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| Now to a conversation with Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin. | ||
| He talks about the release of special counsel Jack Smith's report on Donald Trump's election interference case. | ||
| He also weighs in on the president-elect's cabinet picks during an event hosted by Politico Playbook. | ||
| We have a lot of things to discuss that kind of fall right within your wheelhouse. | ||
| But before we kind of get into the latest sort of Justice Department news, Judiciary Committee related news, I want to take a moment to just talk about Joe Biden. | ||
| Obviously, he's leaving office in less than a week. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, his campaign in 2020 posited that his election might be a way to turn the page on the Trump years and to sort of reinvigorate American democracy in a way that he envisioned it. | ||
| Trump is now coming back, so that project seems to have failed. | ||
| What do you make of Biden's legacy under the circumstances? | ||
| Well, first of all, thanks for having me. | ||
| And it's appropriate to be talking about Joe Biden here at Union Station, Mr. Amtrak himself, you know. | ||
| But I barely recognize Union Station. | ||
| This is pretty amazing the way you guys have done it up here. | ||
| Look, Biden did put those Trump years behind us, and he beat Donald Trump by more than 7 million votes, 306 to 232 in Electoral College. | ||
| And we should never forget that. | ||
| I know that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by 3 million votes in this last election. | ||
| But I think we need to keep some perspective about where America is. | ||
| And, you know, it's one of the great things about democracy that we have these pendulum swings and turns. | ||
| And of course, anybody who was an incumbent during the post-COVID-19 inflationary period went down all over the world, left, right, and center. | ||
| And so we can't forget that historical context. | ||
| But I think that he was a great president who ranks right up there with some of the best from the 20th century, like Lyndon Johnson, like Franklin Roosevelt. | ||
| We did massive infrastructure investment. | ||
| I sat there for four years under Donald Trump. | ||
| We had Infrastructure Week, we had Infrastructure Month, we had Infrastructure Barbecue. | ||
| We just never had an infrastructure bill. | ||
| And Joe Biden sent it to us his first week in office. | ||
| We passed it in the first month, a $1.2 trillion investment in the roads, the highways, the bridges, the ports, the airports, rail, trails, cybersecurity, rural broadband, you name it. | ||
| And that, to me, really set the tempo for an administration that had huge breakthroughs, like with the Chips and Science Act and the semiconductor industry, the Inflation Reduction Act, which was not only the most massive investment in climate action in world history, but also dramatically reduced prescription drug prices in the country. | ||
| I concede it had a terrible name because it didn't begin to capture everything that was going on. | ||
| But look, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris oversaw huge growth in the economy. | ||
| More than 16 million new jobs created the lowest unemployment in the last 50 years in our history. | ||
| And so I would rank him up there with the best of the 20th century and some of the best of the 19th century in terms of his articulation of democratic ideals and constitutional values. | ||
| I think you could fault him for not fully wrestling with the politics of the 21st century, which has grown so fragmented and decentralized through the internet and the breakup of the old communications and media systems. | ||
| And I think that's where he had problems. | ||
| But the historians are going to treat him and his administration very kindly. | ||
| Let's talk about some legal issues, some Justice Department-related issues. | ||
| Obviously, last night we got some major news in the form of the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith's report into the investigation and prosecution of Donald Trump concerning the 2020 election. | ||
| You have not had an opportunity to read that report in full. | ||
| I think very few people have. | ||
| I imagine you'll be rigging it in the days ahead, as many of us will be. | ||
| What are you going to be looking for in that document? | ||
| What is going to sort of pique your interest? | ||
| Well, I think if you add together the three major investigative reports, you have a comprehensive documentary and narrative record as to what happened with respect to January 6th in the effort to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. | ||
| The first wave was the impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the Senate, and I was the leader of the House managers as we went over there. | ||
| And we definitively proved that Donald Trump had incited the insurrection against the union, and we had robust, bipartisan, bicameral majorities validating that. | ||
| Then we had the January 6th Committee, which gave a completely comprehensive and exhaustive recitation of all of the events leading up to the attack on the Capitol, the effort to get the vice president to step outside of his constitutional role to declare and then exercise unwritten vice presidential powers to nullify electoral college votes and then to kick the whole election into the House of Representatives, | ||
