MSNBC "All in with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: "President Trump lashes out."
Interview
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HAYES: Joining me now, one of the members of Congress leading the impeach investigation into President Trump, Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, member of both the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. First, your reaction to witnesses that the investigative committees have called, being nabbed in an airport with one-way tickets to Vienna.
REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): Well, it`s starting to feel more and more like Watergate, I think, to the people who remember Watergate. Except it`s kind of an upside-down Watergate because they`re -- these kinds of characters were found first during the Watergate break-in.
HAYES: Right.
RASKIN: You know, the Ehrlichman`s, and the Haldeman`s, and McCord`s, and then they worked their way up to the president. Here, the President started or was discovered first because of the fateful phone call where he kind of clinched the shakedown deal against President Zelensky. But what`s coming out now is the whole team behind the shakedown operation, and all of Giuliani`s people who were engaged in this very insidious shadowy campaign in Ukraine to do a number of different political duties and execute a number of different political schemes for the President.
HAYES: Do you want to -- I mean, we found out today that -- so these guys had tickets to Vienna when they get nabbed at the airport. They have lunch with Rudy Giuliani. Rudy Giuliani had told Elaina Plott at The Atlantic that he was flying to Vienna just coincidentally. Do you want to know more? I mean, are you going to get to talk to any of these people as part of your investigation independent of what other SDNY does?
RASKIN: Well, I haven`t spoken to anybody in the committee staffs about this, but I`m personally fascinated by what they were doing. Where they just trying to escape? Where they, you know, trying to leave the country? Did they understand that the heat was drawing in on them? Were they continuing to conduct the other schemes on behalf of Giuliani and the president? All of these things are fascinating. But the critical thing that`s going on politically here, Chris, is that America has woken up to the corrupt and lawless character of the White House. And everybody understands the basic contours of the Ukrainian episode. The President of the United States engaged in a shakedown of a vulnerable American ally and partner in President Zelensky in order to political dirt on his political opponent back home. Nobody has ever seen anything like it. And that shakedown is a complete sellout of American values, and it`s a sellout of our election. And what we`re seeing from, you know, this illegal funneling of money from abroad through a campaign finance scheme that these guys were involved in, is that they do not have respect for American elections. You know, I disagree with everything that Jim Jordan says, but I respect entirely his right to be involved in our elections. It`s not true of Russian spies and Ukrainian researchers and Chinese operatives and the United Arab Emirates, and the Saudis and all these other people, they`re trying to get involved in our election. Can`t they find any Americans who support them? Why do they need to be bringing in all of this power and money from abroad to interfere with this election? And we`re talking about this election in 2020. It`s just an outrage and a scandal after what they did to us in 2016.
HAYES: Final question for you is about Mare Yovanovitch who is a pivotal figure in this, a career Foreign Service, had been the U.S. Ambassador Ukraine, the target of a sort of smears from Rudy Giuliani with a packet of files he sent to Mike Pompeo that were being circulated on the State Department, the target of these men to the extent that they were giving donations and meeting with a congressman to get them to write a letter. Like she clearly becomes a target of Rudy Giuliani and Don Jr. and these indicted gentlemen and a whole lot of other people. She is supposed to testify tomorrow or will be deposed, I suppose, tomorrow. Is it your understanding that she`s going to be there?
RASKIN: I have no reason to think that she won`t be there tomorrow. I`ve been out making some speeches for the last several hours so I don`t know whether there have been any changes in these, you know, developments relating to her appearance. But I will say, there was clearly a campaign of sabotage directed at her. Anybody who basically was I`m going to play ball and subordinate their professional commitment to the President was going to be targeted by them, and they did it. But we got to remember this, Chris, this is not exactly an Agatha Christie mystery at this point.
HAYES: No, we learned --
RASKIN: We know exactly what happened. We`re trying to fill in --
HAYES: Yes, we got -- we got -- well, basically the --
RASKIN: We`re just filling in the details at this point.
HAYES: Yes. The crime was admitted to in the first page of this novel. We`re just like learning -- we`re now on the flashback mode and figure out how you know, how did we actually get there. Congressman Jamie Raskin, thank you very much.
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