has been interesting, you saw a lot of people, you know, in the tech community and conservatives talk about how you needed Trump to be a free speech president. He was going to be a free speech president. We have to have free speech in this country. Well, a sitting senator should be able to ask a question of the head of Department of Homeland Security.

And in fact, I find it odd that Kristi Noem wouldn't recognize Senator Alex Padilla. I mean, he is the ranking member, I believe, on one of the immigration committees. So the idea that she absolutely doesn't know who he is is absurd. But you've got Donald Trump saying, if people show up to protest his tanks in the streets, that they're going to be met with incredible force. Well, he's not talking about violence. He's not talking about riots.

He's talking about people who show up to protest the tanks in the streets that they will be met with force. I mean, this is what this administration is doing. This is not singular. This is not one off. This is about how this entire administration is approaching people who dissent. And so nobody better come here and try to tell me this is a free speech president or a free speech administration. Her reasoning for the treatment of Senator Alex Padilla is that he was disrespectful. Being disrespectful is not a reason to handcuff somebody on the ground. It's just not even a US Senator, right? It's not. And I gotta say, my last thing is,

Republican senators should be very careful on this right now. If they do not come out and defend Senator Padilla's right to ask questions of this administration, of his colleagues. They are setting an extraordinarily dangerous precedent for how senators are going to be treated in this country. They should protect their own institution. They should have an interest in their office being protected from this kind of behavior

because they're all gonna wanna ask questions at some point, accountability questions of their leadership, and that is right and it's American. We have an answer already to Sarah's question about Republicans, at least on the House side. I'm actually not going to play this, but Tim Miller, Speaker Johnson, I've been asked to play it. Let me play this. It's not my decision to make. I'm not in that chamber.

But I do think that it merits immediate attention by other colleagues over there. I think that behavior at a minimum is, it rises to the level of a censure. I think there needs to be a message sent by the body as a whole that that is not what we are going to do. That's not how we're going to act. We're not going to have branches fighting physically and having senators charging cabinet secretaries. We got to do better. So Jim Miller, the victim is who Speaker Johnson would like to see censured. Yeah, I mean, you can't even see Kristi Noem in the video. It's like hard to tell. Like

this notion that he was some physical threat to her is just absurd. And he's getting manhandled and bullied and thrown to the ground. It's sick. And it's hard to even dignify what Mike Johnson said with a response. It's related to what you said right before the break, Nicole, that they're not interested in deescalating. They actually want to escalate. There's an article in the Real Clear Politics,

a conservative website this morning. They interviewed a bunch of Republican strategists and folks in the Hill. Mike Johnson might even have been quoted in the story if I recall about how they want this fight. Like they think that a fight over disorder in the streets of California is a winner for them politically and is going to be their path to have a better midterm and they're not hiding it. It's not like a conspiracy theory of the anti-Trump crowd that are saying that Trump wants escalation and that Republican, Niagara Republicans want escalation in the streets of LA, they're saying it. Like they, they are, their explicit policy

efforts is they want to turn the heat up. They want it to seem like things are out of control because they think that's a political winner for them. And that goes back to what you and Ben were talking about about propaganda earlier and why they're replaying the same videos over and over again of some legitimately bad things that some folks are doing. But they're trying to blow it out of proportion and they're trying to instigate it because they think it's a political winner and because that's part of the playbook that they have put forth for seizing more power.

And so I think that ties directly to the speaker's response there.