MSNBC "Hardball with Chris Matthews" - Transcript "Trump reverses decades of policy."

Interview

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MELBER: You have a momentous briefing they`re ending with that shrug and the chairman walking offstage. And one way to look at it is it`s vividly honest. You asked him, what is this? He says, call it what you want. You ask him, well, what will it lead to and he says, I don`t know. Are there more answers here? Well, we have an extraordinary guest right now to help understand what this Judiciary Committee is doing right now and why it might matter regardless of what it`s called. Jamie Raskin, a member of the House Judiciary Committee is here on THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW. Thanks for joining us.

RASKIN: I`m delighted to be with you, Ari.

MELBER: Is this an impeachment probe?

RASKIN: Sure, we were just confronted with overwhelming evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors 10 episodes of obstruction of justice presidential candidate is campaign welcoming with open arms foreign interference in our presidential election. You know, if Bill Clinton can be impeached for telling one lie about sex, that`s low crimes and misdemeanors. This is in the category of high crimes and misdemeanors, and we`re investigating it and we`re trying to figure out whether these are high crimes and misdemeanors that justify impeachment. But I would say that our investigated future involves a lot of other issues. You know, I think the American public has the sense that money is really at the heart of the Trump White House and he has essentially converted the presidency into an instrument of self enrichment a money-making enterprise basically for himself and his business and his friends, and that`s what the whole federal government has turned into. And so, we need to investigate whether the foreign Emoluments Clause, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 has been violated and is being violated every day. There have been reports that different foreign governments have basically been filling Donald Trump`s pockets through the Trump hotel, through the office tower, through the golf courses. There`s the domestic Emoluments Clause which says that he`s limited to receiving his salary. We can`t increase it, we can`t decrease it. And yet every time they go to Mar-a-Lago, for example, they`re spending $75,000 or $100,000 that goes directly from federal government agencies and departments to the Trump hotel. So, that I would say should be the beginning of following the money but we remember that Donald Trump said that he would basically blow up the special counsel investigation if they looked at his finances. He`s not going to be able to hamstring. The U.S. Congress in the same way. We`re going to get to the bottom of all of it.

MELBER: Do you think there`s a high crime that the president obstructed justice?

RASKIN: Well, certainly, multiple times. Each one of those episodes describe --

MELBER: So, if that`s the case, let me press you on that, because I think everything you just laid out viewers would say, yes, that sounds bad and certainly in the Congress`s ambit to do something about it. But why would that require any further delay? There is a -- there is a concern that the Democratic Party in the House talked a lot about waiting for things waiting for Mueller to finish, and waiting to get the report and waiting to get Mueller to testify. We are now past all of that and so a conversation about the Trump Hotel or, you know, legitimate concerns about constitutional limits on form bribes make sense, but not necessarily as a reason to wait further to deal with whether or not there`s consequences for what you define as obstruction.

RASKIN: Yes. Well, I`m not talking about waiting. I`m talking about aggressively accelerating our investigation and to all of the corruption and criminality that pervade the White House an executive branch of government and most people understand, despite Donald Trump being able to gerrymander the subject matter of the Mueller investigation, that all of that started because Donald Trump wanted to build a -- make a billion dollar deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow, and meantime was collecting money that was being laundered from Russian oligarchs through the hotels and through the various businesses. That was the genesis of the relationship with the Russians. It was not a political conspiracy as Mueller found. You know, if Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence did not need Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump to execute their plot against America, they just used at the Trumps but they didn`t conspire with the Trump`s to make it happen. Unfortunately, the Trump`s never called FBI. They just said, come on in and you know find the emails and dump the WikiLeaks and so on. But, look, money was at the heart of it and money continues to be at the heart of it, and there`s a very important constitutional principle here. Our founders wanted the president United States and every member of Congress to be 100 percent devoted to the public interest of the American people, and not to Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan and Turkey, and any government that comes over that decides to fill the president`s coffers. And the presidency is not supposed to be a money-making operation. We`ve got to vindicate that principle, but I agree with you, we`ve got to do it quickly.

MELBER: Did you learn anything from Bob Mueller`s testimony that was not in the Mueller report?

RASKIN: No, everything -- I read the Mueller report I think three or four different times, and he stuck extremely closely to the text. I think he opened up a bit in the afternoon, when he was willing to say that all of the presidents conduct was unpatriotic and unethical and immoral. There he`s strayed, you know, a couple of feet beyond the four corners of the text. But basically what he recited to us and confirmed for us were all of these episodes of obstruction of justice with Michael Cohen, where they called him up to try to butter him up to say, you know, stay on the team, stick to the party line. And when he decided, he couldn`t lie anymore, he spilled his guts and told the truth about Donald Trump and the payoffs to Stormy Daniels and so on. At that point, they turned on him and you know Trump basically threatened and drop a dime on him saying we know about your father-in-law and we know about this member of your family and that member of your family. You know if the president`s got evidence of criminality among his staff or friends, he should turn it over to the FBI and not hold it in store as a form of leverage against them to keep them from testifying against him. That`s what mob bosses do.

MELBER: Congressman Jamie Raskin from the House Judiciary Committee, on a night when you`ve been busy in making news, really appreciate you joining us.

RASKIN: Thank you for following the story and I hope everybody out there gets some comfort that in the Article 1 branch, we are zealously going to uphold and defend the Constitution.

MELBER: You heard it here and I wish you a good a good evening as well.

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