>> Mike Bloomberg is sitting on a number of past comments and actions during his time
as Mayor of New York that are absolutely horrendous, and deserve scrutiny particularly as he's
rising in the polls in numerous states.
One hasn't been talked about much to this point, and that is his active encouraging
of the wide spread long term spying in New York City.
On a number of different individual Muslims as well as Muslim communities and groups,
in the years after 9/11.
And so he was finally asked about that during an interview with NPR.
We've got a few little excerpts from that.
Here's the first.
>> You said later the surveillance was justified in order to keep the country safe.
But there have been independent reviews since that show, not a single arrest was made.
>> Well, its good.
>> it's going to be attributed to this surveillance.
>> Okay, term one, remember you're talking about right after 9/11 when everybody was
petrified about another terrorist attack.
We were super careful to always obey the law.
Number one is the right thing to do.
And number two, you knew people would be looking at it.
We had just lost 3000 people at 9/11.
Of course we're supposed to do that.
>> Okay, so the moral argument that he's making is reprehensible.
The legal reference he makes to, everybody says it was okay, is 100% not correct as we're
gonna get to but that clip reminded me so much of his approach to stopping press that,
you do what you gotta do.
And yeah, we never found anything.
It was horribly inefficient, terrible program but it didn't affect me or anyone I know,
so who cares why you're getting so worked up about it.
>> Yeah, and he didn't even just keep the investigations in New York City in the five
Burroughs.
He did it in the tri-state area, which is New Jersey, New York, Connecticut.
That is a huge scope of investigative reach that the mayor should not have.
Once again, he is testing the limits or, in fact-
>> Exceeding limits.
>> Exceeding them very much so of the powers as mayor.
He did it all the time as well under stop-and-frisk.
The boundaries of the law don't mean much to him.
And when you said the phrase, you do what you gotta do, reminded me also of his presidential
run.
He will pour as much money as needs to into how many states.
He's gonna do what he feels he needs to get done to get the result that he wants which
is to buy the presidency.
He doesn't really care about testing the limits of What is acceptable what is moral what is
legal when he was the mayor of New York City and this Muslim surveillance, which was over
250 mosques, schools, community centers, just regular people trying to live their lives.
He just didn't really care.
We're just gonna do that just to give the appearance of safety and I would love if someone
from back in the day just said, well, the Japanese that they attacked us at Pearl Harbor
we did what we had to do.
We turned all of them, what was I gonna do?
That's his argument.
So you're just gonna do away with civil liberties, people's rights as human beings.
Just because of fear, that's emotional leadership.
>> Yeah.
>> That's not rational, decent leadership.
>> Yeah, and the comparison stop at first guard really robust.
I'm scared, the targets aren't me who cares, honestly?
And all of your sense of rights, whether it's privacy rights or honestly, the rights to
your life to not be slammed up against- >> None even censored rights.
It's like the most founding principled rights of our country.
>> Yeah, those are gone if he feels nervous effectively.
>> Pretty sure it's in the top five amendments, all of these things that he violated as mayor.
>> Yeah, yeah, it's one of my favorites.
Okay, so that statement that you saw as well as the rest of his interview was responded
to by the director of the ACLU's National Security Project, Hina Shamsi, who said.
This is an insulting attempt to rewrite the history of an unconstitutional surveillance
program that left Muslims, particularly in communities of color, devastated.
It took brave Muslims and their supporters to go to court before the NYPD finally agreed
to reforms to safeguard communities in New York and beyond.
And no court ever said that the NYPD's discriminatory surveillance program under Bloomberg was lawful.
And so just a reminder, right there, everybody said he was fine.
In the same way that when asked recently about stop-and-frisk, he says, it kind of got out
of hand.
But when we realized that, we cut it by 90%, as if he was concerned about whether it was
legal or constitutional, and as if he had actually instituted that, that he had been
the one to stop it.
Wasn't true as stop-and-frisk.
He's wrong about the legality supposedly being demonstrated.
