MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript: Interview with Jamie Raskin

Interview

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Joining us now is Congressman Jamie Raskin, congressman from Maryland. He sits on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. I will tell you he`s also a member of the January 6 Select Committee.

Congressman Raskin, you are a busy man at the best of times. Thank you for making time to be with us here tonight.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): I`m delighted to be with you, Rachel.

[21:25:00]

MADDOW: It`s a lot of news to get through and we`re breaking some of it here tonight for the first time. Let me just first ask you based on your role on both committees if I`ve gotten any of this wrong or misstated any of this as far as you know.

RASKIN: Believe it or not, everything that you`ve said about Dr. Hatfill is consistent with what we`ve been able to learn from different sources. But, of course, we`ve sent him this subpoena because we want all the documents that he`s got.

We`re talking about a virologist who was working, he said, 10 hours a day, seven days a week on COVID-19. He was enthusiastically hawking the hydroxychloroquine cure for COVID-19. He was an active vaccine skeptic. He was urging the firing of Dr. Fauci, and pretty much everything that he said was at least parallel to what President Trump ended up saying.

And it`d be interesting to know which way the influence was flowing. It may have been going back and forth, but he clearly was someone who was meaningfully involved in their COVID-19 efforts, and I used that word in a very liberal way. But what`s curious about him is that he also was a political actor and as you were saying, at the end, he began to range far and wide in terms of the Trump entourages, his activities, including being delegated to go out to Arizona to work on their efforts to spread the big lie out there and to try to overturn the 2020 election.

So, you know, the public health of America was in hands of people like this. Because he was classified as a volunteer rather than actually put on staff, he didn`t have to go through any kind of ethics review and that means there was no conflict of interest check in terms of any of his private activities.

MADDOW: One of the other things that does seem that sort of sticks out going through these documents today is that while he appears to have downplayed to the committee his role in the coronavirus response, he has certainly played it up in his correspondence to many of the people he was emailing with, talking, bragging about how influential he was how much time he was spending on this had become more than a full-time job for him, and while as you mentioned he was only ever classified I guess formally as some sort of volunteer, at least he never went through any of the sort of vetting process and disclosure process you`d have to go through in order to be a more formal White House advisor or White House employee, he does say in some of these documents that he`s got a dot-gov email address, he`s got an email address that cites him in the executive office of the president.

Is it, in fact, clear whether or not he was in fact officially attached to the -- to the White House into the Trump administration?

RASKIN: No, it`s not entirely clear. It`s possible he was that -- he was put on the government payroll, but we just don`t know at this point. He`s using private email to conduct government business, outside of the rules. But perhaps he was put on the government payroll at some point and we just don`t know that. So there are a lot of mysterious facts here that need to be cleared up, and we should be able to get to the bottom of that.

I mean, it`s you know I`ve got a real affinity to what we`re going through with uh in the January 6 Select Committee.

Basically, there are lots of people who declare themselves to be public servants or people trying to render service to the country and they should continue to render service to the country by turning over all information that they have. Certainly, this is where we are on January 6. It should be considered not only a duty for anyone who`s got information about the violent attack, an insurrection on America on January 6, to turn over that information. It should be considered an honor. It should be considered a privilege.

I certainly hope the former president United States would turn over all the information that he has, but perhaps, that`s too much to hope for.

MADDOW: Well, on that January 6 investigation, as I mentioned at the top, you are a very busy man you are on the committee that is investigating the coronavirus crisis, you were also on the January 6th investigation committee, and these subpoenas that went out um tonight to Steve Bannon, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, who was a senior communications aide to the president, and Kash Patel, sort of mysterious figure who ended up at the highest levels of the Pentagon in the very late stages of the Trump administration, those -- those subpoenas from the January 6th investigation do represent a sort of I guess sort of an acceleration, a sort of ticking up of the intensity of your investigation.

I wanted to ask if we should expect those to be the first of many subpoenas or are these four really at the center of the bullseye into in terms of who you`re hoping to hear from?

[21:30:01]

RASKIN: No, I think that you will find that there will be other subpoenas forthcoming. We`re collecting a lot of information from emails, Facebook posting, Twitter postings. We have millions of pieces of evidence that have already flowed into us, and a lot of this was televised and recorded. And so, if any of these people think that they`re somehow going to escape undetected, they`ve got something else coming, and they really should cooperate at this point with our investigation by giving us all of the information they have about the attack on Congress.

There were more than140 officers of the Capitol police and the Metropolitan Police Department who were seriously injured, broken noses, broken arms, broken ribs, broken legs -- you know, traumatic brain injuries. We`ve got dozens and dozens of people suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome right now, and for the first time in American history, they delayed the counting of electoral college votes by four or five hours, and this was the most massive violent assault on the workings of Congress and on the U.S. Capitol since the war of 1812 and 1814.

So how in the world could a high-ranking government official want to hide information or relevant documents that he or she might have about what took place? I mean, that`s an astounding thing when you consider it.

MADDOW: Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin sits on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis and also on the on the select committee that is investigating the January sixth attack, a lot of news from both of those committees tonight, sir. Thank you for your -- for your diligence as a member of Congress, putting in all the extracurricular activities uh that can be done as a member of Congress right now. Thank you for your time tonight for being with us.

RASKIN: And thank you, Rachel.

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