| where we would be voting, as they knew, not on the basis of one member one vote, but one state one vote under the 12th Amendment. | ||
| And the violent assault surrounding that attempted coup. | ||
| So that was all laid out in painstaking detail by the bipartisan January 6th Committee. | ||
| And nobody has laid a glove on a single factual detail in that more than 800-page report that was based on interviews and testimony by hundreds of witnesses. | ||
| And most of the key witnesses came from the Trump administration themselves. | ||
| People like Cassidy Hutchinson, who, at great personal Risk to herself came forward and told the truth about what had happened. | ||
| And nobody's laid a glove on that. | ||
| So I started to look at the report by Jack Smith last night, and I saw, again, him corroborating the findings of these prior investigations, but also laying out a very compelling case. | ||
| Certainly probable cause, and I think that they would have been able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, but who knows? | ||
| It was all nullified. | ||
| But in any event, laying out the legal case for why there was an actual conspiracy to interfere with people's voting rights, to usurp the election away from the people and the Electoral College, and to interfere with the joint session of Congress in the peaceful transfer of power. | ||
| It's all right there. | ||
| And nobody has successfully contested a single detail, much less advanced a counter-narrative. | ||
| I know some of my colleagues sometimes talk about Antifa or Hamas or FBI agents on their way down to the DC jail where they go and protest for the release of all of these Antifa fighters. | ||
| Of course, they knew they weren't Antifa fighters. | ||
| As Kevin McCarthy told Donald Trump on January 6th itself when they were on the phone, these are your people, Mr. President. | ||
| Call them off. | ||
| And of course, that prompted the response from Donald Trump: well, maybe they're just a little more interested in a fair election than you are, thereby conceding, of course, that these were his people that he had incited with the words, you got to go and fight and fight like hell. | ||
| And if you don't, we're not going to have a country anymore. | ||
| So, look, we're a democracy. | ||
| The government belongs to the people, and we've got to deal with the facts. | ||
| James Madison was very clear about that. | ||
| We've got to deal with the truth. | ||
| So, you can make arguments for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or whoever you want, but you should make them based on facts, not based on conspiracy theories and lies. | ||
| Obviously, you know, the Smith report brings to a conclusion a remarkable and unprecedented prosecutorial endeavor in this country. | ||
| And, you know, your constituent, Attorney General Merrick Garland, obviously has played a very integral role in that project. | ||
| I want to read a couple of quotes from the last couple weeks in some of the news coverage concerning the prosecution and its conclusion. | ||
| Representative Gerald Nadler, who you're obviously taking the place of, recently told Huffington Post: Merrick Garland wasted a year in initiating the investigation and eventual prosecution of Donald Trump. | ||
| An anonymous Justice Department official involved in the early portion of the investigation recently told CNN, quote, they wasted time, they were not strategic, it was a whole year of nothing. | ||
| They waited so long they ended up helping Trump in the primary and dividing the country. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| On that time question, well, obviously, I mean, looking at it in hindsight, the prosecutors ran out of time. | ||
| So it seems hard to argue with the proposition that it all should have begun earlier, which isn't to say it necessarily would have won, because they were trying to run out the clock no matter what. | ||
| And if you're dealing with a completely partisan judge like Eileen Cannon, she would have done anything in her power to make sure that the clock was run out. | ||
| So who knows what the difference would have been, but undoubtedly, I'm sure a lot of people feel they should have started earlier. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Well, the DC case obviously is pending here in front of a different judge. | ||
| The classified documents case was handled with Judge Cannon. | ||
| Given all of this, obviously you have devoted years of your life to understanding what happened after the 2020 election and what led to January 6th, and obviously worked on the committee. | ||
| What do you make of the legacy of that committee? | ||
| I mean, is it challenging for you now to go back? | ||
| I mean, on some level, do you think it was all worthless or pointless? | ||
| On the contrary, I think that it was invaluable and historically will be a landmark moment where on a bipartisan basis we had a congressional committee that was devoted to one task and we conducted and lived our oaths of office to stand up for the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and we were not going to allow a political hatchet job to take place. | ||
