Biden slams Trump response to Capitol siege

Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous, Andy Serwer and Rick Newman discuss President-elect Biden’s address to the nation.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Alexis Christoforous. You were just watching President-elect, Joe Biden, denouncing yesterday's riots at the Capitol building that left four people dead and forced lawmakers to evacuate the building. He spoke for about a half an hour and in his speech he said our President is not above the law, justice is blind. And he went on to talk about how we need to restore, in his words, the honor, integrity, and independence at the Department of Justice. To that end, he took this time to nominate some folks to the DOJ.

He formally nominated Judge Merrick Garland, former President Obama's failed Supreme Court nominee, to become US Attorney General calling him the people's lawyer. And is also nominating Lisa Monaco of Massachusetts as Deputy Attorney General. He made a couple of other nominations as well. But I want to get reaction to what President-elect Biden just said with our Editor in Chief, Andy Serwer, and our senior columnist, Rick Newman, who are joining us now.

Andy, I'm going to start with you. What were some of the big takeaways for you from what you just heard? Oh Andy, I think you're muted. That's OK, we've all been there.

ANDY SERWER: I'm sorry about that. It happens to the best of us.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: OK. No worries.

ANDY SERWER: I like your point, Alexis, about how the President-elect wrapped yesterday's events together with the announcements at DOJ. And he started off very fiery and obviously was very passionate about that. And this is a known group of people, you talked about Judge Garland and Lisa Monaco. They're very credentialed. I think you could argue it's kind of a low bar coming after some of the people that have been named in the Trump administration, quite frankly.

And one thing I really liked about what President-elect Biden did is when he was talking about Merrick Garland, Alexis, he did not rub the Republicans nose in the fact that they blocked his nomination to the Supreme Court. It would have been easy to take a shot at Mitch McConnell right then and say, you remember that the obstinate Republicans blocked him from getting on the Supreme Court but he chose not to do that. And I think that's a real olive branch out to the next Senate Minority leader and an important one. So I think that these people, having sort of set the stage that way, it'll be interesting to see and he made it very clear. He was very sort of pointed, I hope they get a swift and easy confirmation. And I think that's going to be interesting to watch, Alexis.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Yeah Rick, what do you think? I mean now with the Senate in Democratic hands will Biden have an easy time getting Garland through the nomination process, do you think?

RICK NEWMAN: Yes, absolutely. And we haven't even been talking very much about what a seismic shift it has-- it's going to be on Capitol Hill now that Democrats will control the Senate, even by just a one vote tie breaking majority. That means Democrats control the agenda, it means they control the committees, and it means they control what happens to Joe Biden's nominees. In fact, it's possible that Biden was waiting to see the outcome of those two Georgia Senate races and that he might have nominated somebody different, somebody who was not Merrick Garland if Republicans retained control and he had to get the nominee through the Republican committees. So I think-- look, I mean what we've been hearing Republicans saying the last, let's say 12 to 18 hours, there are probably half of all the Republicans in Congress can't wait to get the Biden-- the Biden nominees into the Justice Department so we've got some grown up leadership. Especially now that we're in the process, at the FBI, of trying to track down these people who broke into the-- into the Capitol and ransacked the place. I think it would feel a lot better for a lot of people, including a lot of Republicans, for the Biden Justice Department to be doing this rather than the Trump Justice Department. So I think Merrick Garland is going to get confirmed in lightning speed.