CNN "The Situation Room" - Transcript: Interview with Rep. Jamie Raskin

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Joining us now, Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat on the Oversight and Judiciary committees. He was inside this closed-door deposition.

Congressman, thanks very much for joining us.

I'm going to read one little paragraph from this 10-page document, this opening statement from David Holmes, the U.S. counselor for political affairs at the embassy.

He was at the table when they were -- when the conversation between the president and Ambassador Sondland was taking place.

"I heard Ambassador Sondland greet the president and explain that he was calling from Kiev. I heard President Trump then clarify that Ambassador Sondland was in Ukraine. replied, yes, he was in Ukraine. And he had just" -- sorry, Wolf, trying to go through the entire details of this right now.

Ambassador Sondland -- "President Trump clarified that Ambassador Sondland was in Ukraine. Ambassador Sondland replied, yes, he was in Ukraine, and went on to state that President Zelensky -- quote -- 'loves your ass.' I then heard President Trump ask, 'So, he's going to do the investigation?' Ambassador Sondland replied that 'He's going to do it,' adding that, 'President Zelensky will do anything you ask of him.'

"Even though I didn't take notes of these statements, I have a clear recollection that these statements that were made. I believe that my colleagues who were sitting at the table also knew that Ambassador Sondland was speaking with the president."

All right, you're there. You heard him read this statement. Tell us the significance of what we have now learned.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): Well, Wolf, I don't know whether the statement you just read has been released or whether a statement presented by the witness has been officially released, so I can't confirm or deny the specific text there.

I will tell you that everything that I heard in that room confirms and corroborates everything we have understood up until this point, which is that the president was the one who was executing this campaign of extortion, shakedown against the Ukrainian government.

And Ambassador Yovanovitch's testimony today, I think, was absolutely devastating to the president and his defenders. She demonstrated very clearly, a 33-year veteran of the State Department, Foreign Service, an ambassador who served four Republicans and two Democrats, totally nonpartisan, and she was able to essentially show that Trump doesn't care about the State Department, he doesn't care about American values, he doesn't care about the Ukrainian people.

Of course, he cared about one thing, which was to extract from President Zelensky this statement about the Bidens, that, and then also to confirm the Russian disinformation theory about the 2016 campaign, that it was the Ukrainians, and not the Russians, that interfered in our elections.

So I think that, when everything comes out from this evening's testimony, I think it will be a very important addition to the specificity of the evidence. But it confirms everything that the majority has been explaining here.

[18:25:04]

BLITZER: Some of your Republican colleagues, as you know, they have insisted the account of this phone conversation between the president and Ambassador Sondland was simply hearsay.

But now we have heard directly from David Holmes. How credible do you finding his account?

RASKIN: Well, I found this witness absolutely credible, again, a complete professional who's devoted his career to the State Department and the Foreign Service. He's been all over the world. He's high- ranking. He's a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.

And he was just a completely credible witness with no incentive to lie, like all of these other State Department and military officials who are coming forward to tell the truth.

This is a moment of great heroism and patriotism for people who work for the United States government. I know that our colleagues across the aisle have been slandering them as the deep state.

They are not the deep state. They are the servants of the American people. They are democratic government, when democratic government is working properly. And what the president did was to set up a rogue operation under Rudy Giuliani to attack the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Ambassador Yovanovitch, and to undermine what America's real priorities and values were in dealing with that country.

BLITZER: And, remember, this phone conversation that Ambassador Sondland had with the president took place on July 26, the day after the president's phone conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine.

And in his statement -- I will read another sentence to you, Congressman. This is David Holmes, the U.S. counselor for political affairs, U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. "My clear impression was that the security assistance hold was likely

intended by the president either to express dissatisfaction that the Ukrainians had not agreed to the Burisma-Biden investigations or as an effort to increase the pressure on them to do so."

So, basically, what he's saying is, this was the quid pro quo. The $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine was being withheld until the Ukrainians launched this investigation of the Bidens.

RASKIN: Well, look, the same president who's converted the presidency into an instrument of self-enrichment through his hotels and resorts and tried to have the G7 at the Doral National Trump resort in Florida went on to convert the presidency into an instrument of reelection, and essentially put the whole government of the United States and the hundreds of millions of dollars of aid that we voted for Ukraine to the service of his political campaign, in order to cook up stories and dirt about the Bidens.

And the story is one that the public understands clearly. And the last-ditch argument of our colleagues across the aisle is going to be, well, he did it, but, well, so what? In the final analysis, he got caught and, therefore, no harm, no foul, all's well that ends well.

Of course, that's like somebody robbing a bank and getting caught right when they're about to exit the bank and saying, oh, well, I never made it outside the door, so everything is OK, you can have the money back, let's start over again.

It's -- the stakes are way too high for the American people and for Congress to let this kind of serious criminal misconduct go.

BLITZER: Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, thanks so much for joining us.

RASKIN: And thank you for having me, Wolf.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source