| We were not going to allow the truth to be swept under the rug. | ||
| And we didn't. | ||
| And again, you know, anybody who's got any particular factual contradictions of points in the January 6th report should come forward because nobody has. | ||
| It is quite remarkable, actually. | ||
| As Trump has continuously over the last couple of years said it's all lies, it's all made up, it's a fraud. | ||
| He has never contested a single material allegation from the committee's work or from the January 6th case that Smith brought. | ||
| I want to transition to the Judiciary Committee now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You're going to be taking on a new role as ranking member. | ||
| So congratulations on that. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| With Democrats in the minority, you're going to have maybe a bullhorn, but not some institutional power. | ||
| When Trump does something that crosses some sort of line, in your view, maybe it's firing someone, maybe it's prosecuting someone, what sorts of tools do you think are going to have at your disposal to try to push back? | ||
| Well, they have the narrowest of majorities, which of course undercuts the fraudulent claim that it was some kind of landslide election. | ||
| It started 220 to 215. | ||
| It's down to 219 to 215, I believe. | ||
| And then after Lee Stefanik goes and Michael Waltz, it'll be 217 to 215, which if you do the math, you will figure out they cannot afford to lose a single vote. | ||
| And you're talking about a coalition that is already beginning to fly apart between the billionaire bolegarks like Elon Musk, who love cheap foreign labor. | ||
| They want to expand the H-1B program. | ||
| Then you've got Steve Bannon and the nativist majority within MAGA who want to cut off all immigration to the country. | ||
| You've got some people like my friend Speaker Johnson, who was just up here, who sponsored the Life Begins at Conception Act, who have been advancing the idea of banning abortion nationally, which was of course enabled by the Supreme Court's decision overruling Roe versus Wade. | ||
| And then you have others, and I would maybe include Donald Trump in this, who don't really care about abortion and are doing everything they can to run away from the issue, even though he was bragging about having appointed the justices who did overturn a woman's right to choose. | ||
| So I think that they have the slenderest of majorities. | ||
| And on any particular issue, huge divisions and fissures going on with their coalition. | ||
| And we're going to do whatever we can to work with people. | ||
| I mean, Jim Jordan is my counterpart on judiciary. | ||
| We sponsored legislation together called the Press Act that I'm very proud of. | ||
| I hope he's still proud of it. | ||
| Which protects the right of reporters not to have compulsory production of their confidential sources in their notes and documents. | ||
| That passed unanimously in the Judiciary Committee. | ||
| It passed unanimously in the House. | ||
| And unfortunately, after Trump tweeted against it, it was held up by one or two senators in the Senate. | ||
| But I hope we could continue to push that through in the interest of protecting freedom of the press. | ||
| You guys are not the enemies of the people, as you've been called. | ||
| You are the people's best friend. | ||
| When you're doing your job right, you are the people's best friend. | ||
| What do you expect Jordan's focus is going to be, though, right? | ||
| I mean, he is coming in and he has endorsed Trump's claims that basically he's been, the Justice Department has been, quote-unquote, weaponized against him, that the investigators are corrupt somehow, that the prosecutors in New York and Fulham County. | ||
| I mean, he seems primed to potentially use his perch as the chair of the Judiciary Committee to try to probe some of these things. | ||
| I mean, I feel like the American people are exhausted and sick of all of the right-wing conspiracy theories and the nonsense, and there is no public appetite for prosecuting the prosecutors, investigating the investigators, and so on. | ||
| If they think that they have some substantive, different analysis of what took place on January 6th, come forward and tell America what it is. | ||
| But otherwise, these are just ludicrous fishing expeditions. | ||
| We just went through one of those for the last two years when I was the ranking member on the Oversight Committee, and we had to completely demolish and humiliate the absurd case made by Chairman Comer and the Republicans for impeachment of Joe Biden for high crimes and misdemeanors, which remain still unknown and unspecified. | ||
| We don't even know what they are, and some of the Republicans are saying, let's keep it going. | ||
| If you look at the Weiss report, which was released this week, that was a Republican U.S. attorney who was named to his position by William Barr. | ||
| And they came forward with all of this stuff about Hunter Biden, about the tax charges and the gun charges that took place, and nothing about Joe Biden. | ||
| It just further underscores that all of that was nonsense. | ||
