Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said President Donald Trump “threats” to withdraw from NATO were “reckless.”
Partial transcript as follows:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: The president said this week that the United States is considering withdrawing from NATO, a sentiment that was echoed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Are you confident that Congress can keep the United States in NATO?
JEFFRIES: Certainly, I hope that there will be a bipartisan effort to convince this administration that withdrawing from NATO would be a reckless choice. This is a dangerous world. We need more friends, not more adversaries. And we should not walk away from an alliance that has actually kept the world and the United States as safe as possible in the aftermath of World War II. And the president should stop issuing these threats and attacking our allies while coddling up to people like Vladimir Putin and Russia, which is a sworn enemy of the United States of America. He’s got our priorities in terms of our friends and our adversaries all wrong.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me switch gears now to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE funding. As you know — as you know, the Democrats have been pushing for reforms in ICE as a condition for that funding, but now the Republicans are say they’re going to try to circumvent that by going through the reconciliation process, which means they could get the funding just by having a majority vote. So, does that moot your efforts?
JEFFRIES: Well, the first thing that needs to happen is that the House of Representatives under the leadership of Speaker Johnson and Republicans need to bring us back into session so we can actually reopen the Department of Homeland Security, stop creating chaos at airports all across the country and forcing people, including what happened to TSA agents for weeks, to work without pay.
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