Really fast lemme run through a couple of bits of info about the surveillance.
In 2011, the AP published a series of articles outlining the gathering of intelligence by
the NYPD on over 250 mosques, student groups and more, the department collaborated with
the CIA to deploy undercover agents as well as placed informants in mosques, and kept
tabs and just about everybody.
NPR reported that an undercover police officer once accompanied a group of Muslim college
students on a whitewater rafting trip actually remember to it covering that years and years
ago, as Emma alluded to in 2007.
They actually targeted Muslims in Newark, New Jersey without the authorization from
Cory Booker; who was inconveniently the city's mayor at the time, but he can be ignored.
We can just go in because we're nervous again.
Now, thankfully in 2018, Hassan vs City City of New York, a lawsuit filed by civil rights
organization Muslim Advocates, reached a landmark settlement.
The first ever case brought forth by Muslims who were surveilled under the NYPD's programming.
The settlement required that the NYPD stop all suspicion-less surveillance activities
on the basis of religion or ethnicity.
By the way, the settlements came after the AP won a Pulitzer Prize for For that reporting
we talked about at the time of that investigation, the NYPD was still denying that the spying
program existed and at that point had existed for years and years.
But to hear Bloomberg tell it, it was totally fine.
Everyone loved it.
It was never wrong.
Why would we hide it?
We knew it was right to do.
And we knew people would be checking.
We didn't lie about it for years and years and years and years until we were finally
forced by a court to stop.
>> Talk about another parallel to stop-and-frisk.
>> Exactly.
>> He was forced by a court in 2015 to stop and frisk.
And what do you know, now he's saying, I did away with stop-and-frisk, 95% just by my own
volition.
A judge made you, a judge made you.
>> Yeah.
>> Same thing we're looking at here, even though he's defending it even last year.
What do you mean?
He's not defending stop and frisk anymore, but he's just being like, yeah, we kind of
had to do this because Muslims have no power in this country and all of the media really
treats them with just a despicable amount of contempt.
But also when we're talking about settlements, it reminded me I don't know if we've talked
about it on the show.
Bloomberg fought the Central Park five, for years and years from getting settlements from
the city for being wrongfully imprisoned for that horrific crime that they were imprisoned
for.
>> Yeah.
>> So we're talking about parallels with trauma.
>> That's a pretty strong one.
>> Pretty strong one, Bloomberg made sure that even though these five boys, their lives
were destroyed, years and years taken from them, trauma inflicted upon them, wrongfully
convicted.
Their entire childhoods gone.
Bloomberg fought them and nickled and dimed them to make sure they were unable to get
settlements that they deserved.
And now he doesn't really care about money, he's not fiscally conservative with his own
money, because he's spending and trying to buy this election.
But when it came to doing the right thing in New York and actually helping out these
kids now adults no no no he wasn't gonna do that either.
>> Yeah before we and I want to say a couple my fears related the story one is that I fear
that even if this is being discussed if, thankfully NPR asked about it maybe it'll be a question
of the acid debate but probably not.
Because the American people, even the best of times don't really care about their privacy
rights.
They don't expect any right to privacy.
And in particular if the surveillance is on the Muslim community, for a lot of Americans,
that is not going to be a priority.
Bloomberg may be the worst in this area potentially.
But a lot of Americans are perfectly happy to go along with demonizing that community
when we saw that
>> For years and years, probably up until and including today.
And I will say when you look at his approach to this, stop and frisk his comments about
the NSA, of course they should be reading all of your emails.
I don't think that we've, maybe Trump but other than Trump, we've never experienced
a politician as openly,
>> Disrespectful towards any sense that you have rights from intrusions into your life,
being spied on, all of that.
The idea that he might expand federal power in that area, he is salivating for it, as
Emma alluded to.
He didn't feel constrained by the requirements, the power that he had as mayor, he went beyond
that.
If he was president, any sense that you have any rights would be utterly gone.
The CIA, it would be everywhere.
And I think that he has a track record unlike any other politician to cause
those fears.