| And it did come down to the word of Alexander Smirnoff, who was a Russian intelligence asset who lied about Ukrainian payments to Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. | ||
| Like that is established now. | ||
| Alexander Smirnoff was convicted in court of trying to give these lies to the FBI. | ||
| So that should be definitive proof to put it to rest. | ||
| But in lieu of any real program that unifies their party, much less the Congress, much less the country, they want to go back to these right-wing conspiracy theory phishing expeditions. | ||
| It's just outlandish and madcap. | ||
| This week, your counterparts in the Senate on the Judiciary Committee are going to be hearing from Pam Bondi at her confirmation hearings. | ||
| I believe they're scheduled for two days. | ||
| What should Senate Democrats be asking her? | ||
| Well, I haven't done a full study of her career and her positions, but I know that she and Kash Patel both bought into the big lie about the 2020 election. | ||
| They both bought into the completely fraudulent concept that Donald Trump had beaten Joe Biden when Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by more than 7 million votes, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, and there were more than 60 federal and state court decisions repudiating every claim of electoral fraud and corruption that they had advanced in court. | ||
| And eight or nine of those judges were appointed by Donald Trump himself. | ||
| So we have this definitive, absolute legal record refuting their big lie, and yet they want to appoint as the Attorney General of the United States and the FBI director people who embrace the big lie and then embrace all of the lies to follow, including the lies about January 6th. | ||
| That is like a very big dividing line, obviously, for someone like you. | ||
| You're going to have to deal very closely with them if they're confirmed to their positions as Attorney General and FBI Director. | ||
| Are you concerned that that is going to be difficult? | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| I mean, leave aside just January 6th itself and the fact that our democracy came very close to being overthrown. | ||
| But their whole approach to the law and to facts is deeply, profoundly troubling. | ||
| I mean, do we want people in charge of the FBI and the Department of Justice who can't tell truth from fiction, who can't read 60 federal and state court decisions to see that the pieties that they're mouthing are completely fraudulent. | ||
| And that's a real problem for the whole country. | ||
| And I would hope that America wants to stand up for the rule of law and the truth. | ||
| There's no democracy without truth. | ||
| And you can see that very simply just from an election. | ||
| Because somebody wins an election and somebody loses an election. | ||
| You don't always get your way. | ||
| For example, the Democrats, we just went on January 6th to the joint session of Congress and we engaged in the peaceful transfer of power. | ||
| We were constitutional patriots. | ||
| Our candidate didn't win, but we accepted that. | ||
| Remember when America used to do that? | ||
| Well, in 2020, they took us off in a different direction because they said we're going to allow our political desires to dictate our sense of reality and facts and truth. | ||
| How dangerous is that for a democratic society? | ||
| Our Constitution was created by enlightenment liberals, people who wanted to get away from the rule of dogma and what we would call today propaganda and disinformation, and yet we now have political forces in society who want to be run completely by dogma and completely by propaganda, whether we're talking about COVID-19 or who won an election or, you know, | ||
| is the evolution part of science or not. | ||
| For the last couple of years, obviously, Donald Trump has been threatening retaliatory prosecutions if he's re-elected, which he has been. | ||
| He did this through the campaign. | ||
| He tweeted about it. | ||
| He's at some point sent some mixed signals about this, but it has been a consistent through line for years now. | ||
| How concerned are you that Bonnie and Patel will actually pursue a campaign of retaliatory prosecutions? | ||
| Well, you know, we don't have kings and queens here. | ||
| Our Constitution was written by American revolutionaries who rebelled against monarchy in the idea that the people who get into power can just prosecute their political foes, even if they haven't done anything wrong. | ||
| So I know there have been a whole bunch of threats made, especially against Benny Thompson, the chair of the January 6th Committee, the vice chair, Liz Cheney, the members of the committee, January 6th, prosecutors who've prosecuted hundreds of people who wounded, injured, and hospitalized more than 140 of our police officers on January 6th, | ||
| smashing them with Confederate battle flags and Trump flags and spearing them, causing heart attack, strokes, broken jaws, you name it. | ||
| So yeah, I know that they're talking about prosecuting the people who responded to this outrageous assault on our democracy. | ||
| And all I can say is I will stand up for the Constitution and what the founders did. | ||
