MSNBC "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" - Transcript

Interview

MSNBC "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" - Transcript

MSNBC "COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN" INTERVIEW WITH REP. JERROLD NADLER (D-NY) INTERVIEWER: KEITH OLBERMANN

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MR. OLBERMANN: We're now joined by Congressman Jerry Nadler, who sits on that Judiciary Committee.

Congressman, thanks for your time tonight.

REP. NADLER: It's a pleasure.

MR. OLBERMANN: You gave Mr. Rove a deadline of the 2nd of February to respond. He has now responded. What does your committee do about it now?

REP. NADLER: Well, if he refuses to show up, we're going to have to vote a contempt citation. When we vote the contempt citation, we'll have to bring it to the whole House. The House presumably will vote the same contempt citation. The law then says that a contempt citation voted by the House, or the Senate, for that matter, is given to the U.S. attorney, quote -- this is the law -- "whose duty it shall be," unquote, to deliver it to the grand jury. In other words, he must prosecute and enforce the subpoena.

Now, President Bush, as in so many other things, simply ignored the law and instructed the U.S. attorney not to obey the law and not to enforce the subpoena. I imagine President Obama will not do the same -- will not do the same thing.

MR. OLBERMANN: Do you have any communication from the current White House about that?

REP. NADLER: No, it's premature.

MR. OLBERMANN: Okay. The mechanisms of all this are what? The FBI would have him brought into the chamber to sit at the witness table, or what --

REP. NADLER: No, no, no.

MR. OLBERMANN: Well, what happens?

REP. NADLER: That's a different kind of contempt. The normal -- that's inherent contempt. The normal contempt is you simply arrest him. The grand jury indicts him. You arrest him for contempt and you put him in jail until he is prepared to testify, to obey the subpoena.

MR. OLBERMANN: Is there any precedent, to your knowledge, for what he's claiming, that a no-longer-sitting precedent -- president, rather -- leaves a kind of vestigial privilege to people who may not have even been authorized to have that privilege when the president was still in office?

REP. NADLER: I think that there's a certain privilege that does attach even to an ex-president. But there's no privilege here. Even if some communications -- executive privilege is a privilege to protect certain communications so the president can get honest advice. That's all it is. It's a common-law privilege.

There is certainly no privilege to say that anyone around the president, including the president, certainly after he's president, cannot simply refuse to show up. I mean, a proper exercise of the privilege would be to come to the committee and to object to a specific question and say, "I can't answer that question on the grounds that it's privileged," and then you could litigate whether, in fact, that was a proper exercise of privilege or not.

But simply to hold the committee and the Congress in contempt by saying you failed to show up, there is no basis for that in American history except for Harriet Miers and Mr. Bolten in the last year of the Bush administration, who were just as contemptuous and are under contempt citations now.

MR. OLBERMANN: So presumably, barring some totally unexpected action by the Obama administration, this ends up with Rove appearing before your committee or sitting in jail until he does so? If he does finally show up and denies doing anything --

REP. NADLER: Well, he would have to go to court. It would end up with him going into court and then presumably being sentenced to jail until he agrees to appear before the committee.

MR. OLBERMANN: But if he does -- if and when he does appear, and if he denies doing anything illegal and does not provably commit perjury, what happens then? What's the absolute end game here?

REP. NADLER: Well, he has to answer all legitimate questions. He has to answer all relevant questions unless he can assert a privilege. Now, you can assert a privilege against self-incrimination based on the 5th Amendment. You can assert executive privilege if you can show that answering that question would destroy the right of the president to get frank advice on something.

But, I mean, on most of these things, there is no claim -- in fact, there's denial that the president knew anything about it, which means, by definition, there is no executive privilege. So he would have to answer those questions. If he didn't, he would be put in jail. He'd be cited again for contempt and go to jail.

MR. OLBERMANN: There's a lovely symmetry to it.

REP. NADLER: Again, it's exactly --

MR. OLBERMANN: A lovely symmetry to it in some respects.

REP. NADLER: Yeah. It's exactly the same as we all remember when people went before the House Un-American Activities Committee or the McCarthy committee. They refused to answer questions. The courts held in some cases that they didn't have the right to do that, and they were put in jail. Now, those committees were terrible; they were abusing their rights. But there's clearly no ability simply to hold your -- thumb your nose at Congress and say, "I'm not going to show up."

MR. OLBERMANN: Right. At least you have to cross that first threshold of coming through the door.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York, great thanks for walking us through this. We appreciate it.

REP. NADLER: It's a pleasure.

END.

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