MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show - Transcript: "Trump seeks emergency order."

Interview

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MADDOW: Joining us now is Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal from Washington. She`s a member of the House Judiciary Committee. You saw her there questioning Robert Mueller yesterday. Congresswoman, I really appreciate you making time to be here. Thank you.

JAYAPAL: It`s great to be with you, Rachel.

MADDOW: First of all, I have to tell you, I`ve just been looking forward to talking to you about what you took away from this day of testimony. You`re a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Very outspoken, on-the-rise member of the Democratic Caucus and recognized I think by all sides as that. On the Judiciary Committee, you had your own chance to question him. What meant the most to you about Mueller`s testimony?

JAYAPAL: I think kind of the most important pieces were that he repeatedly basically said that the president was lying on a number of things. He was not completely exonerated. He actually did have substantial evidence that the president committed acts of obstruction and we went through five of those in fairly granular detail. And what Robert Mueller didn`t say didn`t really matter because what he did is actually validate everything that was in his report that we know most people haven`t read and most importantly we know Bill Barr tried to mislead and try to the American people. And so, as I was sitting there listening, I just kept thinking about how the Republicans kept asking things and reading things that helped us because they -- you know, when Ken Buck asked Robert Mueller can the president be prosecuted after he leaves office, he was asked that twice. He seemed surprised by the answer. There were other times he red parts of the March 27th letter. There were a number of times I thought the Republicans felt very scattered in their approach. I think you noticed a big change from when they were with us to when they -- the afternoon Intelligence Committee hearing. They were much more gentle in some ways with Robert Mueller because I think they came across as looking very petty undermining this guy who has a long history of credibility working for a Republican president. So, to me, it was a really important groundbreaking moment because we were able to get a lot of things on the table that we knew were there but the American people did not.

MADDOW: There was -- one of the reasons I particularly wanted to talk to you tonight is because of your role on the judiciary committee. I wanted to ask you about something that happened in the other committee hearing. In the intelligence committee under questioning from Congresswoman Val Demings, there was like a jaw-dropping moment where she asked him if the president had been untruthful in his written testimony to investigators. And Director Mueller said generally yes, effectively that was the exchange. To me, that seemed like a very big deal, particularly for your committee, for the judiciary committee, to have notice confirmed by Director Mueller that the president was untruthful in his written testimony to federal investigators. That seems to me like a pretty serious allegation of criminal behavior on the part of the president. I was wondering what you thought of the significance of that moment or am I reading too much into it.

JAYAPAL: No, I thought it was significant. But don`t forget he has committed a number of acts, and that`s what we confirmed throughout. I think Val Demings questioning just confirmed another thing that we already knew, which is that he is not generally truthful. But that was true even in the acts of obstruction. So, if you look at the fact that he engaged in direct witness tampering, the fact that he dangled a pardon, the fact that he told many other people to lie, the fact that he tried to get through Corey Lewandowski, he tries to get the special counsel fired, I mean, these are all acts that anybody else does these things, they would be prosecuted. And so, I think we ended each of our pieces with that. And I think Val`s piece was the perfect capstone in some ways because this is a guy who is not truthful. None of the people around him are truthful. This is a campaign that was rife with context, lying after and saying things didn`t happen. Don`t forget also that Hope Hicks lied to us. We are going to have Hope Hicks back before the Judiciary Committee. She said she had no knowledge of the hush money that president Trump paid. That turns out not to be true. So this is just a network of lies. The president is sitting right in the middle spinning all of these lies and everybody around him is helping him to just continue to cover up.

MADDOW: Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, co-chair of the congressional progressive caucus, it is great to have you here. Thanks for being here.

JAYAPAL: Thanks so much, Rachel.

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