| They gave everybody the First Amendment, the freedom of speech, the right to petition government for redress of grievances, the freedom of the press. | ||
| They also gave those of us who are in Congress the protections of the speech and debate clause, that we can't be arrested and prosecuted for doing our jobs as legislators. | ||
| And, you know, solidarity is going to be the watchword moving into this new period. | ||
| I'm going to stand up for anybody who suffers political prosecution, persecution, retaliation, or death threats, and those kinds of things, which of course have been legion ever since this nightmare began. | ||
| So, I mean, it sounds like you're prepared to contemplate that this might be something you need to deal with, sort of retaliatory prosecutions in a second Trump administration. | ||
| Obviously, there's been quite a bit of talk recently about whether Biden should issue some preemptive pardons on his way out of the office, particularly as it relates to members of the January 6th Committee. | ||
| Some people, like Adam Kinzinger, have said that they don't want one. | ||
| Would you like a pardon? | ||
| We don't need a pardon in any just world because we haven't committed any crimes and we haven't done anything wrong. | ||
| We've just done our jobs. | ||
| And so, you know, the speech and debate clause protects us against federal criminal prosecution, state criminal prosecution, and also against civil lawsuits that would try to attack us simply for doing our jobs and fulfilling our legislative functions. | ||
| So, you know, I know different people have different feelings about the whole pardon thing because there are these outrageous threats that are being leveled against people just for doing their jobs, like January 6th prosecutors at the Department of Justice. | ||
| And so I don't know what the right answer to that is. | ||
| And, you know, I'm glad we've got a wise president with wise people around him who will be able to figure that out. | ||
| Obviously, a lot of the focus has been on members of the January 6th with respect to the retaliatory prosecution and the pardons, questions in the press, interviews in the press. | ||
| Are there people outside of that universe? | ||
| True, because those are pretty prominent people, right? | ||
| And let's be honest, they're going to be able to use resources at their disposal, money, access to defend themselves if it comes to that, people like you. | ||
| But what about the lesser-known people? | ||
| I mean, are there people out there that you are legitimately concerned about? | ||
| The speech and debate clause the courts have found applies to staff, but obviously staff could come within the scopes of any retaliatory fury that's unleashed on the public. | ||
| There are also the witnesses. | ||
| I mean, I worry most about people like Cassidy Hutchinson. | ||
| Michael Cohen, who was Donald Trump's lawyer who came forward to tell the truth about the crimes that were created by the hush money payoff scheme with Stormy Daniels. | ||
| Lev Parnas was Rudy Giuliani's right-hand man who came forward and tell the truth and say there was nothing there. | ||
| We were trying to concoct stories about Joe Biden. | ||
| He's somebody who could be threatened. | ||
| So I think people in that category need our assistance and our solidarity. | ||
| And I would hope that there's some things that could bring us together where we can work on together in a bipartisan way. | ||
| For example, I know that President-elect Trump seems to be very proud of the fact that he won in the popular vote this time. | ||
| He didn't win in the popular vote in 2016, but he won by more than 3 million votes. | ||
| I know Joe Biden was proud that he won by more than 7 million votes in 2020. | ||
| Well, how about we get everybody together and say it's time for us to start electing the President of the United States the way we elect representatives, senators, governors, mayors, everybody else? | ||
| Whoever gets the most votes wins. | ||
| Let's use this as an opportunity to get beyond all of the problems with the Electoral College, which is an accident waiting to happen every four years. | ||
| That's something that we could do. | ||
| You know, another thing we could do is to ban stock trading by members of Congress. | ||
| The floor of the Senate and the floor of the House should not be like the New York Stock Exchange. | ||
| I would hope that's something we could get together on. | ||
| There's real progress we can make if we're willing to talk to each other and we're not just drowning in recrimination and retaliation for the last set of conflicts. | ||
| I think that's a great note for us to conclude on. | ||
| So thank you so much for joining us and speaking with me. | ||
| for having me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Coming up next, Pete Hegseth testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on his nomination to be Defense Secretary. | |
| Then House Speaker Mike Johnson briefing reporters after the passage of a bill that would prevent transgender girls and young women from participating in women's sports at public schools. | ||
| And later, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, discussing the first 100 days of the incoming Trump administration. | ||
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