MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: Interview with Jamie Raskin

Interview

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O`DONNELL: Leading off our discussion tonight is Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He is a member of the January 6th Select Committee.

Congressman Raskin, thank you very much for joining us tonight after this important day`s work.

And I want to begin with you as a constitutional law professor and a former impeachment manager in this second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the lead impeachment manager for the insurrection of the Capitol.

From an evidentiary standpoint, you obtained the testimony today that the people attacking the Capitol were saying repeatedly, "Trump sent us, Trump sent us" That strikes me as an important point in your quest to find out how this happened and who made this happen.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): Yes, you`re right, Lawrence. That was the unanimous sense of these witnesses that people were saying, Trump sent us. We were invited to be here by the president and some people, of course, started to use that as a defense saying, we thought that the president had jurisdiction over the Capitol and so we were invited to be there. We were not trespassing.

Of course, legally, that doesn`t work. I can tell people that I actually own your house and they can go in. You`re still trespassing when they go in, you know.

But what is so interesting about this is, of course, we already had robust bicameral, bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate defining as a constitutional legislative fact that Trump incited a violent insurrection. So that was already established.

But what this is about with the select committee is who organized it, who mobilized it, who financed it, how did they do it? Why did they do it? Are we still under threat today but these forces?

So, we`re going to figure out these networks of association among domestic violent extremists groups like the Three Percenters, like the Oath Keepers, you know, they took Proud Boys, the militia groups, with the Trump White House and with different political operatives. We`re going to figure out how it was organized, and how they were able to get this far or this close to overthrowing the democratic Constitution of America.

O`DONNELL: Have you had meetings with the Justice Department yet about how to avoid bumping into what is now their criminal investigation of the same thing?

RASKIN: Well, let me just say, you know, that Chairman Thompson has said from the beginning, we are going to do anything that would compromise in any way any individual criminal investigation or criminal prosecution. However, there are clearly trends that had emerged in different patterns of association and interaction that we`re very interested in that they can educate us about that don`t compromise in any way the integrity of any particular investigation or prosecution.

O`DONNELL: Let`s listen to what Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney said today.

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REP. LIZ CHENEY (R-WY): When a threat to our constitutional order arises as it has here, we are obligated to rise above politics. This investigation must be non-partisan. What we begin today by taking the public testimony of these four heroic men, we must also realize that the task of this committee will require persistence. We must issue and enforce subpoenas promptly. We must get to objective truth. We must overcome the many efforts we are already seeing to cover up and obscure the facts.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O`DONNELL: Issue and enforce subpoenas that promptly. What has the House learned about enforcing subpoenas that against the Trump team?

RASKIN: Well, we`ve learned, of course, that they -- you know, they have no respect for the rule of law. They will fight us at every turn. But an ex president is in a very different posture from the current president, and nobody has even remotely plausible claim to any executive privilege to start in the first place.

So, look, this is not a game as my colleague Liz Cheney keeps saying.

[22:15:04]

This is not cat and mouse or hide and go seek. This is -- this is for real. There was a threat to topple the government of the United States of America and we got a bipartisan, non-partisan duty to determine the truth and figure out what needs to be done to protect ourselves.

And if they get in the way, we will exhaust every possible legal and legislative means to compel them to respect the rule of law because everybody owes the sovereign their honest testimony. And so, if we ask you your testimony, come and testify, 99.99 of the American public would, of course, do it because nobody has anything to hide. And if you start swim squirming and going to hide under your bed, then we`ll realize you`re concealing the truth about something and we`re not going to accept that. You want to plead the Fifth, come on out and plead the Fifth. But otherwise, you`re going to testify.

O`DONNELL: But they will all have the legal right to go to court to try to block these subpoenas that, which in Trump world is always used at minimum just to eat up time.

So you know you`re going to face the challenge of time consuming judicial process on probably every one of the subpoenas against Trump officials.

RASKIN: Well, we`re not going to waste any time in terms of issuing the subpoenas that that we want to issue and we`re determined to obtain everybody`s testimony. And, you know, if people are refusing to testify to the American public and doing everything they can and triple back flips to avoid it, that in itself will be revealing to people.

But we think we`re going to have the documentary evidence that we need, enough witness testimony that we need to fill in the picture about what actually took place on that day, and what do we -- what are the legislative changes that we need to make in order to protect our electoral system, to protect the Electoral College, to the extent that we`re going to be dealing with the Electoral College.

We got to try to make this rather antiquated system work in more responsive way, because with Donald Trump and the fanatics following him now, they basically view the Electoral College as a collection of bobby traps that they`re going to try to exploit in order to defeat the will of the majority, and we have to make sure that`s not going to happen.

O`DONNELL: Congressman Jamie Raskin, thank you very much for joining us on this important night. We really appreciate it.

RASKIN: Thank you so much for having me, Lawrence.

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